If only Boy Scouts leaders could marry. The BSA is about to get douched by the release of files of sexual abuse against scouts. A common denominator between this and the Catholic scandal is, of course, that the perps are homosexual. This is not to say that all homosexuals are potential child abusers, but it does imply that if one wanted to stop all such abuses in the BSA and 90% of such abuse in the Catholic Church, the certain way would be to prevent homosexuals from being leaders, volunteers or representatives. Perhaps this explains why the BSA has drawn the line on admitting homosexuals into BSA as leaders or volunteers.

If only American gays were permitted by the Pope to use condoms.

HIV Continues to Spread Among Gay Men, Studies Show:

As the world’s leading AIDS researchers gather for the International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C., scientists report that despite gains in controlling the spread of HIV, the disease has continued to spread at an alarming rate in the very population in which it first appeared — gay men.

In a series of papers in the Lancet dedicated to the dynamics of HIV among gay men — a group epidemiologists define as men who have sex with men (MSM) — scientists say that the continued burden of AIDS in this group is due to a combination of lifestyle and biological factors that put these men at higher risk. Rates are rising in all countries around the world.

In one study, led by Chris Beyrer, of the Center for Public Health and Human Rights at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, researchers analyzed surveillance reports and studies of HIV among MSM, including data that were part of routine United Nations reporting from member nations. Rates of HIV among gay men ranged from 3% in the Middle East to 25% in the Caribbean. In all reporting nations, rates were on the rise, even in developed nations like the U.S., Australia and the U.K. where HIV is declining overall.

In fact, says Beyrer, income does not seem to matter when it comes to HIV trends among MSM. In the U.S., for example, infection rates among gay men have been increasing by 8% each year since 2001, contributing to a 15% prevalence rate and putting the U.S. on par with countries like Thailand, Malaysia and some African and Caribbean nations where neither awareness of HIV/AIDS nor drug treatments are as widespread. HIV prevalence rates among MSM in Brazil, Canada, Italy and India range between 11% and 15%, while many western European countries have lower rates of around 6%.

Public health experts have been concerned about the rising rates among MSM for years now, viewing the current epidemic as the second wave — the first having occurred in the 1980s. Today’s infections, they say, are affecting a new generation of men who didn’t live through the initial devastation of AIDS’s early days, when there were no drug treatments and a diagnosis was a death sentence. Public health messages about safe sex practices and testing targeted to gay men have waned in the intervening years, and now, some experts say, a new generation of at-risk men have to be educated about the disease.

HIV has always been more common among gay men, but Beyrer and his colleagues say the traditional risk factors may not entirely explain the surge in many cases. Traditionally, HIV experts have pointed to high-risk behaviors such as unprotected sex, having multiple partners, injection drug use and drug use in general for making gay men more vulnerable to infection. But there may be biological reasons for the enhanced risk as well. For example, there is an 18 times greater risk of HIV transmission through anal sex than through vaginal sex, which may explain why the virus continues to thrive in gay men, despite the fact that they still receive the bulk of HIV awareness and treatment public-health messages. “If HIV infection in MSM is heavily biologically determined, do present approaches to HIV programming for MSM, which rely heavily on information, education and behavior change strategies, make sense?” the authors write. “The epidemiology suggests that urgent reform is needed.”

That’s why the latest data on using HIV treatments to protect healthy people from infection, a strategy known as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), are of particular interest to public health experts. In another paper in the Lancet series, researchers estimate that about 25% of new infections among MSM might be avoided if prevention practices such as PrEP could be combined with existing strategies, such as safe sex counseling and condom use.

If only Gay Rights Activists could marry...

...boys under 5.

San Francisco Gay Rights Activist arrested for child porn:

Child porn and molestation scandal shocks SF, ruins Gay Pride public relations blitz

A horrifying child pornography and molestation scandal involving a high profile San Francisco gay rights activist has rocked the city’s political scene; compounding the nightmare, the scandal broke at the worst possible moment, the day after San Francisco’s Pride Parade, which was the culmination of a month-long public relations blitz promoting LGBT equality. The publicity efforts of thousands of people were negated and even reversed by the actions of one man.

The San Francisco Examiner, SFWeekly, the San Francisco Chronicle and various LGBT blogs have all published exposés in the last few hours, each with exclusive information.

WARNING: The following descriptions may be too upsetting for some readers. Proceed with caution.

S.F. Chronicle:

S.F. gay rights advocate arrested over child porn

San Francisco police have arrested veteran gay rights advocate Larry Brinkin in connection with felony possession of child pornography.

Brinkin, 66, who worked for the San Francisco Human Rights Commission before his retirement in 2010, was taken into custody Friday night. He spent the night in jail before he was released on bail, according to a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s department.

The district attorney’s office will decide Tuesday whether to file charges. “We’re still reviewing the case,” district attorney’s spokeswoman Stephanie Ong Stillman said Monday.

Police say that Brinkin had pornographic images, some that appear to show children as young as 1 and 2 or 3 years old being sodomized and performing oral sex on adult men, in e-mail attachments linked to his account, according to a search warrant served by San Francisco police.

Representatives of America Online contacted authorities after coming across e-mail attachments from one of its subscriber’s accounts containing what they believed to be child pornography.

The Los Angeles Police Department, which was assigned to the case, traced the IP address associated with the account, Zack3737@aol.com, to Brinkin, a San Francisco resident, according to court records. Los Angeles police forwarded the case to San Francisco police.

San Francisco investigators say the account was registered to Brinkin, and that he paid for the e-mail service with his credit card.

Police provided two examples of e-mail messages from last year in which Zack3737 provides disturbing descriptions of the exploitive sexual acts.

The e-mail account also is linked to Yahoo discussion groups on sexual exploitation of young boys and girls, according to the search warrant.

The SFWeekly has more extremely nauseating details:

Larry Brinkin, S.F. Gay Rights Icon, Arrested on Child Porn Charges

Police say they arrested 66-year-old Larry Brinkin, the high-profile gay activist, on possession of child pornography on Friday night.

According to the search warrant, SFPD acted after receiving a tip from the Los Angeles Police Department, which obtained from AOL an e-mail exchange between a Los Angeles user and zack3737@aol.com. Police say they linked the AOL address to Brinkin’s IP address; he is owner of the account and paid for AOL service with his credit card.

The warrant claims these e-mails contained images of children as young as perhaps a year old being sodomized by and performing oral sex on adult men. Zack3737@aol.com — whom the police allege is Brinkin — provided graphic commentary on the photos of interracial adult-child sex. Comments included “I loved especially the nigger 2 year old getting nailed. Hope you’ll continue so I can see what the little blond bitch is going to get. White Power! White Supremacy! White Dick Rules!”

The AOL e-mail account was also linked to Yahoo! Groups centering around discussions of child porn, according to the search warrant. Investigators say they additionally found e-mails sent from Brinkin’s now-defunct city e-mail account to zack3737@aol.com.

That's some really sick stuff.

Stay classy, Gay Activists...

...stay classy.

Gay activists invited to the White House take out their hatred on a photo of Ronald Reagan.

These are the people that we are supposed to sacrifice our freedom of conscience on the altar of secularism for.

Via Mark Shea.

Defending the Regnerus Study.

The cliche is that a study gets published that questions a lefist sacred cow; a barrage of criticism gets launched from leftist precincts; then leftists go on to demand that everyone ignore the study as "anti-science."

The recent Regnerus study on homosexual parenting is following the same pattern, but with a difference; social scientists are rejecting the criticisms against Regnerus methodology.

Same-sex marriage is one of the most contentious and vexing issues now facing our nation. It is perhaps in part for that reason that the new study on same-sex parenting by University of Texas sociology professor Mark Regnerus, which finds that young-adult children of parents who have had same-sex relationships are more likely to suffer from a range of emotional and social problems,[1] has been subject to such sustained and sensational criticism from dozens of media outlets, from the Huffington Post to the New Yorker to the New Republic. These outlets have alleged, respectively, that his research is “anti-gay,” “breathtakingly sloppy,” and “gets everything wrong.”

Although Regnerus’s article in Social Science Research is not without its limitations, as social scientists, we think much of the public criticism Regnerus has received is unwarranted for three reasons.

First, there are limitations with prior research on this subject that have seldom been discussed by the media. The vast majority of studies published before 2012 on this subject have relied upon small, nonrepresentative samples that do not represent children in typical gay and lesbian families in the United States. [2] By contrast, Regnerus relies on a large, random, and representative sample of more than 200 children raised by parents who have had same-sex relationships, comparing them to a random sample of more than 2,000 children raised in heterosexual families, to reach his conclusions. This is why sociology professor Paul Amato, chair of the Family section of the American Sociological Association and president of the National Council on Family Relations, wrote that the Regnerus study was “better situated than virtually all previous studies to detect differences between these [different family] groups in the population.”[3] We are disappointed that many media outlets have not done their due diligence in investigating the scientific validity of prior studies, and acknowledging the superiority of Regnerus’s sample to most previous research.

Second, Regnerus has been chided for comparing young adults from gay and lesbian families that experienced high levels of family instability to young adults from stable heterosexual married families. This is not an ideal comparison. (Indeed, Regnerus himself acknowledges this point in his article, and calls for additional research on a representative sample of planned gay and lesbian families; such families may be more stable but are very difficult to locate in the population at large.[4]) But what his critics fail to appreciate is that Regnerus chose his categories on the basis of young adults’ characterizations of their own families growing up, and the young adults whose parents had same-sex romantic relationships also happened to have high levels of instability in their families of origin. This instability may well be an artifact of the social stigma and marginalization that often faced gay and lesbian couples during the time (extending back to the 1970s, in some cases) that many of these young adults came of age. It is also worth noting that Regnerus’s findings related to instability are consistent with recent studies of gay and lesbian couples in countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden, which find similarly high patterns of instability among same-sex couples.[5] Even Judith Stacey, a prominent critic of Regnerus’s study, elsewhere acknowledges that studies suggest that lesbian “relationships may prove less durable” than heterosexual marriages.[6] Thus, Regnerus should not be faulted for drawing a random, representative sample of young-adult children of parents who have had same-sex romantic relationships and also happened to have experienced high levels of family instability growing up.

Third, another study[7] published this month in the Journal of Marriage and Family comes to conclusions that parallel those of Regnerus’s study. This study finds that “children in same-sex parent families scored lower than their peers in married, 2-biological parent households” on two academic outcomes, and that these differences can be attributed to higher levels of family instability in same-sex families, compared to intact, biological married families. This study was also based on a large, nationally representative, and random survey of school-age children; moreover, the same-sex parents in this study lived together. The parallels between the findings in this study and Regnerus’s study strongly call into question the New Republic’s claim that the Regnerus study “gets everything wrong.”

Honest Public Discourse. Honest Social Policy.

Rod Dreher makes a point about the "cheerleading" of the media on homosexual issues: (a) it distorts the perception of reality and (b) it masks policies that people wouldn't accept if they knew the true motivations of the proponents:

In a poll released last month, Gallup found that on average, Americans believe 25 percent or more of Americans are gay. This is, of course, crazy. In truth, social scientists estimate that only between two and five percent of Americans are gay. But if you were a reader of The New York Times, or a consumer of mainstream news and entertainment media, it’s easy to imagine why you would think that. In turn, if you really believe that one in four people in this country are gay, it’s bound to affect your views on the justice of same-sex marriage. If 25 percent of the people of this country cannot marry, well, that’s a huge deal, and it makes the concerns of those who worry about the long-term social effects of gay marriage, and questions of how religious liberty will fare under same-sex marriage, seem picayune.

According to the 2010 US Census, less than one percent (0.77 percent, to be precise) of all American households are constituted of a same-sex couple — and a statistical analysis paper on the Census website cautions that that number probably overestimates the number by 28 percent. The reader who pointed this out to me does the math, and says:

So how exactly do around 650,000 gay couples get to redefine marriage, stifle religious freedom, demand special rights, shut down adoption agencies, mandate the teaching of uncritical approval of homosexuality in schools, tear down the biological family, and tag anyone who disagrees with the label “hateful bigot?” Is there really some overwhelming new social consensus on gay “marriage,” or are we being marketed, manipulated, and maligned by our Ruling Classes into either agreeing with this brave new world or keeping our mouths shut?

There has been no discussion in The New York Times, or in the mainstream media, of the impact same-sex marriage will likely have on religious liberty under the US constitutional framework. I routinely talk with people on both sides of the same-sex marriage issue who haven’t even thought about it. The issue is well-known in legal circles, but is widely ignored by our media. I believe it’s ignored because it greatly complicates the case for same-sex marriage as a matter of politics. If more people understood how constitutionalizing same-sex marriage is likely to affect their churches, parochial schools, and religious institutions, as well as the public schools, they would be far more reticent, I believe, to support same-sex marriage. Or if they affirmed their support of same-sex marriage, they would be doing so from a better informed position, like that of Chai Feldblum, the Georgetown law professor, EEOC commissioner and gay rights activist who says that yes, advances in gay civil rights come at a substantial cost to religious liberties, but that on balance, it’s worth it. As she told Maggie Gallagher in 2006:

“Sexual liberty should win in most cases. There can be a conflict between religious liberty and sexual liberty, but in almost all cases the sexual liberty should win because that’s the only way that the dignity of gay people can be affirmed in any realistic manner.”

If only The New York Times and the mainstream media approached the same-sex marriage story with the honesty of Chai Feldblum! But they do not. It’s advocacy, all the way down, both in what the media choose to cover, how they choose to cover it, and — crucially — what they choose not to cover.

Is it the case that a .5% fraction should redefine the remaining 99.5%?

Likewise, do we really think that sexuality - something not mentioned in the Constitution - trumps religion - something that is?

American Psychological Association captured by gay rights movement...

...during which the APA stopped standing for science rather than politics.

Well, duh.

Dr. Nicholas Cummings, who supports gay marriage, and is the former president of the APA, sounds like an old style liberal who thinks that people should be allowed to disagree, something he says is no longer permitted in the APA.

A former president of the American Psychological Association (APA), who also introduced the motion to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness in 1975, says that the APA has been taken over by “ultraliberals” beholden to the “gay rights movement,” who refuse to allow an open debate on reparative therapy for homosexuality.

Dr. Nicholas Cummings was President of the APA from 1979 to 1980, and also served as a member of the organization’s Council of Representatives. He served for years as Chief of Mental Health with the Kaiser-Permanente Health Maintenance Organization, and is the author of the book “Destructive Trends in Mental Health: The Well-Intentioned Path to Harm.”

In an interview with representatives of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) in late April, Cummings said that the organization’s problems began with the rejection of the Leona Tyler Principle, which required that all public positions of the APA be supported by scientific evidence.

The APA “started changing pretty drastically by the late 1980s,” said Cummings. “By the mid 1990s, the Leona Tyler principle was absolutely forgotten, that political stances seemed to override any scientific results. Cherry-picking results became the mode. The gay rights movement sort of captured the APA.”

Cummings says that the movement for “diversity” in the APA, which he endorsed, had resulted in a lack of diversity regarding heterosexuals.

“If I had to choose now, I would see a need to form an organization that would recruit straight white males, which are underrepresented today in the APA,” he said.

And, incidentally, he says that unbiased, open research on homosexuality was never done.

Check out the video of Dr. Cumming's interview:

Another gay myth bites the dust - lesbians don't make better parents.

There are a number of perennial myths about homosexuality that influence the debate over gay marriage. One is that homosexuals represent a substantial portion of the population. In the '70s, homosexuals spread the claim - apparently originating with Kinsey, who based his studies on prison populations, that 10% of the population was gay. Today, polling routinely shows that Americans think the gay population is around 25%.

According to the Williamson Institute at UCLA - hardly a bastion of conservative irredentism - the truth is that the gay population is not more than 2% and the lesbian population is about 10% of that number.

Another canard is that lesbians make good parents. I heard this canard recently on a debate over gay marriage in Britain on the Unbelievable show. The gay marriage opponent pointed out that these statistics were dubious in that there hadn't been enough time to vouch for the innocuousness of lesbian parenting and such studies that have been done are small.

Apparently, however, there have been a study that debunks the lesbians are good parents myth, and this study involves a sample size of 3,000 adult children of lesbian parents. The results are not good.

Here is a link to the study. The results are tabulated to the right. Here is a link to an interview with the researcher about the studies' methodology.

The Washington Times summarizes the findings:

Two studies released Sunday may act like brakes on popular social-science assertions that gay parents are the same as — or maybe better than — married mother-father parents.

“The empirical claim that no notable differences exist must go,” University of Texas sociology professor Mark Regnerus said in his study in Social Science Research.

Using a “gold standard” data set of nearly 3,000 randomly selected American young adults, Mr. Regnerus looked at their lives on 40 measures of social, emotional and relationship outcomes.

He found that, when compared with adults raised in married, mother-father families, adults raised by lesbian mothers had negative outcomes in 24 of 40 categories, while adults raised by gay fathers had negative outcomes in 19 categories.

Modernity is insane. On the one hand, we hear the idea that evolution is an amazing thing; it can create complex structures that maximizes the health and efficiency of living things. We hear that nature is marvelous and we would all be healthier if we lived in tune with nature.

Based on the fact that pair-bonded heterosexual partners has been the norm selected for by thousands of generations of evolution, we might suspect that pair-bonded heterosexual partners are the best way for human beings to raise children.

But that scientific mindset goes out the window once we start talking about homosexuality. Suddenly, human nature has no history, and we expect to find that novel forms of child-rearing are going to be every bit as succesful as the way that we've been genetically programmed to raise children.

I suspect that a large part of the modern push for same-sex marriage is based on the fact that people assume the truth of the myths. If I thought that 25% of the population was homosexual and that homosexual parents were as good at rearing children, then, frankly, a lot of my objection to homosexual parenting would dissolve. They would all dissolve once we solved the pesky problem that heterosexuals make babies and that the best way of rearing children remains that way which involves inducing "mom" to marry "dad."

I suspect that most proponents of gay marriage, however, really believe in the 25% myth and the "lesbians make better parents" myth. Those myths are false. I suspect that telling people the truth will have a salutory effect of making them reason from the truth to the truth, which is that gay marriage is not a socially good idea.

Incidentally, note that step-parents are not healthy for children. Insofar as that is true, it seems that we ought to be doing something to make parents stay together.

Likewise, I have to admit that I am perplexed by the data that children are more likely to be sexually molested and forced to have sex where the mother is a lesbian. What could the explanation for that be? A lack of maternal instincts which would watch out and protect the child? Are lesbians more prone to sexual misbehavior? That data seems to run against my view of women as being less inclined to engage in sexually aggressive behavior, albeit Lord knows that that stereotype has been taking a beating lately with the raft of women schoolteachers behaving badly.

Disappointed by lack of real hate crimes...

...lesbians fabricate hate crime.

Equal rights for dumb blondes and drunken Irishmen.

Sometimes stereotypes are true.

Here is a case in point, to wit, someone who appears to be - assuming that no significant material has been edited out - a loudmouth, ignorant, redneck, bigotted preacher, calling for gays and lesbians to be segregated behind a high electrified fence until they "all die out."



Given the precedent they've established with threats to burn down churches that sport far, far less offensive ideas, this guy will undoubtedly be on the receiving end of hate mail and death threats.

This article says that will probably be the case:

“I was horrified. I was shocked,” Laura Tipton, member of the group, told CBS Charlotte. “I was hurt to hear him say such horrible things about the LGBT community. Those words were absolutely horrific.”

The group will be holding a protest against the church this upcoming Sunday morning. Tipton is expecting some 250 people to show up.

Actually, the reprisals appear to have already started: it seems that the Providence Road Baptist Church's website is down, either because of a cyber-attack or because of the interest caused by the article, or both.

Incidentally, the article reports:

The church’s website says, “We offer NO apologies in believing the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible is the inerrant Word of God.”

My interaction with King James Onlyists has left the impression that those people would like to put a lot of people on the other side of behind that fence.

What a world of difference between Pastor Worley's video and this Michael Voris video:



But I suspect that the nuances that Voris makes will be lost on the zealots of both sides.

For the "Media Malpractice" File - Remember that speech where Pope Benedict told the world that gay marriage was one of the threats to humanity?

Alternative title - "Homosexuality, not everything is about you."

Dan Savage mentioned it in his diatribe in order to accuse the Pope of claiming that the only thing standing between himself and sodomy was a piece of paper.

Then there is the Huffington Post and Reuters:

VATICAN CITY, Jan 9 (Reuters) - Pope Benedict said on Monday that gay marriage was one of several threats to the traditional family that undermined "the future of humanity itself".

The pope made some of his strongest comments against gay marriage in a new year address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Vatican in which he touched on some economic and social issues facing the world today.

He told diplomats from nearly 180 countries that the education of children needed proper "settings" and that "pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman."

The funny thing is that the Pope didn't say any such thing, and nothing even close.

Andrew Brown at the Guardian points out:

On Monday, Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech to the diplomatic corps at the Vatican at which he didn't say a single word about gay marriage. You can read the whole thing here. So why is it news? Because Reuters and, following them, many other people reported that he had denounced gay marriage as a threat to western civilisation. Philip Pullella, who is one of the very best and most experienced Vatican correspondents, led his story: "Pope Benedict said Monday that gay marriage was one of several threats to the traditional family that undermined 'the future of humanity itself'."

So far as I can see, Pope Benedict just didn't. He did speak in favour of the family "based on the marriage of a man and woman". He did say that "policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself". But there was no suggestion that gay marriage was the most important of these and he didn't mention it at all, whereas he did take up several other sexual issues.

He went out of his way to praise a recent European court ruling that outlawed patents based on human stem cells. He said that "legislative measures which not only permit but at times even promote abortion for reasons of convenience or for questionable medical motives compromise the education of young people and, as a result, the future of humanity". That may be right or wrong. But it's not an attack on gay marriage, or even on homosexuality.

Here's the speech. I've read it. Here's the only passage that could get Savage's knickers in a twist:

Education is a crucial theme for every generation, for it determines the healthy development of each person and the future of all society. It thus represents a task of primary importance in this difficult and demanding time. In addition to a clear goal, that of leading young people to a full knowledge of reality and thus of truth, education needs settings. Among these, pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman. This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society. Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself. The family unit is fundamental for the educational process and for the development both of individuals and States; hence there is a need for policies which promote the family and aid social cohesion and dialogue. It is in the family that we become open to the world and to life and, as I pointed out during my visit to Croatia, “openness to life is a sign of openness to the future”.[3] In this context of openness to life, I note with satisfaction the recent sentence of the Court of Justice of the European Union forbidding patenting processes relative to human embryonic stem cells, as well as the resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe condemning prenatal selection on the basis of sex.

Can you just feel the call for violence against cringing homosexuals in schoolyards across America?

Brown is right. There is not the slightest basis for the headlines that read "Pope Benedict XVI: Gay Marriage A Threat To 'Future Of Humanity."

So, where does this nonsense come from? Are we at the point of post-modernism that there is no longer a felt need to attach one's truth claims to reality.

Sure. Why the hell not?

Activist argues that sadomasochism is a sexual orientation.

Jimmy Akin responds to Dan Savage's rant.

Akin responds in his usual low key, reasonable way.



A question: Savage was clearly engaging in theology - he was providing his own idiosyncratic, one-sided interpretation of text. Would it have been permissible for someone to have provided the other view at this gathering? Such as that provided by Akin Would that have violated the First Amendment? (Obviously, I don't know if this was a state-sponsored gathering.) Has that been done before? I suspect not.

Or are we at a point where the First Amendment permits anti-religious speech, but not pro-religious speech?

Dan Savage wins this year’s Son of Ernst Rohm Award for Most Repellent Representative of Gay Community

Yes, Rohm was both a Nazi and a homosexual. 

Oops, there goes a victim card.

Mark Shea explains why the coveted "Son of Ernst Rohm Award" (the "Rohmy") goes to Dan Savage.

Ernst Rohm: Proof That Just Because You’ve Been a Victim Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Be a Jerk Too.

Shea points to this gay-orchestrated mini-Kristalnacht:

A homosexual activist group calling itself “Angry Queers” claimed responsibility for smashing nine windows in a church known for teaching traditional sexual morality early Tuesday morning.

“Upon arriving at the church, we discovered nine separate windows had been smashed in with rocks, including two beautiful 100-year-old stained glass windows,” wrote Tim Smith, pastor of the Portland campus of Mars Hill Church. “We estimate the damage to be several thousand dollars.”

The vandals sent an e-mail to local television station KOIN-TV stating they took the action, because “Mars Hill is notoriously anti-gay and anti-woman.”

Anti-Gay Bullying Leader bullies Christian Students.

Dan Savage demonstrates the "inner brownshirt" of the pro-homosexual project:

As many as 100 high school students walked out of a national journalism conference after an anti-bullying speaker began cursing, attacked the Bible and reportedly called those who refused to listen to his rant “pansy asses.”

The speaker was Dan Savage, founder of the “It Gets Better” project, an anti-bullying campaign that has reached more than 40 million viewers with contributors ranging from President Obama to Hollywood stars. Savage also writes a sex advice column called “Savage Love.”

Savage, and his husband, were also guests at the White House for President Obama’s 2011 LGBT Pride Month reception. He was also invited to a White House anti-bullying conference.

Savage was supposed to be delivering a speech about anti-bullying at the National High School Journalism Conference sponsored by the Journalism Education Association and the National Scholastic Press Association. But it turned into an episode of Christian-bashing.

Rick Tuttle, the journalism advisor for Sutter Union High School in California, was among several thousand people in the audience. He said they thought the speech was one thing – but it turned into something else.

“I thought this would be about anti-bullying,” Tuttle told Fox news. “It turned into a pointed attack on Christian beliefs.”

Tuttle said a number of his students were offended by Savage’s remarks – and some decided to leave the auditorium.

“It became hostile,” he said. “It felt hostile as we were sitting in the audience – especially towards Christians who espouse beliefs that he was literally taking on.”

Tuttle said the speech was laced with vulgarities and “sexual innuendo not appropriate for this age group.” At one point, he said Savage told the teenagers about how good his partner looked in a speedo.

The conservative website CitizenLink was the first to report about the controversy. They interviewed a 17-year-old girl who was one of students who walked out of the auditorium.

“The first thing he told the audience was, ‘I hope you’re all using birth control,’” she told CitizenLink. “he said there are people using the Bible as an excuse for gay bullying, because it says in Leviticus and Romans that being gay is wrong. Right after that, he said we can ignore all the (expletive deleted) in the Bible.”

As the teenagers were walking out, Tuttle said that Savage heckled them and called them “pansy asses.”

Is this immature and offensive spewing of hate surprising?

Not if you know Dan Savage.

Savage is an "ethicist" and his ethics consist of doing what feels good so long as the one doing it is honest - it is an ethical system for psychopaths.

The EEOC requires that we all participate in other people's delusions.

The EEOC has made an official statement that descrimination against "transgender" people violates federal law.

For those of us who can't keep up with the constantly shifting kaleidoscope of terms used by the GBTLQetc. activists, "transgender" denominates those people who are under the delusion that they are in the the "wrong" body. Sometimes this fixation can lead such people to mutilate their body through "gender reassignment surgery." This article by Paul McHugh, the former head of John Hopkins' sex change department ought to be read by anyone who thinks that these surgeries are a good idea. A few excerpts:

When the practice of sex-change surgery first emerged back in the early 1970s, I would often remind its advocating psychiatrists that with other patients, alcoholics in particular, they would quote the Serenity Prayer, "God, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." Where did they get the idea that our sexual identity ("gender" was the term they preferred) as men or women was in the category of things that could be changed?

Their regular response was to show me their patients. Men (and until recently they were all men) with whom I spoke before their surgery would tell me that their bodies and sexual identities were at variance. Those I met after surgery would tell me that the surgery and hormone treatments that had made them "women" had also made them happy and contented. None of these encounters were persuasive, however. The post-surgical subjects struck me as caricatures of women. They wore high heels, copious makeup, and flamboyant clothing; they spoke about how they found themselves able to give vent to their natural inclinations for peace, domesticity, and gentleness—but their large hands, prominent Adam's apples, and thick facial features were incongruous (and would become more so as they aged). Women psychiatrists whom I sent to talk with them would intuitively see through the disguise and the exaggerated postures. "Gals know gals," one said to me, "and that's a guy."

The subjects before the surgery struck me as even more strange, as they struggled to convince anyone who might influence the decision for their surgery. First, they spent an unusual amount of time thinking and talking about sex and their sexual experiences; their sexual hungers and adventures seemed to preoccupy them. Second, discussion of babies or children provoked little interest from them; indeed, they seemed indifferent to children. But third, and most remarkable, many of these men-who-claimed-to-be-women reported that they found women sexually attractive and that they saw themselves as "lesbians." When I noted to their champions that their psychological leanings seemed more like those of men than of women, I would get various replies, mostly to the effect that in making such judgments I was drawing on sexual stereotypes.

Interestingly, these observations correspond with what I observed in the evening I spent listening to a man extol his gender re-assignment surgery. He didn't want to become a women; he was aggressively insistent that he was not interested in men. But as a woman, he really fell short. I was sitting across from him, and let's just say that his inability to cross his legs in his dress made it an altogether uncomfortable evening. The point being that he simply didn't have the habits formed by growing up as a girl.

and:

The first issue was easier and required only that I encourage the ongoing research of a member of the faculty who was an accomplished student of human sexual behavior. The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jon Meyer was already developing a means of following up with adults who received sex-change operations at Hopkins in order to see how much the surgery had helped them. He found that most of the patients he tracked down some years after their surgery were contented with what they had done and that only a few regretted it. But in every other respect, they were little changed in their psychological condition. They had much the same problems with relationships, work, and emotions as before. The hope that they would emerge now from their emotional difficulties to flourish psychologically had not been fulfilled.

We saw the results as demonstrating that just as these men enjoyed cross-dressing as women before the operation so they enjoyed cross-living after it. But they were no better in their psychological integration or any easier to live with. With these facts in hand I concluded that Hopkins was fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness. We psychiatrists, I thought, would do better to concentrate on trying to fix their minds and not their genitalia.

And:

Having looked at the Reiner and Meyer studies, we in the Johns Hopkins Psychiatry Department eventually concluded that human sexual identity is mostly built into our constitution by the genes we inherit and the embryogenesis we undergo. Male hormones sexualize the brain and the mind. Sexual dysphoria—a sense of disquiet in one's sexual role—naturally occurs amongst those rare males who are raised as females in an effort to correct an infantile genital structural problem. A seemingly similar disquiet can be socially induced in apparently constitutionally normal males, in association with (and presumably prompted by) serious behavioral aberrations, amongst which are conflicted homosexual orientations and the remarkable male deviation now called autogynephilia.

Quite clearly, then, we psychiatrists should work to discourage those adults who seek surgical sex reassignment. When Hopkins announced that it would stop doing these procedures in adults with sexual dysphoria, many other hospitals followed suit, but some medical centers still carry out this surgery. Thailand has several centers that do the surgery "no questions asked" for anyone with the money to pay for it and the means to travel to Thailand. I am disappointed but not surprised by this, given that some surgeons and medical centers can be persuaded to carry out almost any kind of surgery when pressed by patients with sexual deviations, especially if those patients find a psychiatrist to vouch for them. The most astonishing example is the surgeon in England who is prepared to amputate the legs of patients who claim to find sexual excitement in gazing at and exhibiting stumps of amputated legs. At any rate, we at Hopkins hold that official psychiatry has good evidence to argue against this kind of treatment and should begin to close down the practice everywhere.

Also, according to this site, suicide plagues even those who seem to have succesfully transitioned to their new gender.

I can well imagine that disability law may protect those who suffer from this psychological problem - and those for whom gender re-assignment is medically necessary on account of developmental issues, but that is a far cry from recognizing "transexuality" as a "sex."

Like Banquo's Ghost at the Feast, the issue that no one talks about in discussing "homosexual marriage"...

...is whether whether homosexuals really want what marriage means in anything but the title.

The ideal of marriage has traditionally been a life-long, companionate, monogamous relationship oriented toward the generation and rearing of children.  Monogamy has always been a sine qua non of the "western way" of marriage, and that seems like a good thing.  One reason is that human beings have this habit called "jealousy," where if more than two people are in a relationship, then the goods of the relationship may not be divided equally or equitably, which makes the loser resentful.

The traditional way of dealing with the jealousy problem has been to rule it out from the beginning - i.e., monogamy - or to give the power in the relationship to men and leave women powerless to make good on their resentment, e.g., polygamy.

One of the buried issues in homosexual marriages is whether the Western approach can work in such marriages. There is a long tradition of socio-biological research that asserts that men are not by nature monogamists because the male reproductive strategy enables a single man to father a lot of children and then move on.  Women, it seems, are sociobiologically conditioned to monogamy - or at least some form of long-term relationship with someone to help rear the children - because women cannot drop their "eggs" and allow the offspring to fend for themselves. Women require support during pregnancy and for a substantial period of time thereafter.

In the gay subculture, this difference is seen in the large number of partners that homosexuals tend to have. Gays are the ultimate "love and leave them" swingers.

Homosexual marriage runs counter to that ethos.  So, it's not surprising that an emerging issue in the gay culture is how to coordinate the idea of monogamy in marriage with the "swinging" ethos of the homosexual culture.

It's also not surprising to find that monogamy loses in this encounter.  Read this thoughtful peace in The Advocate - The Gay Male Couples Guide to Non-monogamy.  The purpose of the piece is to counsel gay couples to openly discuss the desire for "open marriages" and to be honest with the desire.  As with any relationship, it seems that there are winners and losers, as the article acknowledges that one person in the relationship may be hurt by infidelity.

All in all, the article seems like a temperate, judicious discussion of how to do something really ridiculous, like sawing off one's foot.  Can you imagine a "woman's magazine" giving this advice? 

I can imagine a male-oriented magazine running this kind of article, but my reaction would be "unreal" and "what pigs."

So, here is the thing: if we are redefining marriage, then why can't we redefine what marriage means in terms of fidelity.  If the culture accepts "open marriages" as one approach to marriage, then doesn't that require that everyone discuss open marriage as one of the options on the table?  Does not discussing that subject open up the possibility for the claim that silence betokens consent?  What happens if someone changes thier mind later in the marriage?

And is it worth opening up this can of worms in order to satisfy a couple of hundred men at the expense of the 99.99999999% of women who simply want to assume that marrage means monogamy?

That's not to say that heterosexual males are always sterling examples of monogamy.  As the kerfuffle over Newt Gingrich's request to his second wife for an "open marriage" indicates, assuming the claim is true, then Newt is a pig, and probably shouldn't be trusted with such a major responsibility as the Presidency.

But that underscores the point about jealousy and the normative value of monogamy in a marriage. We all instinctively feel that Marianne Gingrich was well within her rights to say "no" and that - assuming that the allegation is true - Newt was a pig.  We also feel that Marianne was somehow wronged and that she was justified in defending her marriage, which didn't include sharing Newt with Callista.

Pushing Back.

Cardinal defends comparing gay parade organizers to Ku Klux Klan.

Setting off a new round in his dispute with gay right activists, Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George has issued a statement defending his recent comparison of the gay rights movement to the Ku Klux Klan.


George’s initial comments came in connection with a controversy over whether next summer’s gay pride parade would interrupt morning services at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in the Lakeview neighborhood.

That dispute was resolved last week, but the cardinal’s KKK comparison – and his new explanation of those comments – have kept the controversy boiling.

“Organizers (of the pride parade) invited an obvious comparison to other groups who have historically attempted to stifle the religious freedom of the Catholic Church,” the cardinal said in a statement issued Tuesday. “One such organization is the Ku Klux Klan which, well into the 1940s, paraded through American cities not only to interfere with Catholic worship but also to demonstrate that Catholics stand outside of the American consensus. It is not a precedent anyone should want to emulate.”

It sounds like there was a scheduling conflict that was worked out, but the organizers of the parade need to keep in mind that they need to pay attention to the concerns of other groups.

Been there, done that...

...learned to keep my mouth shut when the teacher was a self-righteous leftist bigot.

Economics teacher bullies Catholic student over homosexuality:

A teacher's decision to promote homosexuality in class rather than teach the approved economics curriculum – and the school district's endorsement of that – soon will be hitting the court docket, as a complaint has been filed by a student subjected to the instructor's "bullying."

Officials with the Thomas More Law Center say they have filed a federal lawsuit against the Howell Public School District in Howell, Mich., and teacher Johnson "Jay" McDowell for punishing and humiliating a student after he responded to McDowell's question about homosexuality with his biblically based perspective.

The case developed, according to the complaint, when McDowell told a student to remove a Confederate flag belt buckle because he was offended by it. Daniel Glowacki, a junior, pointed out the obvious hypocrisy: that the teacher can promote a message that might be offensive to students, but students can't wear clothing that expresses a message that is offensive to the teacher.

The teacher, the head of the school's organized labor union for instructors, asked Glowacki specifically about his feelings on homosexuality, and the student responded that as a Catholic he was offended by the lifestyle choice.

The teacher then ordered Glowacki to leave the classroom under threat of suspension, the complaint states.

Homosexual activists jumped into the fray, hailing McDowell as a hero and blasting Glowacki and his family as "bigots," the law center explains. They called Glowacki's religious beliefs "hate."

"National lesbian TV host Ellen DeGeneres got in on the anti-Glowacki campaign. Daniel even became the subject of a school assembly," the organization reported.

It happened on Oct. 20, 2010, the day McDowell wore a purple homosexual-advocacy "Tyler's Army" T-shirt as part of a campaign promoted by homosexuals to highlight alleged "bullying" of homosexuals.

McDowell went even further to eradicate Christian beliefs from his classroom, asking the rest of the class members after Glowacki was ordered to leave whether they accepted homosexuality, the law center reported. Another student raised his hand and also was ordered out of the classroom.

"In this case, the teacher became the bully, and the students who opposed his homosexual agenda became his victims," the center reported.

Officials with the school district, run by Supt. R.C. Wilson, did not respond to WND's request for comment.

"Rather than teach academic courses that day, McDowell decided to spend the entire day promoting this national pro-homosexual agenda, which included showing his classes a video concerning such 'bullying,'" the law center said.

The lawsuit alleges violations by McDowell and the school of Glowacki's constitutional rights to freedom of speech and equal protection.

Robert Muise, the senior trial counsel handling the case, said, "Homosexual activists, with the willing and complicit support of public school districts and teachers' unions throughout the country, are using our public schools to foist their destructive agenda on our children, thereby creating a hostile learning environment for those students who oppose this agenda on religious and moral grounds. This case is just one example of the pernicious effect these activists are having on our students and in our community. We intend to stop it."

The center's report said, "The school district has promoted the concept that religious opposition to homosexuality is equivalent to bullying, hate speech, and homophobia in order to eradicate such opposition."

Here is the relevant Thomas More website page.

More here.

And here is a copy of the Section 1983 Complaint filed on behalf of Sandra Glowacki, the mother of the minor Glowackis.

President Obama and the Homosexual Agenda.

In case you were fooled by his dissembling, he's in favor of it.

The full text of Obama's speech to the HRC Dinner includes:

I vowed to keep up the fight against the so-called Defense of Marriage Act. There’s a bill to repeal this discriminatory law in Congress, and I want to see that passed. But until we reach that day, my administration is no longer defending DOMA in the courts. I believe the law runs counter to the Constitution, and it’s time for it to end once and for all. It should join “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the history books. (Applause.)

Gosh, it seems like only three years ago, in a debate with McCain, that Obama told us he was against homosexual marriage.

And then there is this:

We don’t believe in a small America. We don’t believe in the kind of smallness that says it’s okay for a stage full of political leaders — one of whom could end up being the President of the United States — being silent when an American soldier is booed. (Applause.) We don’t believe in that. We don’t believe in standing silent when that happens. (Applause.) We don’t believe in them being silent since. (Applause.) You want to be Commander-in-Chief? You can start by standing up for the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States, even when it’s not politically convenient. (Applause.)

The problem is that this last claim is an utter and total fabrication as Ann Althouse documents.

The meme is false, as explained here. There is a contagious lie and the President — he who often speaks of transcending divisiveness — is enthusiastically spreading it... while — ironically! — posing in the mantle of oneness, E pluribus unum. The crowd goes wild, by the way. Listen to the audio (at the link). They find the infected red meat scrumptious! And can you blame the poor man? He must serve something to the assembled hungry masses, and this — this! — is the best he's got.


And what does "We don't believe in them being silent since" mean? It's not a transcription error. I've checked the audio. Did he misread the TelePrompTer? There's no simple fix, like combining it with the next line, "You want to be Commander-in-Chief?" The pronouns don't match up. But the crowd loves it. This gibberish is quite delicious!

Here is Althouse's post on the claimed booing.

I have listened to the video several times, and I stand by my perception that only one person audibly yells "boo."


I hear a loud "boo," then a difficult to decipher noise — which could be an ugh response to the booer — and then a little more of a boo, which sounds like the original guy.

ADDED: From Jim Geraghty (who faults Rick Santorum for failing to thank the soldier for his service):

Sarah Rumpf, who was in attendance, writes:

... There was audible booing after his question . . . however, please note that it was not the crowd booing. It was only one or two people.

I was at the debate, in the audience on the right hand side about halfway back... The person who booed was just a few rows in front of us. The booing got an immediate and angry reaction from nearly everyone sitting around him, who hissed and shushed at him. Lots of loud gasps, “Shhhh!” “No!” “Shut up, you idiot!” etc.

See, that's my point. The sound after the loud boo was not more booing or any negativity directed at the soldier. It was hostility to the booer.

Also, Santorum says: "I did not hear those boos . . . If I had, I would have said, 'Don’t do that, that man is serving his country and we ought to thank him for his service.'" As I said in my original post on the subject, these inferences about how the candidates responded to the audience "assumes they hear the sounds and can immediately correctly interpret whether it's an approval or disapproval sound and what it refers to."

In fact, if Rumpf is correct, most of the people watching at home were failing to correctly interpret the sounds they heard. If only one guy booed, and all the other voices were people trying to shush him, and the candidate had launched into some righteous chastising of the the audience, it would have opened that candidate to criticism about how he assumed the people were intolerant and ungrateful.

So, the post-partisan President is attempting to stir up hatred with calumny.

Not surprising.