Minnesota

Katherine Kersten’s First Things Article (Dennis Prager)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Dennis Prager read from a FIRST THINGS article entitled “Transgender Conformity,” by Katherine Kersten. The article discusses Nova Classical Academy, “a K–12 charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota, is the sort of school that most parents seeking a first-rate education for their children can only dream about. Founded in 2003, the school teaches the classical curriculum of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Students read the Aeneid, the Iliad, and Dante’s Inferno.”

First Things continued:

Nova’s website proclaims, “Parents are the primary educators of their children.” The school’s mission statement calls students to “a virtuous life of duty and ideals.” In 2016, U.S. News and World Report named Nova’s high school No. 1 in Minnesota, and the No. 4 charter high school in the nation.

But on October 14, 2015, parents of K–5 students at Nova received an email from lower school principal Brooke Tousignant that was destined to change the school forever.

Tousignant informed parents that, in the coming year, Nova would be “support[ing] a student who is gender non-conforming.” This term, she explained,

describes children whose identities, appearances, behaviors, or interests do not fit traditional societal expectations associated with their sex assigned at birth. It is important to note that this expression of gender is ever-changing as students are constantly exploring many different aspects of their identity.

To support the gender-nonconforming child, Nova would be teaching K–5 students “about the beauty of being themselves.” All K–5 students would read a book called My Princess Boy, “which tells the story of a boy who expresses his true self by dressing up and enjoying traditional girl things.” Thus was Nova Classical Academy plunged into the Twilight Zone of transgender politics.

[….]

….School board meetings at Nova, once sleepy affairs, quickly became scenes of conflict. LGBT activist groups such as Transforming Families (a support group for transgender families) and Gender Justice (a nonprofit law firm) “mobbed the meetings, brought their lawyers, protested, and compelled their sobbing transgender kids to talk about bullying and suicide attempts,” according to Emily Zinos, a longtime Nova parent.

Parents who questioned the proposed policy changes were branded as bigots. “We were ridiculed, mocked, and accused of hatefulness and ignorance, despite our doctoral degrees,” said Tom Lynn, parent of four Nova students. Parents’ free speech rights were also frequently challenged. At one school board meeting, Nova’s attorney asked the school board chair to end public comment, warning that a parent’s reference to the First Amendment could be interpreted as creating an impermissible “hostile environment.”

[…..]

…Individuals who suffer from a psychological condition known as “gender dysphoria” experience a marked incongruence between their biological sex and their “gender identity”—defined as the subjective, internal sense of being a man or woman. Gender dysphoria is listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). It is part of the family of psychological disorders that includes anorexia, body dysmorphic disorder, and body integrity identity disorder (BIID). Anorexic individuals wrongly believe they are obese, while those with body dysmorphic disorder are consumed by the notion that they are ugly. Individuals who suffer from BIID identify as disabled and sometimes seek amputation of healthy limbs or the surgical severing of their spinal cord.

In adult males, gender dysphoria is generally rooted in erotic attractions, according to McHugh. Children are different. They “come to their ideas about their sex” through “a variety of youthful psychosocial conflicts and concerns,” he says. These include “conflicts over the prospects, expectations, and roles that they sense are attached to their given sex—and presume that sex-reassignment will ease or resolve them.”

Gender dysphoria is often associated with pre-existing psychological problems such as anxiety, depression, autism spectrum disorders, and a history of sexual abuse or physical or mental trauma. Other “predisposing and perpetuating factors” include troubled peer dynamics, parental psychopathology, and parental reinforcement of cross-gender behavior during the sensitive period of gender-identity formation, according to Dr. Kenneth Zucker, longtime director of the Child Youth and Family Gender Identity Clinic at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. A child’s ability to resolve gender dysphoria tends to correlate with parental attitudes, with success much more likely if parents minimize the problem, which is exactly the opposite of what transgender ideologues such as the Edwards are doing.

Fortunately, the great majority of young people who struggle with gender dysphoria “identify” with their own sex by late adolescence or adulthood, according to the DSM-5. Estimates range from 70 to 95 percent. For those afflicted, McHugh says, the best treatment is counseling and family therapy….

(MUST read)

Further Details on Ilhan Omar

Published by Papa Giorgio

I see this as a growing assault of our marriage laws. I recently Watched a discussion on polygamy, at the end of the discussion, the researchers all threw out bets on how many years before polygamy become legal. it was 10-to-5-years. But marrying family members is also a cultural aspect to some foreigners-immigrating to these Great States. Hence, you will soon find less than conservative folks (religious or secular) arguing for the normalization of such things. But for now, this is news. Important news.

The continuing saga of Ilhan Omar and her husband collection. Including alleged Bigamy and Immigration Fraud. Not to mention that she married her own brother. And that marriage appears to be on record.

Democratic Fraud and Bigamy Under Sharia Law

Published by Papa Giorgio

A Minnesota Democratic “darling” has fallen apart upon further reflection. JIHAD WATCH notes that “Minnesota State House of Representatives candidate Ilhan Omar has made history and been universally hailed as the first Muslim candidate for that office.” Here is a short bio of, Ilhan Omar, via REWIRE:

…Ilhan Omar, a noted feminist and liberal policy advocate from Minnesota, has won the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party primary in the 60B Minneapolis House district.

Her win means she will likely become the first Somali-American legislator in the United States, the Star-Tribune reported Tuesday. It also means incumbent DFL Rep. Phyllis Kahn, who was first elected to the House in 1972, will not serve a 23rd term.

After the primary results came in, Kahn told the Star-Tribune that Omar “mobilized a lot of people that we didn’t see before in previous elections.” This year, according to Omar’s campaign, 5,868 people from the district voted in the primary—an increase of 37 percent from the 2014 primary.

Omar, 33, currently works as the director of policy initiatives at Women Organizing Women…

Here is another headline since the immediate fervor was over…: “Members of the Somali Community are afraid to speak publicly about their disapproval of a candidate’s involvement in apparent fraudulent marriages.” Here is a small clip from the article:

…A credible source from inside the Somali Community has stepped forward and provided Alpha News with information in exchange for anonymity. For the purposes of the article, we will refer to the source as Z.

Z tells Alpha News members of the Somali Community are being silenced through intimidation tactics and threats of physical violence on themselves and their families still back home in Somalia.

Z specifically mentions a man named Gulaad Hashi and identifies him as “campaign muscle”. Z tells Alpha News, “He serves as [Omar’s] muscle in the Somali community and has been leading a witch hunt to out ‘the snitch’ in the community. He has used everything from intimidation to threats to silence community members from speaking out about this, which is why no Somali has publicly come forward to state what we all know to be true.”…

Another issue with this Muslim candidate is in regards to her marriage[s]. Yes, plural. It looks like she is married to her husband… as well as her brother (in order to commit immigration fraud). POWERLINE notes:

  • The Omar campaign responded to our inquiries through a Minneapolis criminal defense attorney. The campaign declined to provide a substantive response to our inquiries. Rather, it implied that the questions were bigoted.

Yep… maybe the “cultural” argument will be brought in? CREEEPING SHARIA notes as well some additional information.

Larry Elder Sprinkles Some Kryptonite on Liberals

Published by Papa Giorgio

Here is LARRY ELDER layin’ down the SAGE LAW!

Where to start with actor Jesse Williams’ widely praised rant on police brutality and white racism delivered at this year’s Black Entertainment Television awards show?

To his enthusiastic audience, Williams reeled off lie after lie, all in the name of black “resistance” over the “oppressor” – meaning anyone he believes benefits from “this invention called whiteness.” Time magazine called his discourse “powerful.”

Where are fact-checkers when the fact-devoid desperately need fact-checking? After all, Williams practically begged to be fact-checked when he said, “What we’ve been doing is looking at the data, and we know that police somehow manage to de-escalate, disarm and not kill white people every day.”

The “police … manage to … not kill white people every day”?

Let’s start with 2014, the last year for which there are official records. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the police killed 261 whites and 131 blacks. The CDC also found that from 1999 to 2013, the police killed almost twice the number of whites compared to blacks, 3,160 and 1,724, respectively.

Activists promptly note that whites account for nearly 65 percent of the population and that, therefore, one would expect whites to comprise most of those killed by cops. And we are told that blacks, while 13 percent of the population, represent a much greater percentage of those killed by cops. Institutional, systemic, structural racism!

Here’s what those promoting the “police disproportionately kill black people” narrative consistently omit. Whites, despite being almost 65 percent of the population, disproportionately commit less of the nation’s violent crime – 10 percent. Blacks, at 13 percent of the population, disproportionately commit more violent crime. As to murders, black commit nearly half. Yet whites are 50 percent of cop killings.

Criminology professor Peter Moskos looked at the numbers of those killed by officers from May 2013 to April 2015 and found that 49 percent were white, while 30 percent were black. “Adjusted for the homicide rate,” says Moskos, “whites are 1.7 times more likely than blacks to die at the hands of police.” So if anything, whites have more to complain about than Mr. Williams….

Again we see a false narrative built by the media and then is comes collapsing down, via, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR:

Here we go again.

Yet another hotly reported media narrative stamps itself on the national dialogue only to find — oops! — maybe there are actually more facts to be discovered before we know, as they say, “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

This time around the media narrative surrounds the Minnesota shooting by St. Anthony Village Police Department officer Jeronimo Yanez, the shooting victim one Philando Castile. Says a police audio tape of Yanez:

  • “I’m going to check IDs. I have reason to pull it over. The two occupants just look like people that were involved in a robbery. The driver looks more like one of our suspects, just ’cause of the wide-set nose.”

Then we learn that there are pictures out there of the robber — one of two — committing the robbery, gun in hand. And indeed there is a similarity between one of the robbers and Castile.

Now. How did we learn any of this? From a narrative quite different from the mainstream media’s all-too-predictable “racist white cop kills black man” story — a different narrative that went viral over at CONSERVATIVE TREEHOUSE. The TreeHouse story drew instant wrath from liberal websites. Over at Mediaite John Ziegler PUT IT THIS WAY:

  • Shocker! It Looks Like the Media May Have Bought a False Narrative in Philando Castile Shooting

Writes Ziegler in part:

If there is one thing I’ve learned about media firestorms in the modern age of one-hour news cycles and 15-second attention spans, it’s that whoever tells the first story which the news media likes is the “winner.” Once the narrative is set in stone (when the news media works in unison that takes about two days, tops), the truth will face a battle that is severely uphill, into the wind, on ice, and will almost never prevail.

There was no better example of this sad reality than the “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” myth which drove the entire Ferguson fiasco and was the origin of the entire “Black Lives Matter” movement. Every investigation into the matter (including by the Obama administration) later concluded, against self-interest, that this catchphrase was based on an obvious and despicable lie. However, even that did almost nothing to alter public perceptions of that event or the media’s eagerness to give instant credibility to similar claims from the same groups in the future.

Ziegler goes on at a later point to add:

Again, none of this remotely proves that Castile was indeed the armed robbery suspect. The point is that there is a potentially very compelling other side of this story which is being ignored or ridiculed by the media which is already very invested in the current narrative.

One of the best examples of this is the “fact check” website “Snopes,” which, in its typically arrogant and liberal fashion, has definitely declared these “rumors” about Castile to be “false,” while actually doing a pretty good job of establishing that they might actually be true (while also ignoring the significance of what we now know was in the police officer’s mindset). A close reading of their conclusions could best be summed up by saying: “We want this story to be false, so, because it hasn’t yet been proven 100% true by liberal media sources with no incentive to do so, it must be false.”

I have seen many times the power of what happens to media coverage once every new fact is seen through the prism of a false narrative and is impacted by a clear confirmation bias. Everything is then perceived completely differently than it should be, sometimes laughably so….

Exactly so….

(American Spectator)

Marriage and Gender ~ Controlling Nature (Legislating Climate & Gender)

Published by Papa Giorgio

A mix of LIBERTARIAN REPUBLICAN’S POST (<<< now defunct) as well as the POWERLINE BLOG:

Minnesota-based blog POWER LINE discovered this little fact about the legislation, GAY MARRIAGE, MINNESOTA STYLE (source: Star Tribune):

In the Star Tribune, Katherine Kersten casts a gimlet eye on developments:

The marriage amendment may have fallen short at the polls in November, but a majority of Minnesotans continue to support marriage as the union of one man and one woman, according to recent polls by KSTP/SurveyUSA and the Star Tribune. In the Star Tribune poll, only 38 percent said they favored legalization of same-sex marriage.

Clearly, the amendment vote wasn’t a green light for same-sex marriage, and legislators would be wrong to see it that way. Most likely, voters were spooked by a lavishly funded campaign in which supporters of same-sex marriage warned that placing the current definition of marriage in our state Constitution would “end the conversation” about marriage.

Now, just months later, these advocates are mounting an aggressive campaign to do just that. They are pressuring the Legislature to pass SF925, a bill described as “the marriage between two persons authorization.”

More conversation? Who needs it? same-sex marriage supporters seem to say. The issue, they insist, is a no-brainer — a simple matter of “equality,” and the logical next step in the struggle against “discrimination.” The point is so obvious that anyone who questions their project must be a “bigot,” and so drummed out of hearing in polite society.

But a look at SF925 reveals that something much more insidious than advocates let on is underway. This bill would strip the words “mother” and “father” of meaning under Minnesota law. Henceforth, the bill states, these words — among the most beloved and culturally freighted in the English language — “must be construed in a neutral manner to refer to a person of either gender.”

Hmmm. Mothers are Fathers. Boys are Girls. Orwell! thou should’st be living at this hour.

Oh, I can’t wait for the day when we can say that every “boy” and “girl” deserves a “mother” and “father” construed in a neutral manner to refer to to a person of either gender, as required by Minnesota law.

Editor’s note – libertarian Republicans believe if two gays wish to get married, Matzletoff! Hire a couple lawyers, invite all the friends, get a priest or a rabbi, have a big gay wedding in the public park, and then dance the night away to disco tunes. Why get the government involved? And why go out of your way to poke the eyes of those who support heterosexual marriage?

Democrats are trying to be God.

Top-Ten Considered

(Click “Wayne’s Top Ten” to go to article) Perhaps no issue is more nerve-wracking today than same-sex marriage. It’s a magnet for controversy, evoking strong reactions from those on either side of the debate. But beneath all the fiery passion and rhetoric, there are real arguments to evaluate. In this article, we’ll examine the 10 most common ones made in favor of same-sex marriage, many of which you’ve probably heard before. By pointing out the flaws, we’ll show how each argument ultimately comes up short. 

However, before we begin, let’s note a few things. First, this article concerns civil marriage — marriage as defined and promoted by the state. It doesn’t deal with the Church’s sacramental understanding, although the two often overlap. Second, the responses to the arguments are emphatically nonreligious. They don’t depend on any sacred text or divine revelation. They’re based on reason, philosophy, biology and history. Third, this article only refutes arguments in favor of same-sex marriage. It doesn’t touch upon the many positive arguments supporting traditional marriage.

More from the ARTICLE CITED:

…Of course, “mother” and “father” aren’t “gender-neutral” words. That’s a fiction. All Minnesotans have a mother and a father — female and male, respectively. Our state’s legislators may view themselves as powerful, but they can’t repeal this fact of human biology. Yet same-sex marriage advocates must pretend this is possible, if they are to convince the rest of us that a “union” of two people of the same sex is identical to that of a man and woman whose sexual complementarity is the only thing that produces the next generation.

This stripping of meaning from “mother” and “father” is just one signal of the tectonic shift our society will undergo if we try to redefine marriage in a way that portrays the anatomical, social and psychological differences between men and women as irrelevant to human life — just as shoe size and eye color are. We urgently need a conversation at the State Capitol that grapples seriously with the unknown implications of such a step — as they unfold next year and 50 years from now.

Legislators should begin by considering why marriage has been a male/female institution throughout recorded history. Is it really because people in the past weren’t as smart as we are, or were “bigots?” Of course not. It’s because marriage has a vital public purpose: It binds fathers to mothers and the children their sexual union creates. This bond is crucial to children’s well-being — and to society’s future.

To succeed in redefining marriage, same-sex marriage supporters must deny this public purpose of marriage. Instead, they tell us, the only criterion for marriage should be that people love each other. It’s just emotional intensity that distinguishes marriage from all other human relationships.

This claim has far-reaching implications:

First, if marriage is merely about emotional intensity, marital norms based on male-female complementarity — like sexual exclusivity and permanence — no longer make sense, or at best become optional. People can have a number of emotionally close relationships at the same time, and when the intensity fades, so does the reason to stay together.

Second, if emotional attachment is all that’s required, the logic for limiting marriage to two people — or even to people in sexual relationships — disappears. It becomes difficult to distinguish marriage from friendship, which the government does not regulate. That’s why some prominent commentators are already calling for government to “get out of the marriage business” altogether.

Third, making marriage “gender-neutral” would radically alter parenthood. Children need both a mother and a father, who bring different and complementary qualities to child-rearing. Two lesbians or two gay men (or two lesbians and a sperm donor), no matter how loving, cannot replicate this.

Most important: Redefining marriage as a unisex institution would decisively delink marriage from procreation and child-rearing in the public’s mind. Our marriage culture is already seriously frayed, and our children are paying a devastating price. Same-sex marriage would accelerate this trend, by telegraphing that government is now wholly indifferent to whether a child’s mother is married to his father.

The hour is late and the stakes are high. Let the conversation begin.