Seems CNN’s Piers Morgan is not much interested in the story of “Matt Salmon, the gay son of a Republican congressman” because the young man “refused to criticize his father, who is not a supporter of same-sex marriage.” As Paul Mirengoff writes at Powerline:
The rejection of guests because they won’t serve as props to further the host’s simplistic narrative isn’t confined to CNN and MSNBC. I experienced it with a well-known Fox News talk-show host.
But using a son as a prop to bash his father seems to carry the joke too far. Moreover, O’Donnell and Morgan are missing the real story of the Salmons and the Portmans — the loyalty that stems from family love. Matt Salmon is loyal to his father; Rob Portman is loyal to his son.
Wonder who is going to examine the prejudices of Mr. Morgan (and Lawrence O’Donnell at MSNBC). He seems to be assuming that because a man doesn’t support gay marriage, his son must need [to] criticize him.
Maybe we’re not as polarized on gay marriage as the sensationalist coverage of the issue makes it appear….
According to BuzzFeed, the gay son of a Republican congressman claims both CNN and MSNBC canceled interviews with him after he refused to criticize his father, who opposes same-sex marriage, on the air. He said CNN producers were “gung ho” about an interview before they changed their mind.
CNN’s Piers Morgan Live and MSNBC’s The Last Word were the two shows that reportedly canceled on Matt R. Salmon, son of Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.). Sources from both networks responded to BuzzFeed, denying that they dropped him because of his refusal to criticize his father.
“They seemed very gung ho about it,” Salmon said of Piers Morgan Live on local news channel KPNX. “And then when I was talking about how supportive I was of my father, and how I was unwilling to be negative, they seemed to lose interest. And all of a sudden their show got jammed, and they couldn’t fit me in.”
Dennis Prager devotes an hour (without adds, an half-an-hour) to the great issues each week. (Posted by: https://religiopoliticaltalk.com/) This hour dealt with children coming out and telling parents they are gay, and all the ramifications that come with that: love, fear, misunderstandings, keeping one’s convictions on ideals, and the like. Parents call in and share their experiences… one caller hashes out the issue of loss of faith in her son based on this topic and probably realigns (matures) in her thinking on the issue a bit. While I do not fully agree with how Dennis views the issue, I am close on it, and so, recommend Dennis’ input on it. The previous weeks dealing with this can be found here: http://youtu.be/kDh4gZ2yaMg
…Britain’s Iron Lady, has died after suffering a stroke at the age of 87.
Her children Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother had died peacefully following a stroke this morning.
Speaking to Sky News, spokesman and friend Lord Bell, who announced her death, said: “We’ll never see the like of her again. She was one of the great prime ministers of all time and transformed people’s lives.”
He described the former prime minister, a grocer’s daughter from Grantham, as the greatest leader of the Conservative Party with the exception of Winston Churchill.
[….]
Baroness Thatcher, Britain’s first and only woman prime minister, had become increasingly frail and was suffering ill health in recent years.
Iron Lady vs. Socialism
Liberal policies view lower income for the poor and the richer as a good thing as long as the gap is closer… our same struggle today. These brief exchanges took place during Margaret Thatcher’s last speech in the House of Commons on 22 November 1990. Read the complete transcript for this speech here.
She was admitted to hospital shortly before Christmas where she underwent an operation to remove a growth from her bladder but was allowed to return home before new year.
Prime minister between 1979 and 1990, she has been credited with transforming a nation in one decade, putting Britain back among the leading industrial nations of the world.
She became loved and loathed in equal measure as she crushed the unions and privatised vast swathes of British industry, as she led the Tories to three election victories.
Tough beyond measure, she was nicknamed the Iron Lady by a Russian journalist in 1976 for her opposition to Soviet communism. It is a moniker that stuck and was the title of a film in which Meryl Streep took the title role, which was released in 2011.
She was also memorably described by the then French president Francois Mitterrand with the back-handed compliment that she had the “eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe”.
Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said: “Margaret Thatcher was one of the defining figures in modern British politics.
“Whatever side of the political debate you stand on, no-one can deny that as prime minister she left a unique and lasting imprint on the country she served.
“She may have divided opinion during her time in politics but everyone will be united today in acknowledging the strength of her personality and the radicalism of her politics.”
Despite her toughness, few will forget the pictures of Baroness Thatcher leaving Downing Street for the last time with her husband, Sir Denis, and tears in her eyes.
Is this “new dynamic” good for the continued health of the American way, or will it push us further towards a European way of viewing society? Two Books I highly recommend will be after the video:
Although Kay wasn’t necessarily advocating for single parents, the statistics concerning that are scary (via SingleParentSuccess.org):
In 1995, nearly six of 10 children living with mothers only were near the poverty line. About 45 percent of children raised by divorced mothers and 69 percent by never-married mothers lived in or near poverty, which was $13,003 for a family of three in 1998.
75% of children/adolescents in chemical dependency hospitals are from single-parent families.
More than one half of all youths incarcerated for criminal acts lived in one-parent families when they were children.
63% of suicides are individuals from single parent families.
75% of teenage pregnancies are adolescents from single parent homes.
There’s no question that children growing up with both of their parents fare far better in life than any other domestic arrangement.
With such statistics readily available, it’s sad to see a member of the media call it old fashioned to marry before having kids.
Hackers purporting to be affiliated with the collective Anonymous have for days been threatening a massive cyber attack against Israel on Sunday. Their stated vow: to “erase Israel from cyberspace.”
While Israeli government websites appeared to be functioning as of Sunday morning Israel time, Israel supporters had a surprise for the would-be attackers. The OpIsrael website associated with some of the anti-Israel hackers was itself hacked and late Saturday was playing Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah. It also listed 20 facts about Israel not usually recognized by the Jewish state’s detractors.
1. Israel became a nation in 1312 BCE, two thousand years before the rise of Islam.
2. Arab refugees in Israel began identifying themselves as part of a Palestinian people in 1967, two decades after the establishment of the modern State of Israel.
3. Since the Jewish conquest in 1272 BCE, the Jews have had dominion over the land for one thousand years with a continuous presence in the land for the past 3,300 years.
4. The only Arab dominion since the conquest in 635 CE lasted no more than 22 years.
5. For over 3,300 years, Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital Jerusalem has never been the capital of any Arab or Muslim entity. Even when the Jordanians occupied Jerusalem, they never sought to make it their capital, and Arab leaders did not come to visit.
6. Jerusalem is mentioned over 700 times in Tanach, the Jewish Holy Scriptures. Jerusalem is not mentioned once in the Koran.
7. King David founded the city of Jerusalem. Mohammed never came to Jerusalem.
8. Jews pray facing Jerusalem. Muslims pray with their backs toward Jerusalem.
9. In 1948 the Arab refugees were encouraged to leave Israel by Arab leaders promising to purge the land of Jews. Sixty-eight percent left without ever seeing an Israeli soldier.
10. The Jewish refugees were forced to flee from Arab lands due to Arab brutality, persecution, and slaughter.
11. The number of Arab refugees who left Israel in 1948 is estimated to be around 630,000. The number of Jewish refugees from Arab lands is estimated to be the same.
12. Arab refugees were intentionally not absorbed or integrated into the Arab lands to which they fled, despite the vast Arab territory. Out of the 100,000,000 refugees since World War II, theirs is the only refugee group in the world that has never been absorbed or integrated into their own people’s lands. Jewish refugees were completely absorbed into Israel, a country no larger than the state of New Jersey.
13. The Arabs are represented by eight separate nations, not including the Palestinians. There is only one Jewish nation. The Arab nations initiated all five wars and lost. Israel defended itself each time and won.
14. The PLO’s Charter still calls for the destruction of the State of Israel. Israel has given the Palestinians most of the West Bank land, autonomy under the Palestinian Authority, and has supplied them.
15. Under Jordanian rule, Jewish holy sites were desecrated and the Jews were denied access to places of worship. Under Israeli rule, all Muslim and Christian sites have been preserved and made accessible to people of all faiths.
16. The UN Record on Israel and the Arabs: of the 175 Security Council resolutions passed before 1990, 97 were directed against Israel.
17. Of the 690 General Assembly resolutions voted on before 1990, 429 were directed against Israel.
18. The UN was silent while 58 Jerusalem Synagogues were destroyed by the Jordanians.
19. The UN was silent while the Jordanians systematically desecrated the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives.
20. The UN was silent while the Jordanians enforced an apartheid-like a policy of preventing Jews from visiting the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.
UPDATE: Hackers arrested in Jordan… now threatening to attack Jordan, and physically kill Jews:
Anti-Semitic To the Bone
“Today we invade their internet sites and their electronic fortresses, and tomorrow we will attack them in their homes, which were established upon our land and which robbed us of our rights,” …
a friends mom’s on Facebook posted this “meme/quote” and tagged me in it. So, I responded to it with what lies below. I wish to note a few things about the “interaction” that followed. Firstly, this action taken by D.N. (friend’s mom) proves yet again that conservatives are much more tolerant than liberals. A study shows that “liberals more likely to block social-media friends over political differences,” here is DAILY CALLER’S take:
According to a new poll from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, self-described liberals are twice as likely than self-described conservatives to block material on social networking websites that they find politically disagreeable.
Thirty-six percent of social media users said they have blocked, “unfriended” or hidden someone because of politics, but left-leaning participants were far more likely to have taken that action to express disagreement about a friend’s political views.
“Liberals are the most likely to have taken … steps to block, unfriend, or hide” disagreeable political messages, Pew concluded. “In all, 28% of liberals have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on SNS [social networking sites] because of one of these reasons, compared with 16% of conservatives and 14% of moderates.”
Sixteen percent of liberal users said they blocked someone who posted something specific that they disagreed with, compared to eight percent of conservative users.
Liberals are also far more likely than conservatives — 11 percent compared with 4 percent — to completely delete friends from social networking sites because they disagree with their politics.
There has been no word — nor will there likely be any — about whether liberals will enjoy reading this story. Many, if the Pew study is to be believed, will just block it from their news feeds.
Which happened, I was “unfriended.” But here is the kicker, the week prior D.N. got onto my FaceBook and essentially called me a small minded racist bigot! And I quote our conversation:
(She said) “Black people and white people weren’t allowed get married years ago either… if small minded, bigoted people had their way it would still be that way. Gay marriage Is NO different…. religious folks who believe and support same sex marriage ?? They must not be real religious people.”
(I Responded) In other words, a discussion to you is calling me and other readers here “bigots,” and impugning the character of religious gays by creating straw-man arguments of what I (we) say/mean? And when I politely point this out by not pointing out how you name call and use “cards” (sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted ~ S.I.X.H.I.R.B.)….
An interesting thought just came to mind as well. In our previous conversation she mentioned that there are religiously left-leaning people, and that I shouldn’t hold back or discount their thinking, but take into account their thinking BECAUSE they are religious. This was not clearly stated by her, but it was implied. Yet, she apparently does not see the self-refuting aspect of the graphic she posted on her own FaceBook and her previous statement to me. How convenient that she doesn’t practice what she expects others to hold to. If you are conservative and religious, you have no right to force your feelings on people. If you are liberal and religious, game-on!
I didn’t unfriend her? She got onto my FaceBook and called me a racist bigot. Yet, I pointed out the flaws in Judge Judy’s quote and for this, I was ex-communicated. Why? Because leftism is the dominant religion of her being. Here is what I wrote, and what I was doing is making two points that the Judge characterized wrongly the debate with:
that this is a solely religious argument, and;
she herself is pushing her morality on others.
Here we go:
This isn’t a religious argument? For instance, here is an atheist gay man explaining why he is against same-sex marriage:
One of the most respected Canadian sociologist/scholar/homosexual, Paul Nathanson, writes that there are at least five functions that marriage serves–things that every culture must do in order to survive and thrive. They are:
✫ Foster the bonding between men and women ✫ Foster the birth and rearing of children ✫Foster the bonding between men and children ✫Foster some form of healthy masculine identity ✫ Foster the transformation of adolescents into sexually responsible adults
Note that Nathanson considers these points critical to the continued survival of any culture. He continues “Because heterosexuality is directly related to both reproduction and survival, … every human societ[y] has had to promote it actively . … Heterosexuality is always fostered by a cultural norm” that limits marriage to unions of men and women. He adds that people “are wrong in assuming that any society can do without it.”
Going further he stated that “same sex marriage is a bad idea” …[he] only opposed “gay marriage, not gay relationships.”
And then I posted this short video of another gay man explaining the importance of marriage and how same-sex marriage will undefine it:
Then I zeroed in on the statement that religious people are “forcing their morality on other.” I quoted the following mock-conversation to make the point clear via an old philosophy paper of mine:
You Shouldn’t Force Your Morality On Me![1]
First Person: “You shouldn’t force your morality on me.”
Second Person: “Why not?”
First Person: “Because I don’t believe in forcing morality.”
Second Person: “If you don’t believe in it, then by all means, don’t do it. Especially don’t force that moral view of yours on me.”
First Person: “You shouldn’t push your morality on me.”
Second Person: “I’m not entirely sure what you mean by that statement. Do you mean I have no right to an opinion?”
First Person: “You have a right to you’re opinion, but you have no right to force it on anyone.”
Second Person: “Is that your opinion?”
First Person: “Yes.”
Second Person: “Then why are you forcing it on me?”
First Person: “But your saying your view is right.”
Second Person: “Am I wrong?”
First Person: “Yes.”
Second Person: “Then your saying only your view is right, which is the very thing you objected to me saying.”
First Person: “You shouldn’t push your morality on me.”
Second Person: “Correct me if I’m misunderstanding you here, but it sounds to me like your telling me I’m wrong.”
First Person: “You are.”
Second Person: “Well, you seem to be saying my personal moral view shouldn’t apply to other people, but that sounds suspiciously like you are applying your moral view to me. Why are you forcing your morality on me?”
SELF-DEFEATING
“Most of the problems with our culture can be summed up in one phrase: ‘Who are you to say?’” – Dennis Prager. So lets unpack this phrase and see how it is self-refuting, or as Tom Morris[2] put it, self-deleting.
When someone says, “Who are you to say?” answer with, “Who are you to say ‘Who are you to say’?”[3]
This person is challenging your right to correct another, yet she is correcting you. Your response to her amounts to “Who are you to correct my correction, if correcting in itself is wrong?” or “If I don’t have the right to challenge your view, then why do you have the right to challenge mine?” Her objection is self-refuting; you’re just pointing it out.
The “Who are you to say?” challenge fails on another account. Taken at face value, the question challenges one’s authority to judge another’s conduct. It says, in effect, “What authorizes you to make a rule for others? Are you in charge?” This challenge miscasts my position. I don’t expect others to obey me simply because I say so. I’m appealing to reason, not asserting my authority. It’s one thing to force beliefs; it’s quite another to state those beliefs and make an appeal for them.
The “Who are you to say?” complaint is a cheap shot. At best it’s self-defeating. It’s an attempt to challenge the legitimacy of your moral judgments, but the statement itself implies a moral judgment. At worst, it legitimizes anarchy!
[1]Francis Beckwith & Gregory Koukl, Relativism: Feet Planted in Mid-Air (Baker Books; 1998), p. 144-146.
[2]Tom Morris, Philosophy for Dummies (IDG Books; 1999), p. 46
[3]Francis Beckwith & Gregory Koukl, Relativism: Feet Planted in Mid-Air (Baker Books; 1998), p. 144-146.”
I ended with the “you aren’t doing this debate/discussion/national dialogue and good by posting un-truths like the above Judge Judy quote” type finisher. As she unfriended me she said I was saying wacko things? Personally, the above is astute, full of knowledge and close to the heart information by gay men.
In a final word to me, D.N. mentioned that one of her sons said this would happen.
I asked “what would happen?”
Did her son say that I WOULD NOT unfriended her for calling me a small minded racist bigot on my own FaceBook?
Did he say to her that SHE WOULD unfriend me after I pointed to gay men themselves speaking the truth about the immutability of the heterosexual union?
Her son said that would happen?
I don’t think so.
And she is one who would say that the right is creating an air of divisiveness. What a crazy, unthinking, low-voter information world we live in.
One last point not included in the original conversation, but that I believe to be salient to the tactic used by Judge Judy and the myriad of other who think such statements make sense.
Use Judge Judy’s own words against them in regards to these other examples where Christianity led the way,
“They have no right to impose their feelings on the rest of us.”
…Such “exclude religion” arguments are wrong because marriage is not a religion! When voters define marriage, they are not establishing a religion. In the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” the word “religion” refers to the church that people attend and support. “Religion” means being a Baptist or Catholic or Presbyterian or Jew. It does not mean being married. These arguments try to make the word “religion” in the Constitution mean something different from what it has always meant.
These arguments also make the logical mistake of failing to distinguish the reasons for a law from the content of the law. There were religious reasons behind many of our laws, but these laws do not “establish” a religion. All major religions have teachings against stealing, but laws against stealing do not “establish a religion.” All religions have laws against murder, but laws against murder do not “establish a religion.” The campaign to abolish slavery in the United States and England was led by many Christians, based on their religious convictions, but laws abolishing slavery do not “establish a religion.” The campaign to end racial discrimination and segregation was led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist pastor, who preached against racial injustice from the Bible. But laws against discrimination and segregation do not “establish a religion.”
If these “exclude religion” arguments succeed in court, they could soon be applied against evangelicals and Catholics who make “religious” arguments against abortion. Majority votes to protect unborn children could then be invalidated by saying these voters are “establishing a religion.” And, by such reasoning, all the votes of religious citizens for almost any issue could be found invalid by court decree! This would be the direct opposite of the kind of country the Founding Fathers established, and the direct opposite of what they meant by “free exercise” of religion in the First Amendment.
[….]
Historian Alvin Schmidt points out how the spread of Christianity and Christian influence on government was primarily responsible for outlawing infanticide, child abandonment, and abortion in the Roman Empire (in AD 374); outlawing the brutal battles-to-the-death in which thousands of gladiators had died (in 404); outlawing the cruel punishment of branding the faces of criminals (in 315); instituting prison reforms such as the segregating of male and female prisoners (by 361); stopping the practice of human sacrifice among the Irish, the Prussians, and the Lithuanians as well as among other nations; outlawing pedophilia; granting of property rights and other protections to women; banning polygamy (which is still practiced in some Muslim nations today); prohibiting the burning alive of widows in India (in 1829); outlawing the painful and crippling practice of binding young women’s feet in China (in 1912); persuading government officials to begin a system of public schools in Germany (in the sixteenth century); and advancing the idea of compulsory education of all children in a number of European countries.
During the history of the church, Christians have had a decisive influence in opposing and often abolishing slavery in the Roman Empire, in Ireland, and in most of Europe (though Schmidt frankly notes that a minority of “erring” Christian teachers have supported slavery in various centuries). In England, William Wilberforce, a devout Christian, led the successful effort to abolish the slave trade and then slavery itself throughout the British Empire by 1840.
In the United States, though there were vocal defenders of slavery among Christians in the South, they were vastly outnumbered by the many Christians who were ardent abolitionists, speaking, writing, and agitating constantly for the abolition of slavery in the United States. Schmidt notes that two-thirds of the American abolitionists in the mid-1830s were Christian clergymen, and he gives numerous examples of the strong Christian commitment of several of the most influential of the antislavery crusaders, including Elijah Lovejoy (the first abolitionist martyr), Lyman Beecher, Edward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Charles Finney, Charles T. Torrey, Theodore Weld, William Lloyd Garrison, “and others too numerous to mention.” The American civil rights movement that resulted in the outlawing of racial segregation and discrimination was led by Martin Luther King Jr., a Christian pastor, and supported by many Christian churches and groups.
There was also strong influence from Christian ideas and influential Christians in the formulation of the Magna Carta in England (1215) and of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Constitution (1787) in the United States. These are three of the most significant documents in the history of governments on the earth, and all three show the marks of significant Christian influence in the foundational ideas of how governments should function.
Wayne Grudem, Politics According to the Bible [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010], 31, 49-50.
BONUS
This WALL STREET JOURNAL article is a related (to the video/audio) herein. This audio was uploaded March 28, 2013:
NELSON LUND: A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT WITHOUT SCIENCE BEHIND IT
Advocates of same-sex marriages can’t back up claims about positive long-term effects.
By Nelson Lund (March 26, 2013)
The Supreme Court is hearing two cases this week that represent a challenge to one of the oldest and most fundamental institutions of our civilization. In Hollingsworth v. Perry and United States v. Windsor, the court is being asked to rule that constitutional equal protection requires the government to open marriage to same-sex couples.
The claimed right to same-sex marriage is not in the Constitution or in the court’s precedents, so the court must decide whether to impose a new law making marriage into a new and different institution. The justices are unlikely to take so momentous a step unless they are persuaded that granting this new right to same-sex couples will not harm children or ultimately undermine the health of our society.
A significant number of organizations representing social and behavioral scientists have filed briefs promising the court that there is nothing to worry about. These assurances have no scientific foundation. Same-sex marriage is brand new, and child rearing by same-sex couples remains rare. Even if both phenomena were far more common, large amounts of data collected over decades would be required before any responsible researcher could make meaningful scientific estimates of the long-term effects of redefining marriage.
The conclusions in the research literature typically amount at best to claims that a particular study found “no evidence” of bad effects from child rearing by same-sex couples. One could just as easily say that there is no reliable evidence that such child-rearing practices are beneficial or harmless. And that is the conclusion that should be relevant to the court.
Social-science advocacy organizations, however, have promoted the myth that a lack of evidence, so far, of bad effects implies the nonexistence of such effects. This myth is based on conjecture or faith, not science.
Nor is the leap of faith from “no evidence” to “don’t worry” an accident. The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, himself a distinguished social scientist at Harvard, once observed: “Social science is rarely dispassionate, and social scientists are frequently caught up in the politics which their work necessarily involves . . . [T]he pronounced ‘liberal’ orientation of sociology, psychology, political science, and similar fields is well established.”
This orientation has been on rich display in the research on same-sex parenting, which is scientific primarily in the sense that it is typically conducted by people with postgraduate degrees. There are no scientifically reliable studies at all, nor could there be, given the available data. Yet the Supreme Court has been solemnly assured by many scientific organizations, such as the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, that the overwhelming weight of evidence indicates that same-sex couples are every bit the equal of opposite-sex parents in every relevant respect. The number of studies may be overwhelming but the evidence assuredly is not.
The prominent National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, for instance, relied on a sample recruited entirely at lesbian events, in women’s bookstores and through lesbian newspapers. Other studies relied on samples as small as 18 or 33 or 44 cases. The effect of parenting by male homosexual couples remains in the realm of anecdotes. Most research has relied on reports by parents about their children’s well-being while the children were still under the care of those parents. Even a social scientist should be able to recognize that parents’ evaluations of their own success as parents might be a little skewed.
In 2012, sociologist Loren Marks conducted a detailed re-analysis of 59 studies of parenting by gays and lesbians that were cited by the American Psychological Association in a 2005 publication. Mr. Marks, who teaches at Louisiana State University, concluded that the association drew inferences that were not empirically warranted.
There has been only one study using a large randomized sample, objective measures of well-being, and reports of grown children rather than their parents. This research, by Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas Austin, found that children raised in a household where a parent was involved in a same-sex romantic relationship were at a significant disadvantage with respect to a number of indicators of well being—such as depression, educational attainment and criminal behavior—compared with children of intact biological families.
One might expect this work at least to raise a caution flag, but it has been vociferously attacked on methodological grounds by the same organizations that tout the value of politically congenial research that suffers from more severe methodological shortcomings. This is what one expects from activists, not scientists.
As everyone knows, some states have begun to experiment with legalizing same-sex marriage, and public opinion seems to be shifting in favor of the change. Perhaps this will work out well, and the overwhelming majority of states that have been more cautious will eventually catch up. But experiments are never guaranteed to succeed, and one advantage of democracy is that it allows failed experiments to be abandoned. If the Supreme Court constitutionalizes a right to same-sex marriage, however, there will be no going back. The court cannot possibly know that it is safe to take this irrevocable step.
Mr. Lund is a professor at George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Va. This article is based on an amicus curiae brief in support of the petitioners in Hollingsworth v. Perry, filed on behalf of Leon R. Kass (University of Chicago), Harvey C. Mansfield (Harvard University), and the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy.
I am reading a great review of a book on my reading list in the Journal of Creation, Volume 27, Issue 1 (Published April 2013) entitled, “Metaphors for mankind? A review of Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, by Robert Zubrin” ~ Book Review by Marc Ambler. I loved the review, and it is right up my “religio-political alley. Here is an excerpt (pp. 27-29) that I found fascinating and will undoubtedly add to the general knowledge of the reader:
From Darwin to Dachau
Eugenics and belief in racial supremacy eventually led to the horrors of Nazism on the European continent. In a later chapter, Zubrin argues that the evil deeds of the Nazis in occupied Europe, far from being done under cover, and without the awareness of the majority of the German population, was carried out with the complicity and knowledge of the majority. Thoroughly indoctrinated by ‘scientific’ racism, the German people would see Hitler’s actions as at minimum a necessary evil, or even for the ultimate ‘good’ of the Nordic Aryan people. Hitler is quoted as saying in 1941, “The law of existence prescribes uninterrupted killing, so that the better may live” (1. 984). As proof of his argument, Zubrin relates that
“At the height of the Third Reich, there were over 20,000 death camps, and most were discovered by Allied forces within hours of their entering newly liberated territory-as the stench of the camps’ crematoria made them readily detectable. Hundreds of thousands of Germans were employed operating these facilities, and several million more were members of armed forces or police units engaged in or supporting genocidal operations”
The idea that the general populations of Germany and other European countries where this was being carried out were unaware of the Holocaust stretches credulity.
As a further proof of the acquiescence of these peoples due to social Darwinian indoctrination, the writer gives the account of the White Rose resistance group. These Munich based, college students, mainly Lutheran and Catholic, began a campaign of leaflet distribution throughout Germany in 1942.5 Some quotes from their leaflets illustrate their awareness of what was going on:
“Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible crimes-crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure-reach the light of day?”
“Since the conquest of Poland, three hundred thousand Jews have been murdered in this country in the most bestial way. Here we see the most frightful crime against human dignity, a crime that is unparalleled in the whole of history. For Jews, too, are human beings … . All male offspring of the houses of the (Polish) nobility between the ages of fifteen and twenty were transported to concentration camps in Germany and sentenced to forced labor, and all the girls of this age group were sent to Norway, into the bordellos of the SS! Why tell you these things, since you are fully aware of them? … . Why do the German people behave so apathetically in the face of all these abominable crimes, crimes so unworthy of the human race? … . Each man wants to be exonerated of a guilt of this kind, each one continues on his way with the most placid, the calmest conscience. But he cannot be exonerated; he is guilty, guilty, guilty!”
These brave students were captured and tortured in 1943 and some beheaded, some imprisoned. By highlighting this awareness, Zubrin is preparing us for what is possible when men lose their perception of who we are through Darwinian (he would not use the term evolutionary) indoctrination. As another White Rose leaflet declares,
“… when of his (man’s) own volition he leaves his place in the order of Creation as founded for him by God in freedom; when he yields to the force of evil … . We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!” The thesis of Zubrin’s book is that, under the same belief system as the Nazis, genocide has taken place throughout the world over the decades since the war, though by different, less obvious means.
Eugenics in America
Eugenic societies and ideas also began to increasingly manifest themselves with a `back-to-nature’, `Darwinian antihumanism’. Notable disciples in America were such influential individuals and families as the Roosevelts; Henry Fairfield Osborn; and Margaret Sanger, the founder of the American Birth Control League who argued for legal abortion as a means of “eliminating undesirable racial stock”. In the build-up to WWII, blind eyes were turned in America to what Hitler was doing. Eugenic and population concerns lead to the obstruction of European Jews trying to flee, and even to refugees being turned back from American shores, as it turned out to the ovens of German. The Darwinian, Malthusian, eugenic influence continued after the war, though subdued due to the devastating fruits seen during the war, in such organisations as Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club and the Club of Rome, as well as many influential global organisations such as the World Bank and UN.
One of the recurring themes of this book, is of how pseudo-scientific, eugenic books and publications such as that of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, which Hitler referred to as his ‘bible,’ became populist propaganda tools under which devastating policies were justified and implemented. Grant was the vice president of the Immigration Restriction League and a trustee of the Museum of Natural History. This use of eugenic-inspired media was also key in ‘numbing’ the public to other policies later described in the book Man and Earth, a neo-pagan tract written in 1913, was influential in the birth of another child of Malthus’s theory of limited resources—”This twin was environmentalism” (1. 1056), closely linked philosophically to eugenics in both Germany and the USA. It was reprinted in 1980 as one of the founding documents of the West German Green Party, whose founder and first chairman was August Haussleiter, a former SS officer.
Our Plundered Planet, written in 1948 by Fairfield Osborn, the son of Henry Fairfield Osborn. was a 3-million copy bestseller “which became the founding manifesto of the postwar environmentalist movement” (I. 1185). These movements and foundations such as the Conservation Foundation, Sierra Club and the Environmental Defence Fund, had population control as their primary focus. This was especially for developing nations, but was also promoted in post-war Japan where key American eugenic advocates were placed in influential positions, and forced ‘population control’ measures on the Japanese people.
Commissioned by The Sierra Club, The Population Bomb, written by Paul Ehrlich in 1967 amidst much publicity (figure 2), became the “new Malthusian bible for modern times”. Typical of this type of propaganda, prophecies of impending doom were used to induce a popular panic which became a smokescreen for increased government interference in people’s lives.
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death … . We must have population control at home, hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail” (1. 1584). –A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people … . We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense” (1. 1605).
Under the hysteria of this type of propaganda (proven false by history), measures were taken throughout the world to coerce people into population control measures. As an example, Zubrin documents the World Bank’s making loans to third world countries, often ruled by corrupt leaders. The loans were subject to the implementation of broad, coerced programs including abortion, sterilisation and involuntary insertion of IUD’s. These programs often meant that while normal healthcare facilities were neglected and underfunded, `population control’ staff, facilities and resources were state of the art.
Anti DDT, Nuclear, GM and CO2; pro-nature or anti-human?
The writer begins in Chapter 6, entitled “In Defence of Malaria”, to document another post war implementation of eugenic ideology. Most telling is a quote from Alexander King, a co-founder of the Club of Rome, who said “my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem” (1. 1350). DDT began to be used by the Allies in WWII in areas where malaria threatened to derail the campaign against the Nazis and Japanese, with dramatic effect. After the war, DDT programs in the Southern USA, Ceylon, South Africa, and other countries reduced malarial deaths and incidence to almost zero. Alarmed by the implications to population growth, particularly in third world countries, alarm bells again began to be rung by influential eugenicists. If eradicating DDT programs had been overtly sold as a means of reducing population, Western sensibilities would not have accepted it. In what has become a predictable routine, an environmental reason was given to halt DDT use. The marine biologist and nature writer, Rachel Carson was contracted to write Silent Spring (figure 2). In it she warned of the dangers of DDT to wildlife, particularly birdlife. The evocative title says it all, if DDT programs were continued, one day mankind would awake to a ‘silent spring’ bereft of the sound of birdlife. Zubrin goes on to show that the various claims were totally unscientific and cites a number of scientific studies to document this. The environmentalist campaign was successful and DDT was banned in western countries and aid to third world countries again made subject to their suspending the use of DDT. Today, “Malaria kills more than a million people worldwide each year-90 percent of them in Africa; 70 percent children under the age of five.”‘ This is more deaths than due to AIDS, but receives far less media attention; while the cheapest and most effective remedy available to African countries, DDT, is denied them.
The next leftist, environmental cause that Zubrin examines is ‘The Anti-Nuclear Crusade’ …
William Lane Craig uses his opponents own words to prove naturalism is false. The full debate can be seen here, as well as my isolating the most amazing statement I have heard in such a debate, here. Video description for the above:
On February 1st, 2013 at Purdue University, Dr William Lane Craig participated in a debate with Dr Alex Rosenberg on the topic, “Is Faith In God Reasonable?” Over 5,000 people watched the event on the Purdue University campus along with tens of thousands streaming it live online from around the world. In this clip, Dr Craig responds to metaphysical naturalism which asserts that only physical things exist.
This 4-and-a-half-minute response during a debate ~ for my “Serious Saturday” post ~ is a great example of using an opponents words against them. Obviously, in regards to the debate between Dr. Craig and Dr. Rosenberg, this usage was a bit easier, but nonetheless, it shows that naturalism (atheism), as a worldview is self-deleting. That is, incoherent and provably false based on its OWN premises.
Some additional notes from a conversation (FaceBook) that shows the perceive ability to control nature/biology:
(Parenthood) What SSM is doing is a) attacking religious institutions [religious adoption agencies and groups like the Boyscout], and b) attacking gender.
▼ “Those of us who fear the consequences of redefining marriage — asking children if they hope to marry a boy or a girl when they get older, banning religious adoption agencies from placing children first with a married man and woman, denying the importance of both sexes in making families, choosing boys to be high-school prom queens and girls to be high-school prom kings,” etc (http://tinyurl.com/8vq29mj).
States that legalize SSM then enter curriculum and change meanings of words. Massachusetts is scrubbing the words “mother,” “father.”
California has new textbook standards that are leading to this same genderless distinctions. What the Left does — and has done for some time (see the liberal professors book on the matter: “The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America”) is ruin the good for a perceived perfect.
Here is a great example of this being done, and this is not a micro issue, this has to do with truth, and in the SSM debate, deals with a collective wisdom from history, which seemingly you would discount. After example-after-example, Prager ends with this point that is endemic to the left, diversity/mulch-culturalism/political correctness:
▼ Further poisoning musical judgment is the Left-wing value of diversity. In 2011, Anthony Tommasini, music critic of the New York Times, published his list of the ten greatest composers who ever lived. Absent from the list was Haydn, who Tommasini acknowledged was the father of the symphony, father of the string quartet, and father of the piano sonata. Indeed, one of the avant-garde’s most celebrated modern composers (and a justly celebrated conductor), Pierre Boulez, “thinks Haydn a greater composer than Mozart,”” and one of the greatest pianists who ever lived, Glenn Gould, thought Haydn’s piano sonatas were superior to Mozart’s. So, why did the New York Times music critic omit Haydn? Because, he wrote, “If such a list is to be at all diverse and comprehensive, how could 4 of the 10 slots go to composers—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert—who worked in Vienna during, say, the 75 years from 1750 to 1825?” Diversity, not greatness, helped determine the New York Times list of the greatest ten composers. That is why Bartok, Debussy, and Stravinsky made the list but Haydn (and Handel) didn’t.
One article I love, and I will end with this, talks about this leftist egalitarian bent in society that destroys in order to make fair:
“…you will be like God, knowing good and evil…” ~ Serpent (Gen 3:5)
….Scientists who study the brain say that some abilities develop greatly at the expense of other abilities. Socially as well, some talents are developed by neglecting others. Concert pianists seldom have a college education, because the demands of the two things are just too great. Therefore, for both biological and social reasons, the only way for everyone to be equal would be for them to be equal at a lower level of ability than what some people are capable of in some things and other people are in other things.
In other words, if everyone were equal in their many capabilities, the whole species would be no more capable or insightful or resistant to diseases than one individual. Our chances of surviving or progressing would be a lot less than they are now. Even the enjoyment we get from watching Tiger Woods play golf or Pavarotti sing would be lost, for we would all be mediocrities in golf and singing and a thousand other things.
A recent book on the publishing industry showed that 63 out of 100 best-sellers had been written by just six authors. It is not uncommon in baseball for just two players to hit more than half the home runs hit by the whole team.
[….]
Where the desire for equality turns from a quixotic hope to a dangerous gamble is in politics. To create even the semblance of “equality” [of results] requires a concentration of power in the hands of political leaders. [And it is only possible by unequally protecting individual rights!–Editor] And, as the history of the 20th century has shown repeatedly and tragically, in countries around the world, once concentrated power is put into the hands of political leaders, they can use it for whatever purpose they have in mind — regardless of what others had in mind when they granted them that power.
Becoming the pawns of politicians is a high price to pay for letting demagogues stir up our envy and beguile us with promises to equalize.
One sign of an over oppressive movement is illustrated in The Animal Farm, by George Orwell. Napoleon, one of the main characters, concerns himself with the education of the young, and forcefully takes two litters of puppies away as soon as they’re weaned, saying he’ll educate them. In effect the “State” are the ones who are charged with educating and rearing them. Now compare this to a statement made by feminist Mary Jo Bane, assistant professor of education at Wellesley College and associate director of the school’s Center for Research on Woman, and the lesson taught in Animal Farm:
“In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them.”
“Mary Jo Bane, formerly of the Clinton Administration Department of Health and Human Services one of the major voices in the Boston Globe against the average Catholic’s right to freedom of religion. Bane’s most famous quote is ‘We really don’t know how to raise children. If we want to talk about equality of opportunity for children, then the fact that children are raised in families means there’s no equality. … In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them.’”
