Gay Myths from the 70’s and 80’s (Persecution, AIDS, Reagan)

A bit of a FLASHBACK for the uninitiated:

(Just a thought from myself. Many government agencies attempted to restrict blood donations to the vaccinated only

I cannot tell you how many times in conversations, roaming the internet, or the like I see myths about Ronald Reagan or “gay persecution” in shutting down “clubs” and “bars”. Issues surrounding Harvey Milk as some kind of hero in the face of all this, etc ad infinitum. However: History Is A Bitch to the Left!

But before getting to the quote I am finally cataloging as well as the two large excepts in their entirety — one being an article written in 2014 and the other is an entire chapter from David Horowitz’s book Dark Agenda — I wish to first refute the angelic realm set up around Harvey Milk. Again. Here is a conservative gay commentary on the totalitarian (total thought) nature of the Left in promoting a false veneer of historical accuracies (take note Gay Patriot as a blog is sadly defunct):

Here is a portion of a short commentary by Gay Patriot:

Does anyone expect the activist left to be satisfied with their political victory?  If you’ve studied the history of the Civil Rights movement, you know they didn’t stop after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. There are plenty of new frontiers for the Lesbian Gay Bullying Totalitarians to pursue and keep the donations to the Sharptons and Jacksons of the HRC and other professional activist organizations rolling in.

  • Banning disagreement or criticisms of gay behavior through “anti-bullying” and “hate speech” legislation;
  • Mandating school curricula to include “gay history” as well as museums and monuments to be demanded to gay heroes like Harry Hay, Larry Bruckner, and Harvey Milk;
  • Forcing religious institutions to recognize gay marriages;
  • Churches must be forced to perform gay marriages or lose tax exempt status. (Mosques, probably not)

No, this is not the end. This is nowhere near the end. This is just another milestone on the road to our social Pyongyang. The Supreme Court has rejected the rule of law twice in two days in favor of a Judiciary Politburo

(RPT’s Early Thoughts on the Same-Sex Marriage Ruling)

Here is another note regarding Harvey Milk from another post of mine:

Okay… here is the small portion I always pull up in my head when I come across challenges in print or conversation, finally placed here on my site for my extended memory/reference:


“PERSECUTION” (Bath Houses and Blood Donations)


IN THE EARLY MORNING hours of June 28, 1969, New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. Police raids were a common occurrence at the Stonewall Inn, and the bar patrons usually cooperated with police. This night was different.

The patrons threw coins and bottles at police and refused to disperse. The commotion spilled out onto Christopher Street and attracted a crowd of onlookers. As arrests were made, a crowd of more than 400 people heckled and jeered the police. In minutes, the protest escalated into a violent clash in the street. Some protesters taunted the police with shouts of “Gay power!” That night, police arrested thirteen people, and dozens more were hospitalized.

The next night, a crowd again gathered in front of the Stonewall Inn. When police arrived, people shouted and chanted in protest. The gatherings clogged Christopher Street for six nights in a row. One of those nights again turned violent, causing numerous injuries. These events became known as the Stonewall Riots, and the site of the Stonewall Inn is considered the birthplace of the LGBT rights movement. “From the ashes of the Stonewall Riots,” boasted Mark Segal, one of the participants, “we created the Gay Liberation Front.”1

The Gay Liberation Front (GLF) took its name from the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, the official name of the Vietnamese Communist Viet Cong. This new movement would soon become as fierce an antagonist to the religious right (and vice versa) as the radical feminists. Eager to expand the gay rights community and increase its power, the Gay Liberation Front issued a manifesto of the movement’s goals: “We are a revolutionary homosexual group of men and women formed with the realization that complete liberation of all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished.”2 It was another grandiose leftist plan to reshape society and remake the world.

Sex with Strangers as a Revolutionary Act

The radicals defined gay liberation not as the inclusion of gay Americans into the existing social contract, but as the destruction of that contract. As the central symbol of their revolt, gay radicals practiced a defiant promiscuity. It was an in-your-face challenge to what they regarded as a repressive “sex-negative” culture. Gay radicals believed that monogamous marriage and the nuclear family were tyrannical structures imposed on them by their heterosexual “oppressors.” Their name for this oppression was “heteronormativity,” and they set out to overthrow it.

In the view of gay radicals, existing sexual prohibitions reflected no lessons drawn from humanity’s biological realities and moral experience; they were merely “social constructions” imposed by an oppressive culture. Consequently, gay liberators did not seek civic tolerance, respect, and integration into the public order of “bourgeois” life. On the contrary, they were determined to do away with traditional middle-class standards of morality, sexual restraint, and even public hygiene.

The effect of this radical agenda was immediate and devastating. At the height of the sixties, during the flowering of the sexual revolution, doctors saw the incidence of amebiasis, a parasitic sexually transmitted disease, increase fifty times in San Francisco, a center of gay life. The reason for this outbreak was promiscuous sex among gays.3 During the next decade, a tolerant American society retreated, while the sexual revolutionaries advanced. By the end of the seventies, two-thirds of gay men had already contracted hepatitis B.4 Yet criticism of gay sexual practices on any grounds whatsoever—including public health concerns—was immediately condemned as “homophobic,” a form of “racist” prejudice against gays.

Accommodating public officials licensed sexual gymnasiums called “bathhouses” and turned a blind eye toward public sex activity, including hookups between strangers in bookstore backrooms, bars, and “glory hole” establishments. A $100 million public sex industry flourished by decade’s end. Gay activists described the sex establishments as gay “liberated zones.”

One intellectual theorist of the movement, NYU professor Michael Warner, explained: “The phenomenology of a sex club encounter is an experience of world making. It’s an experience of being connected not just to this person but to potentially limitless numbers of people, and that is why it’s important that it be with a stranger”5 [emphasis added]. Warner was the leader of an organization called “Sex Panic!,” a name implying that anyone who thought that public sex with hundreds or thousands of strangers might be dangerous was merely having a panic attack caused by “sex-negative” prudery.

[….]

The only institution in a position to arrest the AIDS contagion at that time was the public health system. But public health officials were already under attack by gay radicals as instruments of the “sex-negative” society. Health officials were well aware that the gay bathhouses were a breeding ground for the various infections that ravaged the gay community. But fear of attacks from gay activists caused officials to take a hands-off policy toward the bathhouses.

Thus, an outbreak of herpes in the early seventies was a sufficient cause for public health officials to close heterosexual sex clubs like Plato’s Retreat. But gay sex clubs, which were spreading far more dangerous diseases, were left open. The reason was the revolution. Gay bathhouses were “symbols of gay liberation from a sex-negative society,” as one prominent activist put it.14 When health officials suggested that gay people could protect themselves by practicing “safer sex,” the gay left responded with hostility, calling the officials “homophobes,” “bigots,” and “Nazis.”

The radical harassment campaigns succeeded, and the bathhouses remained open. The enforcement of traditional public health practices had been rendered politically impossible. Consequently, the epidemic continued to spread, and young gay men continued to die.

[….]

When public health officials tried to institute screening procedures for the nation’s blood banks, and when they asked the gay community not to donate blood during the epidemic crisis, gay leaders denounced the proposals. They claimed that such proposals stigmatized homosexuals and infringed on their “right” to give blood.

The San Francisco Coordinating Committee of Gay and Lesbian Services, chaired by city official Pat Norman, issued a policy paper asserting that donor screening was “reminiscent of miscegenation blood laws that divided black blood from white” and “similar in concept to the World War II rounding up of Japanese-Americans in the western half of the country to minimize the possibility of espionage.”20 The fact that tainted blood donations gave surgical patients and other blood recipients a deadly incurable disease was not a consideration.

During my interview with Don Francis, I asked him when the primary public health methods of testing and contact tracing would be resumed. He said, “When enough people are dead.” It never happened. Apparently, the death toll was never high enough. In 1983, when our AIDS story was published, there were only 3,000 AIDS cases nationally, but they were doubling every six months.21

David Horowitz, Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America (West Palm Beach, FL: Humanix Books, 2018), 80-82, 85, 87-88. (JUMP TO FOOTNOTES)


“Ronald Reagan” (Calling Audibles and Budgets)


Ronald Reagan and AIDS: Correcting the Record (REAL CLEAR POLITICS | O.C. REGISTER)

I’ve never met Larry Kramer, but he and I have something in common: In the 1980s, we found Gary Bauer maddeningly obtuse on the question of whether Ronald Reagan should speak to Americans about the AIDS epidemic.

I was a reporter in the San Jose Mercury News Washington bureau covering the federal response to the epidemic. Bauer was a Reagan administration official aligned with other social conservatives resistant to having the president play a visible role on AIDS. Kramer was, and remains, a prominent gay rights activist.

In early 1987, after Bauer became chief White House domestic policy adviser, prominent voices in the medical community were calling for Reagan to deliver a major address about the crisis. Why have a “Great Communicator” in office, they said, if he won’t communicate the message that safe sex is a matter of life-or-death?

I put that question to Bauer in March of that year. He expressed dismay at the thought of a U.S. president uttering the word “condom.” But with so many people dying of this disease, I found his concern callous—and told him so.

Larry Kramer tells a similar tale, but with more sinister undertones. He claims that in “a personal communication with me in his White House office in April of 1983,” Bauer told him that the president was “irrevocably opposed to anything having to do with homosexuality.”

I’m skeptical. For starters, in 1983 Gary Bauer didn’t work in the White House; he was a mid-level functionary in the Department of Education. More importantly, even before he became president, Reagan had proven the opposite of “irrevocably opposed” to gays, and had demonstrated this tolerance at substantial risk to his presidential ambitions. One can argue that no American politician ever confronted anti-gay prejudice more courageously.

That was in 1978. I was covering education for a California newspaper at the time. Three years removed from the governorship, Reagan was the anointed hero of American conservatism and the presumptive 1980 Republican presidential nominee when an Orange County state legislator, John Briggs, spearheaded a ballot initiative called Proposition 6 to bar gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools.

Reagan’s political handlers advised him to steer clear, but gay Republicans privately asked him to get involved, as did some Democratic friends and some Hollywood pals. Briggs, who wrongly assumed Reagan was on his side, publicly goaded him, too.

Intensive politicking by the California’s liberal establishment had pared Proposition 6’s support from a whopping 75 percent to 55 percent, but that’s where the needle stayed—until Reagan spoke out. In September, he told reporters of his opposition, and followed up with an op-ed saying Proposition 6 would do “real mischief.” Support for it eroded, even in Briggs’ home county, and it lost handily.

One of those who’d urged Reagan to intervene was Los Angeles gay activist David Mixner, a friend of future president Bill Clinton. “Never have I been treated more graciously by a human being,” Mixner said of his meeting with Reagan. “He turned opinion around and saved that election for us. He just thought it was wrong and came out against it.”

This didn’t surprise those who knew Reagan. Like most movie actors, he had several gay friends. But even this is used against him by partisans. “Reagan did not even mention the word AIDS,” Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote last week, “until the disease was impossible to ignore and his friend Rock Hudson had died from it.”

This is almost true. It was Hudson who wouldn’t discuss AIDS; Reagan actually mentioned the disease publicly for the first time two weeks before his friend passed away. But Cohen gets his information about Reagan and AIDS from Larry Kramer—his column was touting Kramer’s new HBO movie—and Kramer is not a reliable source on the 40th president.

He often claims that Reagan never mentioned AIDS for the first seven years of his presidency. Although this falsehood is easily checked, it has spread, like its own kind of virus, into official government documents, liberals’ institutional memories, and countless news accounts from organizations with contrary evidence in their own files. It’s a fabrication with consequences. Three years after Reagan’s death, a New York Review of Books essay offering a measured reassessment of Reagan prompted this response from Kramer:

“Ronald Reagan may have done laudable things but he was also a monster and, in my estimation, responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler,” he wrote. “He is one of the persons most responsible for allowing the plague of AIDS to grow from 41 cases in 1981 to over 70 million today. He refused to even say the word out loud for the first seven years of his presidency and when he did speak about it, it was with disdain.”

Comparing a political opponent to Hitler is obvious evidence of fanaticism, but we are living in hyper-partisan times. Rep. Henry Waxman’s official congressional website repeats the “seven years” calumny while adding that “the Reagan administration consistently refused to commit the resources and effort necessary to provide urgently needed research, health care, and preventive services.”

For the record, Reagan first mentioned AIDS, in response to a question at a press conference, on Sept. 17, 1985. On Feb. 5, 1986, he made a surprise visit to the Department of Health and Human Services where he said, “One of our highest public health priorities is going to be continuing to find a cure for AIDS.” He also announced that he’d tasked Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to prepare a major report on the disease. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, Reagan dragged Koop into AIDS policy, not the other way around.

As for Waxman’s recollections about AIDS funding, he does an unusual thing for a politician: He’s forgotten the success he and other Democrats had in convincing Reagan to spend more money. The administration increased AIDS funding requests from $8 million in 1982 to $26.5 million in 1983, which Congress bumped to $44 million, a number that doubled every year thereafter during Reagan’s presidency.

Finally, the claim that Reagan spoke about AIDS sufferers with “disdain” is simply a smear. Nothing like that ever happened, except maybe in the fictional “The Reagans” miniseries in which Barbra Streisand’s husband played Reagan as a bigot and rube.

In real life—that is to say in 1983, early in the AIDS crisis—HHS Secretary Margaret Heckler (accompanied by New York City Mayor Ed Koch, another Larry Kramer target), went to the hospital bedside of a 40-year-old AIDS patient named Peter Justice. Heckler, a devout Catholic, held the dying man’s hand, both out of compassion and to allay fears about how the disease was spread.

“We ought to be comforting the sick,” said Ronald Reagan’s top-ranking health official, “rather than afflicting them and making them a class of outcasts.”

“I’m delighted she’s here,” Justice said. “I’m delighted she cares.” 


Here is the entire 9th chapter from David Horowitz’s book, David Horowitz, Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America (West Palm Beach, FL: Humanix Books, 2018).

9 A Radical Epidemic

IN THE EARLY MORNING hours of June 28, 1969, New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. Police raids were a common occurrence at the Stonewall Inn, and the bar patrons usually cooperated with police. This night was different.

The patrons threw coins and bottles at police and refused to disperse. The commotion spilled out onto Christopher Street and attracted a crowd of onlookers. As arrests were made, a crowd of more than 400 people heckled and jeered the police. In minutes, the protest escalated into a violent clash in the street. Some protesters taunted the police with shouts of “Gay power!” That night, police arrested thirteen people, and dozens more were hospitalized.

The next night, a crowd again gathered in front of the Stonewall Inn. When police arrived, people shouted and chanted in protest. The gatherings clogged Christopher Street for six nights in a row. One of those nights again turned violent, causing numerous injuries. These events became known as the Stonewall Riots, and the site of the Stonewall Inn is considered the birthplace of the LGBT rights movement. “From the ashes of the Stonewall Riots,” boasted Mark Segal, one of the participants, “we created the Gay Liberation Front.”1

The Gay Liberation Front (GLF) took its name from the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, the official name of the Vietnamese Communist Viet Cong. This new movement would soon become as fierce an antagonist to the religious right (and vice versa) as the radical feminists. Eager to expand the gay rights community and increase its power, the Gay Liberation Front issued a manifesto of the movement’s goals: “We are a revolutionary homosexual group of men and women formed with the realization that complete liberation of all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished.”2 It was another grandiose leftist plan to reshape society and remake the world.

Sex with Strangers as a Revolutionary Act

The radicals defined gay liberation not as the inclusion of gay Americans into the existing social contract, but as the destruction of that contract. As the central symbol of their revolt, gay radicals practiced a defiant promiscuity. It was an in-your-face challenge to what they regarded as a repressive “sex-negative” culture. Gay radicals believed that monogamous marriage and the nuclear family were tyrannical structures imposed on them by their heterosexual “oppressors.” Their name for this oppression was “heteronormativity,” and they set out to overthrow it.

In the view of gay radicals, existing sexual prohibitions reflected no lessons drawn from humanity’s biological realities and moral experience; they were merely “social constructions” imposed by an oppressive culture. Consequently, gay liberators did not seek civic tolerance, respect, and integration into the public order of “bourgeois” life. On the contrary, they were determined to do away with traditional middle-class standards of morality, sexual restraint, and even public hygiene.

The effect of this radical agenda was immediate and devastating. At the height of the sixties, during the flowering of the sexual revolution, doctors saw the incidence of amebiasis, a parasitic sexually transmitted disease, increase fifty times in San Francisco, a center of gay life. The reason for this outbreak was promiscuous sex among gays.3 During the next decade, a tolerant American society retreated, while the sexual revolutionaries advanced. By the end of the seventies, two-thirds of gay men had already contracted hepatitis B.4 Yet criticism of gay sexual practices on any grounds whatsoever—including public health concerns—was immediately condemned as “homophobic,” a form of “racist” prejudice against gays.

Accommodating public officials licensed sexual gymnasiums called “bathhouses” and turned a blind eye toward public sex activity, including hookups between strangers in bookstore backrooms, bars, and “glory hole” establishments. A $100 million public sex industry flourished by decade’s end. Gay activists described the sex establishments as gay “liberated zones.”

One intellectual theorist of the movement, NYU professor Michael Warner, explained: “The phenomenology of a sex club encounter is an experience of world making. It’s an experience of being connected not just to this person but to potentially limitless numbers of people, and that is why it’s important that it be with a stranger”5 [emphasis added]. Warner was the leader of an organization called “Sex Panic!,” a name implying that anyone who thought that public sex with hundreds or thousands of strangers might be dangerous was merely having a panic attack caused by “sex-negative” prudery.

Calculated to Provoke the Religious Right

As the gay epidemics metastasized, nature began to assert itself with ever more devastating results. Opportunistic but treatable infections flourished in the petri dish of the liberated culture, as gay radicals went on with their defiant acts. Even the overloaded venereal disease clinics became trysting places in the liberated culture.

In his authoritative history of the AIDS epidemic, gay reporter Randy Shilts described the atmosphere in the liberated zones on the eve of the AIDS outbreak:

Gay men were being washed by tide after tide of increasingly serious infections. First it was syphilis and gonorrhea. Gay men made up about 80% of the 70,000 annual patient visits to [San Francisco’s] VD clinics. Easy treatment had imbued them with such a cavalier attitude toward venereal diseases that many gay men saved their waiting-line numbers, like little tokens of desirability, and the clinic was considered an easy place to pick up both a shot and a date.6

Far from causing radical activists to rethink their agenda, the burgeoning epidemics prompted them to escalate their assault. When Dr. Dan William, a gay specialist, warned of the danger of continued promiscuity, he was publicly denounced as a “monogamist” in the gay press. When playwright Larry Kramer issued a similar warning, he was accused in the New York Native of “gay homophobia and anti-eroticism.”

At a public meeting in the year preceding the first AIDS cases, Edmund White, coauthor of The Joy of Gay Sex, proposed that “gay men should wear their sexually transmitted diseases like red badges of courage in a war against a sex-negative society.” Michael Callen, a gay youth present at the meeting, had already had 3,000 sexual partners and was shortly to come down with AIDS. When he heard White’s triumphant defiance of the laws of nature, he thought, “Every time I get the clap I’m striking a blow for the sexual revolution.”7

Callen later founded People With AIDS, and, in a courageously candid reflection, wrote:

Unfortunately, as a function of a microbiological . . . certainty, this level of sexual activity resulted in concurrent epidemics of syphilis, gonorrhea, hepatitis, amoebiasis, venereal warts and, we discovered too late, other pathogens. Unwittingly, and with the best of revolutionary intentions, a small subset of gay men managed to create disease settings equivalent to those of poor third-world nations in one of the richest nations on earth.8

Nor did the diseases remain stable. The enteric diseases—amebiasis, gay bowel syndrome, giardiasis, and shigellosis—were followed by an epidemic of hepatitis B, which Randy Shilts called “a disease that had transformed itself, via the popularity of anal intercourse, from a blood-borne scourge into a venereal disease.”9 The hepatitis B virus was transmitted in exactly the same way as the newly identified AIDS virus.

While these epidemics were progressing, the political leaders of the gay community held gay pride parades in major cities like Chicago, San Francisco, and New York. The theme of these parades reflected the liberation ethos of the movement. Half-naked (and sometimes fully naked) men brazenly flaunted their sexuality for maximum shock effect—a deliberate attempt to offend and affront what they regarded as the reactionary culture of the time.

These flamboyant displays of gay liberation persisted for twenty years, inspiring a satiric critique by the liberal website The Onion, “Gay-Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance of Gays Back 50 Years.” The article quotes an imaginary straight female who witnesses a gay pride march in Los Angeles, remarking, “I’d always thought gays were regular people, just like you and me, and that the stereotype of homosexuals as hedonistic, sex-crazed deviants was just a destructive myth. Boy, oh, boy, was I wrong.”10

Flaunting one’s sexuality was considered a revolutionary act. The gay liberation activists were not merely trying to get attention or offend heterosexual society, or, more importantly, to persuade society to accept them as individuals on their own terms. They were trying to change the world by forcing society to accept aggressive public sexuality and, more importantly, promiscuous sexual behavior.

The political effect of these public displays of hedonism was the equivalent of a Supreme Court decision overthrowing tradition and precedent. They were calculated to provoke extreme reactions from the religious right. And they did.

A Clash of Hatreds

The leading religious opponent of gay liberation was Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell. He said, “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.”11 It was a statement bigoted and un-Christian. Similar views were expressed by other vocal leaders of the religious right, while the majority of believers, however repugnant they found these antics, observed the Christian creed to “love the sinner but hate the sin.”

The loud and confrontational voices of the gay radicals were also a minority within the gay community, albeit a large and active one. Most gay people had no interest in taking part in gay pride parades. They just wanted to be accepted and go about their lives. But to much of society, the antagonistic gay activists were the face of gay liberation. They were the leaders—and their rhetoric was no less hateful, deplorable, and intimidating than Falwell’s.

Larry Kramer, a prominent gay writer and activist, was an opponent of such radical organizations as Michael Warner’s Sex Panic! But like many of his peers, Kramer blamed the Republican president for the epidemic. Kramer was well aware that Reagan had been elected with the support of the religious right, which he regarded as the oppressor enemy. “Ronald Reagan may have done laudable things,” Kramer said, “but he was also a monster and, in my estimation, responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler.”12 This was the expression of an extreme and baseless hatred all too common on the left.

There was little that Ronald Reagan could have done to stop the epidemic. He was so hated and mocked by the left that any attempt to speak about the AIDS epidemic would have meant entering a political minefield. The claim that he didn’t provide enough money for research was a canard, since public health officials already knew before they isolated the virus that HIV was transmitted like hepatitis B, which meant that unprotected anal sex with strangers was an extremely dangerous practice.

Members of the Reagan administration also demonstrated genuine concern for the victims of the epidemic. In 1983, still early in its progress, Reagan’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Margaret Heckler, made a publicized visit to the hospital bedside of a forty-year-old gay man dying of AIDS. Not only was Heckler the top-ranking health official in the Reagan administration; she was a devout Catholic. She held the man’s hand out of compassion—and also to calm public fears that the disease might be spread by casual contact. Afterward she said, “We ought to be comforting the sick, rather than afflicting them and making them a class of outcasts.”13

The only institution in a position to arrest the AIDS contagion at that time was the public health system. But public health officials were already under attack by gay radicals as instruments of the “sex-negative” society. Health officials were well aware that the gay bathhouses were a breeding ground for the various infections that ravaged the gay community. But fear of attacks from gay activists caused officials to take a hands-off policy toward the bathhouses.

Thus, an outbreak of herpes in the early seventies was a sufficient cause for public health officials to close heterosexual sex clubs like Plato’s Retreat. But gay sex clubs, which were spreading far more dangerous diseases, were left open. The reason was the revolution. Gay bathhouses were “symbols of gay liberation from a sex-negative society,” as one prominent activist put it.14 When health officials suggested that gay people could protect themselves by practicing “safer sex,” the gay left responded with hostility, calling the officials “homophobes,” “bigots,” and “Nazis.”

The radical harassment campaigns succeeded, and the bathhouses remained open. The enforcement of traditional public health practices had been rendered politically impossible. Consequently, the epidemic continued to spread, and young gay men continued to die.

The Myth of the “Equal Opportunity Virus”

I coauthored of one of the early articles on AIDS in 1983.15 When I interviewed Don Francis, the Centers for Disease Control official in charge of fighting both the hepatitis B and AIDS epidemics, he explained why public health officials didn’t close the bathhouses during the epidemics that preceded AIDS in the 1960s and 1970s. “We didn’t intervene,” he told me, “because we felt that it would be interfering with an alternative lifestyle.”16 I understood what he really meant. He didn’t want his agency to be picketed and attacked as homophobic, and he didn’t want gay activists calling the health officials Nazis.

In 1983 when the article appeared, the AIDS epidemic was still confined to three cities with large homosexual communities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. At the time, the number of AIDS carriers was small enough that aggressive public health methods might have prevented the outward spread of the contagion. But every effort to take normal precautionary measures was thwarted by the political juggernaut that the gay liberation movement had created.

All three epicenters of the epidemic were controlled by the Democratic Party. Gay radicals were a key faction in the party, especially in San Francisco. Gays were also part of the radical “rights coalition,” which included feminists and pro-abortion crusaders. The Democratic Party lined up behind the radicals and supported their efforts to block the enforcement of public health policy.

I interviewed Dr. Mervyn Silverman, the liberal director of public health for the City of San Francisco, and asked him why he didn’t close the bathhouses, since they were greenhouses of the disease. He told me he wouldn’t do so because they were valuable centers of “education” about AIDS.17 He told me this even though there was no such education going on in them. The bathhouses existed only to facilitate anonymous, promiscuous, and dangerous public sex.I knew exactly where Dr. Silverman got his medical expertise on this subject. He was speaking the party line of the Sex Panic! fanatics.18

In fact, the public health system had long been developing and using successful methods for fighting sexually transmitted diseases. Testing and contact tracing were among the most tried and true measures to identify carriers and warn potential targets. Separating carriers from the uninfected who were at risk was the key to fighting an epidemic, as Don Francis had informed me.

But gay leaders successfully attacked and blocked both procedures, which would have made these precautions possible. They condemned commonsense preventive measures as “homophobic” efforts to stigmatize gays and identify them for future “roundups.” Employing these proven public health measures, gay radicals claimed, would make the victims responsible for their plight. Such emotional arguments ignored the fact that those already victimized by AIDS were now potential predators able to infect healthy members of the gay community.

Studies showed that the sexual transmission of the virus overwhelmingly occurred through passive anal sex. Yet that term, or “promiscuous anal sex,” never appeared in public health warnings about the disease—omissions demanded by gay leaders. A $100 million government “information” campaign, led by Surgeon General Everett Koop, was conducted with the slogan “AIDS is an equal opportunity virus.” This claim—and only this claim —was politically permissible, according to gay leaders.

But the claim was false. Sexually transmitted AIDS wasn’t an equal opportunity virus that affected heterosexuals and homosexuals alike. Twenty years into the epidemic, eight out of ten sexually transmitted AIDS cases stemmed from men having sex with men.19

A Preventable Death Toll

The only purpose of the “AIDS information” campaign was to soothe gay sensibilities, so gay people wouldn’t fear that they were about to be put into concentration camps, as their leaders claimed. When public health officials tried to institute screening procedures for the nation’s blood banks, and when they asked the gay community not to donate blood during the epidemic crisis, gay leaders denounced the proposals. They claimed that such proposals stigmatized homosexuals and infringed on their “right” to give blood.

The San Francisco Coordinating Committee of Gay and Lesbian Services, chaired by city official Pat Norman, issued a policy paper asserting that donor screening was “reminiscent of miscegenation blood laws that divided black blood from white” and “similar in concept to the World War II rounding up of Japanese-Americans in the western half of the country to minimize the possibility of espionage.”20 The fact that tainted blood donations gave surgical patients and other blood recipients a deadly incurable disease was not a consideration.

During my interview with Don Francis, I asked him when the primary public health methods of testing and contact tracing would be resumed. He said, “When enough people are dead.” It never happened. Apparently, the death toll was never high enough. In 1983, when our AIDS story was published, there were only 3,000 AIDS cases nationally, but they were doubling every six months.21

When I was researching the AIDS article in 1983, many doctors and researchers I spoke to speculated—correctly, as it turned out—that an AIDS vaccine would be decades away, if one was ever developed at all. To date, there is no licensed HIV/AIDS vaccine, although HIV-infected patients are living longer thanks to new antiviral therapies. Hearing that prospects for a vaccine were so bleak made me feel helpless and deeply saddened. When I did a mental calculation of the coming death toll, I figured that in twenty years there would be 200,000 dead. My arithmetic was faulty. By 2003 there were 523,442 recorded deaths from AIDS in the United States, most of them young, and previously healthy, gay men.22 Most of those deaths could have been prevented if the public health system had not been crippled by radical ideologues.

Attack on a Church

The gay radicals kept the bathhouses open as “symbols of the revolution.” They shut down the testing and contact-tracing programs, which would have exposed the path of the epidemic, allowing health officials to warn those in its path. The radicals did, however, agree on one prophylactic measure to save lives: the use of condoms to practice “safe sex.” The gay community leaders turned it into a campaign with posters proclaiming “Safe Sex Is Hot Sex.”23 Unlike other measures to prevent the spread of disease, condom use was not viewed as “homophobic” by the gay community and wouldn’t interfere with the liberated lifestyle.

Using condoms was prudent advice, but it relied on the responsible behavior of individuals. Responsibility, on the other hand, was precisely the moral characteristic that gay liberation had thrown to the winds. Condom use also brought the activists up against the moral positions of their Christian nemesis, the Catholic Church. The church advocated sexual abstinence and opposed prophylactic measures, even though condoms didn’t serve a contraceptive purpose in gay sex. In a statement titled, “Call to Compassion,” the Catholic bishops warned against the notion of safe sex because it “compromises human sexuality and can lead to promiscuous behavior.” Promiscuous behavior was, of course, the rallying cry of the liberationists— and the root cause of the epidemic.24

This moral conflict led directly to the most notorious demonstration of the AIDS-era protests. In 1989, Larry Kramer’s newly formed ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) joined with WHAM! (Women’s Health Action and Mobilization) to attack a Sunday mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. Over 4,000 raucous protesters gathered outside the cathedral while dozens rushed inside screaming “You’re killing us!” and “Murderers!” at the bewildered congregation. In a calculated outrage that brought widespread condemnation, even from the gay community, one activist crushed a wafer symbolizing the body of Christ. The cardinal called it a “desecration.”

While extreme, these acts of violent hatred were not unusual. A New York Times reporter sympathetic to the gay cause observed:

Rarely are Act-Up’s adversaries seen as well-meaning people working in a complicated world. In Act-Up’s eyes they are liars, hypocrites—even murderers. In 1988, Dr. Joseph, then the city’s Health Commissioner, reduced by half his estimate of the number of city residents infected by the virus. While Dr. Joseph accompanied his study with the warning that no one should think it “in any way reduces the services needed,” Act-Up members accused him of a plot to accomplish that and other nefarious ends. They splashed paint and posters on his house, occupied his office, and called him a Nazi.25

Yet the Times story praised ACT-UP’s offensive tactics for allegedly prodding the government to approve experimental drugs faster. Drugs, however, could not provide an immediate solution to the drug-resistant virus. Thirty years after the attack on St. Patrick’s, medical advances have reduced fatalities and stemmed the tide of the epidemic—but there still is no cure for AIDS.

By promoting sexual promiscuity as a revolutionary act, by disregarding proven social restraints, and by viciously attacking all critics, gay activists led their own community into one of the worst human disasters in American history. The radicals were so focused on their agendas, and so bent on destroying their perceived enemies, that they lost sight of reality: their revolution was killing the people it was intended to liberate.

A Leftist Assault on Freedom and Equality

The radicals rejected the traditional American framework of pluralism, civility, and compromise in favor of a revolutionary agenda. Like radical feminists, they perceived any limits to their desires as oppression by the social order—concluding that the social order had to be destroyed. Such sweeping attempts at social transformation have brought disaster throughout history, no more so than in the last century, which saw epic catastrophes created by National Socialists and Communists seeking better worlds.

Unfortunately, the radical left was able to continue on its long march through America’s institutions, particularly universities, the media culture, and the Democratic Party, coalescing its forces and marshaling its weapons under the ideological banner of “identity politics.” This was the same politics that made the gay community resistant to proven public health methods and common sense. This was the same victim-versus-oppressor politics that caused homosexuals to view heterosexuals and “heteronormativity” as their enemies.

Since the seventies, the radical movement had been establishing a political base in the universities, purging conservative faculty and texts, and transforming scholarly disciplines into political training programs. These leftist indoctrination programs are referred to as “oppression studies,” “social justice studies,” “feminist studies,” “whiteness studies,” and the like. So advanced has this transformation become that Andrew Sullivan, a principled liberal and prominent gay activist, felt impelled to sound an alarm. He pointed out that this radical movement posed an existential threat to the American order of pluralism and individual freedom:

When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education, as we have long known it, toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well. If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large. What matters most of all in these colleges—your membership in a group that is embedded in a hierarchy of oppression—will soon enough be what matters in the society as a whole.26

Sullivan went on to describe how this notion constituted an assault on the fundamental American principle of the freedom and equality of individuals:

The whole concept of an individual who exists apart from group identity is slipping from the discourse. The idea of individual merit—as opposed to various forms of unearned “privilege”—is increasingly suspect. The Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment—untrammeled free speech, due process, individual (rather than group) rights—are now routinely understood as mere masks for “white male” power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites. Any differences in outcome for various groups must always be a function of “hate,” rather than a function of nature or choice or freedom or individual agency. And anyone who questions these assertions is obviously a white supremacist himself.

The only thing Sullivan missed in this ominous warning was the religious foundation of the principles under attack—the “priesthood of all believers” and the salvation of individual souls. These were the beliefs, rooted in faith, that made the Christian right the most vocal and dedicated opponent of the movement Sullivan feared.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Mark Segal, “I Was at the Stonewall Riots. The Movie ‘Stonewall’ Gets Everything Wrong,” PBS.org, September 23, 2015, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/stonewall-movie.

[2] “Gay Revolution Comes Out,” New York Rat Magazine, August 12–26, 1969. The Rat was a publication put out by the Students for a Democratic Society.

[3] Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), Kindle edition, p. 19.

[4] Ibid., p. 18.

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_Panic!.

[6] Shilts, op. cit., p. 39.

[7] Michael Callen, Surviving AIDS (New York: HarperCollins, 1990).

[8] Ibid.

[9] Shilts, op. cit., p. 39.

[10] https://www.theroot.com/where-s-the-pride-in-pride-parades-1790869593.

[11] http://thinkexist.com/quotation/aids_is_not_just_god-s_punishment_for_homosexuals/198214.html.

[12] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/06/01/ronald_reagan_and_aids_correcting_the_rec

[13] Ibid.

[14] My interview with gay activist Konstantin Berlandt.

[15] Peter Collier and David Horowitz, “Whitewash,” California Magazine, July 1983. Reprinted as “Origins of a Political Epidemic,” in David Horowitz, Culture Wars, which is volume V of The Black Book of the American Left (Los Angeles: Second Thought Books, 2015).

[16] My interview with Dr. Don Francis.

[17] My interview with Dr. Mervyn Silverman.

[18] Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999), p. 216.

[19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_HIV/AIDS#United_States.

[20] Shilts, op. cit., p. 246.

[21] Collier and Horowitz, op. cit.

[22] http://www.amfar.org/thirty-years-of-hiv/aids-snapshots-of-an-epidemic/.

[23] Anthony M. Petro, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), Kindle edition, p. 146.

[24] Ibid., p. 133.

[25] https://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/03/nyregion/rude-rash-effective-act-up-shifts-aids-policy.html.

[26] https://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/we-all-live-on-campus-now.html.

The Spiritual “Animism” Found in Leftist Social Movements

I came across this Tweet and I loved the self introspection of the spiritual “feeling” the Left offers in their myriad of social movements that create a false sense of unified purpose.

This was Neil Shenvi’s response that led  me to a co-authored article that is well worth the read:

Here are some excerpts, but the entire article is worth your attention — and, if you are a prodigious reader, I suggest marrying it with this book [chapter] chapter (HERE) from Melanie Philipps, book: “THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN: THE GLOBAL BATTLE OVER GOD, TRUTH, AND POWER.”

The last few years have witnessed a great revival in the United States, as people have gathered to hear a message of sin and repentance proclaimed by spiritual leaders like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X.Kendi. While the antiracist, antisexist, anti-oppressive message of the Great Awokening is allegedly secular rather than religious, its promises of equity, diversity, absolution, and inclusion have captured the imaginations and allegiances of everyone from scholars, to H.R. administrators, to entertainers, to mainstream journalists.

As many cultural commentators have suggested, we are witnessing the emergence of a new, secular religion, which views all reality through the lens of oppression, power dynamics, and social justice. But many people are also noticing a dark side. Last summer, the Smithsonian Institute released an infographic describing “rational, linear thinking” and “cause-and-effect relationships” as attributes of “whiteness.” Public school trainings accuse educators of the “spirit murdering of black and brown children,” and the Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals announced a “gender-inclusive language” policy that replaced the word “breastfeeding” with “chestfeeding.”

Worried by these developments, we join with classical liberals, moderates, and conservatives to oppose the growing illiberalism we’re seeing in our culture. But while secular liberalism is in many respects a procedural set of principles (with an assumption of moral authority) for settling disputes through open dialogue and the rule of law, the ideology of the moment is a grand metanarrative about reality. Trying to oppose an epic metanarrative by appealing to abstract principles may be a fool’s errand. As Christians, we believe this ideology is best challenged not by the secularism from which it emerged, but by an older vision—the one preached by Christianity for thousands of years.

[….]

Second, Christianity knows that we’re all seeking moral justification, whether we explain it with religious or non-religious language. In other words, all of us are seeking to be considered “righteous,” “good,” and “worthy.” While many accusations of performative “virtue signaling” are, no doubt, accurate, some people actually believe what they are saying. When they loudly lament their whiteness, abase themselves for the smallest infractions (microaggressions), and promise to “do better,” they are motivated by the same drive that led Medieval peasants to wear hair shirts, kiss cathedral steps, and buy indulgences.

Christianity doesn’t scoff at this impulse, but redirects it. Our deep, human urge to be justified, to be declared righteous, can ultimately only be met by God’s forgiveness. It won’t be achieved through a never-ending cycle of grievance and absolution.

[….]

The unremitting bitterness and mercilessness of cancel culture flows out of this ideology that draws a sharp line between the bad people and the good people. In contrast, Christianity draws a line between the bad people (all of us) and Jesus. Our hope is not in that we have lived up to God’s righteousness, but in that Jesus did so on our behalf, in his life, death, and resurrection. Thus, every Christian has reason to be overflowing with gentleness and grace: the one who has been shown mercy, shows mercy.

Christians understand C.S. Lewis’s warning that “spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.” Hence, we believe that the true, Christian story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration in the gospel of Jesus Christ is the most effective and complete way to dislodge the mythos of critical social justice. But for those who believe that no such transcendent story exists, fighting wokeness will be an uphill battle.

Here is their forthcoming book: CRITICAL DILEMMA: THE RISE OF CRITICAL THEORIES AND SOCIAL JUSTICE IDEOLOGY―IMPLICATIONS FOR THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY

More via PRAGER:

  • Judaism and Christianity hold that people are not basically good. Leftism holds that people are basically good. Therefore, Judaism and Christianity believe evil comes from human nature, and leftism believes evil comes from capitalism, religion, the nation-state (i.e. nationalism), corporations, the patriarchy and virtually every other traditional value.
  • Judaism and Christianity hold that utopia on Earth is impossible — it will only come in God’s good time as a Messianic age or in the afterlife. Leftism holds that utopia is to be created here on Earth — and as soon as possible. That is why leftists find America so contemptible. They do not compare it to other nations but to a utopian ideal — a society with no inequality, no racism, no differences between the sexes (indeed, no sexes) and no greed in which everything important is obtained free.
  • Judaism and Christianity believe God and the Bible are to instruct us on how to live a good life and how the heart is the last place to look for moral guidance. Leftists have contempt for anyone who is guided by the Bible and its God, and substitute the heart and feelings for divine instruction.

Now for some past posts/uploads of mine… in full….


A NEW RELIGION


This is a great article via the WALL STREET JOURNAL. I clipped the base of the article as it might not be viewable at WSJ’s website. A great and insightful read (h-t to Dennis Prager):

When a mob at Vermont’s Middlebury College shut down a speech by social scientist Charles Murray a few weeks ago, most of us saw it as another instance of campus illiberalism. Jonathan Haidt saw something more—a ritual carried out by adherents of what he calls a “new religion,” an auto-da-fé against a heretic for a violation of orthodoxy.

“The great majority of college students want to learn. They’re perfectly reasonable, and they’re uncomfortable with a lot of what’s going on,” Mr. Haidt, a psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, tells me during a recent visit to his office. “But on each campus there are some true believers who have reoriented their lives around the fight against evil.”

THESE BELIEVERS ARE TRANSFORMING THE CAMPUS FROM A CITADEL OF INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM INTO A HOLY SPACE—WHERE WHITE PRIVILEGE HAS REPLACED ORIGINAL SIN, THE TRANSGRESSIONS OF CLASS AND RACE AND GENDER ARE CONFESSED NOT TO PRIESTS BUT TO “THE COMMUNITY,” VICTIM GROUPS ARE WORSHIPED LIKE GODS, AND THE SINNED-AGAINST ARE SUPPLICATED WITH “SAFE SPACES” AND “TRIGGER WARNINGS.”

The fundamentalists may be few, Mr. Haidt says, but they are “very intimidating” since they wield the threat of public shame. On some campuses, “they’ve been given the heckler’s veto, and are often granted it by an administration who won’t stand up to them either.”

ALL THIS HAS BECOME SOMETHING OF A PREOCCUPATION FOR THE 53-YEAR-OLD MR. HAIDT. A LONGTIME LIBERAL—HE RAN A GUN-CONTROL GROUP AS AN UNDERGRADUATE AT YALE—HE ADMITS HE “HAD NEVER ENCOUNTERED CONSERVATIVE IDEAS” UNTIL HIS MID-40S.

[…..]

“What we’re beginning to see now at Berkeley and at Middlebury hints that this [campus] religion has the potential to turn violent,” Mr. Haidt says. “The attack on the professor at Middlebury really frightened people,” he adds, referring to political scientist Allison Stanger, who wound up in a neck brace after protesters assaulted her as she left the venue.

The Berkeley episode Mr. Haidt mentions illustrates the Orwellian aspect of campus orthodoxy. A scheduled February appearance by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos prompted masked agitators to throw Molotov cocktails, smash windows, hurl rocks at police, and ultimately cause $100,000 worth of damage. The student newspaper ran an op-ed justifying the rioting under the headline “Violence helped ensure safety of students.” Read that twice.

Mr. Haidt can explain. Students like the op-ed author “are armed with a set of concepts and words that do not mean what you think they mean,” he says. “People older than 30 think that ‘violence’ generally involves some sort of physical threat or harm. But as students are using the word today, ‘violence’ is words that have a negative effect on members of the sacred victim groups. And so even silence can be violence.” It follows that if offensive speech is “violence,” then actual violence can be a form of self-defense.

Down the hall from Mr. Haidt’s office, I noticed a poster advertising a “bias response hotline” students can call “to report an experience of bias, discrimination or harassment.” I joke that NYU seems to have its own version of the morality police in Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia. “It’s like East Germany,” Mr. Haidt replies—with students, at least some of them, playing the part of the Stasi.

How did we get here, and what can be done? On the first question, Mr. Haidt points to a braided set of causes. There’s the rise in political polarization, which is related to the relatively recent “political purification of the universities.” While the academy has leaned left since at least the 1920s, Mr. Haidt says “it was always just a lean.” Beginning in the early 1990s, as the professors of the Greatest Generation retired, it became a full-on tilt.

“Now there are no more conservative voices on the faculty or administration,” he says, exaggerating only a little. Heterodox Academy cites research showing that the ratio of left to right professors in 1995 was 2 to 1. Now it is 5 to 1.

The left, meanwhile, has undergone an ideological transformation. A generation ago, social justice was understood as equality of treatment and opportunity: “If gay people don’t have to right to marry and you organize a protest to apply pressure to get them that right, that’s justice,” Mr. Haidt says. “If black people are getting discriminated against in hiring and you fight that, that’s justice.”

Today justice means equal outcomes. “There are two ideas now in the academic left that weren’t there 10 years ago,” he says. “One is that everyone is racist because of unconscious bias, and the other is that everything is racist because of systemic racism.” That makes justice impossible to achieve: “When you cross that line into insisting if there’s not equal outcomes then some people and some institutions and some systems are racist, sexist, then you’re setting yourself up for eternal conflict and injustice.”

Perhaps most troubling, Mr. Haidt cites the new protectiveness in child-rearing over the past few decades. Historically, American children were left to their own devices and had to learn to deal with bullies. Today’s parents, out of compassion, handle it for them. “By the time students get to college they have much, much less experience with unpleasant social encounters, or even being insulted, excluded or marginalized,” Mr. Haidt says. “They expect there will be some adult, some authority, to rectify things.”

Combine that with the universities’ shift to a “customer is always right” mind-set. Add in social media. Suddenly it’s “very, very easy to bring mobs together,” Mr. Haidt says, and make “people very afraid to stand out or stand up for what they think is right.” Students and professors know, he adds, that “if you step out of line at all, you will be called a racist, sexist or homophobe. In fact it’s gotten so bad out there that there’s a new term—‘ophobophobia,’ which is the fear of being called x-ophobic.”

That fear runs deep—including in Mr. Haidt. When I ask him about how political homogeneity on campus informs the understanding of so-called rape culture, he clams up: “I can’t talk about that.” The topic of sexual assault—along with Islam—is too sensitive.

It’s a painfully ironic answer from a man dedicating his career to free thought and speech. But choosing his battles doesn’t mean Mr. Haidt is unwilling to fight. And he’s finding allies across the political spectrum.

[….]

Following the Middlebury incident, the unlikely duo of Democratic Socialist Cornel West and conservative Robert P. George published a statement denouncing “campus illiberalism” and calling for “truth seeking, democracy and freedom of thought and expression.” More than 2,500 scholars and other intellectuals have signed it. At Northwestern the student government became the first in the country to pass a resolution calling for academic freedom and viewpoint diversity.

[….]

He offers this real-world example: “I think that the ‘deplorables’ comment could well have changed the course of human history.”


the Religion of the Left (David Horowitz)


 

Mass Media’s Bias = Big Brother

Facebook on Friday issued an apology to PragerU for “mistakenly” removing several videosand limiting the reach of others. (DAILY CALLER)

Confronting The Left’s Agenda To Silence Conservative Voices – The dire lesson of the Freedom Center’s recent victory over censorship. (FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE)

Michael Ledeen is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center and Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

We’re rightly upset at the censorship of the big social media platforms, and our morale wasn’t improved when something north of three hundred newspapers wrote editorials in virtual unison, or when Mastercard, in cahoots with the Southern Poverty Law Center, attempted to shut down our Center.  Thankfully, we won and they lost. But the efforts to silence conservative spokesmen seem to be intensifying, which makes strategic political sense to me.  If you can’t win an argument on the merits, then either discredit or silence your opponents. 

The Left has lost most of the substantive arguments—from health care to taxation, from foreign policy to defense spending–and their best political chance is to silence the opposition.  This campaign rages throughout the society, from social media to the educational system, from publishers to movie makers. 

There is seemingly no limit to their zeal in silencing their opponents, even to changing our Constitutional system.  Did you know that the Democratic Party is on record against the First Amendment?  Officially, publicly, and, in the United States Senate, unanimously.  They tried to rewrite it in 2014, and introduced a Constitutional Amendment that would have enabled federal and state governments to prohibit various kinds of political spending, broadcasting or publishing. 

This remarkable measure, which flew in the face of the Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, had no chance of being approved by the requisite majorities in Congress and the states.  It was, therefore, a purely political maneuver, laying down a marker for voters and opinion-makers.  Still, the numbers are astonishing:  49 Senators voted for it, and not one—not a single one—voted to preserve the First Amendment.

It gets worse.  Outraged by the Democratic stance against freedom of speech and press, Senator Ted Cruz introduced his own amendment, which consisted of the First Amendment itself.  Once again, the numbers were remarkable.  Not a single Democrat voted for it, either in committee or in the full Senate……

Instagram Makes Free Speech Disappear – Company owned by Navy SEALs banned for criticizing NFL kneelers. (FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE)

Project War Path, a clothing company owned by Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces combat veterans, Charlie Nash of Breitbart News reported Monday, “has been permanently suspended from Facebook’s Instagram platform for ‘hate speech’ after criticizing NFL players who kneel during the national anthem.

The post in question read, “This sums it up, Veteran’s defend our freedom and keep us safe. Meanwhile overpaid turds throw a leather ball around in an overpriced stadium and shit on all the men and women who have been killed defending our country.”

Project War Path co-owner Tej Gill, a Navy SEAL veteran, told Breibart “players kneeling really hits home with me and my teammates, I think it’s disgusting, an insult to all veterans, Americans, and especially families of veterans that have been killed and wounded during war.”

The same post on Twitter was not removed but Instagram took it down. As Gill explained to Breitbart, “I tried to reinstate my account, the form I filled out said my account was permanently suspended for hate speech. I have not heard anything back from Instagram since.”

Gill cited “a very aggressive censorship operation that is being conducted by Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the mainstream media.” Instagram, as it happens is owned by Facebook, which purchased the upstart in 2012 and turned it into a profit center……

CENSORED! How Online Media Companies Are Suppressing Conservative Speech (NEWSBUSTERS)

Executive Summary (Full Special Report can be found here.)

Like it or not, social media is the communication form of the future — not just in the U.S., but worldwide. Just Facebook and Twitter combined reach 1.8 billion people. More than two-thirds of all Americans (68 percent) use Facebook. YouTube is pushing out TV as the most popular place to watch video. Google is the No. 1 search engine in both the U.S. and the world.

War is being declared on the conservative movement in this space and conservatives are losing — badly. If the right is silenced, billions of people will be cut off from conservative ideas and conservative media.

It’s the new battleground of media bias. But it’s worse. That bias is not a war of ideas. It’s a war against ideas. It’s a clear effort to censor the conservative worldview from the public conversation.

The Media Research Center has undertaken an extensive study of the problem at major tech companies — Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube — and the results are far more troubling than most conservatives realize. Here are some of the key findings:

  • TWITTER LEADS IN CENSORSHIP: Project Veritas recently had caught Twitter staffers admitting on hidden camera that they had been censoring conservatives through a technique known as shadow banning, where users think their content is getting seen widely, but it’s not. The staffers had justified it by claiming the accounts had been automated if they had words such as “America” and “God.” In 2016, Twitter had attempted to manipulate election-related tweets using the hashtags “#PodestaEmails” and “#DNCLeak.” The site also restricts pro-life ads from Live Action and even Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), but allows Planned Parenthood advertisements.
  • FACEBOOK’S TRENDING FEED HAS BEEN HIDING CONSERVATIVE TOPICS: A 2016 Gizmodo story had warned of Facebook’s bias. It had detailed claims by former employees that Facebook’s news curators had been instructed to hide conservative content from the “trending” section, which supposedly only features news users find compelling. Topics that had been blacklisted included Mitt Romney, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and Rand Paul. On the other hand, the term “Black Lives Matter” had also been placed into the trending section even though it was not actually trending. Facebook had also banned at least one far right European organization but had not released information on any specific statements made by the group that warranted the ban.
  • GOOGLE SEARCH AIDS DEMOCRATS: Google and YouTube’s corporate chairman Eric Schmidt had assisted Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The company’s search engine had deployed a similar bias in favor of Democrats. One study had found 2016 campaign searches were biased in favor of Hillary Clinton. Even the liberal website Slate had revealed the search engine’s results had favored both Clinton and Democratic candidates. Google also had fired engineer James Damore for criticizing the company’s “Ideological Echo Chamber.” The company had claimed he had been fired for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.” Damore is suing Google, saying it mistreats whites, males and conservatives.
  • YOUTUBE IS SHUTTING DOWN CONSERVATIVE VIDEOS: Google’s YouTube site had created its own problems with conservative content. YouTube moderators must take their cues from the rest of Google – from shutting down entire conservative channels “by mistake” to removing videos that promote right-wing political views. YouTube’s special Creators for Change section is devoted to people using their “voices for social change” and even highlights the work of a 9/11 truther. The site’s very own YouTube page and Twitter account celebrate progressive attitudes, including uploading videos about “inspiring” gay and trans people and sharing the platform’s support for DACA.
  • TECH FIRMS ARE RELYING ON GROUPS THAT HATE CONSERVATIVES: Top tech firms like Google, YouTube and Twitter partner with leftist groups attempting to censor conservatives. These include the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Both groups claim to combat “hate,” but treat standard conservative beliefs in faith and family as examples of that hatred. George Soros-funded ProPublica is using information from both radical leftist organizations to attack conservative groups such as Jihad Watch and ACT for America, bullying PayPal and other services to shut down their funding sources. The SPLC’s “anti-LGBT” list had also been used to prevent organizations from partnering with AmazonSmile to raise funds.
  • LIBERAL TWITTER ADVISORS OUTNUMBER CONSERVATIVES 12-TO-1: Twelve of the 25 U.S. members of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council – which helps guide its policies – are liberal, and only one is conservative. Anti-conservative groups like GLAAD and the ADL are part of the board. There is no well-known conservative group represented.
  • TECH COMPANIES RELY ON ANTI-CONSERVATIVE FACT-CHECKERS: Facebook and Google both had partnered with fact-checking organizations in order to combat “fake news.” Facebook’s short-lived disputed flagger program had allowed Snopes, PolitiFact and ABC News to discern what is and is not real news. Google’s fact-checkers had accused conservative sources of making claims that did not appear in their articles and disproportionately “fact-checked” conservative sources. On Facebook, a satire site, the Babylon Bee, had been flagged by Snopes for its article clearly mocking CNN for its bias. YouTube also had announced a partnership with Wikipedia in order to debunk videos deemed to be conspiracy theories, even though Wikipedia has been criticized for its liberal bias.

[…..]

Fighting Political Desegregation With A Digital First Amendment – Political segregation must end just as racial segregation did. (FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE)

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism

The United States has 325 million people. Facebook has 2.2 billion active users. Google is even bigger. Even a smaller company like Twitter tops the population of the United States with 335 million active users. And not even China has a bigger population than that of the biggest internet companies.

The scale of the internet dwarfs any individual nation-state and obtaining many of the traditional benefits of the nation-state, political freedom, engagement, economic opportunities, requires access through the corporate monopolies that act as the gatekeepers of their own virtual nation states.

Google, Facebook and Amazon aren’t governments, but they have a larger virtual citizenry than any government, and they control access to the marketplace of ideas, determining what ideas billions of people can express, whether they can conduct financial transactions or even exist. Technopolies have a vast sphere of control without having to offer their users any of the personal freedoms of governments.

The virtual state of the internet grew to be controlled by a handful of corporations based out of bicoastal cities, almost universally to the political left of ordinary Americans.

8.8% of tech industry founders voted for Trump, compared to 46% of voters or 56% of the country. 63% of tech bosses are Democrats while only 14% are Republicans. A majority of Americans support the death penalty. A majority of tech bosses oppose it. More Americans want to decrease immigration than increase it. But a majority of tech bosses want to increase immigration levels instead.

60% of Americans oppose socialized medicine backed by tax hikes. 82% of tech bosses support it.

The tools of political participation and engagement, the means by which politicians, political activists and the public interact, are in the hands of leftists. And they’re using them for political segregation.

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, the left blamed social media for its defeat. Campaigns were launched to scour opposition media from social media under the guise of fighting ‘fake news’, conservative organizations and activists were banned from social media and dropped by payment processors after pressure campaigns by left-wing activists denouncing them as ‘hate groups’…….

Totalitarian Seminaries – Dissent Is Not Allowed

David Horowitz has an EXCELLENT point that higher education is really an ideological seminary. Heresy and contrasting thought is NOT allowed. In fact, Dennis Prager makes the point that at a Christian seminary debate and exposure to contrasting thinking is probably more than at a secular university.

Crusading Misnomers

Dennis Prager explains Alan Elsner’s non-sequitur regarding Islamic evil versus Christian evil as relayed in their respective Scriptures. I included another segment at the end that includes David Horowitz when Prager talks about the caller. To see more on this and other topics of “war,” see my post — here: “Causes of Wars,” Concepts (ISIS Compared to Christianity)

Who’s To Blame For The Violent Protests At UC Berkeley?

Conservative commentator David Horowitz and Washington Times staff writer Charlie Hurt on whether President Trump should defund the University of California, Berkeley.

Conversation starts out on the Berkeley Riots. Mark Simone makes a great point about whenever one thinks of Democrats, they will have visions of fires and broken windows.

 

David Horowitz Discusses the Media Lies About Steve Bannon

Remember, Horowitz is one of the people to “prove” Bannon’s anti-Semitism.

The discussion does not stay exclusively on Bannon, but it stays close to the broader issue. David Horowitz has apparently written a seventh book in his series.

Steve Bannon And His Despicable Jewish Defenders! [/saracasm]

The most recent attacks by the Left and the Left leaning media against Steve Bannon (sounds like a superhero name) is so off the reservation that it really shouldn’t be responded to. But lies — allowed to fester — become more than a harmless fib. So, here is my quick rejoinder to assist those who want an answer to this silliness and continued convulsions of the Left. Here is an interview with Joel Pollak who himself is a very observant Orthodox Jew who has worked with Bannon for 5-years:

Firstly, it was Hillary that said “F**king Jew Bastard” of a Jewish man. Secondly, Trump is the most Jew loving man around. Thirdly, David Horowitz, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, Joel Pollak, Alan Dershowitz, Mark Levin, and many other Jews reject the claim that Steve Bannon is an anti-Semite white nationalist. In fact, Bannon will probably be one of the most pro-Israeli chief White House strategist and senior counselor – EVA!

GAY PATRIOT notes:

  • If all that the media has is one Jew (David Horowitz) slagging another Jew (Bill Kristol) over something to do with Jewishness, on Breitbart.com while Bannon presided, let’s face it: They’ve got nothing.

Alan Dershowitz, a staunch Democrat and emeritus law professor at Harvard University, notes how awful this attack on Bannon is:

“But it is not legitimate to call somebody an anti-Semite because you might disagree with their policies. Or because in one instance, like in the Bannon case, an aggrieved wife in a divorce may have said something which he himself has denied having said. I think you always have to have a presumption of innocence and of good faith. And so, I am not prepared to accept those conclusions based on the evidence that I have now seen.” — Alan Dershowitz (via BREITBART JERUSALEM)

(The above video is also from BREITBART)

Another prominent leader in Israel said this in regards to Steven Bannon and the loathsome accusations (BREITBART):

Yossi Dagan, chair of Israel’s Shomron Regional Council, has released an open letter to incoming White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor Stephen K. Bannon, offering his support and congratulations.

[….]

I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate you on the amazing election results for President-Elect Donald Trump and the United States of America. I would also like congratulate you personally on being appointed as Chief Strategist.

We know that you are a strong supporter of Israel and a true friend to the Jewish people and we look forward to your leadership in the White House.

It saddened me to hear about the uncalled for smear campaign against you by political opponents who refuse to accept the reality of losing a fair and democratic election. I am pleased that we in the Shomron, were first to openly support Donald Trump’s campaign and also opened a campaign headquarters here.

I, as leader of the second largest group with-in Israel’s Likud party central committee and Chairman of the Shomron Regional Council, am glad that after 8 hard years we now have decent minded people like yourself, coming to power in Washington DC.

[….]

Blessing from the people and Land of Israel,

Yossi Dagan
Chairman
Shomron Regional Council

Here Rabbi Shmuley Boteach in THE HILL also weighs in on the Issue:

…I barely know Mr. Bannon, having met him for the first time last week at The New York Hilton. But I do know Joel Pollak, an orthodox Jew who is my friend of many years and is a senior editor at Breitbart. Joel is one of the proudest Jews I know and one of the premier fighters for Israel in the national media.

He tells me that Steve Bannon has shown him, and the many other Jewish employees at Breitbart, especially those who are observant, incredible sensitivity and flexibility in helping them always keep the Sabbath and observe the Jewish holidays.

In addition, Breitbart has served as one of the leading publications in The United States that strongly opposed the Iran nuclear agreement, with its $150 billion given to the murderous Mullahs and their genocidal promise to perpetrate a second holocaust of the Jewish people.

I know this is close to both our hearts. Your wife was forced to flee the bloodthirsty Khomeini regime as a teenager. My father and his family were lucky to leave Iran well before Khomeini came to power.

In light of this fact, why would you immediately assume that Breitbart is anti-Semitic? Some of the world’s leading publications — including The New York Times — extolled the virtues of the Iran deal even though it never even punished the Iranian regime for being in constant violation of the 1948 UN Anti-Genocide Convention which expressly forbids genocidal incitement.

Even the ADL opposed the Iran deal and Breitbart stood with the pro-Israel community in making the argument against an agreement that legally gives Iran nuclear weapons in little over a decade.

Breitbart also defends Israel constantly against the anti-Semitic BDS movement whose goal is the economic destruction of the State of Israel.

That does not mean that we need agree with everything published on Breitbart or that there will not be columns we find offensive.

I write for many publications, some more on the left, like The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post, some considered in the middle like CNN, The Washington Post, and The Hill, and some more to the right like The Wall Street Journal and Breitbart. I also write for Israel-based publications like The Jerusalem Post and The Times of Israel, with their differing editorial slants. In all those publications there are those with whom I agree and disagree with strongly.

I have published hundreds of columns in The Huffington Post and consider Arianna Huffington a personal friend. I can tell you that I shared the home page many times with people who vilified Israel in pretty extreme terms. I never took offense. And I certainly never called the editors there anti-Semitic. Rather, I saw the attacks on Israel as an opportunity to respond intelligently and forcefully….

BREITBART’S Jerusalem Bureau Chief

TEL AVIV – Steve Bannon is a staunch supporter of the Jewish state who is committed to fighting anti-Semitism, asserted Aaron Klein, Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief.

Klein was reacting to the baseless smears of anti-Semitism against Bannon, Breitbart’s former executive chairman who was named by President-elect Donald Trump earlier this week as the chief strategist of the new White House administration.

Klein told BuzzFeed: “These smears are laughable to anyone who knows Bannon, a committed patriot who is deeply concerned about the growing threats to Israel. He has been particularly concerned with the dangerous trend of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel sentiment on U.S. college campuses. While at Breitbart, he pitched countless articles on these and other themes in defense of the Jewish state.”…

The “Gluing” of the Brain

(This is with a hat-tip to a friend, Tanner.) I loved this Front Page Magazine article (also in National Review) by David Horowitz, it reads in-part (I invite you to also read the CS LEWIS quotes after the excerpt):

The Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky once described Stalinism as “the perfect theory for glueing up the brain.” What he meant to dramatize was the fact that a regime as monstrous as Stalin’s, which murdered 40 million people and enslaved many times more, was nonetheless able to persuade progressives and “social justice” advocates all over the world to act as its supporters and defenders. These enlightened enablers of Stalin’s crimes included leading intellectuals of the day, even Nobel Prize winners in the sciences and the arts like Frederic Joliot-Curie and Andre Gide. Brilliant as they were, they were blind to the realities of the Stalinist regime and therefore of the virtues of the societies they lived in.

What glued up their brains was the belief that a brave new world of social justice – a world governed by progressive principles – existed in embryo in Soviet Russia, and had to be defended by any means necessary. As a result of this illusion, they put their talents and prestige at the service of the totalitarian enemies of democracy, acting, in Trotsky’s words, as “frontier guards” for the Stalinist empire. They continued their efforts even after the Soviets conquered Eastern Europe, acquired nuclear weapons and initiated a “cold war” with the West. To the progressives seduced by Stalinism, democratic America represented a greater evil than the barbaric police states of the Soviet bloc. Even half a century later a progressive culture still refers to the formative phase of the Cold War as years of a “Red Scare” – as though the fifth column of American progressives whose loyalties were to the Soviet enemy, whose members included Soviet spies, was not a matter of serious concern, and as though a nuclear-armed, rapacious Soviet empire did not pose a credible threat.

How were these delusions of otherwise intelligent and well-intentioned people possible? How were otherwise informed individuals able to deny the obvious and support the most brutal and oppressive dictatorship in history? How did they come to view a relatively humane, decent, democratic society like the United States as evil, while regarding the barbarous communist regime as its victim? The answer lies in the identification of Marxism with the promise of social justice and the institution of progressive values, which will take place in a magical socialist future. Defense of the progressive idea trumped recognition of the reactionary fact.

Once the Stalin regime was identified with the imaginary progressive future, everything followed – its status as a persecuted victim, and its adversary’s role as a reactionary force standing in the way of the noble aspiration. Every fault of the Stalin regime, every crime it committed if not denied by progressives was attributed to the nefarious actions of its enemies, most glaringly the United States. Once a promise of redemption is juxtaposed to an imperfect real world actor, all of these responses become virtually inevitable. Hence the glueing of the brain.

[….]

Our country is at a perilous crossroads, one that is made immeasurably more dangerous by a treacherous national party, which blames its own country for the crimes of its enemies, and by a political opposition too feckless and timid to hold its fellow citizens accountable for their treasonous acts.

 

“If we are to be mothered, mother must know best…. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent. They ‘cash in.’ It has been magic, it has been Christianity. Now it will certainly be science…. Let us not be deceived by phrases about ‘Man taking charge of his own destiny.’ All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of others…. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be.”

[….]

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severley, because we have deserved it, because ‘ought to have known better,’ is to be treated as a human persons in God’s image.”

C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2002), 292 (Full text).

I can imagine no man who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolution­ary who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to confer on future generations: generations who, as one terrible moment now reveals to him, were never going to exist. Then he will see the massacres, the faked trials, the deportations, to be all ineffaceably real, an essential part, his part, in the drama that has just ended: while the future Utopia had never been anything but a fantasy.

C.S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night (New York, NY: Mariner Books, 1984), 131.

The Left’s Fanaticism and Hypocrisy ~ Children Suffer

(Originally posted in September, 2010)

U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies

KABUL, Afghanistan — In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.

“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”

Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records….

(New York Times)

This has been a burning topic in my mind for quite some time. The reason being is that while Bush was President I was told all the time (by the Left) about his apparent connections to Wahhabism via Saudi Arabia… and how we shouldn’t support a President who has these ties. The Ground Zero mosque Imam said he would take funds from any country, and now he is a hero of the Left. Odd. This Imam has already accepted money from known terrorist funding conspirators and I am sure as the money trail is followed, more will come to light. A great article on Front Page Magazine stirs this up again in me. I will post some ideas to maybe get this topic stirred in your mind as well. Could you imagine though, if the Catholic Church executed homosexuals in 5 or 6 countries and then they wanted to build a catholic college on the site where Matthew Shepard was killed. WOW! The outcry from the Left would be deafening.

Here are some excerpts from the article entitled The Mullahs’ Gulag for Gays:

In September 2007, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stood before an audience of college students and faculty at Columbia University and made the perverse claim that there were no homosexuals in Iran. ”In Iran we do not have this phenomenon, I don’t know who has told you that we have it,” he said. Ahmadinejad’s comments, made in a year in which Iran had executed 200 people, homosexuals among them, made shock waves around the globe. Yet the absurdity of the official denial may also have been unintentionally salutary, spotlighting as it did the terrible plight of homosexuals in the Islamic Republic.

There is a good reason that Iran’s theocratic dictatorship denies the existence of gays inside the country. An honest acknowledgment of reality would force the authorities to acknowledge that Iranian gays are regularly marginalized, harassed, tortured, and executed. Sometimes, they are forced into gender-altering operations. Ahmadinejad’s claim also called attention to the hypocrisy of the international community on the issue of gay rights in Iran. President Ahmadinejad’s absurd claim received overwhelming disapproval, yet when Iranian homosexuals are routinely abused and lawfully executed simply for their sexual preferences, that same international community, and the “progressive” Left that claims to champion gay rights, are deafeningly silent….

[….]

….As the progressive backlash against Prop 8 indicates, gay rights are a significant and sensitive issue for Americans, particularly on the Left. But despite passionate outbreaks by the gay community and others, Americans have been uncharacteristically uninterested in the brutal treatment of homosexuals in Iran. These advocates ardently insist that homosexuals have the right to wed, to raise children, and to live as others do, yet they turn a blind eye to the execution of gays in Iran simply for their sexual orientation.

Such executions are in fact enshrined in Iranian law, where homosexuality is punishable the death penalty. Human rights groups estimate that almost 4,000 gays have been executed since 1979, when the Islamic regime took power. Gays are arrested, beaten, tortured, and in most cases, hanged or even stoned.

Sharia, or Islamic law, the legal code applied in Iran, prohibits any type of sexual activity outside the realm of heterosexual marriage. No distinction is made between consensual and non-consensual relations nor between sexual activities conducted in private or public. Any sexual relations other than the traditional marriage between a man and woman—referring to sodomy or adultery, as we’ve recently seen in the case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the woman sentenced to stoning for allegedly having an extra-marital affair—is punishable by death….

[….]

….older males experimenting with younger males has been a part of Islamic societies for centuries as a way to ease sexual temptation in a segregated society that condemns pre-marital sex. Celebrated Iranian poets have often referred to the love between men and young boys in century-old poetry.

Iran is currently one of five Muslim countries to apply capital punishment to homosexuals along with Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, Sudan, and Yemen, according to the 2010 International Lesbian Gay Association’s World Legal Survey. Under the Taliban, Afghanistan also applied the death penalty, as did Sadaam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. After the collapse of the Taliban regime, Afghanistan began punishing homosexuality with fines and imprisonment. In Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Islamist militia followed the Taliban’s lead, attacking, torturing and murdering hundreds of gay men in “honor killings.”

Under the rule of the late Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, homosexuality was accepted to the extent that there was often news coverage of same-sex wedding c ceremonies. Gay rights were a popular item, and there were even some nightclubs that specifically catered to homosexual patrons. According to Janet Afary, professor of global religion and modernity at the University of California Santa Barbara, one of the critiques made about the Shah’s government, eventually leading up to the Revolution of 1979, was that it was excessively liberal on moral issues, such as homosexuality….

You would think that the Progressive Left would be supportive of regime change in theocratic societies that cause such discriminatory [deadly] practices against homosexuals. But they typically do not. Many were for the student uprising in Iran, but their support was typically for the Marxist movement within the Islamic faith. So I see this as more of a support for one view of Utopian versus another view. BUt both views are Utopian, and this may explain the support it engenders from the Left.

The full documentary can be seen here.

Warning: the content of the linked documentary is graphic and disturbing.

The example of a university about 20-minutes away from me should be mind-numbing for the common sense person. You will see what I am talking in this August 15th, 2005 article by Dr. Reisman where she intimates the Left’s love affair in pederasty (bringing it a bit closer than Afghanistan):

Academics need money and have respectability. Pedophiles and pornographers need respectability and have money. The relationship between academic institutions and pornographers and pedophiles, which began with Playboy’s funding the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, continues today at CSUN. The following example demonstrates the link between pornographers and academia.

In August 1998, CSUN used its state-supported offices to organize a “World Pornography Conference.” Led by former Kinsey Institute researcher James E. Elias, pornography industry leaders and performers met with “academics” to discuss and shape national pornography and pedophile strategies to be implemented in schoolrooms, newsrooms, bedrooms and courtrooms.

James Elias, CSUN’s Sex Research Director received his doctorate from the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality of which Wardell Pomeroy was the former Academic Dean. As noted in Kentucky v. Happy Day (1980), Wardell Pomeroy was a Kinsey co-author and sex partner who publicly sought funds from the pornography industry to produce child pornography (Jones, 1997).

The conference featured Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia editor Vern Bullough and his pedophile editorial colleagues: John DeCecco, Daniel Tsang and Wayne Dynes — all professors at major American colleges.3 Chairing the CSUN “Erotic” section on “Child Pornography” was Harris Mirkin, an associate professor of political science at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Mirkin’s 1999 article, “The Pattern of Sexual Politics: Feminism, Homosexuality and Pedophilia” (Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 37) describes the steps pedophiles need to take to gain social acceptance. He advises pedophiles to advocate for the elimination of words like “child molestation” and “child abuse.”

Ralph Underwager was a featured speaker during the section on child pornography. Underwager is a psychologist and theologian who frequently testifies as a defense expert in child sexual abuse cases. In 1993, Underwager and his wife, Hollida Wakefield, were featured in an interview in Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia (Winter 1993, p.3). In his interview, Underwager stated: “Pedophiles can boldly and courageously affirm what they choose. They can say that what they want is the best way to love…” Conference speaker Ted McIlvenna, founder of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, contributed an article in December 1977 to Hustler magazine 4 in which he urged legalization of incest and adult-child sex.

Is there a history of the New Left and this wanting of Islamo-Nazi type regimes that denigrate women and lift rape of young men to new levels? We read just a bit from David Horowitz’s intro of his book, Unholy Alliance:

A further irony of these complaints was that the shah had been, in fact, a modernizer who promoted education and the equality of women. His social progressivism was the very cause of the Islamic revolution that overthrew him. President Jimmy Carter’s liberal aversion to the shah’s authoritarian rule helped to undermine his regime and pave the way for the reign of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic revolution. While American radicals welcomed the revolution of the ayatollahs, their regime was far more reactionary and repressive than the government of the shah, and it both created and inspired the Islamic radicals who confront America as enemies today.

Why has the American Left made alliances of convenience with Islamic radicals who have declared war on the democratic West and whose own values are reactionary and oppressive? Why have American radicals actively obstructed the War on Terror, thereby undermining the defense of the democracies of the West? Why have liberals opposed Operation Iraqi Freedom, whose goals are the overthrow of tyranny and the establishment of political democracy and human rights—agendas that coincide with their own? Why have Democrats turned against the policy of regime change, which they had supported during the Clinton administration in both Kosovo and Iraq? Why has the Democratic Party declared political war on the president’s war and thus made foreign policy a point of partisan conflict for the first time since the end of World War II? What does this fracture of the American consensus mean for the future of America’s War on Terror?

These are the questions the current inquiry seeks to address. In doing so, it necessarily must confront others: What is the nature of the American Left? How does it think about the world? How did it come to ally itself with Islamic jihad? How significant is the threat posed by its opposition to the War on Terror? How powerful is its presence in the Democratic Party? What is its role in shaping the American future?

These are great questions. I think the book that answers them more fully in a short and concise manner can be found in the chapter entitled “The Red-Black-Green Islamic Axis,” in the book by Melanie PhillipsThe World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth, and Power. While my small quote from Melanie does not do her thesis justice, it is a key connecting point in my minds eye:

These curious coalitions are frequently explained as merely opportunistic alliances, where certain groups make common cause with ideological opponents in pursuit of the shared aim of bringing down Western society. This explanation surely is only partly correct. What these various movements have in common goes much deeper: they are all utopian. Each in its own way wants to bring about the perfect society, to create a new man and a new world.

Each therefore thinks of itself as progressive; the supporters of each believe themselves to be warriors in the most noble of causes. The greens believe they will save the planet. The leftists believe they will create the brotherhood of man. The fascists believe they will purge mankind of corruption. And the Islamists believe they will create the Kingdom of God on earth.

What they all have in common, therefore, is a totalitarian mindset in pursuit of the creation of their alternative reality. These are all worldviews that can accommodate no deviation and must therefore be imposed by coercion. Because their end product is a state of perfection, nothing can be allowed to stand in its way. This is itself a projected pathology. As Eric Hoffer suggested in The True Believer, the individual involved in a mass movement is in some way acutely alienated from his own society, an alienation to which he is completely blind. Projecting his own unacknowledged deficiencies onto his surroundings, he thinks instead there is something wrong with society and fantasizes about building a new world where he will finally fit.” This belief that humanity can be shaped into a perfect form has been the cause of the most vicious tyrannies on the planet from the French Revolution onwards.

As Jamie Glazov notes in his book United in Hate, the totalitarian believer publicly denies the violent pathologies within the system that he worships. Privately, however, these are what drew him towards that system in the first place because he is aware that violence is necessary to destroy the old order so that utopia can arise from its ashes. Pretending he is attracted to “peace,” “justice” and “equality,” he actually stands for their opposite. He needs to empathize with the “martyrs” and the downtrodden in order to validate himself vicariously. The Third World, intrinsically noble since it is uncorrupted by the developed world, provides an apparently inexhaustible supply of such validation. That’s why the image of the Palestinian youth armed with only a slingshot touches the radical soul so deeply, and why the radical does not want to hear—why he even denies—the guns that are ranged just behind that youth as he throws his stones.”

Later, after following through with the history of the coining and idea behind the term “Westoxification,” she has a fabulous paragraph that puts in a pretty bow why the Progressive Left so often finds solace in these radical views you would think it would reject:

The Islamists committing mass murder in New York’s Twin Towers or a Jerusalem cafe really do believe they are fighting for justice and to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. The communists and the fascists really did think they were ending, respectively, the oppression and the corruption of man. The environmentalists really do think they are saving the planet from extinction. The radical left really do think they will erase prejudice from the human heart and suffering from the world. And those who want Israel no longer to exist as a Jewish state really do believe that as a result they will turn suicide bomb belts into cucumber frames, and that they are moving in the way that history intended.

I highly recommend this book. As an agnostic, she has a fair view of this program the Left calls egalitarianism. This egalitarianism trumps their placatory stances on homosexuality, women’s rights, and the like.

Democrat Showing His Affinity to Prejudicial Positions and Terrorism

An interesting aspect of this video I had previously watched but did not know about is that this New Mexico Democrat candidate, Alan Webber, was endorsed by a domestic terrorist. The Lonely Conservative points it out for us:

If Webber was a Republican talking about a female Hispanic Democrat we would never hear the end of it. He’d be called a racist who is waging a war on women. But this guy will get a pass. Oh, and he also has ties to the Weather Underground and has urged empathy for a sex offender.

It amazes me how these radicals get professorships.  The guy who endorsed Webber, Mark Rudd, is described a bit at the Free Beacon thus:

Mark Rudd, a leader and founder of the domestic terrorist group the Weather Underground, which has advocated for the violent overthrow of the United States and committed multiple bombings of public buildings in the late 1960s and early 1970s, endorsed Webber in April. Rudd’s wife Marla Painter hosted a campaign event for the Democrat that month.

[….]

Webber tried to distance himself from the endorsement, saying, “of course I denounce terrorism.” However, the candidate praised Rudd for being a “proponent of non-violence” and a teacher at Central New Mexico Community College in Albuquerque.

Another terrorist from those days is Kathy Boudin, who is also a professor, as FrontPage Magazine notes: 

In her parole hearing, Boudin — a veteran of the terrorist Weather Underground — claimed that she participated in the robbery because she felt guilty for being white…

[….]

Former Weather Underground radical Kathy Boudin — who spent 22 years in prison for an armored-car robbery that killed two cops and a Brinks guard — now holds a prestigious adjunct professorship at Columbia University’s School of Social Work.

Another guy I know who was a radical terrorist, who brutally tortured women, and ordered the deaths of individuals via his soldiers. Here are some issues with Maulana Karenga (AKA, Ron Kerenga, the founder/inventor of Kwanzaa), via my post on KWANZAA:

The Los Angeles Times described the events:

“Deborah Jones, who once was given the title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electric cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes at gunpoint. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis’ mouth and placed against Miss Davis’ face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vice. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said.”

From my same paper, originally written to my then 5th-grade son’s teacher and all the parents in the class, is this updated Ann Coulter, likewise, points out the bottom line:

It is a fact that Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by a black radical FBI stooge, Ron Karenga — a.k.a. Dr. Maulana Karenga — founder of United Slaves, a violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers. He was also a dupe of the FBI.

In what was ultimately a foolish gamble, during the madness of the ’60s, the FBI encouraged the most extreme black nationalist organizations in order to discredit and split the left. The more preposterous the group, the better.

By that criterion, Karenga’s United Slaves was perfect. In the annals of the American ’60s, Karenga was the Father Gapon, stooge of the czarist police.

[….]

United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, gunning down Black Panthers and adopting invented “African” names. (That was a big help to the black community: How many boys named “Jamal” are currently in prison?)

It’s as if David Duke invented a holiday called “Anglika,” which he based on the philosophy of “Mein Kampf” — and clueless public school teachers began celebrating the made-up, racist holiday.

HE is now a Professor and Chair Department of Africana Studies California State University, Long Beach.

People pay A LOT of money to indoctrinate their kids.