UK Riots: Young Yobs Back on Streets Despite David Cameron's Pledge

At Telegraph UK (via Theo Spark).

Belladonna Rogers: 'Conservatives and Gay Marriage'

The piece is from a couple of weeks ago, and it's very well done, "Conservatives and Gay Marriage: A Guide for the Perplexed." That said, a lot of this is straw man argumentation, with a bit of hopeless defeatism thrown in. Also interesting is her endorsement of Jennifer Chrisler, of Family Equality Council. She's articulate and attractive, and has honed fear-calming to high art. Yet as I pointed out yesterday, these "nice" people are hunkered down inside the Trojan horse driving a radical LGBT agenda that would horrify a majority of Americans if the truth were known. It turns out Chrisler's spouse is Cheryl Jacques, the former Executive Director of Human Rights Campaign, the extremist gay rights organization that rejects the morality and goodness of a majority of the American people. Here's an interesting tidbit from the comments at Popehat:

The radical LBGT agenda is best defined by such a person as President Obama’s Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings program intended to sexualize school chidren. Kevin Jennings agenda would be held in high regard by the NAMBLA pedophiles. Closer to home Scott Brown replaced Lesbian Senator Cheryl Jacques who went to Washington to head up the LBGT Human Rights Campaign. The mission of the Human Rights campaign is to ram gay rights down the throat of the American people. Scott Brown in turn defeated Cheryl Jacques chief of staff Chief of Staff, and openly homosexual Angus, McQuilken. He is also the Chief of Staff of Planned Partenhood League of Mass. Funny how much of this ties together. I believe that we may be on the eve of a new revolution.

Chrisler's spouse is also discussed here: "The FISTGATE Report." No one is saying gays can't make a family. It's a lie though to entertain the notion the gay family values are mainstream. They're not. And gays activists must use subterfuge and thuggery to ram that agenda home.

Related: At Nampion, "Please Don’t Hurt The Gerbil – New And Improved 2011 Version."

Joseph Fein Defends Pamela Geller

My friend Joseph Fein, who regrettably I haven't linked here in a while, made a very shrewd argument the other day in his post standing up for Pamela Geller, "History Will Look Kindly on Pamela Geller Not Glenn Greenwald." I'm not so focused on the commentary on Glenn Greenwald, who while I've slammed mercilessly in the past (he's a genuine asshole, frankly), I've also commended him for avoiding the herd Obama cult mentality (I recognize consistency when I see it). What caught my eye about Joseph's essay was this passage on ideological rationalization:

Glenn Greenwald wanted Gay marriage to be the norm in the United States. As a Social libertarian, I see no issue here. As a partisan, I see a weak person who won't even stay in his own country and fight for what he believes in. He expects others to do the heavy lifting. Speaking to partisans who think the same way you do on TV, radio and the Internet does not expand converts. (nor does sock-puppeting).



I voted No on 8; I support any two consenting adults to be happy. But every time Andrew Sullivan attacks Palin's family, I always have to rethink that vote.



Now, compare Greenwald to Pam Geller.

I've highlighted in bold the key sentence, but check the whole post for the context. I'd have to talk to Joseph in person to see how he'd vote on a gay marriage proposition next time around (if it's not decided at the U.S. Supreme Court beforehand), but the key is that Joseph would consider changing his position because of the ideological and political violence of the progressive left's pro-gay marriage ayatollahs. I cringed the other day when Andrew Breitbart announced he'd boycott CPAC over the organization's exclusion of GOProud. It's not so much that GOProud is either in or out at CPAC (I think the group's a Trojan horse but I'd let them compete in the marketplace of ideas rather than exclude them). It's that for all of Andrew Breitbart's super aggressive battles against the institutional left, he obviously doesn't get it on this issue. My sense is that he's got friends who are gay. Fine. So do I. But that doesn't mean one has to capitulate to the progressive barebacking agenda. It's bears repeating and repeating again: Gay activists are the most venal, vicious, and unprincipled political organizers going. It's like Rick Santorum noted the other day, when he suggested that gays enjoy "super rights." Progressive gay activists are the left's ultimate bullies. They are in your face, attacking anyone with the slightest inclination toward tradition as a "homophobe" and "racist." They browbeat, intimidate, and harass to get their way. They've threatened to destroy livelihoods over the simple act of voting on a proposition. They's lied and cheated in public forums, for example, with the mock judicial process that reviewed Prop. 8 in Federal District Court. Basically, they've raped the political process to leverage a disgusting and morally reprobate barebacking, rim-station sexual agenda that majorities of voters have consistently rejected nationwide. Fully thirty states continue to prohibit gay marriage across the country, but the tentacles of deathly progressivism have worked their subterfuge in the more left-leaning states, using all manner of deceit and duplicity to carry the day. Most of all is the sickening progressive discrimination that is the centerpiece of folks like the disgusting perv Dan Savage. I wrote recently on his sick bigotry and hatred of regular people: "Gay Sexual Abandon and the Perverse Inversion of Values by Same-Sex Extremists." The gay progressive program of ideological bigotry works because society has been beaten down by political correctness. No one wants to appear intolerant. No one wants to be attacked as anti "civil rights." The problem of course, is that gay marriage isn't a civil right, although regular people have been so brainwashed by progressive Orwellianism they don't know what is good and moral, and to even speak up for something decent is to be viciously attacked, with people's very lives being threatened. So this is why I think Joseph's rethinking of his vote on Prop. 8 is such an incisive opening on this issue. If it were me I'd leave it to the states, and if the voters choose full gay marriage rights so be it. But the process is hijacked by extremists and thugs, and it's not likely those rights would come around through a free and fair democratic process. And thus those folks so happy to call themselves libertarian on the issue just end up being fellow soldiers in the left's campaign to destroy decency in this country.

Update: After Leiby Kletzky Murder

A follow-up to "Reassessment After Leiby Kletzky Murder."

From Neo-Neocon, at Pajamas Media, "In Kletzky Killing’s Wake, We Can’t Lock Up Our Kids."

Great essay. Very reasonable. But again, I'm not sure reason returns very quickly after something so shocking. I don't think folks need to "lock up" their kids. I think we should all be more careful. That mother in Pico Rivera let her child, 6-years-old, go the restroom alone in a public park. My wife spoke about it at the time as something we'd never do. Rape is unconscionable, but the child is alive. Eight-year-old Leiby's forever gone from this world. His mother is gripped with guilt. I feel bad for her. I don't think she made a mistake. She's the mother. She would know her own child's ability. But as I noted already, my youngest boy wouldn't be ready for a 7-block walk all alone. It's not like he'd have a problem walking home. It's that he'd be distracted somehow and lose focus on the mission. He'd dawdle perhaps. He'd get absent-minded. He's got attention deficits. I don't know. But we're not at the trusting stage yet. Call me overprotective. That's fine. My son's well-adjusted and safely snug in his bed. But each child is different. My older son has all kinds of autonomy. But we still worry sometimes.

God bless the Kletzky family. I hope they're coping well. It's so sad.

Pat Austin has some comments on the case as well.

See also New York Daily News, "Leiby Kletzky died fighting for life: Confessed killer Levi Aron has marks indicating a 'struggle'."

Reassessment After Leiby Kletzky Murder

I'm upset by the murder of Leiby Kletzky.

We've had an empty nest all week. Our boys have been visiting relatives in Fresno. They'll be back today, but we've missed them. Sure, the downtime from the kids has been nice. The house is clean as a whistle. We had an open house on Sunday. My wife and I detailed everything. Here's the kitchen yesterday afternoon. A few items on the counter, but there's no usual mess from a full day of family cooking and hanging out, with clothes and toys strewn all about:

My wife hadn't heard of Leiby's death. I mentioned it to her when we went out last night to Yogurt Land. She reminded me of the report over the 4th of July weekend of the 6-year-old boy who was allegedly raped after his mother let him use the restroom alone at Rio Hondo Park in Pico Rivera. It looks like a nice park. No doubt the mom felt safe. In Brooklyn, families have to be asking questions, so many questions. As the New York Times reported earlier:

Suddenly, an Orthodox Jewish community that had blanketed streets and subway stations with missing-child posters, that had promised a six-figure reward, had to face the devastating reality: Leiby was dead, and the suspect was also Jewish, living not far away. His death also forced parents, not just in Borough Park but across the city, to wonder, to speculate, to second-guess themselves: Was it one of those headline-grabbing tragedies that could have been avoided? When is a child ready to go it alone, anyway?

My wife and I agree that our youngest son, who's almost 10, is nowhere near ready to "go it alone," so to speak. And my wife worries about our high-schooler, who walks by himself to and from school. We live in the Irvine Unified School District, and it's safe here. But no need to get a false sense of security. No one can predict when a crime might take place, and when one does people ask, "How could this have happened"? Well, yeah. How? But it's too late by then. The Wall Street Journal had something on this yesterday, "After Leiby Kletzky Murder, Urging Parents to Keep Calm." It's an interview with Hara Estroff Marano of Psychology Today. I can't imagine how this is reassuring:

The Wall Street Journal: Most parents’ first reaction to a story like this is to reassess–and in many cases, ratchet back–the independence they give their kids. What should be guiding their thinking right now?

Hara Estroff Marano: The very fact that this is such a rare event should get some consideration in their mind. One reason people are talking about it is because it’s so strikingly unusual. It’s within a particular community… this is a very insolated incident. I don’t know there are really lessons for outsiders here at all, because we don’t yet know all the details. So any reassessment should focus on the rarity of the event. This is just not something that’s likely to happen very often.

The first reaction is ‘oh my god I can’t let my kid walk down the street.’ No, look at the situation. Instead of saying ‘no you can’t cross the street,’ you say, ‘here, I’ll watch you cross the street’ and watch them a few times, then let them do it alone.

Keep reading.

It's sounds so logical and reasonable. Whereas fears and love aren't. I think parents need to go with their instincts, especially if they've got young kids. A couple more years of hovering ain't gonna harm a child. Frankly, in this day and age, I think families let kids off the leash a bit too early anyway.

Libertarians on Abortion

I'm going to having more on libertarianism in an upcoming essay. I don't see it as a governing ideology, although certainly we could improve a lot of public life, especially economic life, by adopting a way more libertarian programmatic agenda. That said, I've always disliked the rejection of a lot of social morality in libertarianism, and Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie capture some of the moral spinelessness at the clip:

It's enough to say, as Matt Welch does, that one supports the freedom element of the right to an abortion. That part is fine. I've never argued we should have 100 percent criminalization of abortion. The squishy ground is where Nick Gillespie treads, and I don't think he acquits himself well. In fact, he's so squishy he harms even the liberty case for the pro-choice position. Libertarianism becomes a license for perverse libertinism. It's sick to think about what happens to the baby when a woman exercises that sliding scale for the termination of pregnancy. But again, that's why I'm neoconservative on domestic issues.

Ed Morrissey, who prompted the clip, has more: "Video: What is the libertarian position on abortion?"

Gay Sexual Abandon and the Perverse Inversion of Values by Same-Sex Extremists

That's the takeaway for me, from this long piece at the New York Times, "Married, With Infidelities."

Gay sexual abandon. Meaning the gay rights movement is expanding the boundaries of what's morally acceptable to accommodate a model of openly aggressive sexual abandon. Gays want sex when they want it, with whomever they want it, wherever they want it. And they're not afraid of saying it, at all. The Times interviews Dan Savage, the author of the homosexual advice column "Savage Love." Yeah. Savage. And open. Savage is all about openness in marriage. For example, if you're not sexually satisfied, tell your spouse. Say you need more. Get approval and go get laid somewhere else. Savage's mantra is "good, giving, and game," GGG for short. Be good, giving, and game for sexual freelancing. It's a different kind of morality, you might say. Here's this from the article:

Savage’s honesty ethic gives couples permission to find happiness in unusual places; he believes that pretty much anything can be used to spice up a marriage, although he excludes feces, pets and incest, as well as minors, the nonconsenting, the duped and the dead. In “The Commitment,” Savage’s book about his and Miller’s decision to marry, he describes how a college student approached him after a campus talk and said, as Savage tells it, that “he got off on having birthday cakes smashed in his face.” But no one had ever obliged him. “My heart broke when he told me that the one and only time he told a girlfriend about his fetish, she promptly dumped him. Since then he had been too afraid to tell anyone else.” Savage took the young man up to his hotel room and smashed a cake in his face.

The point is: priests and rabbis don’t tell couples they might need to involve cake play in their marriages; moms and dads don’t; even best friends can be shy about saying what they like. Savage wants to make sure that no strong marriage ever fails because an ashamed husband or wife is desperately seeking cake play — or bondage, urine play or any of the other unspeakable activities that Savage has helped make speakable. If cake play is what a man needs, his G.G.G. wife should give it to him; if she can’t bring herself to, then maybe she should allow him a chocolate-frosted excursion with another woman. But for God’s sake, keep it together for the kids.

Okay. Right. What else did Savage do up in his hotel room with the young cake boy? Pattycakes? Folks should read the whole thing when they have a few minutes. And I'll tell you: Savage Love won't work in my house. My wife and I are traditional. We love each other exclusively. And we do so because that's how we conceive marriage. When you marry you're committing to that one person you want to share your life with, exclusively, "forsaking all others." There are lots of reasons for this. But most of all is the integrity of the institution itself, and what it means for the sanctity of vows, honesty, and the regeneration of families. Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller have a child by adoption. How's that going to look as the child get older and sees his parents f**king around with whoever they want? And back to the article, Savage talks about how a man would feel giving his wife permission to have extramarital affairs, but then he realizes he can't abide by the thought of someone else vaginally penetrating his wife. You think?!!

I don't look at the gay marriage issue from a religious perspective primarily, because the argument against gay marriage is at base socio-biological, about preservation of families and society, and the regeneration of cultures. It's about preserving that which is eternally right and good. There is nothing natural about same sex marriage in terms of creating life and living in commitment for strength and safety in family. Same sex couples cannot naturally reproduce, and marriage is most basically about binding one man and one woman for the purpose of natural regeneration. For the gay movement to abandon that to uncontrollable desires is obscene. But there's the morally religious argument as well, seen today at the Wall Street Journal, "Evangelicals and the Gay Moral Revolution."

The Christian church has faced no shortage of challenges in its 2,000-year history. But now it's facing a challenge that is shaking its foundations: homosexuality.

To many onlookers, this seems strange or even tragic. Why can't Christians just join the revolution?

And make no mistake, it is a moral revolution. As philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton University demonstrated in his recent book, "The Honor Code," moral revolutions generally happen over a long period of time. But this is hardly the case with the shift we've witnessed on the question of homosexuality.

In less than a single generation, homosexuality has gone from something almost universally understood to be sinful, to something now declared to be the moral equivalent of heterosexuality—and deserving of both legal protection and public encouragement. Theo Hobson, a British theologian, has argued that this is not just the waning of a taboo. Instead, it is a moral inversion that has left those holding the old morality now accused of nothing less than "moral deficiency."

The liberal churches and denominations have an easy way out of this predicament. They simply accommodate themselves to the new moral reality. By now the pattern is clear: These churches debate the issue, with conservatives arguing to retain the older morality and liberals arguing that the church must adapt to the new one. Eventually, the liberals win and the conservatives lose. Next, the denomination ordains openly gay candidates or decides to bless same-sex unions.

This is a route that evangelical Christians committed to the full authority of the Bible cannot take. Since we believe that the Bible is God's revealed word, we cannot accommodate ourselves to this new morality. We cannot pretend as if we do not know that the Bible clearly teaches that all homosexual acts are sinful, as is all human sexual behavior outside the covenant of marriage. We believe that God has revealed a pattern for human sexuality that not only points the way to holiness, but to true happiness.

There's more at the link, and see also Maggie Gallagher, "New York's GOP Lets Down the Base."

The media may portray the New York victory as the decisive turning point that makes gay marriage inevitable across the country—as they almost always do. Yet every victory for our marriage tradition that I have personally helped make happen was heralded as impossible: from Prop 8 in California, which overturned a state supreme court decision imposing same-sex marriage; to overturning gay marriage in Maine in 2009 through the referendum process; to blocking gay-marriage bills in New Jersey, Maryland and Rhode Island; to passing a marriage amendment through the Minnesota legislature that will go to the people in 2012.

Our string of unheralded victories is possible only because the American people, though they have few visible champions, continue to stubbornly believe that gay marriage is not a civil right and that marriage is different for a reason: These unions make new life and connect children to a mom and dad.

Gallagher's group, the National Organization for Marriage, has pledged $2 million to defeat New York legislators who voted for the bill, and they're gleefully targeting freshman Republican Senator Mark Grisanti, one of the lawmakers who flip-flopped on the issue.

Anyway, at Keith Olbermann interviews Savage at the clip. The political and religious discussion, with sex talk, is at the second half. Savage is super articulate. He makes sexual abandon and immorality sound cool. He jokes about people who "butt f**k" and then offers himself up to Tony Perkins. Savage also goes off on people with strong values as being religiously abused. The most interesting argument is that Savage claims that you can't hold traditional values and also be friendly with gays or have good friends who are gay. Savage perfectly embodies gay bigotry. He says if you are traditional on marriage you must instinctively react violently to gay people. That'a lie that makes people of values primitive. It's also fundamentally dishonest. But this is how gay activists win. They paint conservatives as potentially violent anti-gay extremists, and people of values, because they have values not to offend, capitulate. That's how the gay thuggery of sexual abandon wins. It's evil.