The ACLU

What position did they take on Terri Shiavo? I'll just take a guess, it was not on the side of the rights of the disabled and so on because the ACLU's agenda seems to be much more proto-Nazi or socialist. Their talk of "civil rights" is an increasingly thin mask of their agenda in which the judiciary would become an oligarchy to make all your discriminations for you, guided by none other than the ACLU. Their alliance has grown closer and closer, with the ACLU and the judiciary working hand in hand.

"If you went down the list of controversial constitutional decisions of the last forty years - on abortion, criminal procedure, busing, prayer in schools, aid to religious schools, pornography, discrimination on the basis of sex, alienage and illegitimacy, vagrancy control, street demonstrations, and so on almost endlessly - you could not fail to be struckby the fact that in every case the Court's decision adopted and enacted the position of the ACLU. The ACLU opposes prayer in the schools; the Supreme Courtholds prayer in the schools unconstitutional. The ACLU opposes restricting the availability of pornography; the Supreme Court holds most restrictions on the availability of pornography unconstitutional. The ACLU favors busing for school racial balance, the Supreme Court holds that the Constitution requires busing for school racial balance. Isn't the coincidence amazing? Indeed, one could sum up the situation in a word by saying that constitutional law is simply a device for the enactment of the ACLU's policy agenda."
(Syracuse Law Review
Syracuse L. Rev. 631
ESSAY: CONSTITUTIONALINTERPRETATION
By Lino A. Graglia)

"It would be only a small exaggeration to say that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the paladin of far-left causes and paradigmatic constitutional litigator of our time, never loses in the Supreme Court, even though it does not always win. It either obtains from the Court a policy choice it cannot obtain in any other way because opposed by a majority of the American people--for example, the removal of restrictions on pornography or the prohibition of prayer and Bible reading in public schools --or it is left where it was to try again on another day. It took three tries for the ACLU position on contraception, for example, finally to prevail in 1965 in Griswold v. Connecticut, the progenitor of Roe v. Wade.
.....
The Court functions today primarily as the mirror and mouth piece of liberal academia, especially legal academia, and the enacting arm of the ACLU. The nightmare of the American intellectual is that policymaking should fall into the hands of the American people. The American people favor capital punishment, effective enforcement of the criminal law, prayer in the schools, suppression of pornography, restrictions on abortion, and the assignment of children to their neighborhood schools, all anathema to our intellectual elite. It is only the power of the Supreme Court to create constitutional law that prevents these unenlightened views from prevailing. Policymaking by a committeeof nine lawyers with no particular training or expertise relevant to the issues they decide is far from ideal in the view of academia--policymaking by sociologists, anthropologists, and moral philosophers would surely be better-but it is the only available alternative in America togovernment by the people. The self-assigned primary functionof constitutional law professors, therefore, overwhelmingly far to the left of the American people, is to defend and support what the Supreme Court has done and see that this particular system of government continues.
Defenders of the Supreme Court's decision making of the past four decades are, however, faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, it is not possible in the American context for them to come clean and openly defend a system of totally centralized and totally undemocratic government by majority vote of nine unelected lawyers. The only reason this system of government is favored is that it has overwhelmingly pushed and can be relied on to continue to push policy choices to the left, hardly a reason that can be publicly offered in its defense. On the other hand, it has become increasingly difficult to defend with a straight face the Court's rulings of unconstitutionality as the unavoidable dictates of theConstitution--the only ground generally recognized as legitimate. Even the least sophisticated observer must be aware by now that this is not the case; indeed, it is only the most sophisticated who claim to believe otherwise.
The result has been the creation of a law school industry in the production of "constitutional theory."
.....
The task of justifying the Supreme Court's controversial rulings of unconstitutionality to a nation still purportedly committed to representative self-government in a federalist system is not merely difficult, however, but impossible. It is to be hoped that the increasingly apparent deleterious effects of the Court's remaking of our society will ultimately convince the American people that government by judges is not an improvementon the constitutional scheme--that our four-decade experiment in policymaking by the Supreme Court has been a failure. Nothing is more important to our political health and our continued freedom and prosperity than that the American people reassert their most precious and fundamental right--the right of self-government--and find a means to make the reassertion effective."
(Georgia State University Law Review July, 1998
14 Ga. St. U.L. Rev. 767
SYMPOSIUM: Judicial Review and Judicial Independence:
CONSTITUTIONAL LAW: A RUSE FOR GOVERNMENT BY AN INTELLECTUAL ELITE
By Lino A. Graglia)

The ACLU does not protect all controversial speech, perhaps they are too busy defending NAMBLA. (If history is any measure, that did not happen as a random quirk of principle. Given history, there may be pederasts supporting their interests through the ACLU.)

The controversial speech the ACLU fails to protect while protecting NAMBLA:
"In Oakland, California, two anti-abortion protesters were arrested and charged with child pornography for displaying a picture of aborted fetuses. A trial court in New York, until reversed, enjoined anti-abortion protesters from using the terms "murder"and "kill." The Washington Supreme Court upheld an injunction against pro-life protesters carrying signs or otherwise referring to abortionists as "killers" or "murderers" on the ground that such restriction of free speech was necessary to protect any children who might be in the area. Likewise, Denver police arrested two abortion protesters for carrying a sign saying "THE KILLING PLACE." In Milwaukee, a pastor was cited for disorderly conduct for displaying a banner that read: ""Abortion: The Silent Holocaust.'" In Vermont, a pastor was charged with a felony for distributing literature criticizing a judge's pro-choice ruling, and a local printer was charged with violating a Vermont anti-discrimination law for refusing to print pro-abortion material. Contempt findings were issued against anti-abortion protesters who entered a buffer zone created by a court injunction even though the arrested protesters were not named in the injunction. Such blatant disregard for the right to protest would not be tolerated if the protesters were expressing opposition to a war, or to experimentation on animals, or even if they were expressing opposition to democracy or support for racism or totalitarianism. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) would have run to the rescue, press releases blazing. But the suppression of pro-life free speech has been met with nearly total silence of virtually all First Amendment advocacy organizations."
(Albany Law Review 1999
62 Alb. L. Rev. 853
ARTICLE: THE QUANDARY OF PRO-LIFE FREESPEECH:
A LESSON FROM THE ABOLITIONISTS
By Lynn D. Wardle)

An example of the sort of censorship that was practiced against the abolitionists.

Judicial diktat , slavery and the abolitionist view.

Drawing together the parallels again:
(2002 51 DePaul L. Rev. 825
DOUBLE STANDARDS: THE SUPPRESSION OF ABORTION PROTESTERS' FREE SPEECH RIGHTS
By Christopher P. Keleher)

Left2Right....

Same place that brought you the parasitic vampire babies.

"....pregnancy too involves blood, gore and indeed something like a parasitical relationship. Embryos, fetuses and babies do not neutrally reside in their mothers' bodies, but actively draw from them. .....it seems to me that we treat mothers' bodies especially lightly, as if pregnancy did not suck anyone's blood."(Link)

Now they are reconciling other difficulties in dealing with babies, those little suckers! Mothers, they may vant to drink your milk too!

Onward and upward,
". . . Prenatal injury raises issues quite different from those raised by abortion because nothing about the morality of inflicting prenatal injury hinges on the controversial matter of the moral status of the fetus. This is because the real victim of prenatal injury is not the fetus but the person into whom the fetus, if it survives, will develop." (Link)

They are "real victims" but aborted babies are fake victims, I suppose. The thing to remember about liberals and their victimization scripts is this, they are always working to define their Victims.

Say there was a gay gene (or if more people figured out the strong association between intersexuality and homosexuality, duh!) and people began to practice selected abortions against Gays© in the womb because they didn't want Gay© (Many do not, based on no hope of a heritage of grandkids, gay problems, etc.). In that case, I suspect that liberals would contort themselves in various contradictions to argue that such abortions are wrong because Gay© fits their victimization scripts.

Gay© = Victim

Most liberals have been taught that very well, and conditioned some too. So they will have their feelings about it.

In contrast, the average baby that is aborted seems to have no place in the victimization scripts that liberals believe in.

The mystical attitude of the social Left toward the Judiciary

Recall,
"Deconstruction demystifies the liberal faith. . . .exposing its vulnerability to the same critique it makes of more traditional forms of religious faith. The sacred scripture, the Constitution, is indeterminate. The spiritual intermediaries, judges, are tainted by personal bias, and the body of religious literature, constitutional decisions, protects the status quo. . . ."

Compare the attitudes of social Leftists on a current issue that involves the Judiciary.

"If we are going to let her die -- and I'll trust the opinion of the six courts that we should...."
Culture Wars

"Multiple courts have heard testimony...."

So he goes along with them.

In contrast to such bowing and scraping before the blessed Judiciary,
"Congress is engaged in shameless grandstanding...."

And supposedly they contradict themselves because they complain of the Judiciary overstepping itself more and more....
"....yet here they are frantically trying to get the federal courts to intervene where they have no authority."

Wrong, how silly that is.

Here one sees just how a mystic pseudo-religious belief in the gnostic power of the Judiciary can blind a social Leftist. This was the same sort of issue with Scalia and a failure to understand Scalia's challenge to the liberal faith. It's quite simple, the legislature is that which gives the federal judiciary the power it has, the power to intervene.

In contrast, according to what seems to be some modern form of mystical gnosticism, the Courts can give themselves power whenever they feel like emitting a penumbra or two. That type of liberal faith based on judicial diktat seems to be why the social Leftist does not understand much more than, "The Courts say, so I obey!"

The liberal faith is in need of deconstruction.

______
Side note, same site:
"If you want to take the position that as long as the parents are willing to take on the responsibility of her care, there's no harm in allowing her to stay on the machines..."

She is not "...on the machines." Sheesh, that little fellow seems to understand everything by a combination of "...the courts, the courts!" and his own personal experience. So if his family had to pull a comatose body off of life support then most every case is just like that one. If he knew a nice Gay© , then SSM ought to be legal. It seems if you mix in "...the courts, the courts!" with his personal experience, that's pretty much all he has to say.

Archive...

"Most of the rules of the law of holiness relate to the basic categories of the natural world and of human experience. Such categories as the living and the dead; mortal and divine; human and animal; air, sea, and land; male and female; past, present, and future are common to most peoples. They provide a framework of basic “natural” categories that render the universe meaningful. What is peculiar to the Jewish people is that these natural categories are also moral categories and anything that is ambiguous or threatens to blur the boundaries of these categories is treated as abominable. Hence the ban on the consumption of shellfish, which are not fully sea creatures or land creatures but live on the littoral margin of each, or on the eating of flightless birds, which do not belong properly to the air as birds should and yet are not proper land animals either (Douglas 1970, pp. 54—72). There is a similar explanation for the rules relating to the slaughter of animals for food which insist that the blood (the life) must be removed from the meat (dead and hence consumable) before it is eaten (Lev.17:10—14).

We can see also why sorcery, necromancy, and witchcraft are forbidden (Ex. 22:18; Lev. 12:26—27, 20:6—7; Deut. 18:9—15; 1 Sam. 15:23, 28:7— 20; 2 Chron. 33:6) and why “any man or woman among you who calls up ghosts and spirits shall be put to death” (Lev. 20:27). Such people are dangerous because they break down the division between the living and the dead or between the present and the future (Is. 8: 19—2 2, 47: 13—15).

The book of Leviticus makes explicit a central moral distinction that runs throughout the Old Testament—the Jews must either live in a world of carefully separated discrete categories (i.e., remain a people with a distinct identity) or face a world of utter confusion (Douglas 1970, p. 67; Davies 1975, p. 97). The biblical account of the creation involves the resolution of the world into clear categories from primeval confusion (Gen. 1: 1—19) , and the flood represents the return of that confusion as the separation of the land from the sea is eliminated. The building of the tower of Babel, an impious attempt to join together the separate categories of heaven and earth, is punished by the infliction of confusion on its builders, the beginning of the mutual unintelligibility of men’s various languages (Gen. 11:1— 9), an unintelligibility removable only by the divine gift of tongues (Acts 2:2—12).

It is now possible to provide a complete explanation for the harsh treatment of homosexuality, bestiality, and transvestism in the scriptures. These are all forms of sexual behavior which break down the boundaries between some of the most fundamental categories of human experience—the categories of male and female and human and animal. This is why homo sexuality and bestiality are condemned in Leviticus and why in Deuteronomy God tells the people of Israel through his prophet Moses: “No woman shall wear an article of man’s clothing, nor shall a man put on a woman’s dress; for those who do these things are abominable to the Lord your God” (Deut. 22:5).

It is easy to see how transvestites break down the categories of male and female, but the situation is slightly more complicated in the case of homosexuality. The essential point to grasp is that “male” and “female” are complementary categories, each defined in relation to the other. The male is by definition complementary to the female and only remains male so long as his sexual behavior relates exclusively to females. Any sexual behavior directed by a biological male toward another male will (at any rate so far as the scriptures are concerned) automatically place him in the same cat egory as a female, for whom this is the normal sexual orientation.
Because homosexual behavior involves a person placing himself or her self in the wrong sex category it erodes the boundary between these cat egories. This is why homosexual behavior is linked in Leviticus with bestiality, a sexual practice which breaks down the division between the equally fundamental categories of the human and the animal (see also Epstein 1948, p. 135)."
(Sexual Taboos and Social Boundaries
By Christie Davies
American Journal of Sociology,Vol. 87,
No.5, Mar., 1982 :1032-1063)

Arguments from the Left...

Typically they will begin to make some scripts in which they are Victims. That is where if one attacks what they are saying then you are attacking, "Who they are." It is rather simple. It seems that all you need to do is to throw yourself, personally, in front of whatever views you hold in order to claim some personal hatred or intolerance on the part of any who would dare disagree with you. This type of argument is typical to the social Left.

It also works backwards, the shifting or blurring of what to who.

Some of its form,
"Despite its logical untenability, the genealogical method holds a great attraction for Foucault and his followers. In debates with their opponents, especially if the opponent is a 'positivist' or a 'piecemeal empiricist,' they hold what they believe is an unassailable position by focusing on who is speaking rather than on what is being said. They use the genealogical method to absolve themselves of the need to examine the content of any statement. All they see the need to do is examine the conditions of its production--not 'is it true?' but 'who made the statement and for what reason?'. This is a tactic that is well known in Marxist circles where, to refute a speaker, one simply identifies his class position and ignores what he actually says."
(The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and
Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past
By Keith Windschuttle (The Free Press. NY.) (1997) :132)

Religion, and the Separation of Church and State...

It is important to remember that it has always been debated. Yet not in the atheistic or pagan sense in which religion is to be extirpated from public life for forms of atheistic or pagan Nature based belief systems to take its place.

Some of the religious rationales on the side of separation,
". . . .Backus and other Baptist leaders agreed with their clerical adversaries in believing that religion was necessary for social prosperity and happiness but they believed that the best way for the state to assure the health of religion was to leave it alone and let it take its own course, which, the Baptists were convinced, would result in vital, evangelical religion covering the land."cf. The Library of Congress


It's debatable whether he was right. It ought to be noted that Christianity contains within it the notion of separation based on religious rationales, including freedom of Conscience. In contrast, there is no space for free-will and freedom of Conscience in Naturalism.

Virtually none of the Founders or anyone in American culture at the time that the founding documents were written would agree with the sort of advocacy that comes from the ACLU, an advocacy that is supposedly based on such documents. Their type of advocacy is typically for separation for the sake of socialist extirpation.And after all, the ACLU was founded by Communists, as I recall.

This is the socialist attitude toward religion:
"We want to sweep away everything that claims to be supernatural or superhuman, for the root of all untruth and lying is the pretension of the human and the natural to be superhuman and supernatural. For that reason we have once and for all declared war on religion and religious ideas . . . "
(Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 6, :103)

"It is often suggested that we have no ethics of our own; very often the bourgeoisie accuse us Communists of rejecting all morality. This is a method of confusing the issue, of throwing dust in the eyes of workers and peasants.In what sense do we reject ethics, reject morality? In the sense given to it by the bourgeoisie, who based ethics on God's commandments. On this point we, of course, say that we do not believe in God. . . .We reject any morality based on extra-human and extra-class concepts."
(Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 31, p. 291)

"Every religious idea, every idea of God, even flirting with the idea of God, is unutterable vileness . . . .vileness of themost dangerous kind, 'contagion' of the most abominable kind. Millions of sins, filthy deeds, acts of violence and physical contagions . . . are far less dangerousthan the subtle, spiritual idea of a God . . ."
(Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 15, p. 402)

"We must combat religion, that is the ABC of . . . Marxism." --Lenin

"The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion." --Marx

The Bill of Rights

Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Scalia...

Scalia says,

"And that, of course, deprives the constitution of its principle utility. The bill of rights is meant to protect you and me against - who do you think? - the majority. My most important function on the Supreme Court is to tell the majority to take a walk."

To which Ed says,

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't this at odds with his often stated majoritarian views? During the oral argument in last week's Texas ten commandments case, he argued that the majority has a right to have government endorse its religious views at least to the extent of putting up monuments to them. He has famously said that if the the majority wants abortion to be legal, it should remain legal as long as it is done through the legislature rather than the judiciary.

Ed is missing something, something he seems to have a tendency to miss....text. Perhaps because it is not all thing, still not just nothing, yet still quite something. It seems that Naturalists do not really understand it, or have the eyes to see it. They try to say that much of it lacks "substance" and so on. The social Left tends to focus on Scalia and can only see Scalia and fail to see the principled nature of Scalia's position. Scalia is talking from within the context of his veneration of text. In that context it is his most important duty to tell the majority to "take a walk" if they are going against the text. That is the appropriate time to go against legislative majorities, not on a whim, feeling or a want as the social Left feeeels.

They cannot seem to see that it is the same textual principle that upholds both Scalia's anti-majority and pro-majority positions. They seem to feel, "Hey, he was anti-majority here. So that must mean that he personally hates the majority! But wait a minute, wasn't he pro-majority over there? And doesn't that mean he just loooves, loves the majority? He's contradicting himself!"

They have an odd view of Self. That is why they will try tell you what your feely feelings are instead of looking at textual facts, logic and evidence. You are hating....or you are tolerant and loving. Etc. Their typical argument when they get upset looks like the Jerry Springer show, "Don't be hatin'!" or "You just jealous!" That really has nothing to do with anything as a matter of principle. Although it seems to make them happy to believe such, or to at least let them avoid some cognitive dissonance. But there is a difference between mere perceptual feelings and conceptual principles that existentialists do not seem to be aware of. Existence without essence can be a deathly silence, just try thinking without words.

Ed goes on,

Here he appears to be saying that in any situation where the constitution does not explicitly state that the minority has a specific right, the majority may do as it pleases. Indeed, in this same article he was quoted as saying, "(T)hat's why we have a Bill of Rights. We set them forth in the Bill of Rights. But that is the limit of them, and I do not make up other ones." But this ignores the 9th amendment and the entire concept of unenumerated rights.

The Ninth Amendment states that "the enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Ed seems to be working from within the existentialist assumption of a liberal sort of faith. So if the Constitution says that rights by nature reside in the people he inverts that to something like, "Rights are granted by the Judiciary to the people through their gnostic occult interpretive abilities!"

Etc....it is not as if you can understand the text that they "interpret" in mystical ways. So you had best leave it to the social Left to make all your discriminations for you.

As they say,
"Like the character of an individual, the legitimacy of the Court must be earned over time. So, indeed, must be the character of a Nation of people who aspire to live according to the rule of law. Their belief in themselves as such a people is not readily separable from their understanding of the Court invested with the authority to decide their constitutional cases and speak before all others for their constitutional ideals."(112 S. Ct. 2816 (1992) (emphasis added) Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey)

The Ninth Amendment...what is retained by the people in the schemes of these modern gnostics with their supposed mystical interpretive abilities? The notion that any ideal or right is retained by the people does not make sense given the notions of textual degenerates who would make all your discriminations for you. The Court was meant to be limited by the very document that it now purports to control and define "....before all others..." yet these new politicians now that they must not work to distort text too much or too fast and in so doing have people become aware of their fundamental textual illegitimacy. Jefferson noted that the Constitution would become a "...thing of wax..." if the philosophy of the social Left is adhered to.

He was right and the social Left within the Judiciary has been making it up as it goes along for quite a while now. As it does so it leaves a morass of contradictory decisions and moral degeneracy in its wake. The moral degenerate is the textual degenerate.

Ed does not seem to have the eyes to see that, as the result of his adherence to Naturalism. But others have and note the results,
"To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy."
(Letter from Thomas Jefferson to William Charles Jarvis (Sept. 28,1820) in 15 The Writings of Thomas Jefferson 276, 277(Andrew A. Lipscomb & Albert Ellery Bergh eds., 1904)

It is quite a contrast to what the modern Judiciary writes in its decisions.

Archive...

"Anthony Cook characterizes liberalism as 'a different kind of religion, with its own presuppositions of faith' that conceives of the autonomous rational individual as its own god, pursuing her own perception of good ratherthan a presupposed common good reflecting the will of a transcendent God.

He argues that:

Deconstruction demystifies the liberal faith. . . .exposing its vulnerability to the same critique it makes of more traditional forms of religious faith. The sacred scripture, the Constitution, is indeterminate. The spiritual intermediaries, judges, are tainted by personal bias, and the body of religious literature, constitutional decisions, protects the status quo. . . .

Deconstruction permits us to see liberalism as but another way of understanding the world. . . . The hope is that by deflating liberalism of its pretensions of superiority to religious discourse, the playing field is leveled and the way prepared for a more genuine dialogue between these competing attempts to discern life's purpose and to imbue our lives with meaning.

The structural bias that liberalism has erected to the use of religious knowledge in public and legal discourse does not alter the fact that theological norms are even more useful and fundamental to our understanding of desegregation theory and racial justice in general, than the thoroughly deconstructed and indeterminate norms of liberalism."
(The Journal of Gender, Race & Justice
Spring, 1992, 315
Transformative Desegregation: Liberating
Hearts and Minds
By Wendy Brown Scott)

Aristocracy?

I suspect that a type of populist rhetoric against "the rich" from the Left masks an envy of what John Adams called the natural aristocracy. There are sound reasons that the Founders designed a system in order to attempt to harness the best of each style of government by putting each in opposition to each other. So that each may refine and define the other forms the system has an element of monarchy (Presidency), an element of representative democracy (House of Representatives) and an element of aristocracy (Senate).

As John Adams argued you cannot deny a natural aristocracy because men are not equals in talent. E.g.,
"Although, among men, all are subject by nature to equal laws of morality, and in society have a right to equal laws for their government, yet no two men are perfectly equal in person, property, understanding, activity, and virtue, or ever can be made so by any power less than that which created them. . . ."

Adams was largely responsible for the notion of checks and balances becoming nothing more than a taken for granted truism of American politics today. This combined with a dread of any form of unmixed government was based on a vast amount of study and knowledge leading to the conclusion that each branch of power has ". . . an unalterable foundation in nature; that they exist in every society natural and artificial; and that if all of them are not acknowledged in any constitution ofgovernment, it would be found to be imperfect, unstable and soon enslaved....."

Cicero noted of the purely democratic mobocracy,
"Plato says that from the exaggerated license which people call liberty, tyrants spring up as from a root. . .and that at last such liberty reduces a nation to slavery. Everything in excess is changed into its opposite. . .
For out of such an ungoverned populace one is usually chosen as a leader. . .someone bold and unscrupulous. . .who curries favor with the people by giving them other men's property. To such a man. . . .the protection of public office is given, and continually renewed. He. . .emerges as a tyrantover the very people who raised him to power."
--Cicero (De republica, i, 2.)

Tocqueville notes,
"While you preserve your aristocracy, you will preserve your freedom. If that goes, you are in danger of falling into the worst of tyrannies--that of a despot appointed and controlled, if controlled at all, by the mob."

It is the democratic populism when taken as some sort of moral good per se that is a radical notion. It was typical to the old radical leftists of Jacobin tradition ever since theFrench Revolution. That was the sort of revolution that the American Founders disdained. They knew that the uncivil barbarity inherent in the uncivilized philosophy behind socialism is soon made manifest.

Bias, same issue...

"[Biased] stories [on HIV] were scaring the hell out of millions of Americans. In the beginning, it probably couldn’t be helped. Maybe AIDS really would start to spread among heterosexuals, through sex, from one to another to another and on and on. In the early days, I interviewed “experts” who told me exactly that—and I put it on the air. Who knew?

But after the virus was around for a while, I started to wonder: where are all these straight Americans with AIDS? I didn’t know any. My friends and neighbors didn’t know any. I had read about two brothers with hemophilia who lived in my area and who died of AIDS because the clotting factor they used to control bleeding was infected with HIV. But where was this epidemic I kept reading about in the newspapers and hearing about on the television news?

There was no escaping the fact that the news I was getting from the press and TV didn’t jibe with reality. When I read a study from the Center for Media and Public Affairs (the same research team in Washington, D.C., that had written about the real homeless versus the homeless portrayed on television), I understood why.

The center monitored network TV stories in 1992 and concluded that “TV’s visual portrait of AIDS victims has little in common with real life.” The center compared the people on TV, using only the information provided in the story, with “real-world data on AIDS victims compiled by the Centers for Disease Control”:

• During the period studied, 6 percent of the people with AIDS shown on the evening news were gay men. But in real life 58 per cent were gay men.
• On TV, 16 percent were blacks and Hispanics. But in real life 46 percent were black or Hispanic.
• On TV, 2 percent of the AIDS sufferers were IV drug users. In real life 23 percent were.

“Thus, the risk groups the news audience sees are very different from their real-world counterparts,” was the report’s conclusion.
As with the homeless, television was back in the business of prettifying reality. Make the victims look more like you and me, and maybe we can drum up some support for their cause while we’re drumming up some support for our ratings. And unlike other ailments, like cancer and heart disease, AIDS had civil rights. “How did you get it?” was considered an uncivil question.
In 1991, when Magic Johnson told the world he had HIV, Dan Rather looked into the camera and proved once again that it was more important to be politically correct than factually correct.
“As correspondent Richard Threlkeld reports, the perception may finally be catching up with the reality. That reality is: AIDS is not, quote, ‘just a gay disease!’”
Then Threlkeld, a smart, veteran newsman, narrated, over pictures of Magic: “Magic Johnson’s just the man to educate the rest of us about AIDS. He’s not a drug user. Neither are most AIDS victims. He’s heterosexual. So are four out of ten AIDS victims these days.”
Let’s set aside some important assumptions Threlkeld casually makes about how Magic did or did not get the virus. Because the fact is, Richard Threlkeld knows nothing about how Magic Johnson got HIV.
When Threlkeld came on the air that night and reported that four out often people with AIDS are heterosexuals, I got a certain impression. My guess is so did most of the people who watched the CBS Evening News that night.
When a reporter tells you that four out of ten people with AIDS are heterosexuals, it’s reasonable to think he’s talking about straight, non-IV-drug-using Americans who are getting AIDS through sexual intercourse.

But that’s not at all what Richard Threlkeld was talking about because most of that 40 percent Threlkeld cites got the virus not simply because they were heterosexual but because they were shooting up or having unprotected sex with people who were shooting up. The other heterosexuals apparently were patients in hospitals who got transfusions tainted with HIV, hemophiiacs, maybe even “heterosexual” babies born to mothers who were HIV positive. You would have to include all those groups in order to say four out of ten HIV cases involve heterosexuals.
But what if 40 percent of the people with HIV are Protestants? Or 40 percent have brown eyes? Or 40 percent have dark hair and are under six foot two? No reporter in his right mind would tell his audience, “He’s Protestant and so are four out of ten victims these days.” Or, “He has brown eyes and so have four out often victims these days.”
Harry Stein, a good friend and author of How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right- Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace), wrote in his TV Guide column in 1994 that “AIDS is presented not just as a hideous disease, but as a gauge of our collective humanity.” That is precisely why so many reporters would not ask, “How did you get it?” It some how seemed inhumane. It seemed as if we were not sympathetic.
So when Dave Marash did his Magic Johnson story for Nightline on ABC, he said, “Our curiosity about people with AIDS has often been limited to one hostile question: How did you get it?”
Why in the world is that a hostile question? If Dave Marash did a story about lung cancer, he certainly wouldn’t consider it “hostile” to ask, “How did you get it?”—especially if he knew the answer was “Three packs of Marlboros a day for twenty-five years, Dave.” Dave, and every other reporter, would relish the opportunity to take on Big Tobacco, given the misery smoking has caused.
But AIDS is different. It’s off limits. Only AIDS is shrouded in political correctness. We might offend gays if we ask, “How did you get it?” We fear we may look uncaring and without compassion if we ask, “How did you get it?”

In 1996, Jacqueline Adams did a story for CBS News about teenagers with AIDS and reported that the problem was mainly the result of these kids having unprotected sex.
“Ten years ago, at age fourteen, Luna [Ortiz] was infected with the HIV virus, the very first time he had sex unprotected sex,” Adams reported.
Then she introduced us to a woman named Patricia Fleming, an AIDS activist, who said, “At least one American teenager is becoming infected every hour of every day.” (Six months later, in September of 1996, another CBS News reporter, Diana Olick, reported, “The number of HIV-infected teens continues to rise. Every hour two kids under the age of twenty are infected.” Two—not one! As with the homeless story the numbers keep going higher and higher until they bear no relationship whatsoever to reality. Stay tuned!)
There was one word missing from Jacqueline Adams’s story. Never, not even once, did she or any of the people she interviewed ever utter the word “gay” or “homosexual.” This is quite remarkable: a story about AIDS and unprotected sex, yet the reporter doesn’t tell us any thing about the sexual orientation of the person with HIV. [If he was fourteen it was probably something anthropologists call the "homosexual mentorship." You won't hear anything like that in the Old Press though.]
The closest anyone came was when Luna said, “I wasn’t educated about it [AIDS]. The only thing I knew was Rock Hudson died a year before.” Was that the clue that Luna was gay? I don’t know. Adams never told us.
By leaving out the crucial fact that almost all of these teenage AIDS cases involve homosexual sex or IV drugs or tainted blood, we are left with the impression that straight, middle-class heterosexual teens are being infected with HIV “every hour of every day.”
It’s simply not happening! That anyone is still contracting HIV is a tragedy of huge proportions. That the gay lobby would try to mislead us is understandable. That the media go along is disgraceful.
[. . . . .]
It’s a sad story. But sometimes I get the impression that the media that have helped spread the epidemic of fear would love to spread it just a little more. Sometimes I get the impression that they’d like to write a headline that shouts: “AIDS Epidemic Takes Toll on the Middle Class.” Then it really would be everyone’s disease. Not just the disease of junkies and gays and poor black people in the rural South. Then no one would be safe, just as the media have been telling us for so many years. And then, finally, we would all be equal.”
(Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How
the Media Distort the News (Regnery, 2002)
By Bernard Goldberg :81-84, 87)


"And then, finally, we would all be equal.”

The radical egalitarianism of the social Left is false. Yes, it is radical and it is egalitarianism. I note this for some fellows who do not seem to understand such words.

A similar public relations bias in England,
“The embarrassing truth about the government's Aids campaign is that it has failed to alter the sexual behaviour of the groups most at risk because everyone was finger-wagged, and disbelief has set in."
(The Sunday Times
July 26, 1992, Sunday
AIDS
Byline: Tom Mangold)

It seems typical in the West. In the Old Press, fear mongering sells just as well as other crass and base appeals that they make. While the politicians tend to fancy themselves as the same sort of elite as the Old Press and celebrities. Apparently, despite the fact that it is a losing issue politically there are those politicians who will stick with it because that is their type of socialite society and "gay rights" seems to be the latest pet cause for the socialites on the Left. (As Eugenics was in the past....)

Bias

I'm combining two controversial issues on the blog. It may not be a good idea. But anyway, this was a pretty good book, there is another citation from it here.

"We’ve seen how the October 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a homosexual, became a huge national news story, with the cover of Time magazine proclaiming, “The War Over Gays.” The liberal media predictably used the occasion to blame religious conservatives, calling for hate-crime laws and other items on the gay-Left agenda. But why did the national media ignore a murder that occurred less than a year later, a murder that was just as shocking as Shepard’s?

On September 26, 1999, thirteen-year-old Jesse Dirkhising died from suffocation after being bound, gagged with underwear in his mouth, blindfolded, drugged, taped to the bed, and raped with objects by one gay man while another gay man watched. In this modern media age, ratings-obsessed news programs rush to report on lurid murders of children (can you say JonBenet Ramsey?). But in this case it seems the liberal media did not dare incur the wrath of the militant gay movement by reporting a grisly murder story that had as its villains two homosexuals. Had Dirkhising been openly gay and his attackers heterosexual, you can bet the mortgage the crime would have led every network’s evening news broadcast.

The primary offender in this tale of politically correct self-censorship had to be the Associated Press. While the AP had put the story of the Shepard beating on its national wire, it sent out only local dispatches about the Dirkhising murder. Even these stories were but two-hundred-word pieces of colorless court reporting, which suggested to editors that the story could be buried deep inside the paper. Amazingly, although Dirkhising’s killers implied that the boy had died because of a “sex game” gone awry, the Associated Press never described them as gay men.

The Washington Times told the story of this horrific murder, but, all too predictably, only two other national outlets—the New York Post and Fox News Channel—picked up on the story. Fox News filed a series of reports and made the Dirkhising murder a major topic on its talk shows, but still the established media refused to touch the story. Amazingly, the liberal media saw no news in this statement from a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, the gay rights group: “This has nothing to do with gay people.” The statement was demonstrably false, but it was more shocking coming from the Human Rights Campaign, which was the same group that had led the media to the story of how “hatred” from the “Far Right” and Christian conservatives had resulted in the murder of Matthew Shepard. That propaganda campaign—which was central to the organization’s fund-raising efforts—was marked by poisonous incivility, reckless guilt by association, and ugly rhetorical excess. And yet conservatives are the extremists.

When a mainstream outlet finally deigned to cover the Dirkhising story; it was merely to defend the media’s indefensible double standard. On the Time.com website, reporter Jonathan Gregg acknowledged that the Dirkhising story “received relatively little coverage”—actually, it had at that point received no coverage on the networks, in the news-magazines, or in the biggest newspapers—”while Shepard leaves a story that will probably endure for years to come as a symbol of intol erance and lowest-common-denominator conformity;” But he quickly dismissed the notion that “we in the media elite were unwilling to publicize crimes committed by homosexuals because it didn’t suit our agenda.” Gregg argued that, “essentially, Shepard was lynched—taken from a bar, beaten and left to die because he was the vilified ‘other,’ whom society has often cast as an acceptable target of abuse; Dirkhiser [sic] was just ‘another’ to a pair of deviants.” In other words, he was saying that the victim of a “hate crime” matters much more than someone who doesn’t fit a politicized category. Then Gregg repeated the reckless claim that Shepard’s killers “dramatically reflected some of society’s darkest influences—an acceptance of the persecution of gays” and that “many in our society think that beating up gays is justifiable.” Really? Just who had suggested that the violence against gays was accept able? Just who were these “darkest influences” he cited?

Jonathan Gregg might have wanted to bury the Dirkhising story, but alternative news outlets would not let that happen so easily. In March 2001, the key figure responsible forJesse Dirkhising’s death was convicted of first-degree murder. At that point, writing in the New Republic, Andrew Sullivan pointed out the clear double standard that Gregg and others had so adamantly denied. Sullivan, an openly gay journalist, wrote, “[.....]Consider the following statistics. In the month after [....] Shepard’s murder, Nexis recorded 3,007 stories about his death. In the month after Dirkhising’s murder, Nexis recorded 46 stories about his. In all of last year, only one article about Dirkhising appeared in a major mainstream newspaper, the Boston Globe. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ignored the incident completely. In the same period, the New York Times published 45 stories about Shepard, and the Washington Post published 28. This discrepancy isn’t just real. It’s staggering.”
[.....]
The media have made it clear that they intend to cover gay rights not as a controversial issue but as a cause to be advanced. And the gay movement is relentless, pressuring an already sympathetic media at every turn. For example, Cathy Renna of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) told an October 1999 gathering, “One of the most important things you can do is have those tough conversa tions with journalists about when it is completely inappropriate to run to some radical group like the Family Research Council because of misguided notions of ‘balance.’ We have to offer them some more moderate voices, or convince them that there is no other side to these issues... . We are now in the position of being able to say, we have the high ground, we have the facts, and we don’t have to go one-on-one with these people.” Renna was shamelessly imploring the gay movement to spin the media...."
( Weapons of Mass Distortion: The Coming
Meltdown of the Liberal Media
By Brent Bozell :122-124)

Hatred?

Perhaps an explanation,
"...homophobia is just a propaganda word that gay activists use to ward off attack. It’s an epithet, a scare word that activists use to silence anyone who does not automatically accept the“normalcy” of same-sex sex. They make it sound like a disease, and it’s an effective defense strategy. If leaders of the gay rights movement can put that handle on anyone who has reasonable reservations about the gay political agenda, then they will turn the tables on critics of the movement......
The successful use of certain words, like homophobia, to advance the gay activist propaganda machine, is a triumph that many ad men would envy. But I think gay activists do this quite unwittingly.
.....
The dynamics are clear. Once they realized, as little boys, that they were different, and that they could expect a certain amount of razzing, if not persecution, for being different, they learned to fear, even hate, their tormentors. Then, such is our human propensity to think good of ourselves, they rejected the notion that they could hate anyone. “We don’t hate the straight guys,” they said. And they turned it around,and settled on the notion that the straight guys hated them. They projected their hatred on to the heteroworld, and blamed the hetero world for hating them."
(Homosexuality, A Freedom Too Far
By Charles W. Socarides M.D.
(Adam Margrave Books) (1995) :37)

Dan Rather, retiring this week...or being retired this week.

“I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.”
Dan Rather on The O'Reilly Factor, May 15, 2001

That's the type of thing that the Old Press has to say as they defend Democrats.

Huh...

I wanted to save something here. There are the self defined gays and the self defined ex-gays, the latter is an interesting perspective that is not as much just a bundle of pop-culture type memes.

"There's a general sense that something's not right, not fullfilling -- and it doesn't come from any external source, but from within. No one's a better judge of the potential in each of us than well, us. When your body, mind and spirit are sending you signs of discontent and your sexuality leaves you empty, it's time to listen."
Scattered Words

Proto-Nazis?

Professor Michael Newsom of Howard University,
"No, I didn't miss the point. The employee's religious beliefs prevent him from affirming the value of gay people. I call that homophobia."

Rick Duncan,
"It sounds like your ideological beliefs prevent you from affirming the value of Christians who believe that homsexuality is a serious moral disorder. I call that Christophobia and religious bigotry."

Professor Michael Newsom of Howard University,
"Rick, you are so full of #@#$%!!!!! I am a Christian[sic], but I don't buy into your right wing #!@#$%. (I also suspect that my Catholicism[sic] is something that you can't handle.) No one on this listserv is more ideological or bigoted than you are. Anybody who disagrees with your right wing views is a bigot. It's like the pot calling the kettle black. You are a hateful bigot and a disgrace!"

Unfortunately, the second professor is the type of person writing the type of opinions found in judicial diktats.

Note the original sentiment,
"...affirming the value of gay people. I call that homophobia."

The first sentence has a sense of smarmy moral vanity to it, typical to those who engage in constructing their Gay© people. Those that they then get to protect from all the Big Meanies. The second is meant to be clinical, it is the proto-Nazi tendency to supposedly diagnose the situation in some medical, more physical sense. I.e., the person who dares disagree is being diagnosed with phobia. The proto-Nazi tendency to medicalize can get very crass and crude, very fast. The subject being medicalized is supposedly like an arachnophobe, irrational, driven by irrational fear and so probably about to crush their Gay© people's heads the same as they would a spider's.

So shew, it's a good thing the social Leftist is there to stop the Big Meanies and protect all their Gay© people! There are two things that the social Left tends to care about, their own alternative and subjective ethics and proving that they hold to them because they are smart, intelligent or downright scientific! That's the main reason that they are alternative and subjective, because the traditional and objective is often too easy to humbly admit to.

Even with the vague handwaving that the social Left makes towards their Gays© they are not terribly concerned with the welfare of people, as people. Their Gay© people serve them, to make a point about how tolerant they are, as social Leftists. Oh how the social Leftist knows what others do not, how smart they are, how ignorant the average person who sees the complementarity of the sexes is. The social Leftist blinds theirselves and cannot see the people, as people. They cannot see the people for all their Gays©. And they cannot even really see their own Gays© for their own supposed tolerance and intelligence. You can point out some of the results of the modern invention of the Gays© identity, yet they will often continue anyway. Often they will keep repeating that they know some nice Gays©, which besides proving how tolerant they are is meant to make the case against millenia of moral teachings, any concern for the general welfare, posterity, etc. If you take a rather precise inversion of the philosophy of the American founders then you may almost come to their sort of philosophy. (You're not even supposed to be looking at such things, instead of the subjective. This includes looking to yourself as a subjective subject and what your feely feelings supposedly are about things, so you will be attacked in subjective, personal ways. That subjectivity seems to be meant to cause you to stop thinking, start feeling and to begin to be ruled by your feely feelings, just as the social Leftist is.)

It seems that they are more concerned with their own feelings and their own subjective Selves more than much else. Thus there is a lack of conceptual thought and they rely on more perceptual imagery about Big Meanies, how everyone who disagrees is just like Fred Phelps, etc. All that is meant to appeal to the emotional rather than the rational. There is nothing inherently wrong with getting emotional about things. It is only important that the rational come before the emotional, that you are correct in what you get emotional or passionate about. If your arguments are just one long list of emotional appeals, emotional manipulations, associative arguments, false medicalizing, etc., then you may be getting passionate over virtually nothing for the sake of emotional conditioning.
_____
Side note, on the philosophical framework behind a tendency of placing the emotional before the rational see:
(Hitler's Professors: ThePart of Scholarship in Germany's Crimes
Against the Jewish People
By Max Weinreich
(New York:The Yiddish Scientific Institute, 1946)

Archive...

"This paper reviews evidence for a link between suicide or suicidal behavior and sexual orientation by (1) reviewing studies of the rates of completed and attempted suicides for gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) people compared to the general population; (2) examining risk factors that might explain any differences; (3) outlining opportunities for prevention; and (4) providing directions for future research. Studies suggest an elevated risk of suicide attempts among some cohorts of GLB people, particularly GLB youth. Evidence is also strong that GLB youth are at high risk for associated maladaptive risk behaviors. Mental health problems and substance abuse disorders are critical predisposing factors for GLB suicide, as for the general populations. ....."
(The relationship between sexual orientation
and risk for suicide: Research findings and future
directions for research and prevention
By Mcdaniel, J. Stephen; Purcell, David; D' Augelli, Anthony R.
Emory U School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA, US
Suicide & Life-Threatening Behavior. Vol 31
(Suppl), Spr 2001, pp. 84-105)

"Suicide is also associated with homosexuality. One of the more enlightening studies to come out recently was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry in October 1999. This issue focused on the mental health results of sexual orientation, and contained two articles on the subject, with several comments following the studies.The first article, by R. Herrell et al., found that "same-gender sexual orientation is significantly associated with each of the suicidal measures."

.....The second article, by Fergusson et al., reports that "gay, lesbian, and bisexual young people were at increased risks of major depression, generalized anxiety disorder, conduct disorder, nicotine dependence, other substance abuse and/or dependence, multiple disorders, suicide ideation, and suicide attempts." They then conclude, "Findings support recent evidence suggesting that gay, lesbian, and bisexual young people are at increased risk of mental health problems, with these associations being particularly evident for measures of suicidal behavior and multiple disorder."

There were three commentaries to these studies, one of which was by Michael Bailey, one of the two researchers who did the study on homosexual twins. He commented on the homosexuality and suicide studies and possible explanations:

Homosexuality represents a deviation from normal development and is associated with other such deviations that may lead to mental illness . . . .

Another developmental hypothesis concerns gender. On average, homosexual people are sex-atypical with respect to some traits, both during childhood and adulthood . . . . .

Another possible explanation is that increased psychopathology among homosexual people is a consequence of lifestyle differences associated with sexual orientation. For example, gay men are probably not innately more vulnerable to the human immunodeficiency virus, but some have been more likely to become infected because of 2 behavioral risk factors associated with male homosexuality: receptive anal sex and promiscuity. . . .

. . .Perhaps social ostracism causes gay men and lesbians to become depressed, but why would it cause gay men to have eating disorders?

Bailey's favored explanation was that homosexual youth commit suicide more due to societal oppression. However, a study of youth conducted in The Netherlands makes this hypothesis unlikely. The study also shows a higher rate of youth suicide among homosexuals than in the normal population in The Netherlands. The Netherlands is notably tolerant of homosexuality, even a gay-affirming society with little if any societal oppression aimed at homosexuals."
(Regent University Law Review 2001 / 2002
14 Regent U.L. Rev. 383
Homosexuality: Innate and Immutable?
By A. Dean Byrd and Stony Olsen)

The Gay© identity itself, and choosing to self define as gay:
". . . .gender nonconformity and precocious psychosexual development were predictive of self harm. . . For each year's delay in bisexual or homosexual self-labeling, the odds of asuicide attempt diminish by 80 percent."
(G. Remafedi, J. A.Farrow, and R. W Deisher. “Risk Factors for Attempted Suicide in GayBisexual Youth,” Pediatrics 87, no.6(1991), pp.869—75)

"The very experience of acquiring a homosexual or bisexual identity at an early age places the individual at risk for dysfunction. This conclusion is strongly supported by the data."
(G. Remafedi, “Adolescent Homosexuality: Psychosocial and Medical Implications,” Pediatrics 79, no. 3 (1987), pp. 331—37)

Archive...

"Examined differences between 7,076 heterosexually and homosexually active adults (aged 18-64 yrs) in 12-mo and lifetime prevalence of mood, anxiety, and substance use disorders. Data were collected via the Composite International Diagnostic Interview. Among Ss who could be classified, 2.8% of 2878 men and 1.4% of 3120 women had had same-sex partners. Psychiatric disorders were more prevalent among homosexually active people compared with their heterosexual counterparts. Homosexual men had a higher 12-mo prevalence of mood disorders and anxiety disorders than did heterosexual men, while homosexual women had a higher 12-mo prevalence of substance use disorders than did heterosexual women. Lifetime prevalence rates reflected identical differences, except for mood disorders, which were more frequently observed in homosexual than in heterosexual females. Results suggest that people with same-sex sexual behavior are at greater risk for psychiatric disorders."
(Same-sex sexual behavior and psychiatric disorders:
Findings from the Netherlands mental health survey and incidence study (NEMESIS)
By Sandfort, Theo G.M.; de Graff, Ron; Bijl, Rob V.; Schnabel, Paul
Utrecht U, Dept of Clinical Psychology, Utrecht, Netherlands
Archives of General Psychiatry. Vol 58(1), Jan 2001, pp. 85-91)

An interesting note, places like the Netherlands and Canada are more tolerant, with speech being policed and all. Yet some patterns of disorder and dysfunction hold, as there are some very basic dysfunctions involved that are more than just societal...all the talk of intolerance, tolerance or no. As I look into this issue based on what a sound argument may be as well as facts, logic and evidence, it seems to become apparent why pro-gay researchers try to make claims about "ignorance" so much.

Archive...

_______________
"The studies of child adjustment of children reared in homosexual homes versus married couple homes are further confounded by the fact that the children in homosexual homes have spent a significant part of their childhood in married couple homes before divorce and often maintain significant contact with non-custodial fathers. In the study by Golombok, Spencer, and Rutter for example, one-third (twelve subjects) had spent at least five years in a home with mothers and fathers before living in a homosexual setting, another one-third had lived in a married couple home for at least two years.
(Susan Golombok et al., Children in Lesbian and Single-Parent Households: Psychosexual and Psychiatric Appraisal, 24 J. CHILD PSYCHOL. & PSYCHIATRY (1983) :561)

Moreover, only three children had never lived in a married couple home. (Ib.) Golombok, Spencer, and Rutter found no difference in gender identity, sex role, and sexual orientation between the homosexual-reared versus heterosexual mother-reared children they studied. (Ib. :568) However, gender identity is established in the preschool years (Michael Rutter, Psychosexual Development, in SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATIONS OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHIATRY 322, 323 (Michael Rutter ed., 1980)) when most of the subjects in both groups had been still residing with their mother and father, and there are theoretical relationships between gender identity, sex role, and sexual orientation."
(Regent University Law Review
14 Regent U.L. Rev. 343, 2001 / 2002
Studies of Homosexual Parenting: A Critical Review
By George Rekers and Mark Kilgus)

_____________
A study of New York children reared by lesbian mothers (mostly in couples) and those reared by divorced homosexual single mothers suggested that"there is a possibility that rearing [by a homosexualparent] might influence [the child's] sexual partner choice, temporarily or permanently."
(Ghazala Afzal Javaid, The Children of Homosexualand Heterosexual Single Mothers, 23
Child Psychiatry & Human Dev. 235, 236 (1993))

Also observed in the previous study was that "a girl in a lesbian homecould be more vulnerable [to developing homosexual attraction] because of an increased awareness of herself in relation to other women .... the effect ofan additional exposure to the subculture"might promote internalized permission for homosexual behaviour."
.....
A 1993 study by Philip A. Belcastro, an independent examination of the methodological validity and reliability of fourteen post-1975 published "data-based studies addressing the affects of homosexualparenting on children's sexual and social functioning," found:

"The most impressive finding is that all of the studies lacked external validity. Furthermore, not a single study remotely represented any sub-population of homosexual parents. This limitation, in terms of scientific inference, is imposing.

With only three exceptions ... the studies' designs presented moderate to fatal threats to their internal validity. Seven studiesdid not utilize a control group and only three studies satisfactorily attempted to match comparison groups....

The majority of studies also suffered from internal validity flawssuch as inadequate instrumentation and disparate testing conditions that ... were well within the researchers' control...

Finally, ...most were biased towards proving homosexual parentswere fit parents....Some of the published works had to disregard their own results in order to conclude that homosexuals were fit parents."

The study concluded that "the statement that there are no significant differences in children reared by homosexual parents versus heterosexual parents is not supportedby the published research base."
(Philip A. Belcastro et al., A Review of Data Based
Studies Addressing the Affects of Homosexual Parenting
on Children's Sexual and Social Functioning
20 J. Divorce & Remarriage A(1993) :105, 110)

....When fathers nurture and care for their children, they do so not quite as "substitute mothers" but differently, as fathers. For example, some studies show that fathers play with their infant children more than mothers, play more physical and tactile games than mothers, and use fewer toys when playing with their children. Mothers tend to talk and play more gently with infant children. Compared to mothers, fathers reportedly appear to "have more positive perceptions of the more irritable sons and less irritable daughters," and perceive their baby daughters to be more cuddly than mothers do. Mothers smile and verbalize more to the infant than fathers do, and generally rate their infant sons as cuddlier than fathers do. Moreover, "men encouraged their children's curiosity in the solution of intellectual and physical challenges, supported the child's persistence in solving problems, and did not become overly solicitous with regard to their child's failures." One study found that six-month-old infants whose fathers were actively involved with them "had higher scores on the Bailey Test of Mental and Motor Development." Infants whose fathers spend more time with them are more socially responsive and better able to withstand stressful situations than infants relatively deprived of substantial interaction with their fathers."
(University of Illinois Law Review1997
U. Ill. L. Rev. 833
The Potential Impact of Homosexual Parenting on Children
By Lynn D. Wardle)

Breath taking!

"There is more than enough room for honest, philosophical debate on providing benefits to anyone. But that isn't what we got. Instead, we got Karen Johnson launching a speech so filled with hate-mongering and fear-peddling as to be breathtaking.

....She even invented her own illness, something she called "gay bowel disease," an ailment with which the specialists at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are unfamiliar. But they are getting interested in studying what should be called Bigot's Brain Disease."
(The Arizona Republic
February 14, 1999 Sunday, Final Chaser Arts and Ideas; Pg. E15
Intolerable Behavior: Legislators Guided by Hate,
Capitol Is No Place For Anti-Gay Venom
Byline: Stephen Tuttle)

Typical....

Yet,
"Other authors have reported on the treatment of homosexual men with anorectal diseases, and on the unusual manifestations of AIDS. Croxson et al. reported nine intraepithelial carcinomas of the anus in homosexual men, two of whom already carried the diagnosis of AIDS. Four of the remaining seven patients were reclassified as either ARC or AIDS-P prior to publication of the manuscript. Otherwise "healthy" homosexual men with anorectal diseases have been reclassified asAIDS patients soon after presenting with anorectaldisease. The gay bowel syndrome has been describedas a constellation of diseases in homosexual men at high risk for AIDS. This syndrome includes anal and colorectal infections with gonorrhea, secondary syphilis, condylomata lata and condylomata acuminata, chlamydia, salmonella, cryptosporidium, campylobacter, shiegella, giardia, entamoeba, herpessimplex virus and cytomegalovirus. All of these are diseases for which the colorectal surgeon is likely to be consulted with increasing frequency and widening geographic distribution over the next few years. In this study, 116 of 340 patients (34 percent) with AIDS, ARC, and AIDS-P had anorectal pathology. Fifty-two patients (15 percent) presented with a complaint of anorectal disease and had an average life expectancy of 7.4 months. Fifty-one patients (15 percent) were treated surgically, resulting in a postoperative complication and mortality rate approaching 90 percent. This compares with a less than 5 percent postoperative complication rate following anorectal surgery in otherwise healthy patients. Because the colorectal surgeon may be first to evaluate the homosexual patient, an exhaustive history must be taken.Homosexual men with anorectal pathology must bequeried about recurrent anorectal venereal disease, colonic enteric infection, herpses zoster, and oral candidiasis."
(The Surgical Management of Anorectal Diseases in AIDS and Pre-AIDS Patients
By Steven D. Wexner, M.D., William B. Smithy, M.D., Jeffrey W. Willsom, M.D.,Thomas H. Daly, M.D. November, 1986
Diseases of the Colon & Rectum1986; 29: 719-723)

This pattern reminded me of that,
"This is perhaps the most ignorant and offensive comment I've read from you yet on this topic. It is the one that made me stop to cool down before responding at such length. This is so clearly an erroneous assertion that I hardly know where to begin. After all, how does one begin to answer the illogic in something so ridiculous? What logical response is there to someone who blindly asserts a causal relationship that simply does not exist? ....There's really no way to refute an idea that exists isolated in a bubble solely in someone's mind. To say that changing cultural views would cause men to be gay is just as absurd." (emphasis added)

Yet,

"Broude (Broude, G. 1981. The Cultural Management of Sexuality. Ref. 279. :633-73) concludes that child training can have a profound effect on adult sexual orientation."
(The Cross-Cultural Study of Human Sexuality,
Annual Review of Anthropology,Vol. 16, 1987,
By D. L. Davis, R. G. Whitten :98)

Of course it does.

And so on. This is an obvious point, sexuality is relative to culture. Anyone vaguely acquainted with history ought to know that. No one is saying that there will be some sudden change, everyone's form of sexuality will change tomorrow if SSM is enacted! No, it is more generational. One has to wonder about just how ignorant pro-gay people are sometimes, perhaps that is why they project about "ignorance" so often. But think about it, history and anthropology show that sexuality is relative to culture. If you go by your own feelings it certainly may not feel so. No one is saying that it will feel so in your feely feelings. It is not a personal issue. To shift to the personal on such a broad issue is to take a myopic and subjective focus.

That disregard for posterity and myopic focus only makes sense if you are narcissistic. Perhaps if gender narcissism begins to become narcissism then that focus makes sense. In that case Gays© would tend to have such a subjective focus as the result of gender narcissism. To make matters worse, as I think one study on effeminacy put it, "Tends to cry about nothing...." And so, I suppose that one has to tell the activist to catch their breath, calm down, etc. These fellows get upset sometimes! It's breath taking, living in a bubble. After all, if you take the breath then there is none left for the others in the bubble! And that means you are the Big Meanie.

A series of posts...

I'm going to take a little time here and write some refutations of the usual memes and talking points of the average Gay© activist. This way, I will have some links to refer to instead of providing the same research and so on every time the issue comes up on blogs and the like. The Gay© activist is typically following along in a stream of cultural scripts and memes that have been made for them, passively, guided along by feelings and emotional conditioning in some rather effeminate way.

A generic example,
"Being gay does not give you HIV. HIV is transmitted, primarily, by chosen risk behaviors."

The typical activist has to rely on some scripts and the like about "being Gay©." This is a core tenet. You are not allowed to say anything about what Gay© is. Only they can say the Gay©, all that you say of their manufacturing of the Gay© identity will be "stereotype" and the like. They have to control the type, by censorship if necessary.

In that sentence the manufacturing of the Gay© identity is being divorced from the risky behavior patterns that are inherent to male homosexuality. The form of sexuality neglects the complementarity of the sexes and in so doing amplifies male promiscuity and male risk taking to levels that destroy the subculture in which the complementarity of the sexes is denied.

On a broad cultural scale in the West, the invention of the Gay© identity ("being Gay©") and its linkage to the civil rights movement is associated with AIDS.
"The introduction of the [AIDS] epidemic to developed countries, such as the UnitedStates, followed relatively soon after the 'gay revolution' that had its origins in the riot at the Stonewall Inn, a bar frequentedby homosexual men, in New York City in 1969.....

Similar patterns soon followed in other developed countries, such as Canada, Australia, and those of western Europe."
(The AIDS Epidemic -- Considerations
for the 21st Century.
By Fauci, Anthony S.
The New England Journal of Medicine
September 30, 1999; 341: 1046-1050)

At this point the Gay© activist is sure to engage in some handwaving towards HIV in Africa or other less developed nations.

The first thing that should be noted is the consistent failure to take any responsibility, any at all, among those who go so far as to claim to be the hapless victims of their genetics. It does not just harm their own welfare, it harms others.

The invention of the Gay© identity itself and the way that he Old Press writes cultural scripts for it also takes its toll.

"If the New York Times and other mass media had given the first thousand AIDS victims even a fraction of the coverage given to the seven victims of poisonedTylenol capsules, millons of Americans would have learned of the new disease much earlier, and tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans who are now dead might be living. Instead, the Times published fifty-four stories on the Tylenol affair (several on the front page) and a total of three stories on AIDS— none of which appeared on the front page, and none of which used the words 'sex' or 'homosexual.'"
(Homosexuality and American Public Life,
Edited by Chrisopher Wolfe
(Dallas: Spence Publishing Company)1999, :122)

Typically, the Gay© activist will also want things both ways on the issue of HIV. They will say that HIV has nothing to do with Gay©. But then they will say that Gays© have something to do with stopping it now, unlike the old times. But they never took responsibility in the first place, instead they try to blame Reagan for their own behavior patterns. Yes, blame the President for your own sexual behavior and sexual ethics. It is amazing just how far and contorted things can get. They also want things both ways here, there is no problem with Gay©...but they are fixing it.

On the issue of HIV there will be some vague handwaving towards Africa or other underdeveloped nations, yet the issue there is the same issue of sexual ethics. That has something to do with they such nations are underdeveloped, the fiscal is the social, the social is the ethical. I was conversing with a Hindu once about cultural taboos and what prejudices are pancultural and the like. They said that "sexual perversion" is a luxury that Indians cannot afford. The Gay© activist pointing to other nations to avoid responsibility is pointing to that which makes the case for the civilization of the West that they work to undermine. At times this undermining of civilization can be very clear, as when they begin to argue that what is natural for animals is "natural" for man.

I will finish this post by citing some research. It is not dated the way that the Gay© activist will argue. Feces in the bloodstream and the like are still just as unhealthy now as they were at another date. Excrement has not evolved, so what has changed? All that has changed is the modern manufacturing of the Gay© identity and attempts to destroy the reputation of anyone who would let true information get out into the Old Press. Does the new Gay© identity in which Gays© are saints, the apostles of tolerance, truth and love (Besides having a higher aesthetic sense too! ) prevent the health impact of "being Gay©"? Does it negate the reality of the complementarity of the sexes? Of course it does not, nor does the manipulation of pop-culture and the MTVeee generation prove anything about the general welfare in the real world. Note that the problems associated with denying the complementarity of the sexes have to do with more than HIV.

E.g.,
"The special intestinal and anorectal problems of male homosexuals,the so-called 'gay bowel syndrome,' are often unfamiliar to pediatricians. Symptoms may range from minimal abdominal or rectal discomfort to fulminant dysentery. Both infectious and noninfectious causes have been described. (Sohn N, Robilotti JG.The gay bowel syndrome: a review of colonic and rectalconditions in 200 male homosexuals. Am J Gastroenterol1977; 67: 478-84)

In a vigorous investigation of the infectious agents, Quinn et al.(Quinn TC, Stamm WE, Goodell SE. The polymicrobialorigin of intestinal infections in homosexual man, N Engl J Med 1983; 309: 576-82.) identified specific enteric pathogens in 80 percent of homosexual males with gastrointestinal complaints and in 39 percent of homosexual controls. Neisseria gonorrheae, HSV, and Treponema pallidum are identified in 60 percentof cases of proctitis. Campylobacter species, Shigellaflexneri, Chlamydia trachomatis, Entamoeba histolytica, and Clostridium difficile are identified in 60 percentof cases of proctocolitis. Giardia lambdia is the single agent significantly correlated with enteritis. Once again,the sexual history is a critical item in the evaluation of the adolescent with abdominal complaints. When a history of homosexual practices is elicited, a thorough microbiologicaland endoscopical investigation may be indicated. The reader isreferred to the work of Quinn and colleagues (Quin et al.) for a detailed discussion of the diagnostic evaluation.The final category of sexually related illnesses is the acquired mmunodeficiency syndrome with its infectiousand neoplastic complications....."
(Pediatrics Adolescent Homosexuality;Issues for Pediatricians
By Gary J. Remafedi, MD
Clinical Pediatrics ClinPediatr (Phila) 1985; 24: 481-485)

I'd like to know what these Gay© activists would write to a San Fransico father who's eighteen year old son is being manipulated to "come out" by an older man. That pattern is not exactly atypical. I'd certainly not tell the father this, but here is what seems to me would most likely happen. His son is mentored into a whole community of tolerance and acceptance. Then his son gets HIV or some other problem mysteriously comes up that I'd rather not note. So eventually, his son dies. The father buries his son and will not allow the older "partner" to come to the funeral, etc. Then the Gay© activists write another cultural script about the father's ignorance, hatred and intolerance on their webpages, a script that is reported by the Old Press. Perhaps they use some imagery that Fred Phelps supplies, it is just another instance of homophobia and bigotry by a father against effete Victims.

Then the MTVeee generation begins to feel, "You know, Gay© is good!" And maybe those who are dead in the head and easy subjects for emotional conditioning begin to get mysterious illnesses more and more too. (What is interesting is the impact of cultural scripts and memes on a person like Ed. Not exactly a free-thinker, that one. He claims to be fighting HIV, then promotes the very things that are associated with it.) I'll make another post in this series about medical facts, comparing "gay bowel syndrome" to the sort of thing that researchers say about the host of "problems" or "risky behavior" now.

The Left tries to speak....

From the guy who feels he is waging a culture war, "Here's the arch-moron mynym's latest response to me, wherein he still is too stupid to understand the difference between a public form and a private one."

I never made a legal case about the supposedly public nature of his forums, etc. This is nothing. He's going on tangents about his precious privacy after he writes ignorant and stupid things on the internet (of all places) and then censoring because things like the complementarity of the sexes are all too obvious. What I wrote can be proven, his memes and prejudices based on how nice he feels that Gays© are cannot be. But behold the power of some pseudo-religoius Gay© witnessing and proselytizing, it is rather amazing. I mean, I know some nice Christians but that does not mean I agree with every public policy they may want. Nor would I support something that went against the general welfare just because there were some nice Christians who wanted it. But with the Gays©, their modern saints, social Leftists seem to make exceptions on everything and for everything. This fellow seems to be no exception.

"I'm not going to bother with a line by line refutation of it."

Of course not....

Because, for one thing, you can't. That is why another fellow changed the lines with an odd sort of editing job instead of attempting to refute them. And he also fails to argue the validity of the complementarity of the sexes, yet then acts as if it is not valid. The Yin and the Yang and so on are at the foundation of what I am writing about marriage and SSM. His failure and your failure are telling. It's little wonder that so many are voting against the social Left.

"If you feel like it, go there and pick out all the logical fallacies yourself."

A lot of claims have been made by the Left, not much proof, other than manufacturing some total non-issue about private and public....he likes to talk about what is rational. But it seems that he has no rationale for rationality. He seems to be one of those who will only have rationalizations about it.

"Most amusing thing about it: he actually thinks he was stopped from commenting here because he was disproving me."

That's because I was. From that absurd interracial marriage argument to your false sort of "equality" arguments. Racial discrimination and sex discrimination are far from comparable, nor is it apparent why anyone should want a sex-blind society in the same sense that a color-blind society is desirable. Forms of sexuality that are clearly not "equal," should not be treated as if they are equal.

Uh oh...

Someone is tripping and slipping a bit in one of the comments sections on Right2Left. He did a decent job of writing for the other side. But that may be all for him, I think.

I may deal with the studies he brought up at some point if I have the time.

Right2Left...

I am going to begin writing down a theory and assembling some evidence, between a lot of other things. So, see what you think of some ideas about a continuum between transcendence and immanence and its associations with the masculine and feminine.

The Right falls more to the side of the masculine and transcendence. For instance, after 9/11 American politics went to the Right because the masculine is emphasized for its ethos of provision and protection. The Left is typically more nurturing and focused on healthcare. It is interesting that the leaders of the American Left have some problems based on such an immanent focus being rather feminine. Examples, Al Gore has to be more of an "Alpha Male," he grows a beard, then he shaves, etc. It's rather humorous. John Kerry has to have a hunter shoot some ducks for him and then pretend that he shot them. Dean says something like, "We have to reach out to the people we are missing on God, guns and gays." I don't recall the exact comment. But I do recall the growling. What was it, "Yeeeaaargh!" Yee haw!

God, guns and gays, what are those three issues

Father God, provision and protection, effeminacy.

Yes, you are missing some people there. There are those who make an issue of the gender divide with respect to the Right not winning enough votes from women. Yet the Left has its problems with men...and increasingly with women too. It is interesting to note that married women lean toward the Right more.

When the Left starts obsessing over healthcare too much it is almost as if they want to breast feed the nation and then change all our diapers. The simple fact is, most people do not want to be treated as a baby by such smothering mothers. And it is not smart politically to take these patterns of immanence and transcendence too far in either direction. It is not smart for the Left anymore than the Right ought to focus on transcendence to the point of flying off and denying physical existence altogether. (E.g., some Taliban man hopping on a plane, etc. That is hyper-masculinity, typical to Islamism.)

The blindness of the America Left is rather humorous. They seem blind to the electorate and they seem to feel that creating an "Alpha Male" will help their troubles. (It's not going to help if you say that is what you are doing. Duh. Being a man is something you are, it is not something you act. It is authentic. Some inauthentic acting just makes the whole situation much, much worse, exacerbating the original problem. The irony!) Then there is Gore's whole mommy Earth thing that is typical to the Left. It is not that these patterns are necessarily good or bad. Good or bad, I don't know that you can win an election by appealing mainly to single women and some effeminate men no matter how strong you are as an incumbent in decent economic times or how weak the candidate of the Right is.

I'll finish this later, maybe much later. I have some old writing and some evidence for the beginnings of a theory somewhere that I probably ought to read again. So reader, you can jump in and try to tear into such a theory if you want. (Just try to know what you're talking about, lest your ideas be the ones to be torn apart.)

Later.