Terrible Editorials, Opinion Pieces and Letters to the Editor

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MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

I live in Minnesota which is a pretty blue state but we still have our fair share of complete nutcases which have all come out of the woodwork with the debate over the marriage amendment that's going to be on the ballot here in 2012. A local newspaper actually decided to publish the following letter which looks like a copy/paste from Freep. Luckily I have the number of the person who put this in the paper and I'm going to make sure that she gets an earful from hordes of militant homofascists.

quote:

I Now Pronounce You�

Dear Editor:

Homosexuals being in love and in a committed same-sex relationship is a theme of recent letters written to sway the legislature from banning homosexual marriage. Love and commitment were mentioned as though they were the norm in homosexual relationships.

As https://www.conservapedia.com/Homosexuality_Statistics demonstrates, there are dozens of things wrong with the gay life, one being that homosexuals don�t usually have committed relationships with one another. Theirs are more quick-timish, and that rather than relationships between one another, it�s more like between one and all the others.

Dr. Maria Xiridou of the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service published a study of young male Dutch homosexuals in the May 2003 issue of the journal AIDS that showed that homosexual partnerships last on average only eighteen months. Additionally, they have an average of eight partners a year outside of their main partnership.

Love and commitment are terms being co-opted by homosexuals to serve their agenda. It is necessary to soften up America with propaganda in order to accomplish their desire, which is an unlimited supply of raw material to satisfy consumption.

Prominent homosexual advocate Daniel Villarreal, lamenting that gay activists usually deny that they want to indoctrinate children, said: �Let�s face it�that�s a lie. Why would we push anti-bullying programs or social studies classes that teach kids about the historical contributions of famous queers unless we wanted to deliberately educate children to accept queer sexuality as normal? Recruiting children? You bet we are. We want educators to teach future generations of children to accept queer sexuality. In fact, our very future depends on it�.

Why does their future depend on indoctrination? Because they can�t reproduce. They can only recruit.And our schools are the best source of the raw material needed to satisfy their expansive appetites.

Rod Bergengren
Cambridge

# ¿ Jun 3, 2011 21:19

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 01:32

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

Another one of Katherine Kersten's awful articles was posted before but luckily she has written another one with the exact same premise as the one before, gays are the REAL bullies.

quote:

We can expect aggression on marriage vote

A block thrown through a home window. Cars vandalized. Hate-filled anonymous phone calls at home and work. Swastikas scrawled on houses of worship. Physical assaults. Dismissal from employment because of political views.

Are these examples of retaliation against civil-rights activists in the South in 1954? Attempts by an authoritarian government to quash dissent?

No, this is the sort of intimidation that Americans who support marriage as the union of a man and woman can face today. Persecution of opponents is becoming a tool of the trade for some gay-marriage activists, who -- ironically -- seem to view themselves as beacons of tolerance.

Now, the groundwork for such intimidation is being laid in Minnesota.

In an early skirmish in the battle over the marriage amendment, which will be on the ballot in 2012, the state Campaign Finance Board has issued a ruling that could require a nonprofit organization to disclose the identity of supporters if that organization contributes to the marriage-amendment campaign.

The board's ruling breaks with the interpretation of the law in other recent amendment campaigns, and is an attempt to change the rules in midstream.

As a result, Minnesotans who believe that gay people have a right to live as they wish, but who oppose redefining marriage, may find their civil rights, livelihoods or safety threatened if they dare to oppose what's becoming politically correct orthodoxy.

The people of California can tell you where disclosure rules can lead. Each of the incidents I opened this column with occurred there during the 2008 debate over Proposition 8, the state's marriage amendment.

Ask the restaurant manager who was forced to resign after her $100 donation triggered a street protest and a boycott of her establishment.

Ask the dentist who lost patients, the family-owned creamery that endured protests and retaliation, or the lawn sign distributor and the elderly lady who were assaulted as they peacefully expressed their views.

These days, however, harassment and reprisals aren't confined to election season.

In North Carolina in June 2011, for example, corporate leadership consultant and motivational speaker Frank Turek was fired by Bank of America after someone there learned he had written a book opposing same-sex marriage.

In Turek's words, "I was Googled, I was outed, I was fired for being somebody who has a traditional marriage viewpoint."

North Carolina defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman, as do 43 other states. Citizens there support one man/one woman marriage by 61 percent to 34 percent. Yet you can still lose your job in North Carolina for publicly daring to cross the new Diversity Ayatollahs.

Given this reality, we need an organization to defend Americans who face reprisals merely because they exercise their fundamental civil rights.

Now we have it: the Marriage Anti-Defamation Alliance (MarriageADA), whose spokesperson, Maggie Gallagher, is a cofounder of the National Organization for Marriage. MarriageADA exists to protect and defend people like Turek.

These people could include the school guidance counselor whose counseling license activists sought to revoke after he appeared in a television ad for one man/one woman marriage during a ballot referendum in Maine.

Or the wedding photographer who was sued and ordered to pay a nearly $7,000 fine for declining to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony in New Mexico.

Or the couple in Vermont who declined to host a same-sex wedding reception at their inn because of their Christian faith.

MarriageADA's larger mission is to fight back against the attempt of media, entertainment and political elites to convince the rest of society that belief in marriage as a male/female institution -- the form it has taken across the world and throughout history -- is equivalent to racial bigotry.

This out-and-out falsehood is having a chilling effect in workplaces across the country.

For example, if you work for a large corporation -- even in a "one man/one woman" marriage state like Minnesota -- you may face uncomfortable pushback at your job if you voice your support for traditional marriage, or donate to a protraditional marriage group.

If you donate to a group supporting gay marriage, of course, you face no such penalty.

America's need for MarriageADA should open our eyes to the increasingly Orwellian situation we face. It's becoming an act of civic courage -- as speaking out against Jim Crow in the South once was -- to support marriage as a bedrock male/female social institution, and to state your belief that children need a mother and a father.

This raises a troubling question: If gay marriage supporters can intimidate and silence their opponents while one man/one woman marriage remains the norm, to what authoritarian extremes will they go if same-sex marriage becomes the law of the land?

Those poor oppressed homophobes! :qq:

At least this time she didn't talk about her imaginary "gay friends" that oppose gay marriage.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2011 22:54

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

Yeah I love how they always try to sugar coat the hell out their beliefs by saying stuff like "I was fired for being somebody who has a traditional marriage viewpoint" when we're talking about a man who said that gays are partnering with Muslims to destroy western civilization and that being gay is like standing in front of a speeding truck. If you're gonna be a right-wing extremist nutjob at least have the balls to be upfront and honest about your beliefs.

I also love how how all of the far right anti-gay types go on and on about the CDC HIV/AIDS statistics in gay men and present them as "proof" of the "destructive homosexual lifestyle" when if you knew anything about HIV, statistics, safe sex, or just had a shred of mental capacity whatsoever you'd be able to find out on your own that the former does not imply the latter.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2011 20:07

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

Bruce Leroy posted:

Even worse, they completely fail to mention that HIV is almost 100% preventable if people reliably use condoms and dental dams if they are not completely monogamous with their sexual partner. HIV is not a homosexual disease but rather a sexually-transmitted disease which is easily preventable.

Logically you'd think that conservatives would apply the same "personal responsibility" shtick to HIV that they would to every other issue but in this case their desire to criticize gays outweighs even the desire to preach the message of bootstraps. An impoverished minority living in a broken home in a high crime area can simply work hard and bootstrap their way to success but if you're gay you're gonna get AIDS and die no matter what unless you repent and turn from your filthy immoral ways.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2011 05:58

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

Jesus loving christ, I know food, housing, and quality education is far too much to ask for in America without being branded a lazy parasite but I didn't think "ability to walk" was going to be added to the list.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2012 22:13

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

At first I was enraged by this Op-ed piece but now I'm just sad, I can't really feel anything but :smith:

about what it would be like to consider this description of gay life in the south as "acceptance, admiration and even respect." I'm just surprised that the times published this as is, almost no gay person who regularly reads the times is going to consider this "acceptance."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/04/opinion/were-here-were-queer-yall.html

quote:

Many people assume that because the South is the nation�s most evangelical and politically conservative region, it is probably also a hotbed for hate crimes against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. But while such crimes do occur, they are less common than in large urban centers, where the absence of a tight community and the abundance of strangers make it easier to target people for their differences.

I should know: as a lesbian who has lived in the South my entire life, and in a small town in the Deep South for part of it, I�ve met many people � men, women and transgendered � whose sexual identity has not prevented them from living a life of acceptance, admiration and even respect by their families and communities.

My friend Helen and her partner, Kathleen, for example, have made an enormous impact on the small town of Louisville, Ga., in rural Jefferson County. Several years ago they bought an old fire station and turned it into an art gallery. What began as a way to showcase rural artists has expanded into a larger community endeavor in which children from the local public schools, many of whom are quite poor, are given free classes in art and art appreciation.

And the gallery openings? The last one I attended drew nearly 100 people.

It�s an unspoken truth that Helen and Kathleen are in a committed relationship, and yet they�re invited to social gatherings as a couple, and only a few months ago Helen gave the graduation address at the local high school. People know who they are and very likely understand the nature of their relationship, and it�s clear they value the investment that Helen and Kathleen have made in their community.

In the mid-1990s, while in graduate school, I lived in the small city of Hattiesburg, Miss. There I met gays and lesbians who came to Hattiesburg from nearby rural communities like Petal, Wiggins, Runnelstown and even more far-flung places to enjoy the one gay bar that was within reasonable driving distance, or simply hang out with friends. Though they came for the comforts of a larger L.G.B.T. community, their sexual orientation was often known to their communities back home.

They were gay, but they weren�t only that. Many of them were working class, from religiously conservative families and often politically conservative themselves.

One woman I met, Sandy, is what you�d describe as butch. She drives a truck and she belongs to a (nearly) all-male hunting club. She goes on coon hunts, which she�s described to me as romantic adventures with the baying of hounds in the cool of the night. Her mother, on the other hand, was a proud member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a prim and proper Southern lady.

Because my dissertation was about the U.D.C., Sandy took me to meet her. While at her mother�s house, Sandy went back to her old bedroom and returned with a badge she had won in the eighth grade � for sewing a dress. She seemed to take pride in the fact that as a woman who had pretty much rejected traditional femininity, she had won top prize at her school for sewing.

I don�t think her mother ever openly acknowledged her daughter�s sexual orientation, which she certainly knew, because such things usually go unsaid in the South.

Most Southerners who aren�t comfortable with homosexuality don�t use terms like �gay� or �lesbian.� They�ll use euphemisms. A gay man is a �little light in the loafers� or has �sugar in his britches.� If a lesbian has a partner, the partner is often referred to as her �friend.� But everyone knows exactly what it means.

To be sure, such acceptance is often possible because, in a small community, gays and lesbians don�t represent a large population to begin with. As my partner, who grew up in rural South Carolina, told me, �in my high school, the L.G.B.T. group had a membership of one and was taking applications.�

And there is a limit to the acceptance. In the rural South, people love their sons and daughters and they may even break bread with the florist and his partner, but they still believe homosexuality is a sin. They draw the line at a gay pride march down Main Street, and they won�t stand for gay marriage.

Still, as Alana�s Uncle Lee has shown America, there are gays living in the rural South who don�t all set out for the big city. They lead rich lives and have families, and sometimes even communities, that love them and accept them for who they are.

MaxxBot fucked around with this message at 07:24 on Oct 11, 2012

# ¿ Oct 11, 2012 07:22

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

Even GOProud and most gay conservatives are out of the closet at least and probably wouldn't be comfortable with referring to their partner as a "friend" in any context, this is way worse.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2012 16:43

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

What's really to blame for the tragic CT shooting? Lax gun laws? Bad parenting? Inadequate care for the mentally ill? Not enough kindergarteners with concealed-carry permits? Nope, the gays did it!

quote:

NUGENT: Connecticut killings a result of moral decay

The heart of the matter is that our Humpty Dumpty culture has taken a great fall.

Like an iceberg, we only periodically see the psychotic manifestation, the tip of our shattered culture, but what lies just beneath the surface is a gigantic cultural cancer that is rotting America from within.

The ugly and dangerous truth is that we live in an embarrassing, politically correct culture that exalts and rejoices in the bizarre; aggressively promotes an �anything goes� value system; and vilifies, condemns and mocks traditional societal values and customs at every opportunity.

We�ve embraced a culture of contempt that attacks the very institutions that make for a healthy and strong society, and then we�re shocked when it spirals out of control. The only thing I�m shocked about is that anybody is shocked.

More laws and more restrictions won�t fix our culture. The problem we face is much deeper and more insidious. What ails us is a spiritual bankruptcy of cultural values that actually matter. More laws and restrictions can�t cure that.

Until we admit what�s at the heart of the matter, we will continue to put a Band-Aid on gaping wounds and try to convince ourselves we�ve done something meaningful.

As with most things, the cure to this mess begins and ends with the family. Traditional family values have been under siege for decades by our culture of contempt. In the absence of a solid family, the whole thing slowly unravels and rots.

Our greatest fear should be that we�ll scratch around the margins by looking to government to solve the problem. With the best of intentions, our government will hold commissions, write lengthy reports and pass a new law or two. Like we always do, we�ll then move along, convinced that we�ve done good and pretending we actually accomplished something.

Meanwhile, somewhere in America, another bug-eyed young man is planning the next massacre.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2012 20:19

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

I would love to see what kind of diets those hysterical idiots feed their kids, or themselves for that matter. I'm sure that they're such paragons of pristine health and nutrition that energy drinks being offered in their presence warrants this sort of attention.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2013 21:06

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

I feel sort of petty as this was written by an eighth grader (more accurately by an eighth grader's parents) but this has to be the most egregious example of talking out of both sides of one's mouth I have ever seen. This chick could show even Mitt Romney a thing or two about how it's done.

quote:

Letting gays participate in Boy Scouts? Why not?

My initial reaction for letting gay men and boys join the Boy Scouts was a no-brainer. Of course they should be able to! I believe your sexual orientation has nothing to do with how well you fulfill the core values of being a Scout. These include citizenship, compassion, faith, honesty, respect and many others. In that case, gays have every right to participate.

It goes deeper though. Today�s society is all about being equal. We are not all equal nor are we the same. Sometimes there has to be limitations for the good of all of us. When I say this, I would like you to think: Would you allow your young daughter to go out in the woods with a male attracted to the opposite sex for a week when he has full responsibility over her? I am not accusing nor being stereotypical, but no parent in their right mind would ever take that chance.

Now let�s switch that situation around. A gay man goes out on a weeklong hiking trip in the Bob Marshall and in his hands is the sole responsibility of your son and several other young boys. It is just something to keep in mind when forming your opinion.

Prior to 1994, there were more than 2,000 abuse cases having to do with the Boy Scouts of America. That was almost 20 years ago. Imagine how many there are today.

It really is a sad thing because there are some gay men out there who would make amazing troop leaders and gay boys who would do great as Scouts. Unfortunately, there are a select few who may act inappropriately, and we just cannot have that happen.

The Scouting founder, Robert Baden-Powell, wrote in the very first Boy Scout handbook that �No man is much good unless he believes in God and obeys His laws.�

Boy Scouts of America was founded as a religious group, and homosexuality is not tolerated. The organization repeats that this is not a new policy and it is not meant to confront gays but rather to enforce long-standing guidelines. The Boy Scouts of America believes that gays are not proper role models of Scout oath and law. They do not criticize or condemn those who wish to go on with a homosexual lifestyle.

The 12th point of Scout law is to be reverent to God. Our society as a whole cannot determine whether homosexuality is approved in the eyes of God. It seems unfair and unrealistic to expect an organization like the Boy Scouts of America to determine something we as a society cannot.

In the diverse culture we live in today, we may initially believe that we want everyone regardless of their sexual orientation to be admitted freely to all organizations, however the Boy Scouts are a unique group dealing exclusively with impressionable young boys.

The risk of abuse upon this age group is already worrisome. If you wouldn�t want to endanger your own son or younger brother and expose them to that environment, then how could you feel that it would be acceptable for someone else�s son or brother to be put in that situation? It always boils down to risk versus benefits.

Abbie Williams is an eighth-grader at North Middle School and a member of the Tribune�s Teen Panel.

Gays are totally equal to straight people! Also they're pedophiles, not fit to be leaders, and homosexuality is a lifestyle.

# ¿ Feb 25, 2013 20:44

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

Now that we understand gays in the Boy Scouts, how about gays in the NFL?

http://milehighsports.com/2013/02/28/knudson-its-about-whats-best-for-the-team/

quote:

For the record, Manti Te�o says empathically that he�s not gay. With no evidence to the contrary, there is no reason to believe otherwise.

But the Te�o episode with a pretend internet girlfriend who turned out to be a guy brought up that possibility and, more importantly, re-opened the debate about openly homosexual players and their acceptance in the NFL.

A decade ago, there was the matter of Esera Tuaolo, former NFL defensive lineman who made a splash when he came out as openly gay after his retirement and wrote a book on the subject. He also went on to a career as a professional singer. Tuaolo voiced complaints about having to stay in the closet while he was in the NFL. His grievances were noted by the ever politically correct NFL, but largely fell on deaf ears otherwise, probably because he was viewed by most people as having had a successful career in professional sports and music, and now as an author. He didn�t seem to need much sympathy.

The issue had been largely dormant in terms of the NFL until the Te�o episode. At the Super Bowl, San Francisco 49ers defensive back Chris Culliver stuck his cleat in his mouth while being interviewed on the subject, making it clear that he would be uncomfortable with gay teammate. His views � although very poorly stated � are probably shared by a large majority of his NFL brethren. And the debate was sparked.

It�s very important when wading into this debate that we differentiate between actual discrimination and hurt feelings. Tuaolo was not discriminated against in any way. I�ve yet to hear anyone associated with pro sports, and that includes the comments from Culliver, that are advocating any sort of discrimination of anyone based on their sexual orientation.

Maybe I missed something, but I�ve yet to hear about any athlete being denied any opportunity based on his or her sexual orientation. Discrimination is wrong, and most of us believe gay people should have every right afforded every straight person.

No one has said that gays should not be allowed to play in the NFL. What has been said is that having a gay teammate would make some players uncomfortable. That�s about their feelings. Feelings aren�t right or wrong; they�re just feelings. It�s telling someone their feelings are wrong that�s the real wrong.

So what�s being debated here is not actual discrimination, but rather hurt feelings. Just because Tuaolo felt uncomfortable about his homosexuality inside a machismo-filled, heterosexual-dominated locker room does not mean he was denied any opportunities. In fact, he endured emotionally and has profited handsomely by taking full advantage of his talents and opportunities.

It�s also important to consider that the heterosexual players involved have feelings, too, and they�re no more or less valid than the feelings of those in the gay community. It�s amazing how many people feel free to criticize and tell athletes how they are supposed to feel, as if that�s anyone else�s right.

Along those lines, the PC police in the media have been quick to blast the NFL as the �last bastion of Neanderthal thinking left in the world� (I guess they�ve never been to the deep south, but that�s another story.) Those who have never lived in a locker room, with its badly needed and justifiable �foxhole mentality,� have been quick to criticize athletes for not being tolerant of the idea of having a gay teammate.

�Every other work place environment has long ago accepted the idea of having openly gay co-workers. What�s wrong with pro athletes?� The answer is nothing. There�s nothing wrong with pro athletes that isn�t wrong with the attractive woman in the office who is uncomfortable with being gawked at.

Critics of pro athletes are conveniently forgetting about some pretty substantial differences in workplace environments. Trying to compare the local �more tolerant� accounting office with a pro sports locker room is absurd. Those who work 9-5 with a gay co-worker aren�t essentially living together. They aren�t spending 24/7 living under a microscope, with every move they make being scrutinized. They aren�t traveling across North America and going into intense competition in hostile environments and then being expected to perform flawlessly as a unit. And they aren�t showering together afterwards. Important distinctions.

In a normal work environment, people are individuals with jobs. In pro sports, it�s all about as George Karl puts it, �teamness.� Individualism and personal agendas might be okay in a normal workplace, but it�s not okay in team sports. Teamness is what fans demand from the teams they pay to watch. Any individual with an agenda that�s even slightly different from that of the team hurts that cause.

Just as absurd as comparing workplace environments is the ridiculous claim by some in the gay community that there wouldn�t be any sort of physical attraction for a gay athlete toward any of his straight teammates � which would cause those very uncomfortable situations. He�s gay; he�s not dead. He can�t just flip a switch and turn off his feelings when he walks into the locker room.

Of course he�s going to have feelings of attraction toward a teammate or two. It�s human nature. These are some of the most physically fit and desirable human beings on the planet. The gay athlete isn�t going to notice that? And obviously, the straight teammates are going to feel the same sort of vibe that the attractive girl on the co-ed softball team gets from a few of the men on her team. Attractive people know when they�re being �checked out� and it leads to those very awkward moments. It�s human nature for people to be attracted to other people and it�s not going to stop happening because the workplace environment is a locker room rather than a typical office setting.

We should salute Esera Tuaolo and other gay athletes who are able to keep their sexual orientation private during their playing days. It�s got to be very difficult to do, and yet it�s what�s best for the team.

That�s what this all should come down to. What�s best for the team.
Internal strife and locker room drama is bad for ANY team. Personal agendas are not welcome. Nothing that infringes on the cohesiveness of the locker room can be tolerated. If a player who is not an irreplaceable superstar becomes any sort of distraction, he�s going to get released. We�ve seen countless examples of that.
That�s why it remains the best option for any homosexual athlete in a team sport to keep his orientation private. He�s doing what�s best for himself by doing what�s best for the team.

There will be plenty of time for pronouncements and getting that nice book deal after the playing days are over. We�ve seen examples of that, too.

You see, wanting gays in the NFL is just downright heterophobic.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2013 21:31

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

This is probably my favorite part right here.

quote:

I�ve yet to hear anyone associated with pro sports, and that includes the comments from Culliver, that are advocating any sort of discrimination of anyone based on their sexual orientation.

Yeah, who in their right mind would call for something like that? :allears:

Tim Hardaway posted:

Well, you know I hate gay people, so I let it be known. I don't like gay people and I don't like to be around gay people. I am homophobic. I don't like it. It shouldn't be in the world or in the United States.

There's probably hundreds of other examples, Reggie White is another who was extremely homophobic just off the top of my head. Really though, the entire thing is just so flawed and so poorly thought out. I have no idea why people like this think it's a good idea to write at length about their opinions on extremely controversial topics without doing one iota of research into the topic or, gasp, talking to a gay athlete.

MaxxBot fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Mar 1, 2013

# ¿ Mar 1, 2013 22:17

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

Godless liberals such as myself have long scoffed at the idea of "recruiting" kids into homosexuality but now someone has gone through the efforts of writing at length about how this terrible thing could theoretically happen.

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2013/04/9970/

quote:

A Boy's Life with Unisex Scouts

I see a boy.

Luke is ten years old. He sports a cowlick across his forehead, and a bright smile.

Despite the birth of a child a thousand miles away with vestigial organs of the opposite sex, and despite genetic anomalies that blunt the edge of masculinity or femininity here or there, everyone is certain he is a boy. It took the doctor in the delivery room but a moment to declare, �It�s a boy!�

Luke is outdoors a lot, running after baseballs, footballs, and soccer balls. He has what Marilynne Robinson happily calls �skinny boy strength.� You can see it in the muscles of his chest. His voice is pitched high, but not really�as if a flute were played an octave low.

People who pretend not to know what a boy is will scoff, but he runs like a boy, he makes boyish jokes, he shoots toy guns like a boy, he horses around the yard with a boy�s abandon, and if he helps his mother bake cookies, he does that like a boy, too. It helps that he has a father, who was a boy once, and who still has a lot of the boy in him, as most fathers do.

Consider that boy, Luke.

Look at him through the eyes of his father: that is to say, with philosophical love.

He has the boy�s body that shadows forth the body of a man. He will have sturdy shoulders, and the swelling in his throat suggests the timbre of the man�s voice. He is going to be taller than the average woman.

Fallen creature that he is, Luke stretches to the limit of what his parents allow, but already he is taking into his heart the Rules his mother represents, Rules that make for decent life among other people from day to day, and the Law his father represents, moral truths that can no more change than can the polestar fall from the sky.

He is a boy: vir futurus, a going-to-be man. Meaning: He will join other men, brothers fighting to attain or defend the common good. Greater meaning: He is made for a self-giving that is categorically impossible among his male friends. He is made for a woman. It is the orientation of his body, in its sexual form. It is the orientation of his masculine being, developing in a natural and healthy way.

None of this should be controversial, no more than claiming that the noonday sky is blue. Should someone protest, �It isn�t so! I saw it green once, when a tornado was coming,� we�d look askance, and wonder whether he had lost the capacity for normal communication. A boy is not a girl. A boy grows up to be a man. A man marries a woman, for love and for a family: That goal is stamped upon his body. Even savages without a doctorate in philosophy can figure it out.

Consider Luke, the boy, through the eyes of his father. What does he see?

He sees the vir futurus. He also sees himself, and his own father, and his grandfathers. I�m not just talking about physical resemblance. They share the same sex: They share the same mode of relating to the future of their kind. They are not the bearers of children, but the begetters. They are not the field, but the sowers. They cannot know the body-from-body bond their wives know when they bear children. Theirs is an approach from outside; and they enjoy the strengths and suffer the shortcomings of the far-sightedness that that approach implies.

Every normal and healthy and responsible father wants this for his son. It�s not like wanting the boy to go to Princeton. Such things may happen or not, and are extrinsic to the boy�s nature. It�s rather like wanting that the boy should not suffer scurvy or rickets. The father wants Luke�s bones to grow straight. He wants his soul to grow straight, too.

So does his mother. She�s suspicious of women who like to keep their boys in diapers, as it were. So she nudges Luke toward her husband. She buys them the same kinds of clothes. She admires Luke�s skill in hitting a ball, or painting, or building a tepee�whatever he sets his heart upon.

She becomes to him the best of girls, even when he doesn�t know he likes girls yet. She never ceases to be his mother and to command his respect, but she will also claim his duty as her protector. If the groceries are heavy, she asks him to handle them, knowing that eventually he will overmatch her in strength. When that day comes she�ll boast about it to her friends.

Her love for him is necessarily a love for his nature as a boy. One cannot say, �I love my terrier Whitey, but I wish he wouldn�t wag his tail.� She wants him to grow up to be a man whom a good woman would marry. She cannot encourage that by personal example. She encourages it rather by showing the love of a woman for her husband, regardless of the sparks that attend every union of the sexes. And she encourages it by expectation. She calls him to manhood by letting him practice being the man: as a mother teaches her son to �lead� her in a formal dance.

Such instruction cannot be generalized for all kinds of friendship. Nothing in nature is really like married love. Only in this love does one give of oneself, forever, to someone who stands across a divide in being: the one who begets, the one who bears.

The sex of a human being is marked in the voice, the hair, the shape of the face, the thickness of the bones, the contours of the torso, the quality of the skin, everywhere. A friend of the same sex is an image of myself, an alter ego. He echoes my voice.

But the spouse is no alter ego. The spouse complements my voice. The man to the woman and the woman to the man are suggestions on earth of the totaliter aliter, the wholly other. Well does Scripture compare the union of God with the human soul to the courtship and marriage of bridegroom and bride.

The giving, in this case alone, spans generations past and to come, not in mere intention, but intrinsically. When husband and wife unite in the act of marriage, they bear to one another precious strands of life. They do what their parents and grandparents did, and those ancestors are present in the heritage of the flesh.

The couple may act to thwart the effect of this reality. Disease or debility may thwart it also. But the reality is unalterable. When they unite, they do the time-transcending, child-making thing. They are the cause, effectual or exemplary, of children in the world.

All this they understand in their hearts, whether or not they express it in words.

In a healthy time, they could take for granted the assistance of their neighbors and of teachers at school. It�s not a healthy time. So the father must think things through.

Sometimes Luke and his father go by themselves, or with another father-son pair, for a hike in the woods, or to fish in the lake, or for an afternoon at the speedway�the boys can determine the destination. They separate from the girls, but not out of scorn. Instead the father teaches the boy to honor girls. A wife is not a playmate. Attached to this honor is a natural reticence before the mystery of the other sex.

The pure soul, the reverent soul, senses that the other sex deserves his honor. Thus there are certain things that boys do with boys, or talk about with boys, and not with girls. The occasional separation of the boys from the girls strengthens the sense that each sex is completed in the other. Indiscriminate mingling breeds indifference; but after the company of one�s own sex, the sight of the other is like a paradise upon the horizon, new, fascinating, delightful, and dangerous.

With his own sex, however, there should be naturalness and ease. So the father, on their treks alone, undresses before the boy as carelessly as he would undress before the dog, teaching the boy to do the same. The meaning is clear: You and I are alike. That is why we can do this.

If it were a healthy time, if it were a good time to be a boy, he and Luke and their boyish friends might strip and jump in a lake after a sweaty hike. But it isn�t a healthy time, so the father declines. Yet when he takes Luke to the gym, he will usher him into that man�s world as a wholly normal thing. If he�s shy, he�ll overcome his shyness for the boy�s sake, and stand free and easy in the dressing room, talking to a couple of the guys as unselfconsciously as if they had run into one another on the street. We�re all the same, son. You�re one of us.

Does he talk to Luke about sex? All the time, with words and without: when he puts his arm around his wife as they sit on the sofa together; when he digs a flower garden for a Mother�s Day present, and asks Luke to help; when he tousles the boy�s head, when he pretends to be a monster chasing him about the room, when he rolls on the grass with him and the football as if he were ten years old and not an old guy with sore knees.

He uses words too. �When you�re a man,� he says, introducing duties sometimes, and sometimes glories. �A real man has integrity,� he says. �Good men stand by their words.� �A boy makes excuses, but a man admits his fault.� �A boy thinks it�s brave to be reckless. A man knows the difference.� Sophisticates may snort. Let them, till they see what kinds of men their sophisticated sons have made.

But does he talk to Luke about sex�the mechanics? In a healthy time, he wouldn�t have to, so soon. It�s not a healthy time. So he does, gently, when the boy seems curious. He must protect Luke against wicked and foolish people, even teachers. But he grounds those discussions in reality: husbands and wives and children. He does not vaporize about �when you�re ready� or �when you really love somebody.� Pablum seasoned with poison, that.

The plain truth is that the man�s body is for the woman and the woman�s is for the man, and the child-making thing, the thing that unites them, really does make children, and children need a mother and a father committed to one another forever. Luke understands this. He is innocent, and whatever he sees, he sees clearly. Adults are not innocent, and gaze upon phantasms.

What about aberrations? When Luke asks about them, because of things he�s heard at school, the father says that certain people are confused, and do bad and unnatural things with their bodies. They become prone to terrible diseases. But when he catches Luke in a tiff calling another boy a sissy, he reprimands him severely. Since he would not complicate Luke�s passage to manhood, he grants other men�s sons the same courtesy, especially when those boys are walking a more difficult path.

He and his wife keep destructive images out of their home. No pitching the tent beside a cesspool. Luke doesn�t have a computer or a television in his bedroom. Why should Luke be taught his morals by people who dwell in a world unparalleled for its combination of depravity, stupidity, luxury, and vanity? Better to play with his little sister and brother, and talk to his parents.

Of course, Luke will not be at home all the time. Lately he has been asking to join an old group called the Boy Scouts. Luke�s father has to think about this.

In a healthy time, not so long ago, he would not have had to think about it. He�d have taken for granted that his commonsense view, that a boy is a boy, a vir futurus, meant in the very structure of his body to be for a woman, for the begetting and raising of children, would have been shared by everyone else. In particular, it was shared by the Boy Scouts. For the Boy Scouts were, to quote the pastor whose homily appears in the first issue of Boys� Life magazine, to �quit themselves like men.�

The boy in the title was, if anything, more important than the scout. If a certain boy in the ranks were caught trying to entice others in things unmanly, and here I am including also the unmanly things that boys attracted to girls do, he�d have been taken aside, or sent to the counseling he badly needed, or quietly dismissed from the corps.

Luke�s father now asks what should happen if one of the troubled boys makes his predilections public. He remembers the tumult of puberty all too well. He remembers the confusion of feelings, the longing to be one of the boys, the fear of embarrassment, and the strangeness of girls, many of them for a brief time taller than Luke will be.

He does not want any word, or suggestion, or tale, or touch, to make Luke�s passage through the straits any more troublesome than it must inevitably be. Most especially does he not want a young scoutmaster with an eye for young men to drop a casual hint about his life, as if it were as moral as eating.

Luke�s father has a right to expect that people will not obtrude themselves into his son�s normal growth to manhood. It is wrong to lay a snare in the boy�s path. It is downright wicked to do so, when the life held forth not only frustrates the natural aims of Luke�s parents and the natural fulfillment of the boy�s masculinity, but also leaves those who are snared prone to an array of terrible diseases, both physical and moral.

He notes with wry irritation that Luke�s teachers are apt to wag their fingers at perfectly innocent things, like cupcakes in a lunchbox, but will cheer when a boy publicizes his entry into the bizarre and self-destructive.

But it isn�t just the pitfalls that the father is thinking of. It occurs to him that the Boy Scouts and he have come to an impasse. There is no reconciling them. The Boy Scouts now proclaim that there is nothing to being a boy, and nothing to the boy�s becoming a man; they might as well be the Unisex Scouts, as they are in Canada, where the scouting movement has collapsed.

In other words, Luke�s father is being asked to enroll his son in a group specifically limited to boys, but one that does not recognize the nature of boyhood and its progress to manhood. Thus there is no real justification for the group; that its membership is male is accidental and not of the essence. He and they do not see the same being in Luke. He sees his boy, and the man-to-be; they see a neuter. He sees a father-in-training; they see an immature human thing, a bundle of appetites that are not in themselves subject to moral judgment.

What is the father supposed to do? He can recall that better time, that healthier time, and can name several boys he knew who, if they were boys today, would inevitably be enticed, by loneliness or a trick of the lewd or boredom or a desperate need to be noticed or a despair that they could ever become true men, into the life of the male forever seeking the male.

He knows that most of them weathered the storms, precisely because the assumption that a boy is a boy gave them protection, some breathing space, some time to sort out their feelings and to grow up. He wants for Luke some small survival of that better time.

Where can Luke�s father turn? To the only institution left standing that affirms the goodness of human nature, both masculine and feminine. Grace perfects nature, said Thomas Aquinas. In this time, grace is needed merely to recognize that there is a nature to begin with. In this time, it is impossible to raise any real man without trying to raise a godly man. This is not icing. It is of the essence of manhood and womanhood.

Luke will know, if but intuitively, that his calling as a Christian, to leave his selfishness behind, to enter what Saint Paul calls the glorious liberty of the children of God, implies the just use of his sexual powers: to give, if God calls him, his body and his heart forever to the woman he loves. That won�t teach him how to pitch a tent in the woods. It might teach him how to build a home in a wasteland.

So there you have it, all it takes is one subtle hint from a young scoutmaster and BAM he's on the road to a lifetime of sodomy, AIDS, and eternity in hell.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2013 20:52

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

Dennis Prager is very infuriating because he seems like such a nice old man, is funny for a conservative, and he even sounds like a wise old rabbi when he's doing his non-political talk hours. Then he changes the topic to politics and it's absolute purestrain crazy, this has to be one of the worst op eds he has done yet.

quote:

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced last week that it will discontinue the free school breakfast plan it initiated last year.

Called "Food for Thought," the plan provides school breakfasts to about 200,000 students.

It was funded by the LAUSD and the nonprofit Los Angeles Fund for Public Education, whose goal is to raise the number who participate to about 450,000 students (out of a total of 645,000 in the entire district).

If you go to the fund's website (lafund.org), you are greeted with these messages: "Learn to dream" (in English and in Spanish) and "Imagine your life without limits." These are essentially meaningless messages. But, as we shall see, the fund's breakfast program is not only meaningless; it is quite destructive.

The reasons for the announced cancellation were that the program had drawn rodents and insects into classrooms, and that classroom learning time was being wasted by students eating for long periods in class.

But the rodents, insects and disruption of class learning time are nothing in terms of destructiveness compared to the free breakfast itself.

First, the program was created to solve a problem that does not exist.

It is inconceivable that there are five, let alone 200,000 or the projected 450,000, homes in Los Angeles that cannot afford breakfast for their child. A nutritious breakfast can be had for less than a dollar. For examples, go to WebMD, which lists five "Breakfast Ideas for a Buck."

Second, it both enables and encourages irresponsible, disinterested and incompetent parenting. Given how inexpensive breakfast can be (not to mention the myriad public and private programs that provide food for poor households), any home that cannot provide its child with breakfast demands a visit from child protective services. Any parent who cannot give a child breakfast is not too poor; he or she is too incapable of being, or too irresponsible to be, a competent parent.

Third, even where decent parents are involved, free breakfasts at school weaken the parent-child bond. Hundreds of thousands of parents who are able and happy to provide their child with breakfast have accepted the offer -- because anything free is too enticing for an increasing number of Americans. But what they have done is made the proverbial deal with the devil. They have traded in one of the most fundamental definitions of parenthood -- providing one's children with food -- for a dollar and for a little less work as a parent. As a result, these parents become less of a parent to their children.

And fourth, the free breakfast profoundly weakens young people's character. When you grow up learning to depend on the state, you will almost inevitably -- even understandably -- assume that the state will take care of you. And you will grow up also assuming -- as do Europeans, who give far less charity than Americans for this very reason -- that the state will take care of your fellow citizens, including your own children.

These are the ways in which the left has damaged children and families through free school breakfasts.

But it gets worse. "Canceling" the program does not mean ending it.

Remember, the program is not being canceled because of its destructive effects on students and family life. The reasons it is being canceled are that rodents and insects infest classrooms, and that classroom learning time is wasted while the children stretch out breakfast eating time.

Therefore, the program is being shifted to the schools' cafeterias. The public employee unions, which govern the state of California and the city of Los Angeles, have demanded that the program be shifted from the classroom to the school cafeterias so as to employ more cafeteria workers.

Virtually everything the left touches is either immediately or eventually harmed. The free breakfast program is only one, albeit a particularly dramatic, example.

Why, then, do progressives advocate it? Because it meets three essential characteristics of the left wing: It strengthens the state; it has governmental authority replace parental authority; and perhaps most importantly, it makes progressives feel good about themselves. The overriding concern of the left is not whether a program does good. It is whether it feels good.

What I want to know is what does he plan on doing with all of the poor people's kids once CPS takes them away? Surely the solution isn't to simply have BIG GUBMINT take care of them until they're 18, maybe we can borrow from newt's idea and make them indentured child janitor servants or something.

# ¿ May 8, 2013 02:33

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

edit: nvm

MaxxBot fucked around with this message at 20:57 on May 8, 2013

# ¿ May 8, 2013 20:50

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

Mike Adams is exceptionally douchey even by the standards of conservative pundits, everything he writes is just dripping with spite and vitriol. His latest column is supposedly what he would tell Jason Collins if he were president, even though in real life any self-respecting person would tell him to gently caress off and hang up before he got halfway though this self-righteous diatribe.

quote:

My Phone Call To Jason Collins

People often write to me expressing their dissatisfaction with President Obama and his policies. They also like to write to me asking how I will do things differently if I am elected president in 2016. For example, they ask whether I would have taken the time to call Jason Collins after he "came out" - becoming the first openly gay active player in the NBA. The answer is a definite "yes." I would have called him immediately. And here is what I would have been able to say to the White House Press corps if later asked about our conversation:

"I told Jason I could have been much prouder of him. One of the extraordinary measures of social regression that we have seen in this country has been the insistence that the interests of the LGBT community be interjected into every aspect of American life. Now, the agenda is even present in kindergarten sex education classes in Massachusetts. At first, it was placed there by those who insisted that such educational classes would be fully optional for objecting parents. Now, parents who show up at these schools objecting to the sexualization of their children are threatened with prosecution for trespass. None of this would be happening if homosexuals were content to live their lives privately and peacefully without imposing their agenda upon those who respectfully disagree with them.

"I reminded Jason that everyone deserves full equality. But I also reminded Jason that the so-called LGBT community already has full equality, not just partial equality. For example, he had a right to marry his fianc� of seven years. But just because he decided to relinquish that right, it does not mean the courts need to create a new right for him to exercise. The polygamists tried that in the 1800s and the Supreme Court rightly said �no� to their legal arguments. Given that there is far greater historical acceptance of polygamy than so-called gay marriage, he has no broad right to marry anyone he chooses. So I urged Jason not to use his newfound platform to push this issue. I will have more to say about substitutionary rights - the idea that when you relinquish a right, you get to select a new one - in a future press conference. But now back to Jason.

"I also told him that I was disappointed that the LGBT community was no longer seeking tolerance, but instead seeking acquiescence to the notion that their lifestyle is every bit as healthy as the traditional American family. Of course, that is simply absurd. I reminded him that even Elton John recently recognized that his adopted son would suffer because he had no 'mummy.' I urged Jason to avoid gay adoption as it was not in the interests of the child - although it might be an effective publicity stunt once his first round of media adoration has subsided.

"Given the importance of sports in our society, for an individual who's been mediocre at best in one of those major sports to suddenly say 'This is who I am. I'm proud of it. I'm still a great competitor. I'm still seven foot tall and deliver a hard foul' was simply a distraction. I think for a lot of young people out there who are confused and who are struggling with these issues, to see a role model like that who is interjecting sex into sports, well, it's just not a good thing. I think America should be concerned that this is just one more stunt reinforcing this ongoing illusion that we do not treat everybody fairly, and that we judge people on the basis of their sex life rather than their character and their job performance. We can't judge them on the basis of those things if they keep interjecting sex into the workplace. That just isn't right. So, I'm very displeased with Jason and I told him that.

"Over the course of his career, Jason has averaged less than five points a game and made less than two-thirds of his free throws. The fact that he was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated merely because of the fact that he likes to have sex with men is just embarrassing. There are far better and more deserving athletes who will never be featured on the cover of a major sports magazine. What a shame he got there the easy way by 'coming out' rather than coming to the gym to work on his foul shots.

"I told Jason, what is most notable about his recent conduct is his lack of courage. He lived a lie and misled a nice woman for seven years. Only after it became politically correct to be gay - and when anyone on the NBA was assured a six-digit fine for criticizing him - did he come forward. I've never seen a seven foot man act so small.

Jason has taught young people to do easy things, not hard things, in order to win the affection of others. He has taught them that they are to be judged, not by the content of their character, but by the many colors of the banner of sexual political correctness. That will be the legacy of Jason Collins. I wish he had thought of the long term consequences of his decisions before he made them. Whether we like it or not, an athlete is a role model. Others are watching. And that is something I plan to talk about again in my next White House Press Conference.

"Now, does anyone have any questions about the economy? This country is in serious debt and we�ve already wasted too much time on an over-paid, aging athlete who is neither a victim nor a hero.�

I want to judge you by the content of your character but I just can't because whenever your name comes up I just can't think of anything other than disgusting, immoral, hot, steamy gay se.... what were we talking about?

MaxxBot fucked around with this message at 22:20 on May 9, 2013

# ¿ May 9, 2013 22:16

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

I love how when talking about real white Americans literally anyone can become a billionaire business owner if they work hard because that's the American dream but when talking about immigrants it's totally fine to categorically write people off for life as failures because of a low IQ :psyduck:

# ¿ May 13, 2013 20:33

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

Ever want to know what would happen if one were to expound "You're the real racist/sexist/homophobe/anti-Semite" over several pages? Me neither.

http://stevedeace.com/news/national-politics/victimology-how-scumbags-become-heroes/

Jan Mickelson posted:

Victimology: How Scumbags become Heroes

It begins with Shelby Steele�s insights in �The Content of Our Character�� Whites lack the authority to say what they see�facts have to be denied if the facts can be accused of �insensitivity� to blacks�the vacuum in white authority is cancerous�the public schools are all but devastated, universities are stunted by ideology, corporations are more unctuous than churches, the media are more unctuous yet and American politicians of left and right speak in barren clich�s.�

John McWhorter in �Losing the Race� makes similar observations. He lists three mainstream notions which are keeping American blacks apart� I will make the point later that blacks aren�t the only ones.
1. Separatism, a natural outgrowth of Victimology, which encourages black Americans to conceive of black people as an unofficial sovereign entity, within which the rules other
2. Americans are expected to follow are suspended out of a belief that our victimhood renders us morally exempt from them.�
3. A strong tendency toward Anti-intellectualism at all levels of the black community.�

So, when a person or group thinks of himself as a victim, he removes himself from the usual moral constraints of mainstream culture. ��if I�m abused, I�m entitled to live by my own rules� � usually at the cost of those doing the �abusing� � even if no personal infraction has happened.
Got a list of people or groups who have aspired to and achieved victim status? Sure you do. Blacks, homosexuals, Jews, Christians, workers, welfare recipients, females, Hispanics, illegals, legals, unionists, government employees, and postal workers. Now take this list and substitute that name or group for �black� in McWhorter�s list. An almost perfect fit can be found for nearly every aspirational group claim.

Therefore, for �them�, at some level, they will seek exemption from equality before the law. They are victims therefore they are virtuous; therefore they are �entitled�� to something (usually) at the expense of the rest of us. And if you resist their claims of a victim-based entitlement you are a bigot.
It is interesting that employers know this about under-performing employees they are about to fire for cause. It the relationship is coming to a bumpy end, the former employee is told to vacate the building ASAP � often under security escort. Why? Same logic. If the employee feels aggrieved by the relationship or severance, he feels exempt from the usual ethics of the business culture and he can rationalize doing much damage to the �old boss� on the way out the door.

In the late 80�s Marshall Kirk wrote a book called �After the Ball: How America will Conquer its fear a & hatred of Gays in the 90�s� It�s the tactical textbook of the homosexual lobby describing the techniques intended to work the rest of us over.
�Portray gays as victims of circumstance and oppression, not as aggressive challengers. In any campaign to win over the public, gays must be portrayed as victims in need of protection so that straights will not be inclined to refuse to adopt the role of protector�we must forego the temptation to strut our gay pride publicly to such an extent that we will undermine our victim image.�
Our effect is achieved,� wrote Kirk, �without reference to facts, logic or proof��
Get that part? ��without reference to facts, logic, or proof��

It worked. Just ask the Boy Scouts.
If Victimology doesn�t work, if moral persuasion doesn�t work, if facts reason and logic doesn�t work, then just take over the organization from the inside and then lie your arse off.
Just ask the NAACP.
Homosexuals didn�t like the fact that the old NAACP resisted redefining marriage. The NAACP didn�t appreciate the homosexual lobby using the politics of victimology to achieve it. However, the homosexual lobby simply joined the NAACP, took over the reins and changed the organization to make it pro-homosexual. Problem solved.
Here�s what happened to the Boy Scouts.

This is a direct quote from the Arizona Jewish Post: �Jewish Scouting leaders are taking a vocal role in efforts to pass a historic resolution that would partially lift a ban on gays in the Boy Scouts of America. In a meeting of the National Jewish Committee on Scouting in February, members voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution lifting the BSA�s longstanding ban on gay members. Now the Jewish Scouting group is working to shore up support for a resolution to be voted on at the Boys Scouts of American�s annual convention in Dallas later this month (it was held and the resolution was affirmed to permit gay membership) that would prevent the Scouts from denying membership to anyone younger than 18 on the basis of sexual orientation.�
��NJCOS Chairman A.J Kreimer says the proposed compromise is a deeply flawed one. The notion that a gay Scout would be expelled upon turning 18, or that a gay rabbi might be barred from hosting a Scouting unit at his synagogue, is �untenable�.�

�Still, as one of the oldest BSA charters and the sole representative of a major religion, the NJCO, which was founded in 1926, has been forced to rebuff opponents of gay inclusion who try to sway the Jewish Scouts by quoting biblical passages.�
�I respond by saying until you tell me you keep kosher, don�t try to tell me you read the Bible in its entirety and do everything it says,� said John Lenrow, BSA�s Northeast Region Ex. VP for NJCOS. (National Jewish Committee on Scouting)

Well, that�s a false standard, especially by Jewish standards. �Keeping kosher� cannot be compared to the biblical prohibitions again sodomy. �Keeping Kosher� refers to maintaining dietary laws of the Old Covenant while laws against sodomy were part of the ancient civil code. These are clich�s which are served up by liberals to re-write the social script of society at large, and now being successfully used to bully the Boy Scouts.
How did they do it?

They joined an organization which was built upon western tradition and Christian ethics, then re-wrote the rules to conform to their liberalism. And, as you can see, by lying their arses off.
For the record, try selling the notion of �gay rabbi� to the orthodox Jews in Israel. You might want to invest in a stone proof helmet and Kevlar vest.
The Jewish leader claimed that homosexuals can�t be excluded on the basis of the Bible any more than we should exclude somebody for eating the wrong thing or mixing their fabric choices. This is rubbish. Jewish dietary and ceremonial laws had no civil penalty. If you violated a dietary law, the worst thing that could happen to you was that you could be sent away from the table, or you would not be invited to eat with observant Jews. If you violated the purity laws, you could be sent away from the community until you got your act together. Violate the sodomy laws and you would be invited to leave the planet, one rock at a time.

The liberal Jews know all this stuff�and that they are borrowing these techniques from Saul Alinsky and the rhetoric from that West Wing rant which is still making the rounds on YouTube.
The irony here is that here you have biblically illiterate Jews misstating the laws of Moses and making their own spiritual heritage an object of ridicule. Minimizing their own history, they ridicule Christians for adopting their abandoned ethics.

Liberal Jews are indistinguishable from any other kind of liberal�actually rejecting the concept of God-given laws as a source for ethics or civil law. They find even the concept of God-given law or laws derived from it to be repugnant. The other irony is that the Boy Scouts once was something of a Christian group associated with the YMCA organization. God and Country wasn�t an all of the above, one-size-fits-all deity. It once was a Protestant organization, so much so that Catholics refused to join it until they could run their own Catholic versions.
So, gradually, non-Christians, Mormons, Jews, homosexuals all found their way into the new �inclusive� BSA. And what was once a character-building organization is now a multi-cultural cesspool. The original charter and goals have been re-scripted by the new bosses.

The cultural vacuum left by weak-chested Christians has been filled with whatever movements which have more passion and zeal to evangelize for their causes�culture liberals, liberal Jews and the homosexual lobby. And as we just demonstrated, sometimes they are the same people.
From a recent AP news story, �Vice President Biden thanked Jewish leaders for helping change American attitudes about gay marriage and other issues. Biden says culture and arts change people�s attitudes. He cites social media and the old NBC TV series �Will and Grace� as examples what helped change attitudes on gay marriage.

Biden says, quote, �Think�behind all that, I bet you 85 percent of those changes, whether it�s in Hollywood or social media are a consequence of Jewish leaders in the industry.�

Biden says the influence is immense and that those changes have been for the good.

Biden was speaking �at a Jewish American Heritage Month reception hosted by the Democratic Nation committee. He says Jewish values are �an essential part of who Americans are.�
Many Americans, especially Christians, have a romantic view of modern Jews, thinking of them as God�s chosen people. They are exempted from the normal societal critiques because of their victim status.
Tied to end-times eschatology, Christians see modern Jews and Israel as a special people and special place, worthy of support, subject to nearly automatic affection and affirmation. These attitudes are routinely exploited, big time.

We must acknowledge that it is indeed easy to demonstrate victim�s status for Jews. The Holocaust was real. The ghettos were real. The pogroms were real. The massacres were real. The dhimmitude was and is real.

For homosexuals, victim status is part of their identity politics aspirations. The behavior by which they wish to be defined has been stigmatized and until recently was illegal. By asserting victimhood, homosexuals have achieved class protection nearly everywhere, leveraging victimhood toward universal marriage status for same gender couples.

But, if one points out the toxic nature of liberal secular Jews politics upon our social fabric, the observer is opened to charges of anti-Semitism.
Or, if one points out or criticizes the self-destructive social pathologies of many American blacks, the observer will be open to the Al Sharpton treatment�race baiting.
If one expresses open skepticism for the aspirational claims of the gay lobby, the observer is open to charges of homo-phobia and bigotry.
Fill in your own blanks about feminism, open borders advocates, etc. Same result.

What�s the ultimate point?

Return for a moment to the issue of Jews, the Boy Scouts and same gender marriage�the forms of propaganda employed can only be effective upon a very dumbed down and willfully ignorant public. This generation of Americans, including American Christians, is no exception. If you are a Christian who finds yourself softening your critique of liberals who advocate toxic ethics, business or sexual, because they are Jews, then you are a mark.

If you are a taxpayer who finds himself backing off stating �what you see� as Shelby Steele observed, you are a mark.
If you are a parent who thinks the Boys Scouts really should be open to sexually confused kids or that marriage should be offered to people of the same gender because a secular Jew trashes his own holy book, then you are a mark.

If a Jew is a scumbag, he isn�t less of a scumbag because he is a Jew. If you pull your punches and don�t say what you see, because some hustler might falsely label you anti-Semitic, then you are a mark.
If a black is a scumbag�
If a white is a scumbag�
If a Christian is a scumbag�
If a Republican is a scumbag�
If an immigrant is a scumbag�

The list goes on and on. By the way, if you say to yourself, �Well he may indeed be a scumbag, but he is OUR scumbag.� You aren�t a mark, you are an enabler. And YOU are a scumbag.
The same point applies to any identity politics movement, racial, gender, or religious movement. The same point applies to all the issues as well� to banking, foreign policy, the definition of marriage, international relations, pornography, Hollywood or aberrant Supreme Court rulings, etc. It�s ok to say so. It is not ok to not �say what you see�.

Jan Mickelson is the Marconi-award winning host of The Jan Mickelson show on NewsRadio 1040 WHO Des Moines.

Yes, how on earth could one accuse this poor man of anti-Semitism or homophobia? Surely describing the BSA as a "cesspool" upon inclusion of Jews and gays is just the hard truth, no animus there whatsoever!

MaxxBot fucked around with this message at 02:38 on Jun 4, 2013

# ¿ Jun 4, 2013 02:30

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

quote:

According to the Media, President Obama and the slick-haired Al Sharpton, we white devils are supposed to feel very sorry for the plight of the black teen.
I believe Americans, by and large, do have sympathy for any person or group who�ve had life deal them a bad hand.

However, young black thugs, you�ve got to work with us a little bit because you�re kind of operating against the storyline the aforementioned are singing about y�all, and thus, making it difficult for us to soulfully commiserate.

Of what, pray tell, do I speak?

Well, homeslice, it goes something like this: For us to give a crap about your below-par existence we�d like to hear less and less about�

- Your ghastly grades in school

- Your ridiculous dropout rates

- Your colossal out of wedlock birthrates

- Your embracing of a musical culture that celebrates the shooting of cops and doing filthy, vile things to someone�s daughter

- Your love affair with drugs and alcohol

- Your #hatethem tweets aimed at white people

- Your flash mobbing and robbing places and people

- Your audacity to blame everybody and their dog for your odious behavior

- And your ginormous, misplaced racial chip on your shoulder

Yes, if you could/would chill on some of that stuff, well � That�d be great. That would make us crackers think, �Hey, maybe you�re serious about getting out of the ditch you�re in.�

Another difficult thing that makes it hard for us to believe you�re just poor, helpless victims of the machine is when a couple of teens from your crew gun down an innocent, twenty-two-year-old, white, Aussie student just to spice up the inherent boredom which accompanies the dog-days of summer. That act of uncut evil helps us not. Yep, that heinous stunt really makes all this �poor you� crap fly right out our windows.

And lastly, and I hate to be negative, but there was one more incident perpetrated by two black teens this week that also unraveled the sweet story Sharpton and the President would have us believe. It was the beating death of an eighty-eight-year-old, WWII vet in Spokane, Washington. That demonic deed, coupled with the murder of Chris Lane this week, makes it impossible for anyone with a brain to feel anything towards your personal dilemma except, �Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.�

Yes, the brutal murder of someone�s grandpa and the senseless slaying of someone�s son by black thugs this past week do nothing but reinforce what the FBI National Crime Victimization Survey concluded, namely, that young black males are seven times more likely to commit murder than people of other races.

So, young black thugs, if you�d like us to empathize, trust and help you with a hand-up, howzabout cease and desist with the inhumane behavior, huh? Until then, we�ll be suspicious of young black teens, traveling in groups, taking an unusual interest in our person, especially if they�re dressed like gangbangers and are acting suspiciously.

Call us weird.

Why do all of these urban feral thug youts have a racial chip on their shoulder? Now excuse for a moment, there's a black guy standing by my house I need to call the cops.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2013 23:54

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

While on the topic of "articles that are indistinguishable from satire," this steaming pile of poo poo from today seems to fit the bill perfectly. At least I can take some solace in the fact that this line of thinking has declined dramatically in popularity from a decade ago, but I'm sure it will come back eventually once everyone forgets about Iraq.

quote:

Yes, We Are the World's Policeman
Dennis Prager

In his speech to the nation on Syria last week, the president twice emphasized that America is not the "world's policeman." According to polls, most Americans agree.

Unfortunately, however, relinquishing this role assures catastrophe, both for the world and for America.

This is easy to demonstrate. Imagine that because of the great financial and human price the mayors and city councils of some major American cities decide that they no longer want to police their cities. Individuals simply have to protect themselves.

We all know what would happen: The worst human beings would terrorize these cities, and the loss of life would be far greater than before. But chaos would not long reign. The strongest thugs and their organizations would take over the cities.

That is what will happen to the world if the United States decides -- because of the financial expense and the loss of American troops -- not to be the "world's policeman." (I put the term in quotes because America never policed the whole world, nor is it feasible to do so. But America's strength and willingness to use it has been the greatest force in history for liberty and world stability.)

This will be followed by the violent death of more and more innocent people around the world, economic disruption and social chaos. Eventually the strongest -- meaning the most vile individuals and groups -- will dominate within countries and over entire regions.

There are two reasons why this would happen.

First, the world needs a policeman. The world in no way differs from cities needing police. Those who oppose America being the world's policeman need at least to acknowledge that the world needs one.

Which leads to the second reason: If that policeman is not the United States, who or what will be?

At the present moment, these are the only possible alternatives to the United States:

a) No one

b) Russia

c) China

d) Iran

e) The United Nations

The first alternative would lead, as noted, to what having no police in an American city would lead to. Since at this time no country can do what America has done in policing the world, the world would likely divide into regions controlled in each case by tyrannical regimes or groups. China would dominate Asia; Russia would re-dominate the countries that were part of the former Soviet Union and the East European countries; Russia and a nuclear Iran would dominate the Middle East; and anti-American dictators would take over many Latin American countries.

In other words, a) would lead to b), c) and d).

Would that disturb those Americans -- from the left to the libertarian right -- who want America to stop being the "world's policeman"?

Note well that Europe is not on the list. Europeans are preoccupied with one thing: being taken care of by the state.

As for e), the United Nations, it is difficult to imagine anyone arguing that the United Nations would or could substitute for the United States in maintaining peace or liberty anywhere. The U.N. is only what the General Assembly, which is dominated by the Islamic nations, and the Security Council, which is morally paralyzed by Chinese and Russian vetoes, want it to be.

Americans are retreating into isolationism largely because of what they perceive as wasted American lives and treasure in Iraq and Afghanistan. But this conclusion is unwarranted.

It is --leaving-- not fighting in -- Iraq and Afghanistan that will lead to failures in those countries.

Had we left Japan, what would have happened in that country and in Asia? Had we left South Korea, would it be the vibrant democracy and economic power that it is today -- or would it have become like the northern half of the Korean peninsula, the world's largest concentration camp? Had we left Germany by 1950, what would have happened to Europe during the Cold War? We did leave Vietnam, and communists imposed a reign of terror there and committed genocide in Cambodia.

American troops around the globe are the greatest preservers of liberty and peace in the world.

To return to our original analogy of cities without police: Thinking that we can retreat from the world and avoid its subsequent violence and tyranny is like thinking that if the police go on strike in Chicago, the suburbs will remain peaceful and unaffected.

We have no choice but to be the world's policeman. And we will eventually realize this -- but only after we, and the world, pay a terrible price.

In the meantime, the American defeat by Russia, Syria and Iran last week means that the country that has been, for one hundred years, the greatest force for good, is perilously close to abandoning that role.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2013 20:43

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

Yes Huffington Post, I totally come to your supposedly super liberal website to have gay writers tell me to stop being so gay and gross and by the way, go back into the closet. No one wants to hear about that poo poo anyways, just act like you're straight and you'll be accepted!

quote:

Are Gay Men Scared of Monogamy?

In a recent blog post I wrote on The Huffington Post, "8 Things Gay Men Need to Stop Saying," I listed "Do you want to sleep with other people?" as one of the things that gay men need to erase from their phraseology. My tongue-in-cheek look at gay culture, which was meant to be taken with a grain of salt, created a maelstrom, with hundreds of people tweeting and responding to this one specific question that has come out of the mouths of so many gay men.

"Don't tell me how to be in a relationship."

"Why are you dissing open relationships?"

"I will do what I want with my partner."

These were several of the (more polite) messages I received once the blog post went viral and people all over the world were responding to it. It even sparked a discussion of HuffPost Live -- "Queer Monogamy: All It's Cracked Up To Be?" -- in which I participated. I seemed to be the only person in the discussion who truly believed that gay male relationships should be monogamous, and in a Carrie Bradshaw moment, I thought to myself, "With all this opposition to gay monogamy, are gay men simply scared of monogamy?"

I honestly don't care what people do behind closed doors. I come from the old school: What you do in your own bedroom is your own business. But with gay couples fighting for the right to marry in every state in the country, why on Earth would this conversation come up? Isn't it an oxymoron? Don't we want straight people to understand that we want what they want? Whether or not they partake in open relationships or threesomes as their gay counterparts do, they certainly don't talk about it as openly as we do. So to me, the gay community is essentially saying, "We are fighting to have the same rights that you have, but we are going to continue to sleep with people outside our relationship and partake in threeways, because we can, and it's our right to do whatever we want." You're trying to make a case for equality, but it doesn't seem that you want to adapt; you'd rather rewrite the rules, even though marriage usually involves only two people in the boudoir. In fact, sleeping with someone outside your marriage is usually grounds for divorce.

I've thought about this topic a lot, and I discussed it with a friend over dinner the other night. We sat down next to a friend of his, who was dining with his best friend Jim. Aside from Jim, everyone at the table was in a long-term relationship. Jim moaned about the trials and tribulations of dating in New York and how difficult it is to find a quality boyfriend. When I asked him how he was looking, he told me that he rarely goes to mixers or parties; instead, he uses Tinder and Grindr to search for a boyfriend. Mind you, I do believe that these apps can be useful (mainly for hooking up or connecting guys in rural areas who do not have a safe place to congregate), but I do not believe that either is useful for finding true love.

My friend and I told Jim that we may be able to connect him with one of our friends, and when we asked him what he was looking for in a guy, he regaled us with a long list of physical attributes. He had designed the perfect-looking man in his mind. However, when I asked what he was really looking for in a man, personality-wise, the only thing he could come up with was, "Someone funny." Everyone wants someone with a good sense of humor. But really? When I asked him if he would like me to put him in touch with Mixology, a completely offline matchmaking service strictly for gays, he told me, "No, thank you. I have all I need to find a beau, and it's in my pocket," referring to the apps on his mobile phone. I went on to speak about Mixology's success rate with matching people offline based on personal interests and education; in fact, they withhold photos of people's potential matches in order to match them based on personality rather than looks. But he wanted no part of it.

To me, it seemed that this man was frightened of monogamy. He would rather sift through thousands of photos every day, searching for the perfect-looking man rather than the perfect man for him. Everyone wants a perfect-looking mate, but if that perfect-looking mate has poo poo for brains, then it's back to the drawing board, and the cycle essentially beings again.

Afterwards, I went straight to Meghann Novinskie, a woman I have great respect for. She has helped me through a relationship crisis or two, and she has years of experience working in the dating industry. She is also the relationship expert and one of the brains behind Mixology.

"There is a place for Tinder and Grindr in our culture," she told me, "but not for those who are actually looking for relationships. Tinder and Grindr aren't the place to search for a soul mate. They're more of a distraction, if anything, if you're looking for a partner."

So if people are using those apps to look for a relationship and it's clearly not working out, why do they continue to do the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result?

"Relationships can be scary," Meghann said, "and I believe that some people use those apps to [postpone] really trying to be in a relationship, potentially because they are scared of settling down. Plenty of my clients have confessed to using Grindr, and there is nothing wrong with that, but they come to me once they have gotten it out of their system and are ready for something meaningful and special rather than a one-night tryst. It could also be the fact that until recently, gay relationships and marriages haven't been as accepted as straight marriages, so it potentially hasn't been in the minds of many gay men to settle down until recently."

As we continue to fight for the right to marry in every state while also trying to redefine relationships to make nonmonogamy acceptable, it leaves many in the gay community confused. I know plenty of gay couples who are in happy, healthy relationships who don't cheat or partake in threesomes, but I also know many who do. Why is the gay community now trying to redefine what a relationship between two men or two women should entail?

"I have always had the firm belief that if you find someone that you really love, the question of 'do you want to sleep with other people?' rarely comes up," Meghann told me. "But if it does, have a plan. Are you OK with this? Or not? What's the plan if you're not game for the shift from monogamy to 'monogamish,' as Dan Savage likes to say?"

Certainly, some straight men and women cheat on each other or have open relationships or threesomes, so it's a wonder that we don't hear about it more often. And it's a wonder to me that gay men are so vocal about their open relationships and their need to redefine relationships on their terms if they also want the same rights as everyone else.

I suppose it all comes down to personal preference. I prefer to be in a monogamous relationship with my boyfriend, but many other gay men do not. However, it seems to me that if we want our relationships and marriages to be accepted by our straight counterparts, then maybe it's time to keep a lid on what exactly it is that we do behind closed doors. Maybe it's just no one's business.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2013 23:02

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

Hasters posted:

It's not so much talking as reading, I should have said. It's hard to go a day reading news in the LGBT community without someone telling me that my marriage is wrong, I'm wrong for being in a monogamous relationship and everyone is supposed to cheat all the time.

These people are idiots but they were not the focus of this article, this guy is basically another version of these people because his view is "you MUST be monogamous" as opposed to "you MUST NOT be monogamous" whereas sane, rational human beings say "it's your own drat relationship and none of my business." The thing that really makes me angry about the article is the notion that gay people must conform to a certain standard of behavior as to avoid offending and alienating straight people. Not only is that not equality and not what we have spent decades fighting for but it's completely divorced from reality. We didn't achieve the progress we have made by hiding all of that icky gay stuff from the general public, we got it by slowly making the public more accepting of homosexuality and the gay community over time. When the LGBT rights movement first started the very idea of a gay person was offensive to the majority, following this idiot's line of logic they should have just stayed in the closet forever.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2013 18:18

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

I always read this guy's articles because he is absolutely off his loving rocker but also because like freepers he is sometimes brutally honest about to extent to which his insane beliefs have drove him apart from all of his friends and family. Of course the conclusion he comes to is that they're all indoctrinated by the evil homosexual agenda :downs:

.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/12/what_christmas_means_for_traditional_family_advocates.html

quote:

What Christmas Means for Traditional Family Advocates
By Robert Oscar Lopez

Every Christmas, I am reminded of how insufficient our Christ-centered holidays are. On Bill O'Reilly's show we get consternation about a "war on Christmas." Many FOX News viewers worry about the tireless push by secularists to turn the day into a December recess between World AIDS Day and Anderson Cooper watching the ball drop in Times Square.
But what if public venues acknowledged that the holiday was about the birth of Jesus? Would we be closer to His truth?

Did Jesus do anything other than be born and die?
Long before atheists strived to eliminate Christ from Christmas decorations, the two Christ-centered holidays, Christmas and Easter, had already taken on a consumerist and shallow countenance. Unfortunately, the narratives surrounding Christ on both days make Him passive, even to Christians; He is a cooing babe or a stoic martyr on a cross.
How can either the newborn or dying Christ hope to compete with the vitality and jolliness of Santa Claus or the empathetic dynamism of a gigantic fuzzy bunny? Obviously this crucial figure's life and birth are important, but I wish we had more days to think about the many events that filled Jesus's life between His beginning and end.
My pick for a Christmas line we don't often associate with Christmas
Perhaps this year, more than in most years, the oft-overlooked passage I find important is John 15:13. While I've often seen this passage translated from the Greek as "there is no greater love than this, to lay down one's life for a friend," I like to translate as closely as possible to the original:
Greater love than such a man, has nobody; when he places his psyche down for the people who are dear to him.

Psych� means soul and "butterfly." It is different from other words for "life" and distinct from pneuma, or "breath," which is sometimes used as the soul.
To lay down your soul in this sense means a great deal -- not merely the obvious sacrifice of risking harm to oneself to save others, like a fireman or warrior, but also the less celebrated sacrifice of giving up one's comfortable way of living.
Following this quote is the important follow-up clarification: "Those dear to me are those who do as I command them." One must put God and His mandates first.
Does John 15:13 mean anything to me in 2013?

These words meant a lot to me when I went to basic combat training for the U.S. Army. While my military career never took off, I still wrestled the way many soldiers do with the problem of killing. Would God forgive me if I had to kill? John 15:13 eased my conscience.
John 15:13 has come to be much more valuable to me this year, since 2013 was a stormy time for advocates of traditional family values. While I am not, as many in the gay press have alleged, an "ex-gay," I am a lifelong bisexual and the son of a lesbian. I spent my teen years and twenties immersed in the promiscuous world of gay sex.

While I still include myself in the LGBT acronym, I am in a faithful marriage to a woman, which is crucial because I love my wife and also because we have a daughter together. On most days, deep down, I want to enjoy the privileges and comforts that this fortunate life has provided to me, and stay out of the culture wars.

But I can't hide and be quiet, because John 15:13-14 reminds me that God has ordered me to stand up for what is right on behalf of others less fortunate than myself. To know and see what is wrong, what is cruel, what is harmful, especially to the innocent, is to be subject to God's mandate. We must do as God commands and bear witness so that others can be led out of darkness, as I was, and as others have.
Bearing witness does not mean always confronting the LGBT lobby. Certainly there are plentiful abusers who are heterosexual to be taken to task.

But my burden is unique: it is the gay world whose crimes I saw, and that world that I must face with a sense of compassion for the vulnerable among us who might be crushed by its callousness.
Why does it have to be so hard?

This year, Justice Anthony Kennedy drank the ligbitist Kool-Aid and decided that the only reason people have for opposing homosexual marriage is "animus," while a steady flow of conservatives genuflected to the monolithic gay lobby and cashed in with their metrosexual friends (not to mention a sweet little pick-me-up from Paul Singer): John Bolton, Jon Huntsman, Rob Portman, etc.

Then, of course, came the string of mangled quotations from Pope Francis, which involved the pope asking people to stop talking about homosexuality -- either to condemn it or uphold it -- and instead talk about bringing love to the needy, with the predictable result that that the pro-gay media (I repeat myself) talked about nothing else for months in a chorus of "The pope loves the gays! The pope loves the gays!"

At Christmastime, those of us who can see the truth about these gay issues face multiple conflicts. The world believes that we are full of what Anthony Kennedy calls "animus." We are increasingly pathologized as haters or else criminalized as the purveyors of discrimination. Our politicians surrendered us for thirty pieces of silver from the Human Rights Campaign and Paul Singer long ago, while religious leaders either cave, as did most Methodists and reform Jews, or else cut ties to us to save themselves the bother, as have many Catholic and Anglican leaders.
The LGBT lobby has been ruthless about intruding into all our relationships both personal and professional to indoctrinate people in its sexual ideology. It doesn't matter that this ideology of biological determinism and sexual abandon destroys gays themselves, as well as the people around them who feel the fallout from their depression, sexually transmitted diseases, eating disorders, anxiety, exploitation, sexual assault, domestic violence, and suicide -- all the trademarks of a gay world that has been decaying from within while its self-appointed lobbyist overseers bicker with the outside world about same-sex marriage.

The more resources the LGBT lobby has shifted from reforming gay culture to erecting a fa�ade of suburban marital normalcy that precious few gays can ever really obtain, the gloomier and unhappier gay people have become as individuals.

Yet to bear witness on this topic is relentlessly painful. The LGBT lobby has warped my relationship with students, my relationship with gay friends, my relationship with the press, my relationship with bosses at the university, my relationship with readers, and saddest of all, my relationship with my own family. My relatives, all well-intended liberal devotees of the New York Times, will believe what Frank Rich or Maureen Dowd writes about gays before they believe me, their own brother. Of the large brood fostered by our sprawling family tree, only I knew of my mother's sexuality from early on and viewed her partner as a second mother; not coincidentally, only I ended up coming out as queer and living a queer life.

"Let's agree to disagree," they say, when the topic of Governor Brown's signing a ban on ex-gay therapy comes up. "That's how you see it, but not necessarily how it is," they say, when I tell them about the epidemic of homosexual rape in the military, something I witnessed firsthand because I was the only one who served in the armed forces. "My gay friends tell a different story," they say, when I try to open up about what really happened between 1984, when I was first introduced to gay sex at the age of thirteen, and 1999, when I fell in love with the woman who would become my wife. "You've always been one to exaggerate." And at last, on the issue of our own mother, "I don't feel comfortable talking about this."

To bear witness and speak honestly means, sometimes, having to feel pain at the hands of people you love. In a time of chocolate cookies, fireplace stockings, and wrapping paper, I wish that John 5:13 didn't remind me that these are among the things that God expects us to surrender if it means we must speak a truth that others do not want to hear.

It is written in Exodus, "Honor thy father and thy mother." Family advocates must hold these lines close, and soldier on. Love can keep us going, but we must eventually reconcile ourselves to an existence where even love can be part of the psych� we have to give up in order to do as Christ commands us. Tactics matter, I suppose. Share some eggnog and change the topic; drive home to Los Angeles and see the deep blue sea stretching calmly out to the horizon. Remember that all the fellowships and courtesies in this life are borrowed from God and nothing that He has promised never to take away.
Christmas does not mean only presents, candy canes, and pageants. It also means laying down what is most precious to us, to do as we're commanded.

It just makes me sick that this rear end in a top hat's poor dead mothers have become a political football for his anti-gay advocacy. Almost every article he writes mentions his mothers, who he claims to "love" so much, as failed parents who turned him gay. Especially the fact that he is somehow surprised that his family members don't want to eagerly join in on bashing his own dead mother, I just can't comprehend how someone can be so consumed by their anti-gay political views to go to that length.

MaxxBot fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Dec 17, 2013

# ¿ Dec 17, 2013 17:51

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

This Jason Pargin rear end in a top hat seems like the sort of person who would watch the movie Wall Street and immediately conclude that Gordon Gekko is their hero and role model, like my old college roommate did.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2014 23:03

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

VitalSigns posted:

No, see Singapore is more free, because heterosexuals in Singapore are not oppressed by the spectre of LGBT people walking the streets un-imprisoned, un-beaten, and un-murdered

Actually I have heard for how awful they are in other areas they are at least passable on LGBT rights, all things considered. They do hold gay festivals and stuff without being beaten, and while homosexuality is still illegal there it's much like in the US right before Lawrence where it had become mostly symbolic. I still wouldn't want to live there but it's no Russia.

# ¿ Jan 15, 2014 16:15

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

The guy would be a complete rear end in a top hat if not for this little part.

quote:

The kids each got their own computer, but had to build it. I bought the processor, memory, power supply, case, keyboard, hard drive, motherboard, and mouse. They had to put it together and load the software on. This started when they were 12.

If I were this dude's kid this probably would have been the only enjoyable moment of my childhood.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2014 21:26

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

It's telling, although not at all surprising, that most of the articles I have posted in here are not from some horrible right-wing site but from Huffington Post. They publish some really, really awful poo poo.

Exhibit A: Gay man defending Russian anti-gay laws

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/jj-mccullough/russia-lgbt_b_4758584.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000008&just_reloaded=1

quote:

Since it seems we as a nation are now incapable of consuming any news that lacks a Rob Ford connection, the fact that many of Canada's biggest cities have taken to flying rainbow flags over their city halls during the Sochi Olympics made headlines last week primarily because the Toronto mayor is against it.

Ford finds the fad offensive presumably for the same reason he finds gay pride parades offensive; he's an old-fashioned, conservative guy who gets squeamish about public flauntings of sexuality. (How exactly he squares this belief with his previously-established view that bragging about cunnilingus is an acceptable topic for a press conference remains unclear).

There's a much better reason to be skeptical of the preening movement to fly pride flags at city hall, however, and it's got nothing to do with one's view on sexuality. For what it's worth, I'm gay, and I find the whole thing distasteful, not because the global crusade for LGBT rights isn't important, but because casting the Sochi Olympics as the world's leading front in this struggle displays an appallingly sheltered lack of context and perspective on both queer rights and human rights in general.

Mayors raising the rainbow flag is the latest trendy protest against the much-despised "anti-gay laws" which passed the Russian parliament last summer, criminalizing the "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations among minors." No sooner was the ink dry on Putin's signature than gay celebs like George Takei and Stephen Fry began calling for a boycott of the Sochi games in retaliation, and it didn't take long before American gay bars were dumping vodka in the streets, European athletes were brandishing rainbow nail polish, and President Obama was vowing to include a bunch of openly gay sports stars in his country's official delegation.

The implied pretext is that the persecution of homosexuals in Russia is the worst thing the Russian government has ever done, and a unique outlier of homophobic behaviour in an otherwise civilized world.

Neither is remotely true.

A recent piece in the New York Times documenting the plight of gays in Nigeria provides a chilling window into what a genuinely homophobic society looks like. In that country, tough new laws have strengthened the criminal status of homosexuality, with punishments of up to 14 years in prison for a broad range of homosexual activities (though more "lenient" judges may merely prescribe 20 lashes with a leather whip). In the nation's heavily Muslim north, law enforcement has been arresting dozens as part of a renewed crackdown on gayness, with Amnesty International claiming some cops have compiled "a list of suspected gay people" for surveillance.

In Russia, by contrast, homosexuality has been completely legal since 1993. My Lonely Planet guidebook calls attention to Moscow's "active gay and lesbian scene," and that the Moscow Times features "articles about gay and lesbian issues as well as listings of gay and lesbian clubs." Some quick Googling turns up plenty of Russian gay tourism sites boasting lists of the hottest bars, bathhouses, and cruising parks. As many wags snarkily observed, Sochi itself even has a lively gay bar despite the dopey mayor's insistence his city is homosexual-free. Patrons of The Lighthouse, incidentally, are reported to be getting a bit tired of western journalists constantly asking if they feel oppressed.

It's similarly worth noting that Russia's recent ban on homosexual "propaganda," however odious we may find it in practice, was motivated primarily at protecting children from sexually explicit materials, and imposes fines, not jail, as punishment. The much-reported vagueness of the legislation also leaves a lot up to interpretation -- many observers saw it as a mostly symbolic way to curry populist favor in a country where the vast, vast majority still considers homosexuality moral vice (ironically, making the legislation one of the more democratic acts of Putin's Russia) and as the AP noted at the time, "most activists believe that the law will not be widely enforced" even as they remain officially suspicious. Only four have faced charges to date.

To be sure, Russia deserves protest. If I were mayor of a Canadian metropolis, I might be inclined to fly the Ukrainian flag over my city hall to protest the Putin government's brazen efforts to colonize and control that long-suffering Russian neighbour, efforts that have led to the chaotic street violence of today. Or perhaps the flag of the Free Syrian Army, in solidarity with those dying by the thousands opposing the Assad dictatorship that's actively funded, armed, and supported by Moscow. Or perhaps the flag of one of the many dissident opposition groups whose leaders have been beaten or jailed by a regime the NGO Freedom House considers one of the worst in the world when it comes to upholding its citizens' basic right to free expression and an impartial justice system.

A Canadian leader willing to take a public stance on one of those issues would be bold and courageous, but also controversial, provocative, and risky -- basically everything Canada's complacent gay rights slacktivists are not.

No member of the Canadian political class wants to stake a position on Russian democracy or foreign policy simply because such causes are neither safe, easy, or fashionable, nor do they pander to a domestic constituency as powerful and well-heeled as urban gays and their liberal allies. So instead we witness the inflation of Russia's comparatively mild "anti-gay" laws into a much larger crisis than they actually are, and at the expense of a great many issues we'd be doing the Russians (and the foreign victims of Russian policy) a much greater service in caring about.

Fifty years from now, it's easy to imagine a Russia with gay marriage, gay politicians, and even more gay clubs and bars than it has now, simply because that's very obviously the direction their society's been progressing for decades. What remains tremendously uncertain, however, is whether Russia of 2060 will be a society that's any more democratic than it is now, with an improved respect for the freedoms for its citizens, the sovereignty of its neighbours, and the importance of human rights abroad.

2014, the history books will read, was the world's moment to protest. Will Canada's mayors be confident they picked the right cause?

Oh sorry I meant "anti-gay" laws, don't want to be so mean to poor Russia :ohdear:

MaxxBot fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Feb 10, 2014

# ¿ Feb 10, 2014 21:15

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

My Q-Face posted:

I must have read a different article than the one you did, because what I saw was pretty clearly a jab at toothless politicians jumping on a toothless legislative act while not taking any real stance on Russia's actual current and ongoing human rights abuses in Syria and the Ukraine. But go on being butt-hurt because gay rights is so fashionable.

The sections that I bolded are blatantly false and are clearly trying to whitewash the law and downplay the situation of LGBT Russians. He mentions the gay bars in Moscow but totally leaves out how they have been under regular attacks which the police have done little to thwart. He claims that the law "was motivated primarily at protecting children from sexually explicit materials" while if you look at the instances where the law was invoked children were never involved, the law has been used to essentially deny freedom of speech and assembly to gays.

Noting that homosexuality is legal in Russia is completely aside the point. If you will get beaten up in the streets for being openly gay, beaten up if you go to the bars, and set up and beaten/killed if you make an online personal ad, why does it matter that it's legal?

EDIT: Your description of the law as "toothless" is absolutely preposterous. You can't even write an article in favor or gay rights or in any way express that being gay is ok under this law. People have been fined or threatened with fines who weren't even gay but simply trying to advocate gay rights. People have been fined or detained simply for holding up a sign or kissing in public. Just because the people aren't thrown in prison doesn't make the law toothless, it has a massive chilling effect on LGBT Russians and their allies. That description also leaves out how there has been a massive wave of anti-gay violence since the passage of the law.

He also calls them "anti-gay laws" as in he doesn't think they are actually anti-gay, if you don't see a problem with that I don't know what to tell you.

MaxxBot fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Mar 10, 2014

# ¿ Mar 10, 2014 17:53

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

My Q-Face posted:

Many many thousands more are dying in Syria daily directly because of Russian support to one side and opposition in the UNSC to any intervention, your human rights aren't more important than their human rights, and that's what I (and that author) mean by "it's Fashionable to get all up in arms about gay rights". It's all nice and makes you feel good about yourself to jump up and down and boycott and mock Russia over its Gay Rights stance, but its Syria stance..

gently caress off.

I see you didn't bother to respond to my post where I pointed out how much of an idiot you are.

EDIT: I see you're still calling it a "toothless law," did you even read my loving post? Care to respond to any of my arguments? Is a complete denial of freedom of speech and assembly to not only gays but their supporters "toothless" in your mind?

The entire basis for my criticism of the article was the fact that he downplays and whitewashes the situation of LGBT Russians and the anti-gay law. Your continual focus on the greater point of the article, which I did not criticize or respond to in any way, is completely irrelevant. The question is did he or did he not downplay and whitewash the law and the answer is unambiguously "yes."

It's entirely possible to say that issues Y and Z are more important than issue X without downplaying issue X. In fact, trying to downplay issue X makes your concern about Y and Z look more hollow, and that's precisely what's happening in that article.

MaxxBot fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Mar 15, 2014

# ¿ Mar 15, 2014 21:06

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

This spat between Michelle Malkin and Colbert reminds me of when John Hawkins got mad at Alex Baldwin after he made a bunch of homophobic remarks. Normally that would be laudable but here is John Hawkins writing on the subject of homosexuality.

quote:

If you're gay, you're not allowed to act on it. If that seems harsh or unfair to you, well, sorry, but you'll have to take it up with God. It's His rule.

"Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination." -- Leviticus 18:22

The people of Sodom and Gomorrah could tell you how serious God is about that -- if there were any of them left.

Hawkins seemed oddly unconcerned about homophobia before this specific case, as if there were something different, hmmmm.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2014 00:09

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

Good to see the GOP is reaching out to hip, cool youngsters to update their image.

http://townhall.com/columnists/dustinsiggins/2014/06/13/the-sexual-humor-in-not-having-sex-n1850420/page/full

quote:

The Sexual Humor in Not Having Sex

I'm a virgin. Sexually abstinent. I've never �hooked up,� �been laid,� or �gotten any.�

And I'm cool with that. And I get a kick out of watching people's eyes grow as big as dinner plates when they hear my sex life is non-existent.

I was at the gym a few years ago, stretching after lifting weights. Two female friends were nearby, talking in graphic terms about their sex lives as they lifted. After 15 or 20 minutes of increasing awkwardness on my part, I finally asked them to stop. One of the women was surprised, and said, �Everyone likes to talk about sex!�

When I told her I had never experienced what she was talking about, she dropped her weights and left the area, saying, �This is awkward.�

Another time, an Army buddy and I were having a discussion about sexual morality. Eventually, realization dawned, and he proceeded to drop the volume of his voice from a conversational level to a whisper. �Are you a virgin?!�

�Yes,� I whispered back. �But you don't have to whisper.�

He ended up laughing at himself. �I did, didn't I?�

It's amazing what happens when I tell people I'm sexually abstinent. Some people play it cool. One day, when I was dressed in a suit purchasing some alcohol at a convenience store, a guy told me to �bring a girl home for him.� I told him that �I would, but the Catholic guilt is strong in this one.� He gave me a thumbs-up, and said, �I got you, man.�

Clearly, Star Wars overcomes differences of sexual practice.

More often than not I get a look of absolute shock, often followed up by stuttering. Such as the customer service employee at a sporting goods store in New York City, who, a few minutes after meeting me and my buddy Jeremy, made a crude sexual joke. I told him I didn't know what he was talking about -- not having experienced what he was referencing -- and as Jeremy burst into laughter the guy looked to him for clarification. The poor guy proceeded to stutter his way through saying, �Oh, um, well, good for you...�

Just a couple of months ago, I was on-air at CPAC, and mentioned that I will be sexually abstinent until I am married. Two women who happened to be in the general vicinity overheard this, and their amazed expressions were priceless.

Why have I never had sex? The decision was made at first because my parents informed me of the costs and benefits of pre-marital sex, from the spiritual consequences to more mundane ones. To paraphrase my father, sex is an adult activity -- which meant if we wanted to have sex while living under his roof, we would find ourselves living on our own, as adults do.

At the time, being about 13, free clothes, free shelter, and free food on the table every day were more important than sex.

Later, in college, I stayed abstinent because of my Catholic faith, something that has grown increasingly stronger in adulthood.

Now, though? The reasons are so much more complete than a teenager's cost-benefit analysis or fear of Hell's fire. I've learned that abstinence until marriage is not just about me, but also my future wife. Waiting until marriage means sex will be more than a carnal pleasure, instead fulfilling a relationship that is based upon a deep love. And rather than put myself or sex partners through the emotional harm that comes from sleeping around, I will be working with my wife to bring us closer together, and hopefully "be fruitful and multiply."

People think of God as a cosmic killjoy who wants to keep us down. But life has showed me that God knows that what we want now is not always what's best for us -- and when I follow His guidance, life is a whole lot better.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm a guy. I wish I was married and having sex all the time. But it looks like God might reward my patience, since at least one study shows sex might actually be more enjoyable if I wait until I've walked down the aisle.

Until that point, though, I'll keep watching people go from cracking jokes to slack-jawed amazement. And wondering why it's okay for Miley Cyrus to "twerk" on national TV, but not having sex is so weird people lose their ability to speak.

I guess simply trying to force people to stop having sex isn't going far enough for the GOP now, they have to force you to stop even talking about it. I also love how this guy goes out of his way to inform everyone that he's a virgin, but I bet if I told him I was gay he would say that's a private matter and that I shouldn't shove it in his face.

MaxxBot fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Jun 13, 2014

# ¿ Jun 13, 2014 17:57

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

I'm surprised that conservatives hate soccer so much considering how the FIFA leadership loves homophobia and slave labor.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2014 04:04

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

Hey guys I have a totally brand new argument against same-sex marriage that you've surely never seen before!

http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/07/why-gay-rights-are-not-the-new-civil-rights

quote:

Supporters of same-sex marriage love to make analogies to the African American Civil Rights Movement. Analogies are rhetorical devices that require careful scrutiny. While I do not find the attempt to connect bans on gay marriage to miscegenation laws persuasive, nevertheless there is nothing inherently wrong in trying to find parallels between these two social movements. In that spirit, let me offer my own reflections on what we can learn by comparing them.

Rather than beginning with a description of the Civil Rights movement and then looking for similarities to gay rights, my arguments goes in the opposite direction. That is, I begin with the extraordinary success of gay marriage advocacy and then ask what the Civil Rights movement would have looked like if it had followed the gay rights strategy.

First, then, let�s quickly recap that strategy. In a remarkably short period of time, gay marriage advocates have convinced millions of Americans that gay marriage is just the same as straight marriage. Gays thus deserve the right to marry because gay marriage will do nothing to damage or alter that revered institution. Put differently, the definition of marriage can be expanded without any negative consequences for society.

The aspect of this strategy that is relevant for my argument is its emphasis on sameness. Gay marriage is just as good (just as morally straight, we could say) as straight marriage. Therefore, denying gays this fundamental right is just as arbitrary as denying blacks their civil rights.

If the argument of sameness works for gay rights, could it have worked for Civil Rights? Imagine the following �alternative history.� It is the early sixties, and while it should be obvious to everyone that all human beings are the same in every important respect, racism is alive and well. The white political leaders most sympathetic to the plight of African Americans decide to make the case for this moral sameness by arguing that black people are really white. �Look past their skin,� they say, �and you will find that they are just as white as we are.� This argument is so effective that the discourse about race in America changes nearly overnight. Anyone who wants to talk about the distinctiveness of African American culture is accused of racism. Even black leaders who want to draw attention to black history and its unique challenges and achievements are shut down. There is no black pride movement, no discussion of the particularity of black culture, and no effort to find room in public discourse to reflect on the uniqueness of black life in America. Blacks continue to have their own history and culture, but those differences cannot be named, analyzed, and celebrated. For the purposes of social justice, blacks have become white.

Civil rights, of course, were not won in that fashion, and it is a good thing, too. White America had to learn to recognize not just black rights but also black lives, including their views on American history and their contributions to American culture. Blacks did not win civil rights because they are really white, and they did not have to give up their blackness to become full members of the American experience. Moral sameness did not eclipse historical and cultural differences.

That is not the case with the gay marriage debate. Gay couples who want to marry, according to their advocates�especially their straight advocates�are just the same as straight couples. Their pursuit of monogamy, their desire for children, their rites of courtship and reverence for tradition are no different from what goes on in the heterosexual world.

The result of this rhetorical strategy is the unofficial (and in many cases, official) banning of any discussion of the differences between gay and straight relationships. Everyone knows there are differences, but they are treated as insignificant and irrelevant for public debate. Worse, those who point out these differences are tagged with a label�homophobia�that puts them in the ranks of racists.

Gay marriage has won widespread support, but at the cost of erasing what makes homosexuality different from heterosexuality. Gay love has its own history, and gays can be rightly proud that their struggles to survive in hostile conditions has often taken the form of extraordinary cultural creativity. None of that can be acknowledged if homosexuals and heterosexuals experience their sexuality in the same ways.

But of course, they don�t. Gay sex should not be treated as if it were really straight sex. That, however, is exactly what the sameness rhetoric does, even though its most basic assumption is rarely if ever spelled out. That assumption is so bold, so counterintuitive, and so unbelievable that it must not be made explicit, even though the entire gay marriage appeal rests upon it: The anus is the same as the vagina. The most intimate act of self-giving, of penetration, in homosexuality is just as sacred, just as physically and psychologically healthy, just as fecund, just as spiritually uplifting, just as mutually pleasurable, and just as tenderly beautiful as the sexual intercourse of a heterosexual couple. I don�t think very many people really believe that, but as long as it is not stated, it cannot be discussed, and as long as it is not discussed, it cannot be denied.

Bonus post by the author in the comments section.

quote:

Thanks for those thoughts, Aaron. I was hoping my position would resonate with some (many?) in the gay community who resist assimilating the cultural expressions and social structures that emerge from the distinctiveness of gay sexuality with the experiences of the straight world.

Gays can't marry because dicks and butts are icky, and lesbians don't exist! Also, many gay people support this well crafted and thought out argument.

It should be noted that this isn't some random rear end in a top hat's blog, First Things is supposed to be a website for intellectual discussions of topics related to Catholicism, and the right-wing Catholics who visit this site actually think this qualifies as deep theological discussion.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2014 05:02

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

I love how as opposed to trying to make that article somewhat believable that this guy is a former liberal he has to go straight to LIBERALS ARE NAZIS, they just can't hold back.

# ¿ Jul 25, 2014 05:28

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

This guy is such an insufferable shithead, everything he writes goes into poe's law territory but this one is especially egregious.

http://townhall.com/columnists/john...t-life-n1883160

quote:

Dear Millennials: Hollywood, Your Favorite Bands, and Your College Professors Have Been Lying To You About Life

I feel sorry for Millennials. We are leaving them an almost insurmountable debt, an American Dream that seems tarnished, and chances are, they're not going to have it as good as their parents.

However, we've done something even worse to these kids. We've left far too much of their education in life to Hollywood, musicians, and college professors who've passed on a skewed view of the world. Not only have most of these kids never been told the truth about how the world works, they've been told that anyone who even tries to tell them the truth should be immediately tuned out because they're boring, mean and "uncool."

Unfortunately for them, reality doesn't care about boring, mean or "uncool." It just keeps rolling on like a threshing machine, cutting anyone who ignores it to pieces.

With that in mind, do you REALLY want to know why America has been so prosperous? Want to know why we're a superpower?

It's because of Judeo-Christian values, Western culture, a Puritan work ethic, patriotism, capitalism, small government, adherence to the Constitution, and a capability and willingness to use our military to decimate enemies of our country.

None of those things are being celebrated in songs by Lady Gaga, movies by James Cameron, or in women's studies courses at American colleges.

Do you want to know who has made America successful?

Ninety eight percent of the businesses, inventions, and great ideas that made America a cultural, economic, and military superpower came from old dead white guys of the sort who are sneered at on college campuses as bigoted, awful relics of bygone eras. That's ironic if you think about it because without those men the colleges where they're being sneered at wouldn't exist.

So much of our country is like that.

The only reason we have so much money to "redistribute" is because we spent so long devoted to capitalism. The only reason we feel so comfortable mocking Christianity is that we think a culture shaped by Christian morals will hold together anyway. We're become so confident that our culture will remain steeped in patriotism and Western values that we've come to believe we can allow an unlimited number of foreigners who don't share those values to enter our country illegally without changing anything.

Confidence is a good thing, but when it's coupled with a people who stop doing the things that make them successful, it becomes hubris.

We've forgotten that rich people and corporations can move out of the country, that people will change their behavior when it no longer benefits them, that no matter what our race, color, or creed, we all suffer if our culture becomes a corrupt sewer and that many great nations have been laid low when they stopped doing the things that made them successful. We've forgotten that we're one nation in a competitive world, full of other countries that yearn to see us trampled in the dust so they can have their day in the sun. We've forgotten that we're competing with workers in India, corporations from Britain, and with resource-hogging governments like China and Russia -- and guess what? They're all hungrier than we are because life has already taught them the hard way that you don't get participation trophies just for showing up.

We've forgotten not only how our country became successful, but the people who are making it successful.

We're successful because a lot of steady, responsible people do boring jobs that have to be done. It's the man who works 40 hours in his first job and another 20 hours a week at a part-time job so he can pay the bills for his wife and kids. It's the stay-at-home mom with spit-up on her blouse who has been on her feet for hours cleaning and taking care of the kids. It's the small businessman who worked 70 hours a week for peanuts over the last decade to get his business to the point where he can have people complain that he's not paying enough in taxes. It's the single mother who gives up partying every night to make sure her child is taken care of like he should be. It's the pastor who says something from the pulpit that will be controversial, but that his flock needs to hear. It's the cop who sweats through a half dozen encounters with drunk, drugged, and potentially violent creeps each night because he cares about keeping a neighborhood safe. It's a soldier sleeping in a tent far from home because he's doing his part to keep the peace. It's the couple who feels like they've achieved the American dream because they got married, bought a house, had two kids, and are putting enough money in their 401k to retire someday.

Those people don't get the respect they deserve because they're more concerned with doing their jobs, paying their bills, and making sure their kids get every advantage possible rather than yelling about "the patriarchy" or protesting the "oppression" of people who are asked to take a drug test to get their welfare benefits. No one is making any reality shows about people like them and if they do make it onto the silver screen, the Christian is a jerk, the dad is a buffoon, mom is a crabby Stepford wife, the southerner is a toothless redneck, the cop is crooked, the soldier is a mindless drone, the businessman is screwing everyone for profit and they're all living bland, oppressive lives waiting for some pampered pretty person to show up and teach them the error of their ways.

Hollywood, academia, and popular culture champion a world where snark has replaced wisdom, marriage isn't considered a lifetime commitment, where there's spirituality without God, where it's better to be silent than to risk offending someone, where people don't understand that everything is a trade-off, and where the more happy, successful and well-adjusted you are, the more likely it must be that you screwed someone else over to get that way.

Contrary to what you may hear from Jay-Z, Miley Cyrus, and your college professors, life is not about how many times you get laid, how much marijuana you smoke, and embracing trendy causes to impress your friends.

It's about working 10 times harder than you thought you'd have to in order to get half as far. It's about struggling through your twenties and working like a dog in your thirties to start to accumulate some money in your forties. It's about trying to find a decent house in a nice neighborhood near a good school for your family. It's about taking more satisfaction in buying a gift for someone else than getting something for yourself. It's saying a prayer for a friend or family member who�s about to have an operation. It's about doing the right thing, not getting recognized for it and being fine with that because it was always about doing the right thing for you.

If that sounds frightening or depressing because it doesn't involve partying, getting blackout drunk and having sweaty sex in the alley behind a bar every few months, it's not. You can take a lot of pride in earning your keep, paying your own way, and doing your part to take care of yourself, your family and your country. It's also the sort of quiet lifestyle most successful Americans actually live as opposed to the funhouse mirror image of reality that's glorified in our popular culture.

One day, Millennials are likely to have a burden put on their shoulders almost as big as the ones the Greatest Generation carried, but they won't have the faith, the work ethic and the road-of-hard-knocks education gained from living through the Depression to carry them through. For their sake and the sake of our country, let's hope that enough of them have listened to their parents, their grandparents, and their churches instead of Hollywood, their favorite bands, and their college professors.

The bolded part is basically the conservative version of the American Dream, work your rear end off all day for no reward and never have any fun, unless of course you're one of the all-important "job creators" in which case you can do whatever the gently caress you want. The funny thing is that the people under 30 I know who are really wealthy and successful are all crazy partiers because apparently people like spending their large amounts of disposable income on fun things :monocle:

# ¿ Aug 27, 2014 16:15

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

Radish posted:

Anyone who writes poo poo like that should have to itemize their time to prove he or she both worked as hard as claimed and that there is no idle time spent for recreation.

He maintains some bottom tier right-wing news site and writes tons of incredibly lazy and poorly written articles, this one is actually an exception in that he actually bothered to arrange it into paragraphs rather than just listing a bunch of poo poo. He also looks like something out of goons.jpg, surely from a lack of time given all of that hard work.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2014 20:52

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

I love how you can generally get a sense of how unhinged someone's opinions are just by looking at their spelling and grammar. Really random use of quotation marks and capitalization along with gratuitous amounts of dashes and ellipses is always a dead giveaway.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2014 21:00

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

I don't think I've ever seen so many illogical arguments, technical errors, and writing mistakes packed into such a short article. Even the comments section thinks it's poo poo.

http://americanthinker.com/blog/2014/10/inventor_of_led_light_wins_physics_nobel.html

Inventors of LED light win physics Nobel

quote:

The three scientists responsible for allowing governments to ban most incandescent light bulbs by inventing the LED have won the Nobel Prize in physics.

quote:
Reuters:

An American and two Japanese scientists won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Physics on Tuesday for inventing a new energy-efficient and environment-friendly light source, leading to the creation of modern LED light bulbs.

Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano of Japan and Japanese-born U.S. citizen Shuji Nakamura won the prize for developing the blue light-emitting diode (LED) -- the missing piece that now allows manufacturers to produce white-light lamps.

The arrival of such lamps is changing the way homes and workplaces are lit, offering a longer-lasting and more efficient alternative to the incandescent bulbs pioneered by Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison at the end of the 19th century.

"Red and green LEDs have been around for a long time but blue was really missing. Thanks to the blue LED we now can get white light sources which have very high energy efficiency and very long lifetime," Per Delsing, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, told a news conference.

The award is a notable example of a practical discovery winning the prize -- in contrast to last year, when the physics prize went to scientists who predicted the existence of the Higgs boson particle that explains how elementary matter attained the mass to form stars and planets.

"Incandescent light bulbs lit the 20th century; the 21st century will be lit by LED lamps," the academy said in a statement.

Frances Saunders, president of Britain's Institute of Physics, said the shift offered the potential for huge energy savings.

"With 20 percent of the world�s electricity used for lighting, it�s been calculated that optimal use of LED lighting could reduce this to 4 percent. Akasaki, Amano and Nakamura�s research has made this possible and this prize recognizes this contribution," she said.

I suppose congratulations are in order, but I'm not celebrating much. The light given off by blue LED's is weaker than your standard bulb and it's toxicity is well known:

quote:
Ogunseitan and other UC-Irvine researchers tested several types of LEDs, including those used as Christmas lights, traffic lights, car headlights and brake lights. What did they find? Some of the worst offenders were low-intensity red LEDs, which were found to contain up to eight times the amount of lead, a known neurotoxin, allowed by California state law and which, according to researchers, �exhibit significant cancer and noncancer potentials due to the high content of arsenic and lead.�

Meanwhile, white LEDs contain the least lead, but still harbor large amounts of nickel, another heavy metal that causes allergic reactions in as many as one in five of us upon exposure. And the copper found in some LEDs can pose an environmental threat if it accumulates in rivers and lakes where it can poison aquatic life.

Ogunseitan adds that while breaking open a single LED and breathing in its fumes wouldn�t likely cause cancer, our bodies hardly need more toxic substances floating around, as the combined effects could be a disease trigger. If any LEDs break at home, Ogunseitan recommends sweeping them up while wearing gloves and a mask, and disposing of the debris � and even the broom � as hazardous waste.

Furthermore, crews dispatched to clean up car crashes or broken traffic lights (LEDs are used extensively for automotive and traffic lighting) should wear protective clothing and handle material as hazardous waste. LEDs are currently not considered toxic by law and can be disposed of in regular landfills.

The worst that could happen if you broke an incandescent bulb was a piece of glass in your bare foot. Now we have to worry about hazardous waste? Sheesh.

The claim that we'll realize that much in energy savings is unproven. How much do we pay for increased eye strain? Or the increased cost?

As with all things, a choice would have been preferable to an edict from the government.

MaxxBot fucked around with this message at 07:11 on Oct 8, 2014

# ¿ Oct 8, 2014 07:08

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

The pope is a liberal CINO :qq:

. I don't understand why these morons don't just convert to evangelical American Christianity rather than beg for the Church to spend more time bashing gays and shut up about the poor.

quote:

Can the Pope Shut Up Too?

Last week I pleaded for Federal Reserve chair, Janet Yellen, to shut up. Yellen had gotten crosswise with me in her attempt to inject politics into her role as head of the banks in the country.

Specifically, Yellen argued that income inequality is rising in the United States and that it greatly concerns her in her role as Fed chair.

�The distribution of income and wealth in the United States has been widening more or less steadily for several decades,� said Yellen to Fed conference members �to a greater extent than in most advanced countries�.The extent of and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concerns me.�

Besides being wrong on her facts, Yellen is also wrong in her function as the head of the banks.

The Fed�s role is to make sure that banks have enough capital to make it through times when banks demand immediate cash�thus the name: Federal Reserve Bank.

The fact that the Fed sucks at that reserve role�as we saw in 2008-- doesn't give the chair license to free agent into policy areas that are wholly political.

And this phenomenon of saying controversial things that polarize us by leaders who are supposed to be above politics is disheartening.

I have increasingly despaired that our leaders worldwide are so inadequate at their primary function that they seek to distract us from noticing their inadequacies by straying from their own lanes.

And now this inadequacy is being exhibited by one of our newest messiahs from the Left, Pope Francis, who lane-wise, seems like a drunk driver.

Attempting to bolster his image as pro-science, pro-evolution, Francis just told a group of pontifical scientists: �God is not a divine being or a magician, but the Creator who brought everything to life,� in reference to accounts of creation.

As a practicing Catholic, I have a bone or two to pick with the church. Like many institutions, the Roman Catholic Church is hierarchical, myopic and often more concerned with image than it is with results.

To the extent that Francis is seeking to change those things, I applaud him and his successors. And I support the scientific account of creation as not incompatible with that of the Bible.

But in his desperation to be relevant, Francis used words that will hurt Catholics for a long time, unfortunately.

While other media outlets concentrate on Francis saying that God is not a magician, I grieve that a pope would dare to say that God is not divine.

I don�t know how I can support a pope�or church�that says that God is not divine.

The church�s role as arbiter of scientific thought seems so important to Francis that he is willing to sacrifice the divinity of our Creator in order to glamorize the secular elements of man.

Like similar comments by Francis on the economy and homosexuality, those on the Left will seize upon the Pope�s words to demoralize and degrade believers in the Christian Church.

They will twist them to work as anti-religious, anti-Catholic propaganda.

We have come a long way down from saintly John Paul II to Pope Francis.

John Paul II was a miracle of divine intervention who helped spread the faith and convert the nations.

But Francis seems to be more concerned with the judgments of men than he is that God. The assertion from a pope that God is neither divine nor omnipotent is startling. But what is perhaps most startling is that such an admission would be met with blas� acceptance by the Christian world.

So why exactly are Christians being martyred in the Middle East and elsewhere?

For a man who poses as God? Or for a god who poses as man?

The answer here-- as with many of our others leaders-- is unfortunately: Yes.

# ¿ Oct 30, 2014 17:11

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 01:32

MaxxBot: Oct 6, 2003; you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

Crazy is the default from this guy but this is just so bizzare and incoherent I had to post it. Apparently the reason people have dirty, nasty, depraved sex like rimjobs and blowjobs is because of feminism. Before feminism people only had missionary, lights-off, partially clothed sex which is obviously the most enjoyable kind.

Feminism and Sex: �Bad, Dumb, and Desperately Unfun and Unsexy�

quote:

WARNING: The following passage contains content of a sexual nature. Reader discretion advised.

Anna Merlan�s verdict on a destined-for-infamy scene in Girls can best be understood as a verdict on Lena Dunham�s feminist ethos.

Dunham�s ethos, in turn, can best be understood as an expression of the decadent cultural values of 21st-century �progressives�:

They are the Nowhere People � rootless, without loyalty to family, community or religious tradition, and thus �free� to create for themselves imagined identities and idiosyncratic belief systems. Although they usually think of themselves as unique individuals, they are really sheep in a herd, predictable and therefore ultimately boring. Any politics, as long as it�s not conservative politics; any religion as long as it�s not Christian religion; any sexuality as long as it�s not normal sexuality.

So when HBO provides a dishonest pervert like Lena Dunham a platform from which to promote these values, our objections and criticisms are automatically rejected as illegitimate if expressed in terms of our own preferences � Christian, conservative, normal.

Dunham deliberately degrades the most attractive actress on the show � Allison Williams, daughter of NBC News anchor Brian Williams � by depicting her engaged in a shameful (to say nothing of unhealthy) kind of depraved sexual activity, and why? Because it is necessary, in the feminist mind, to believe that human beings are incapable of finding pleasure in sex that is healthy, wholesome and consistent with traditional morality. A husband and wife happily having normal intercourse together? This is impossible, according to feminist theory, which construes heterosexual love is inherently oppressive to women.

�Male sexual violence against women and �normal� heterosexual intercourse are essential to patriarchy because they establish the dominance of the penis over the vagina, and thus the power relations between the sexes. . . . There are numerous examples of ways that heterosexual practice establishes male domination in women�s most private and personal spheres. . . . Men see women as objects for their sexual gratification.�
� Dee Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men�s Violence, and Women�s Lives (1994)

Heterosexual intercourse � note how Professor Graham placed �normal� inside scare-quotes � is a horrific experience inflicted on women through �male domination,� you see. If a male obtains �sexual gratification� from a woman through �heterosexual practice,� this means she has been victimized by his �sexual violence.�

Feminism�s implacable hostility to marriage and motherhood � especially as these institutions are understood by Christians � inevitably produces a rhetoric that is anti-male and anti-heterosexual. Male sexuality must be demonized, and women�s universal victimhood asserted, in order to justify the feminist project of destroying the basic institutions our society. The feminist rhetoric of �gender,� aimed at subverting our normal understanding of masculinity and femininity, is an integral part of this project. Normal women prefer masculine men and normal men prefer feminine women. Therefore, if feminists can teach young people to reject their normal �gender roles� by teaching them that these roles are oppressive, this androgynous �equality� will make it more difficult for young people to form normal relationships as adults.

�Social constructions of gender, like power, stem from patriarchal ideologies . . .
�Environmentally speaking, gender is independent of sex . . . and signifies the social constructedness of what maleness and femaleness mean in a given culture. The hierarchy that implicitly positions men above women due to reproductive difference, is a harmful one.�

� Amy Austin, �Patriarchy and the Problem of Being Born Female,� Aug. 9, 2014

Parents who wish their children to be successful and happy adults, and who therefore encourage boys to be masculine and girls to feminine, are seen by feminists as part of a system that oppresses unhappy weirdos and miserable failures. In order to satisfy the resentments of unattractive women, the normal admiration of beauty must be prohibited � the �male gaze� reduces females to being �sex objects.� In order to compensate unhappy women for their personal failures, male achievement must be derogated as social injustice � men�s success is presumed to be unfairly obtained through discrimination against women.

These feminist beliefs serve the function of telling unhappy women that they are never responsible for their own unhappiness, and the propagation of this belief system provides career opportunities for women like Lena Dunham whose only claim to fame is her devotion to feminist ideology. No matter how wretched Girls may be � it�s supposed to be a �comedy� � critics feel obligated to praise it, because Dunham presents herself as a feminist and the show�s themes are therefore interpreted as feminist messages, even if this involves the celebration of Allison Williams getting a �desperately unfun� rimjob.

The editors of Huffington Post are required to heap unmerited praise on �the incisive, witty and hilarious dialogue that Dunham and the rest of her writing team come up with every week,� and cite as examples these lines from the first episode of the HBO show�s fourth season:

Hannah on preparing to move: �I don�t usually pack. I usually leave my crap in a pile and hope it makes it to where I�m going.�

Shosh on life after college: �I finished my degree. And now I�m just in the world, trying to get �er done.�

How incisive! How witty! How hilarious! Between this alleged brilliance and Allison Williams getting a rimjob, we can expect Lena Dunham to collect another pile of Emmy Awards for Girls.

No one can be permitted to criticize this phenomenon as what it actually is � a deliberately perverse insult to our sense of human decency � because telling the truth about feminism is a hate crime.

There seems to be a link between insane ideology and being incapable of writing like a normal human being. I love how he mentions use of "scare quotes" seemingly oblivious to the fact that he apparently can't go an entire paragraph without haphazardly inserting them somewhere.

MaxxBot fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Jan 14, 2015

# ¿ Jan 14, 2015 22:16

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