Project, much?

Unhinged feverswampleft journalist explains how Ratzinger Conspiracy secretly swindled Pope Francis into meeting Kim Davis.

Because, obviously, the Pope has absolutely no opinions on the "human right of conscientious objection."

On the other hand, when "they" are accusing you of doing something that wouldn't occur to you, that means they are doing it to you.

//However, as the pope is preparing to go wheels-up in Philadelphia, I'd get the word to a reporter – say, Terry Moran of ABC. On the plane ride home, Moran would ask the pope a vague question about "religious liberty," without mentioning Davis's name, which seems a curious omission for a veteran journalist to make. The pope again would give a fairly anodyne answer about freedom of conscience with which nobody can disagree. Then, with the pope safely back in Rome, I'd leak the news to a conservative Catholic website and wait for the inevitable explosion. (Implicit in this strategy are two facts: a) that the pope doesn't know who Davis is or the facts of her situation, and b) that the Vatican press office will resort to its default position of clumsy semi-stonewalling when the  story breaks.) When it comes, lo and behold, Kim Davis gets to give an exclusive interview to ABC, the same network that employs the reporter who asked the question on the airplane. But to pull this off, I'd need someone with serious clout within the Church bureaucracy. And this is where Vigano comes in.

The man is a real player within the institutional church. He first came to prominence as a whistleblower during one of the several investigations of the Vatican Bank, which may be what got him exiled to this godless Republic in the first place. Despite that fact, Vigano is well-known to be a Ratzinger loyalist and he always has been a cultural conservative, particularly on the issue of marriage equality. In April, in a move that was unprecedented, Vigano got involved with an anti-marriage equality march in Washington sponsored by the National Association For Marriage. (And, mirabile dictu, as we say around Castel Gandolfo at happy hour, one of the speakers at this rally was Mat Staver, who happens now to be Kim Davis's lawyer.) In short, Vigano, a Ratzinger loyalist, who has been conspicuous and publicly involved in the same cause as Kim Davis and her legal team, arranges a meeting with Davis that the legal team uses to its great public advantage. Once again paraphrasing New Orleans lawyer Lamar Parmentel from The Big Easy, the Vatican is a marvelous environment for coincidence.

(Also, I have been remiss in not mentioning that, because of the way John Paul II larded the cardinalate with conservatives, the pope was surrounded by conservative American clerics, including his host in Philadelphia, Charles Cardinal Chaput, who's really something of a dog's breakfast. While presiding in Denver, Chaput led the movement to deny communion to pro-choice American politicians. And, after this pope met with survivors of sexual abuse in Philadelphia, Chaput reached deeply into the Corporate Works Of Mercy to declare...//

Catholic pro-tip: "Corporal," not "corporate," you idiot.

You.Must.Submit....

...if you don't, you are just a hateful bigot making yourself a victim!

I know, it doesn't make any sense, but that's the way that gaybrownshirt left sees it.

//But the optics of it are bad no matter what. Rather than moving us forward on LGBT rights ever so slightly, as many viewed the pope as doing, he now, with this meeting, emboldens the haters in the church who will be pushing to make sure church doctrine continues to call homosexuality "intrinsically disordered." And it sends a message to all those people who've experienced anti-gay discrimination -- like the Catholic school teachers fired from their jobs in the U.S. simply because of who they are -- that this pope is not going to end that discrimination any time soon. Rather than stopping that discrimination, he welcomed, with open arms in the Vatican's own embassy, the bigots who promote that discrimination but who've turned themselves into the victims.//

How to read.

It is like gay activists don't even try to hide the lies anymore.

Here is the first paragraph of a column where Cardinal Burke shares the Catechism:

//The former Archbishop of St. Louis and current Cardinal Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, Cardinal Raymond Burke said in an interview published Thursday that families have a responsibility to protect their children from exposure to LGBT people. Family members or not, he said, people who “suffer from same-sex attraction” are “inherently disordered” and their relationships are “always and everywhere wrong, evil.”//

That's pretty bad.  The cardinal said that "gay people are disordered" and that their "relationships" are "evil."

What a nasty man!

Never mind that he didn't say that.

Here is what the Cardinal actually said:

//“If homosexual relations are intrinsically disordered, which indeed they are — reason teaches us that and also our faith — then, what would it mean to grandchildren to have present at a family gathering a family member who is living [in] a disordered relationship with another person?” he asked.//

So, homosexual relations - not people - are "disordered," which is technical philosophical term from Aristotle meaning not properly ordered to the proper end of an activity, e.g., eating is properly ordered to nutrition, not gluttony, and sexual relations are properly ordered to conjugal love and the production of children.

Likewise, it is the "acts" not the "relationships" that are evil.  Same-sex relationships - being a species of friendship - are not only good but quite normal.  What is evil is suborning the virtue of friendship into a misuse of the sexual faculty.

The author can agree or disagree, but this blatant misrepresentation is either dishonest or bespeaks a person who literally cannot read.

More Pro-Gay Bullying.

A round-up of news about homosexuals "punishing" people and churches who Fail.To.Approve.

Tolerance is the moment between breathing out one orthodoxy and breathing in another.

After the experience of being descended upon by herds of free-thinking, pro-homosexual brownshirts, Stacy Trasancos reflects:

OK, I get it now. This is for anyone afraid to speak up about immorality because you don't want herds of "freethinkers" following each other to your website leaving hundreds of uncharitable messages. There's nothing to fear about evangelizing. There was a time not that long ago that the derision I received for saying I was offended by homosexual PDA's at the park would have had me in a corner crying like a baby, but I haven't shed a tear. Actually I learned something very important, peaceful, and joyful - and powerful. When you know who you are and who loves you, negative comments from complete strangers can't hurt you.


I remember reading the vile comments left for Jennifer Fulwiler when PZ Myers followers were sent to harass her. It made my blood boil because I hurt for her, and it instilled fear in me. But now I realize something: It probably didn't make her blood boil nearly as much. Someone wondered if I now know how the homosexuals feel who are harassed and persecuted. No, I don't think I know how they feel, but I wish they knew how I felt. When the message you have is about love and beauty, and real truth, your dignity and confidence is not dependent on other people's opinions. Being bullied doesn't make you angry and it doesn't make you want to seek revenge. You are sheltered and protected no matter where in the world you go.

True love is right there in front of all of us, ready to be grasped, and that love is found in Christ. It is a love that is always before you, lifting you higher, reminding you (as Lisa Graas reminded me) that you are in this world called to be a saint, but you are not of this world. Actually the overwhelming outpouring of love from fellow Catholics (and even many atheists) has been an unexpected and glorious gift. If I can give something back, let it be this: Evangelize without fear.

The only thing that I regret is that some people said I hurt them with my comments. For that I apologize, I did not mean harm to anyone. I also encourage those who are hurt to examine their own conscience and ask themselves why they are hurt and if it was really me, or really something else. Just like I'd be a horrible mother if all I did was tell my children they were wonderful when they were really doing something wrong, I'd be a horrible citizen to just pretend society wasn't experiencing a tremendous breakdown when in fact we live in a world where good is perceived as bad and evil is perceived as good. We are in serious decline.

And people wonder why they are so unhappy.

I suspect that you who are leaving angry comments on this blog were unhappy before I ever wrote a word about being offended by immoral behavior, and I suspect that were I to suddenly do what you are trying to intimidate me to do - as Mark Shea so well puts it, "Remember. Tolerance is not enough. You. MUST. Approve. And you MUST force your daughter to approve as well." - not a single one of you would be any happier for it. As Sister Lisa Marie puts it today, quoting St. John, "The one who fears is not yet perfect in love." As for me and my fears, it wasn't that I feared going to the park and seeing homosexual PDA's. It's that I felt resentment for knowing that if I spoke out about how much it disturbs me, that I would be persecuted for it and I feared that persecution. OK, I've conquered that fear now and I will strive to speak out in love.

An experiment in playing "spot the idiot."

Stacy Trasancos has posted a mild rant on her blog about going into public places and having her children exposed to public displays of affection by homosexuals. It's a rant that has been expressed by many parents with children of a certain age who feel that society is conspiring to make their job as parents that much harder.  Until my daughters were of a certain age, I never noticed the constant commodification and sexualization of woment, well, at least I never noticed it as a "bad thing."  Likewise, I remember pulling up behind one "lady's" truck with a license frame holder that said "0 to c*nt in 60 seconds", but there was no star in the word.

As an adult, I don't care.  As the caretaker of children with minds like sponges, I felt that my job was made exponentially more difficult by narcissistic jerks.

Anyhow, Stacy Transancos' post was up for only a few minutes before it got its first visitor telling her that she was a bad person.  After comments started trending in the direction of judgmental and hateful people telling her that she was bad for being judgmental and hateful, she shut down the comments.  She opened them up again as almost an experiment in letting the non-judgmental forces of society have their say and the comments became a cesspool of hate directed against her.

As Mark Shea observes:

Gay Brownshirts on the March

Stacy Trasancos mentioned that she'd like to be able to take her little girl someplace without subjecting her to gays making out in public.

Huge mistake. The brownshirts have flooded her comboxes to scream about her urgent need to approve of homosexuality or face the consequences.

Stacy: Remember. Tolerance is not enough. You. MUST. Approve. And you MUST force your daughter to approve as well.

If you'd like to join in and suggest that the apostles of tolerance ain't so tolerant, click the link.

Update:

Here is a sampling of the comments:

Anonymous said...


And this is why I will never set foot in America. Still living in the past, I see. I wonder what people think of you having seven kids? Sounds like someone can't keep their legs shut.



August 30, 2011 4:33 AM

Jubal on Current said...

You seriously need to get a life or move out of Massachusetts. Larger secular agenda...you are not free your living in a religious mental prison.



August 30, 2011 5:05 AM

DD said...

Stacy, let them rant. They know not of what they speak. The Devil is in their words. We can only pray for them.

DD



August 30, 2011 6:27 AM

Anonymous said...

This blog post offends me in ways that are inexpressible.

This is our community. We are responsible citizens. We live by the rules, we pay our taxes, we take care of our things. I'm supposed to be able to influence what goes on in our community, and as a voter I do exercise that right. But I'm outnumbered. I can't even go to normal places without having to sit silently and pretend to be something I'm not out of fear of offending some uppity religious people on "moral" high-horses. We all know what would happen if I asked these people to stop displaying, right in front of me and my children, that they live in hate.

If someone doesn't share your religion, what gives you the right to demand that they act in accordance with it anyway?

@Christina Martin "My children aren't even aware of how babies are made. If they don't know about sexual intercourse, what on earth makes it a good idea to explain to them about sodomy?"

Exactly. If your kids know about hetero relationships without knowing a thing about what happens in the bedroom, why do you need to talk about sex when you explain same-sex relationships?



August 30, 2011 6:36 AM

Kris said...

I am sorry to hear that LGBT people "scare" you so much. I feel so sorry for your children especially if one of them ends up being part of the LGBT community because them knowing how you feel about it will cause them so much pain.

Better watch out for the scary atheists too because we are everywhere and just might teach your children the truth about science and all that stuff.



August 30, 2011 6:43 AM

Herb (12th Apostle) said...

I don't have to be tolerant of someone's hatred.



August 30, 2011 7:33 AM

Anonymous said...

Joe G. - I guess "NOH8" only applies if you AGREE with them.... otherwise it is open season.



August 30, 2011 7:40 AM

Anonymous said...

You're sad. dumb cunt.

The Continuing Kulturkampf - Remember the Self-Liquidating Cardinal Rule of Liberalism: "Freedom protects everything except unfreedom, and tolerance endures everything except intolerance." - Eduard Windthorst

Mark Shea links to this video of a couple of attacks on people protesting in favor of traditional marriage. What gets me is the casualness of the attacks as if the attackers were operating within the cognitive dissonance of Windthorst's dicta.




This video is useful for playing the "spot the idiot" game.



Clearly, the pro-homosexual side is more interested in intimidation; with the masked faces, shouts of "God is dead," flipping the bird and screaming, they sure aren't interested in convincing people that their side is the side of tolerance and reason.  Again, though, that behavior is entirely consistent with Windthorst's Self-liquidating Rule that "tolerance endures everything except intolerance."

Here is the "TFP" homepage.

Homosexual marriage is having the same corrosive effect on the legal system as abortion has had.

This is an essay that is a useful reminder about what being a lawyer is supposed to be about.

Same-Sex Marriage and the Assault on Institutional Integrity by Matthew J. Franck:

 After publishing articles recently in the Washington Post and First Things, both arguing that the defenders of conjugal marriage between a man and a woman should not be tarred as irrational bigots, “haters,” or “theocrats” by the advocates of same-sex marriage, I received e-mail messages from likeminded friends hailing me for my “courage.” I was grateful for their appreciation, but a little mystified at what I took to be overstatement. I find little reason to hail the “courage” of someone who defends the consensus view of the whole history of human civilization—that marriage is a bedrock social institution that unites a man and a woman in order to make a family—as rational and well intended. But one of the kind notes came from a friend who was about to leave for Cuba to help beleaguered Christians there, persons of whom the word “courage” can be used without embarrassment. So what was going on?


It was simple: my correspondents were academics, writing from within the establishment of American higher education, where it can be very uncomfortable to speak out against the idea of same-sex marriage. Are people’s jobs on the line if they dissent? This is harder to say with certainty, and the circumstances will not be the same everywhere. The deadly combination of unchallenged liberal presumptions and casual intimidation of dissenters is probably at its worst in the most prestigious universities, which set the tone for the rest of the country, on this issue as on many others. But in all except the most resolutely religious colleges, there is no doubting that the default position of the American academy is to dismantle the institution of marriage and remake it on a new basis. The result is a good deal of self-silencing—self-exile into the “new closet” on issues involving sexuality—not just by students but by faculty, too. The path of least resistance turns out to be the path of no resistance. For institutions that claim to be homes of diverse views and free inquiry in the pursuit of truth, this creeping orthodoxy is a sign of wounded institutional integrity and failed leadership.

The same harm to institutional integrity, and the same ethical failure of institutional leaders, is now publicly on display in the most elite precincts of the legal profession. On April 18, the press reported that Paul Clement, former solicitor general in the last administration, would take up the cause, so contemptibly abandoned by the current administration, of defending the Defense of Marriage Act in federal litigation, with Clement’s firm, Atlanta-based King & Spalding, engaged by the House of Representatives.

One week later, on April 25, King & Spalding’s chairman Robert Hays announced that the firm was withdrawing from its representation of the House, apparently leaving DOMA’s defense without legal counsel in federal court. Notwithstanding the blandishments of Mr. Hays about “inadequate” vetting of the decision to take the case, it was evident to everyone that this retreat was made under pressure, with the gay advocacy group Human Rights Campaign leading a concerted political and economic campaign to bring the firm to heel. Within an hour or two on the same day came the news that Clement was decamping from King & Spalding to take new employment at Washington’s Bancroft law firm, and intended to continue his representation of the House, and of the interests of the United States, in the DOMA litigation. In his letter of resignation from King & Spalding, Clement describes his conduct as the only “honorable course,” saying he was driven by “loyalty to the client and respect for the profession” of law. “Defending unpopular positions is what lawyers do,” he wrote, adding that the “adversary system of justice” and “the rule of law” itself are at stake. Clement finished by quoting the late Griffin Bell, once a King & Spalding partner as well as attorney general in the Carter administration: “You are not required to take every matter that is presented to you, but having assumed a representation, it becomes your duty to finish the representation.”

Supporters of the Defense of Marriage Act were quick to hail Paul Clement’s courage, and he certainly deserves praise for his unhesitating decision to do the right thing. But it detracts not at all from Clement’s rectitude to remark that there was nothing heroic in it. He did what any lawyer would do who conformed his actions to the time-honored ethical norms of his profession. Lawyers and law firms accept and reject clients for all sorts of reasons, including moral affinities and moral objections, political sympathies and ideological opposition. But once a lawyer has been engaged as a client’s advocate, a relationship is created for which words like “duty” and “honor” are exactly the right ones. Clement rightly understood that this duty demanded he sacrifice any competing claims on his loyalty of his law partners, and leave the firm. What this cost him we cannot know, but again, his action was an ordinary sort of courage, not an extraordinary sort.

What is extraordinary, and therefore worthy of more of our attention, is the behavior of King & Spalding and the leadership of its chairman Robert Hays—as well as the behavior of the political activists at the Human Rights Campaign and elsewhere who embarked on an open campaign of intimidation that is morally reprehensible in a constitutional republic.

It appears, from other cases taken on by King & Spalding, such as its pro bono representation of unlawful enemy combatants detained at Guantanamo, that the firm’s politics lean leftward. But again, lawyers and law firms accept and decline clients and causes for many reasons, and political ideology is not an illicit ground of such choices. Knowing this might inform one’s judgment if one of its partners ran for public office, or were nominated for attorney general, and it might incline certain clients to seek representation there or to go elsewhere. But it is not in itself blameworthy to undertake the representation of clients and causes of whom others disapprove. As Paul Clement himself said, this is what lawyers do—and what someone in the profession must do, if the adversary system of justice, central to our rule of law, is to function well.

What is blameworthy—indeed, squarely inimical to the norms of legal practice—is for a firm’s leaders to buckle under political pressure and abandon a client they have agreed to represent. King & Spalding’s withdrawal may even have violated various codes of legal ethics. But even if no codified norms were breached, the firm’s decision to bug out on advocating the constitutionality of DOMA is deeply troubling as a failure of institutional responsibility. And it is not merely the law firm as an institution that should concern us here, although the firm is one kind of institution (and the larger it is, the more “institutional” any firm looks). It is the institution of the law itself that is at stake. Mr. Clement might seem to have been engaging in hyperbole when he remarked in his resignation letter that the rule of law was harmed by the firm’s decision. But he was not.

Those of us who are not lawyers, hope never to need one, and enjoy a good joke at the profession’s expense might be loath to admit it, but the rule of law depends to a great degree on the probity of lawyers and judges. Law graduates, when admitted to the bar, become “officers of the court,” and this is no quaint honorific like “esquire.” Each time they assume the burden of advocacy for a client, they also take on a duty to the court of the jurisdiction in which they practice on the client’s behalf. The lawyer is the conduit through which the client’s interests are communicated to the court, and, in the opposite direction, through which due process is meted out to the client. Just as the judge is expected to have no conflicts of interest in the case before him, the lawyer representing a party is expected to have no interest whatsoever that can be distinguished from those of his client. The judge must be disinterested in the outcome, but the advocate must have, and appear to have, an identity of interest with the client and cause on whose behalf he advocates. Once assuming this burden, his own private, competing impulses to separate himself from his client must vanish from his calculations, for his duty is a public one, vital to the provision of due process, and, for that reason, is of the utmost solemnity.


Thus the King & Spalding skedaddle is more than an unseemly ditching of a client in order to escape the heat of political pressure. It is a blow to the institutional integrity of the legal system, and this would be true even if the abandoned party were not the United States itself. The firm will rightly suffer in reputational terms, but is no doubt big and established enough to survive the self-inflicted wound.

But what is behind this unexpected caving of such a large and well-esteemed law firm? If King & Spalding’s leaders exhibited cowardice and a failure of integrity, it is worth our noticing that they were bullied into it by the organized enemies of DOMA, led by the euphemistically named Human Rights Campaign (HRC). It is increasingly clear that the movement for same-sex marriage has no regard for the ethical norms of institutional integrity that ordinarily govern the processes of republican self-government in the United States.

The day after King & Spalding was reported to be taking the DOMA case, the HRC launched a high-pressure campaign to force the firm to reverse its decision. This was too much even for the liberal editors of the Los Angeles Times, who oppose DOMA but recognize a principle when they see one. Ditto the editors of the Washington Post, who chastised HRC after the success of its campaign of intimidation.

But intimidation—“mau-mauing the flak-catchers,” Tom Wolfe memorably called it—is now the default tactic of same-sex marriage advocates. What else, for instance, explains the antics of now-retired federal judge Vaughn Walker, who wanted to broadcast the Proposition 8 trial in California, and then broke his promise—and his legal duty—to keep the trial’s video record from public view? What else explains the instantaneous denunciation of all opponents of same-sex marriage as “haters”? Resistance to such intimidation, in the name of the ethic of institutional integrity, is fast becoming the duty of all persons in positions of institutional responsibility, whatever their private views on homosexuality or same-sex marriage. When we witness such principled resistance, as in the case of Dean Evan Caminker’s decision to stick with Ohio Senator and alumnus Rob Portman as the commencement speaker at the University of Michigan’s law school—despite the outcry of those who object to Portman’s 1996 vote for DOMA as a House member—we should applaud it heartily.

A sage older colleague of mine is fond of saying that integrity is something you can have just by deciding to have it. But you do have to decide. It’s that easy, and that hard. But those who would sacrifice ethics and the integrity of our institutions to the victory of a political cause must be sharply rebuked by fair-minded conservatives and liberals alike.

Angry Gay Left Mobwatch



Michelle Malkin's blog provides context as follows:

After just singing and worshiping God for a while, Roger decided that we should all hold hands in a circle and continue singing. So we did.

Someone (Actually a person who came up and hugged and kissed some of us who he knew from the past) convinced some people that we were there to protest against the no on 8 campaign.

Then some guy who was dressed up like one of the sisters (The sisters of perpetual indulgence is a group of men who dress up like nuns and call themselves the spiritual authority of the Castro.) took a curtain-type thing (Which I think they use to curse people) and wrapped it around us.

Then a crowd started gathering. We began to sing “Amazing Grace”, and basically sang that song the whole night. (At some points we also sang “Nothing but the Blood of Jesus” and “Oh the Blood of Jesus”.) At first, they just shouted at us, using crude, rude, and foul language and calling us names like “haters” and “bigots”. Since it was a long night, I can’t even begin to remember all of the things that were shouted and/or chanted at us. Then, they started throwing hot coffee, soda and alcohol on us and spitting (and maybe even peeing) on us. Then, a group of guys surrounded us with whistles, and blasted them inches away from our ears continually. Then, they started getting violent and started shoving us. At one point a man tried to steal one of our Bibles. Chrisdene noticed, so she walked up to him and said “Hey, that’s not yours, can you please give it back?”. He responded by hitting her on the head with the Bible, shoving her to the ground, and kicking her. I called the cops, and when they got there, they pulled her out of the circle and asked her if she wanted to press charges. She said “No, tell him I forgive him.”

Afterwards, she didn’t rejoin us in the circle, but she made friends with one of the people in the crowd, and really connected heart to heart. Roger got death threats. As the leader of our group, people looked him in the eyes and said “I am going to kill you.”, and they were serious. A cop heard one of them, and confronted him. (This part is kinda graphic, so you should skip the paragraph if you don’t want to be offended.) It wasn’t long before the violence turned to perversion. They were touching and grabbing me, and trying to shove things in my butt, and even trying to take off my pants - basically trying to molest me. I used one hand to hold my pants up, while I used the other arm to hold one of the girls. The guys huddled around all the girls, and protected them.

The local media provides this:

SAN FRANCISCO -- In San Francisco's Castro District, people on both sides of the same-sex marriage controversy confronted each other on Friday night, as police tried to keep the peace. Proposition 8 passed in a close vote and eliminated the right of same-sex couples to marry.

Members of the gay community said that almost every Friday night, a Christian group meets at the corner of Castro and 18th Streets. They try to convert gays and lesbians into a straight lifestyle.

This Friday night, the message didn't go over well. Some gays and lesbians reacted by trying to chase the group out of the Castro.

"Their rights were respected," said Joe Schmitz, an opponent of Prop 8. "They got a chance to go ahead and pray on the sidewalk and I had the opportunity to express my freedom of speech which is telling them to get out of my neighborhood."

San Francisco Police officers in riot gear formed a line and escorted the religious group into a van to safely get them out of the area.

Members of the gay community insisted that their reaction to the Christian group was spontaneous. "It was not an organized thing. We're tired of it. It's not religious. It's not a racial thing. It's about hate. We're trying to send a message across the world that we're standing up and we don't want this to go on anymore," said Adam Quintero.

That's an amazingly even-handed description for what was obviously something turning into an ugly mob scene that required the cops to form a line at the end. The paper says "people on both sides of the same-sex marriage controversy confronted each other," which doesn't do justice to the role of the angry gay mob as hate-filled aggressors.

My secretary was in San Francisco this weekend with her teenage son and saw some gay protest marches including the usual freakshow, which somehow we never see as the face of same-sex marriage.

Maybe public contribution lists are not such a good idea.

After all, there is a reason for the secret ballot - it prevents the kind of retaliation and extortion that the gay left is visiting on supporters of Prop 8:

Moore's 7,000-word treatise came to mind last week when gay activists began targeting sponsors of Proposition 8, the successful ballot initiative that amended the California state constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage. Taking to the streets in furious indignation, activists created an "enemies list" of those who had contributed to support the measure, targeting them for boycotts and protests.

The elderly co-owner of a Mexican restaurant, who had given $100 to support the referendum, was driven to tears as she confronted "60 members of Los Angeles' LGBT community" who demanded an apology and an equal contribution to a proposed effort to repeal the referendum.

That incident reminded Diana West of the Soviet show trials of the 1930s, but it reminded me of Roy Moore, because of the angry insistence of gay activists that opponents of same-sex marriage are depriving them of their rights -- "rights" that Moore showed to be utterly alien to our nation's legal tradition.

One activist who helped compile the enemies list told Time magazine: "My goal was to make it socially unacceptable to give huge amounts of money to take away the rights of one particular group, a minority group." Of course, the restaurant owner's $100 contribution to the "Yes on 8" cause was not "huge," but the principle is the same.

As the California activists spewed their fury -- allegedly vandalizing Mormon temples, making terroristic threats toward Catholics, and hurling racial epithets at African-Americans (who voted 3-to-1 in favor of Prop 8, according to exit polls) -- their vitriolic rage highlighted how the progressive rhetoric of "rights" undermines and destabilizes political consensus

Before the matter gets flushed down the left's memory hole, let's remember that the terrorist act against Catholic fraternal organizations involved mailing "white powder" - apparently inert white powder - to the Knights of Columbus, just to throw a scare into them, i.e., terrorize them.

The return of the Klan, this time in designer sheets.