Homosexual Behavior is Slavery

The West held that freedom, liberty, is the opportunity for a being to express its essential nature, not to do things that corrupt or contradict it.  Homosexual behavior being an obvious denial of what is true about the essence of human sexual nature, the “freedom” to act out homosexual desires is akin to the freedom of a dog to fly like a bird.  The dog can jump off a balcony, but his passage through the air could never be called “flight.”  To the Western Mind, then, there is no “freedom” in acting to betray one’s essential being.  This is, in fact, slavery, because once your will has taken you outside your nature as a human being, you cannot exercise true freedom.  You can’t be true to your nature, because you have chosen to do the opposite.  And the longer you practice such betrayals, the more likely you are to become addicted to them, deepening your enslavement; the more you think you are practicing “freedom,” the less truly free you are getting.

Patrick Michael Murphy, “How the West Was Lost,” p.144-145

Same-sex Marriage Leads to Collapse of Culture

As the national marriage rate remained stable, the marriage rates in states that redefined marriage fell at least 5 percent.  This is perfectly logical.  If marriage is simply a matter of romance between consenting adults, some persons, content simply to cohabit, will not bother to get married.  But cohabitation isn’t as stable as marriage and…a drop in the marriage rate of only 5 percent would mean over a million fewer women marrying.

In the Netherlands—the first country to redefine marriage as a genderless institution—marriage rates for young women dropped an additional 5 percent over the rate at which they were already declining. That is, same-sex marriage is a symptom of a collapsing marriage culture, and it then becomes a cause of further and more rapid decline.

Ryan T. Anderson, “Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom,” pg.159-160

Controlling the Culture

Since the days of President Wilson and John Dewey, Progressives (née Socialists) have fought to gain control of America’s gatekeepers — academia, the media, entertainment. This struggle didn’t just begin amidst the turmoil of the 60’s with Timothy Leary’s infamous “Turn on, tune in, drop out” mindset. Certainly there were giant leaps for Progressive minds made in that decade. Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” programs began the wholescale dependence of lower income upon the government.

In the span of one decade, Progressives set the stage for subtle, but unrelenting indoctrination of subsequent generations of young people. Conjoined with LBJ’s Great Society agenda, the Left moved the public away from the Founders’ vision of faith and freedom, and toward an ever-increasing government dependency.

Now, 50 years later, academia in the United States is mostly controlled by the Progressives who have ushered in new textbooks to reaffirm their worldview. The gatekeepers keep a stranglehold on education materials, only approving those texts which reinforce the revisionist history worldview, a worldview that typically demonizes America, the Founders, the early settlers and pioneers.

Tami Jackson, “One Woman Battles to Restore Real, Not Revisionist, History to the Classroom”

Liberals and the “Poor”

The liberal Left likes to use the nation’s “poor” to justify its constant cries for higher and higher taxes, demonizing all who resist granting money to the visible at the expense of the invisible. Those who do not want taxes raised still higher to help the poor are not compassionate.  Over time, this short-sighted philosophy has robbed the term “poor” of any meaning. … No group of people would, on their own, come up with the concept of charity or the notion of poor.  These are both legacies of western civilization’s Judeo-Christian origins…. The main reason it is so difficult to define “poor” is because we are people, not animals. …  You see, it is relatively easy to define poverty in an animal. Say an elephant requires sixty pounds of vegetation each day to remain healthy. Say a lion requires twenty pounds of meat. If either animal receives less than this, it can safely be regarded as poor. They each have less than they need.  However, if you speak of what a person needs you start sounding a bit like Karl Marx, who felt that communism would provide all a person really needs. His spiritual heirs discovered that Karl Marx erred.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.247

Transgenderism Is Identity Politics

The transgender movement has made clever use of the powerful force of identity politics. Clearly, personal identity, the totality of one’s sense of self, does not consist simply of gender any more than it does of one’s race, ethnicity, religion, or class. Such, however, are the categories upon which identity politics are built. To be politically effective, identity politics depend upon lumping people into groups that obliterate personal identities and characteristics. There are no individuals in identity politics, only amorphous masses of people with a common and defining property, one exploited for a political purpose.

This process exploits differences between people (cultural, social, ethnic, religious, etc.) to build constituencies of the aggrieved, the marginalized, and those led to believe they’re marginalized. They are assured redress of their grievances by a special interest group—commonly a political party that profits at the polls from activating them as a victimized group. The victimized must of course have victimizers, who are vilified as oppressors of the community of aggrieved.

Richard B. Corradi, Psychiatry Professor: ‘Transgenderism’ Is Mass Hysteria Similar To 1980s-Era Junk Science

Appeasement

Parents Who Allow Children to be “Transgender” Are Insane

If a four-year-old girl, who, afraid of being displaced in her parents’ affection by a new baby brother, announces that she is a boy, wise parents do not begin treating her as a boy. They do not assume she is transgendered. Instead, they embrace her and assure her that she is their precious little girl whom they love. Parents who allow prepubescent children to choose whether they want to be male or female have relinquished their role as rational adults, and are themselves in need of psychiatric consultation.

Richard B. Corradi, Psychiatry Professor: ‘Transgenderism’ Is Mass Hysteria Similar To 1980s-Era Junk Science

Government and the Economy Don’t Mix

Government intervention produces distortions in an economy, makes for uneven and often wasteful development, sets the stage for booms and busts, tends to enrich some and impoverish others.

Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 4: The Growth of America 1878-1928, pg.14

Sexual "Orientation" and "Gender" Are Fluid

Nor is there any convincing evidence that sexual orientation is biologically determined; rather, research tends to show that for some persons and perhaps for a great many, “sexual orientation” is plastic and fluid; that is, it changes over time.  What we do know with certainty about sexual orientation is that it is affective and behavioral—a matter of desire and/or behavior.  And “gender identity” is even more fluid and erratic, so much so that in limited cases an individual could claim to “Identify” with a different gender on successive days at work.  Employers should not be obliged by dint of civil and possibly criminal penalties to adjust their workplace to suit felt needs such as these.

Paul McHugh and Gerard V. Bradley, “Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Employment Law”

Tradition Refuses to Submit to Oligarchy

There is one thing that I have never from my youth up been able to understand.  I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition.  It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time.  It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. … If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable.  Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise.  Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.   It is the democracy of the dead.  Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pg.40-41

The Psychiatric Field’s Manipulation to Promote Fraud

The transgender movement was greatly energized when The American Psychiatric Association (APA) in its 2013 revised edition of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders” (DSM-5) delisted “Gender Identity Disorder” as a psychiatric “disorder,” reclassifying it as “Gender Dysphoria.” However, rather than providing a scientific validation of the transgender agenda, the APA’s action was a remarkable abrogation of professional responsibility in the interest of political correctness.

Unlike medical diseases, psychiatric disorders have no diagnostic biologic markers—no physical findings, laboratory tests, or imaging studies. Psychiatric diagnoses consist of symptom checklists determined by committee consensus. It should come as no surprise that the process is exquisitely reactive to prevailing cultural and political winds. Absent biomarkers that define illnesses, there is no end to the mental and emotional conditions that can be called psychiatric disorders. It can be extremely profitable for an activist special-interest movement to succeed in getting its cause legitimized as a mental disorder, not least for a pharmaceutical industry poised to retarget psychotropic drugs to treat any new mental illness.

Richard B. Corradi, Psychiatry Professor: ‘Transgenderism’ Is Mass Hysteria Similar To 1980s-Era Junk Science

What Really is the Meaning of “Poor”

The liberal Left likes to use the nation’s “poor” to justify its constant cries for higher and higher taxes, demonizing all who resist granting money to the visible at the expense of the invisible. Those who do not want taxes raised still higher to help the poor are not compassionate.  Over time, this short-sighted philosophy has robbed the term “poor” of any meaning. … No group of people would, on their own, come up with the concept of charity or the notion of poor. These are both legacies of western civilization’s Judeo-Christian origins…. The main reason it is so difficult to define “poor” is because we are people, not animals. … You see, it is relatively easy to define poverty in an animal. Say an elephant requires sixty pounds of vegetation each day to remain healthy. Say a lion requires twenty pounds of meat. If either animal receives less than this, it can safely be regarded as poor. They each have less than they need. However, if you speak of what a person needs you start sounding a bit like Karl Marx, who felt that communism would provide all a person really needs. His spiritual heirs discovered that Karl erred.  People’s ability to produce is finite and limited by their strength, ability, and life span. People’s needs, on the other hand, can be infinite. While all individual animals of a species are pretty much alike, no two humans are alike. It is simply not possible to speak of a human’s needs. … There is one additional complication in trying to speak of people’s needs. We all have limitless desires. … To put it directly, wealth and poverty to animals are absolutes; to humans, they are comparatives. …

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.247

The Delusion of “Transgenderism”

Transgenderism would refute the natural laws of biology and transmute human nature. The movement’s philosophical foundation qualifies it as a popular delusion similar to the multiple-personality craze, and the widespread “satanic ritual abuse” and “recovered memory” hysterias of the 1980s and ‘90s. These last two involved bizarre accusations of child abuse and resulted in the prosecution and ruined lives of the falsely accused.

Such popular delusions are characterized by a false belief unsupported by any scientific or empirical evidence and have a contagious quality that overrides rational thinking and even common sense. This all-too-human tendency to suspend individual critical judgment and go along with the crowd is greatly facilitated by social media. Most important, however, the cause has received the imprimatur of “experts.” The very people who should know better have bought into the hysteria. Just as “mental health professionals” a generation ago supported the child abuse delusions, and even participated in prosecuting the unjustly accused, so too have they fueled the fire of the transgender delusion.

Richard B. Corradi, Psychiatry Professor: ‘Transgenderism’ Is Mass Hysteria Similar To 1980s-Era Junk Science

REAL Marriage

The Reason for Public School

The public school movement was always more than simply an effort to have schools provided at taxpayer expense.  Nor was it simply an effort to have an educated electorate as the franchise was extended to more people, as is sometimes alleged.  The most zealous of the reformers were determined to use the power of the state by way of the schools to break the hold of religious tradition and the inherited culture and to change society through the child’s training.  These American reformers were influenced by European educational reformers such as Rousseu, Pestalozzi, and others who taught that the child was naturally good and needed only an environment within which to unfold.  American Transcendentalists usually held similar ideas.  They were influenced also by the Prussian schools, where a thoroughgoing system of state-controlled compulsory education was well established.  The common school, Horace Mann wrote, “is the greatest discovery ever made by man. . . .  Let the common school be expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged; men would walk more safely by day; every pillow would be more inviolable by night; property, life, and character held by a stronger tenure; all rational hopes respecting the future brightened.”

The public school movement is especially significant, because it was the first major effort in the United States which succeeded in linking the power of government to an effort to reform and transform society.  It was hardly the last, however.  It should be said, too, that local communities continued to control the schools throughout the 19th century, and the schools were generally kept within the framework of local belief and traditions.  The early reformers did little more than set the stage for more determined ones later on.

Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 3: The Sections and the Civil War, 1826-1877, pg.90-91

The Public School Assault

The public school movement [of the mid-1800s] thrust toward the center of American life, affecting Americans generally, and has resulted in a structure which has lasted to the present.  It was aimed at the children, impinged upon the family, and entailed the use of government power in ways that endangered, at the least, the life, liberty and property of Americans, or, if not their lives, their liberty and property. . . . 

Nobody much supposed that it was the duty of the taxpayers to pay for the education of their children, nor the right of the government to impose schools or the taxes to pay for them upon parents or others.

Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 3: The Sections and the Civil War, 1826-1877, pg.89

The Christian Religion is the Barrier of Protection

The whole modern world is at war with reason; and the tower already reels.  The sages, it is often said, can see no answer to the riddle of religion.  But the trouble with our sages is not that they cannot see the answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle.  They are like children so stupid as to notice nothing paradoxical in the playful assertion that a door is not a door.  The modern latitudinarians speak, for instance, about authority in religion not only as if there were no reason in it, but as if there had never been any reason for it.  Apart from seeing its philosophical basis, they cannot even see its historical cause. . . . [T]he modern critics of religious authority are like men who should attack the police without every having heard of burglars.  For there is a great and possible peril to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary.  Against it religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier.  And against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier, if our race is to avoid ruin.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pg.25-26

Race vs Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

First, sexual orientation and gender identity are linked to actions, which are a proper subject matter for moral evaluation, and race is not.  Second, race manifests itself readily, whereas sexual orientation and gender identity are ambiguous, subjective, and variable traits. Third, special privileges based on sexual orientation and gender identity undermine the common good by weakening a marriage culture, while protections against racism do not.

Ryan T. Anderson, “Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom,” pg.140

Pernicious Effects of Pornography

Pornography leaves the impression with its viewer that sex has no relationship to privacy, that it is unrelated to love, commitment or marriage, that bizarre forms of sex are the most gratifying, that sex with animals has a specially desirable flavor and that irresponsible sex has no adverse consequences — no venereal disease, illegitimate births, abortions, premature marriages, single-parent families or moral erosion.  I see no way that a torrent of material with this subliminal message, which ultimately fans out to reach people of almost all ages, can fail to have pernicious effects.

Dr. Reo M. Christenson, “Political science calls for common sense in porn issue,” American Family Association Journal, April 2000, pg.12

A Quandary

How can a couple build a marriage when they must walk down the aisle to become husband and wife in order to make respectable the fact that they have already become father and mother?

William S. Banowsky, It’s A Playboy World, p.82.

Only Real Christians Have the Power to Hold Back the State

A nation made up of citizens with deep religious faith will never allow its government to plunder tomorrow to pay for today.  Citizens with true faith in God will never offer their votes in exchange for assets forcibly seized from other fellow citizens.  So those who wish to seek and retain political power over their fellow citizens must first attenuate the religious faith of their populations.  In America this means that those in government who view themselves as masters (rather than servants) over the rest of us must do all they can to weaken Christianity.  Those of us who venerate freedom, be we Jewish or Christian, be we religious or secularized, have no option but to pray for the health of Christianity in America.  No other group possesses both the faith and the numbers sufficient to hold back the ever-encroaching, sometimes sinister, power of the state. 

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.246

The Rights of Merchants

The man who owns an article of trade or commerce is not obliged to sell it for any particular price, nor is the mechanic obliged to labor for any particular price.  He may say that he will not make coarse boots for less than one dollar per pair, but he has no right to say that no other mechanic shall make them for less.  The cloth merchant may say that he will not sell his goods for less than so much per yard, but has no right to say that any other merchant shall not sell for less price.  If one individual does not possess such a right over the conduct of another, no number of individuals can possess such a right.  All combinations therefore to effect such an object are injurious, not only to the individual particularly oppressed, but to the public at large. . . .

New York court, 1835, in summary of their judgment against a union which was fixing prices and not allowing non-union members to be hired. Cited, by Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 3: The Sections and the Civil War, 1826-1877, pg.61-62

Comment:  According to this judgment, even the government has no right to fix wages, nor do activists have the right to force people to sell products to them.  Isn’t it interesting how the modern activist judges now rule against private rights of the merchants.

Our Constitution Does Not Permit Government Alms

I readily, and I trust feelingly, acknowledged the duty incumbent on us all, as men and citizens, and as among the highest and holiest of our duties, to provide for those who, in the mysterious order of Providence, are subject to want and to disease of body and mind, but I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States. . . . It would, in the end, be prejudicial rather than beneficial to the noble offices of charity. . . . 

President Franklin Pierce, 1854.  Cited, by Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 3: The Sections and the Civil War, 1826-1877, pg.48

Arguing With a Madman

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pg.11

Character Matters

Liberals and Morality

Although they seek to ban morality … from law and public discourse, liberals face a dilemma whenever competing claims to the good emerge.  Affirming one group’s liberty claim, or claim to “equal” treatment, often inflicts harm on others. The decision to grasp one horn of this dilemma, to privilege one group’s interests over another, inevitably expresses a particular and non-neutral understanding of morality, despite anyone’s efforts to call it something else.

Leaving behind the bonds of history and tradition animating morality does not produce freedom because a new morality emerges in its place, raising new demands. We are seeing the consequences of these processes in our public life. Instead of allowing competing truth claims to be aired, we see “safe zones” emerging to protect some from the “harm” of discomfort. The putative right to define one’s own existence and meaning, projected as fundamental by a majority of wise heads on the Supreme Court, apparently now extends to various forms of sexual expression, even at the expense of those who have different moral commitments. And these kinds of decisions that prefer one group’s version of rights over others (including even those explicitly enumerated in the Constitution, such as religious liberty) are expanding. Problems compound as the formulation of rights requires an affirmative duty of governmental and social support, which requires the coercion of others to achieve the good for some.

Government is intruding into the private sphere in ways that would have been unthinkable in American life a generation ago. No one predicted that transgender bathroom access would become a condition for withholding federal funds or that Catholic religious orders would be required to pay for contraception and sex transformation surgeries in their healthcare plans. Political tendencies toward incremental change and social dialogue, familiar to Burkean conservatives, have been abandoned in favor of bold new movements that are detached from constraints of tradition. Judge Posner recently remarked that “I see absolutely no value to a judge of spending decades, years, months, weeks, day, hours, minutes, or seconds studying the Constitution, the history of its enactment, its amendments, and its implementation.” He seeks to avoid the threat of “allowing the dead to bury the living,” but he offers no basis for the living to discern the propriety of these changes apart from their own preferences and beliefs. Apparently, the wisdom of the ages resides in those who wear the robes, who will become our rulers.

Edward A. Morse, “Unmasking Liberalism.”

What Fundamentally Makes a Marriage

Marriage can and should be color-blind, but it cannot be blind with regard to the two sexes.  The color of two persons’ skin has nothing to do with whether they can unite in the sort of comprehensive union naturally oriented to family life, in which the lovemaking act is also a life-giving act—the kind of union that demands permanence and exclusivity.  Race has nothing to do with whether they can give any children born of their union the love and knowledge of their own mother and father.  Race has nothing to do with society’s orderly reproduction, which the court’s preceding cases recognize as central to the fundamental right to marry.  The sexual difference between a man and a woman, however, is central to each of these concerns.  Men and women, regardless of their race, can unite in marriage, and children, regardless of their race, need their mom and dad.  To acknowledge such facts requires an understanding of what most fundamentally makes a marriage.

Ryan T. Anderson, “Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom,” pg.70

It Never Changes

Modern Economics Comes From Atheists

Not surprisingly, only one group of Americans is consistently resisting this massive cultural change in our values. Only they possess the faith to forego short-term snake-oil fixes in order to ensure the long-term fiscal and social health of society. …only America’s religious conservatives, both Jewish and Christian, possess the spiritual muscle to attack the malevolence at its root, which is the secular tendency to ignore the invisible. No wonder that Adam Smith and most of the other fathers of modern economics were God-worshiping Christians. No wonder that Keynes and other big-spending fathers of economic modernism were atheists.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.245-246