Dakota Beacon

In this age of media insolvency and newsroom job cuts, I sometimes think that restaurant reviewers are doubling as religion writers.  After all, both today seem to treat their subjects as matters of taste.  In fact, I expect to soon open a modern newspaper’s religion page and read something akin to the following:

The steeple was sufficiently impressive, although there were obvious stress cracks in the paint.  As I entered the church, I was greeted by an all too obsequious usher whose fawning attempts to please were rendered quite unwelcome by his dollar-store shoes, mismatched tie and sport coat, and noticeable dandruff.  I was secondly accosted by the aroma of incense, which, although vaguely reminiscent of a potpourri, was overpowering and gratuitous.  I entered a pew and found it had been finished with a dark stain wholly ill-suited to the pine of which it was constructed.  My kneeler rotated easily on its hinges but emitted a perceptible squeak, and, more egregiously, its cushioning would probably be found wanting by someone suffering from patella tendonitis or another debilitating physical condition.  Certainly, if your spirit is willing but your flesh weak, this may not be the church for you . . . .

What brings this to mind is an article I stumbled across today about Tiger Woods, his Buddhism and his reaction to Brit Hume’s January recommendation that the golfer explore Christianity to remedy his woes.  It was penned by David Gibson, a “religion” writer who says that he is, as I am, a convert to Catholicism.  If I seem suspicious of his Catholicity — of, in fact, his religiosity — it’s because I am.  His biography states, “Gibson won the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year Award, the top honor for journalists covering religion in the secular press. In November he will receive the top prize for opinion writing from the American Academy of Religion,” and both are quite fitting.  His writing seems more secular than religious and reduces Truth to opinion.

That is to say, Gibson seems to embrace the relativism that defines our age.  I have read two articles he has written on the Hume/Woods story, and in neither one does he exhibit the slightest understanding of the concept of Absolute Truth.  I’ll explain.

I know a man who is an orthodox Jew.  He walks the walk, following all of the 613 Judaic laws he must and praying at the appointed times of the day, regardless of where he finds himself.  Now, because he is authentic, he believes his religion contains the full deposit of faith. 

Of course, a corollary of this is that he believes mine does not. 

Does this bother me?  Not really.  In fact, while I disagree with his ultimate conclusion, I expect nothing less than his absolutism.  Why sacrifice for a faith — constraining your impulses based on its teachings — if you think it’s just a flavor of the day?  Heck, if I thought religion was just a fancy name for opinion, I’d become a hedonist — or at least a Unitarian.

In contrast, in Gibson’s commentary, there is never an acknowledgment that Hume is behaving in precisely the way a true man of faith would expect a true man of faith to behave.  Instead, it smacks of secularism.  Gibson acts as if Hume seeks to impose a taste, as if he has had the temerity to ask someone with a distinctively different palate to adopt his favorite flavor ice cream.  

Yet, this piece isn’t about Hume or Woods; in fact, it’s not even about Gibson.  The reality is that if Gibson is the relativist he appears, he simply reflects contemporary America.  And the statistics are staggering.  In 1994 already, a poll showed that 72 percent of Americans agreed that there is no such thing as Absolute Truth.  Even more to the point here, 64 percent of born-again Christians agreed.  Some sources even claim that by 2002 that number had risen among born-again church youth to 91 percent.  But whatever the exact figure, that it touches the heavens is no surprise.  I’ve long understood that moral relativism is the characteristic spiritual disease of our time (and the worst of all time).  I’ve also long known that this portends rapid moral collapse and, consequently, the civilizational variety.  But right now I’ll limit my commentary mostly to the impossible marriage between Christianity and relativism.  (Non-Christians will find plenty here for them as well, however, so read on.)

Let us be blunt: It is simply not possible to espouse relativism — which holds that right and wrong are opinion — and be a true Christian. 

Why?  It’s simple: Jesus did not die for our opinions.  Jesus did not say that His blood was the blood of the new and everlasting covenant and that it would be shed for you and for all so that opinions may be forgiven; He did not say, I am a way, a truth, and a life; He did not say, let he who is without opinion cast the first stone; He did not say to that dark tempter, “It is said, ‘Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God,’” but, hey, Satan, whatever works for you.

There are many doctrinal differences among the denominations, and good people could debate them ad nauseam and still not settle every one.  Yet, if anything is central to Christianity, it’s the belief that Truth is spelled with a capital “T,” that it is absolute, universal and eternal.  And also central is a corollary of this belief: that there is an absolute, universal and eternal answer to every moral question; that right and wrong are not a matter of opinion, that they don’t change from time to time and place to place (although the perception of them certainly can.  Ergo, swords lopping off heads). 

In fact, understand that moral relativism does nothing less than render the foundational act of Christianity, the sacrifice on the cross, incomprehensible.  Why?  Simply because Jesus died for our sins, and this presupposes that sin exists.  However, if what we call morality is simply opinion, then there can be no such thing as sin.  For who is to say?  “Hey, I have my truth, you have your truth.  Don’t impose your values on me!” protests the relativist.  And if there is no such thing as sin, there was no reason for Jesus to sacrifice himself.  After all, what does anyone need to be forgiven for if there is no sin?

Now we come to why this piece isn’t just for Christians.  The concept of Absolute Truth lies at the heart of Judaism, Islam and, in fact, philosophy itself.  Why philosophy?  Because, properly defined, philosophy is the search for Truth.  Now, some — including many philosophy professors — would dispute this, but they are not only babies in philosophy but also have adopted the endeavor of a madman: searching while claiming there is nothing to find.

If there is no Truth, only opinion, then there are no answers to be found.  But then why ask questions?  It is like setting out with ship and sail in search of treasure while convinced no treasure exists.  It is like the Wright brothers having sought the secret of heavier-than-air flight while believing such a thing impossible or scientists seeking to split the atom while believing fission could only be fiction.  Thus, it’s no wonder college students roll their eyes at their philosophy requirement.  They enter class and hear, in essence, “Side with Aquinas and believe Jesus is the living God and the life, or with Nietzsche and believe God is dead and that, by extension, there is no reason to live.  Believe in the Ten Commandments or, as occultist Aleister Crowley said, that “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”  Pick your flavor.  And, if you can still find a reason to rise in the morning, I’ll see you in class tomorrow.”  Instilled with the idea that there is no treasure, students just aren’t illogical enough to want to search anyway. 

Of course, it’s tempting to embrace religious-equivalency doctrine in a multi-religious society because it’s thought that it enables us to get along.  Like two little boys in a schoolyard who each agree to relinquish any claim that his daddy can beat up the other’s, we make the following unwritten pact: “I won’t say my faith is better than yours if you don’t say your faith is better than mine.  Deal?”  And it does work.  Except, there then is not only no reason to fight about religion, there is no reason to even discuss it.  There is, in fact, no reason to even adopt it.  That is, unless it somehow makes you feel good.  But adherence to the principle “If it feels good, do it” is a pathway to something. It’s called sin. 

Through his embrace of relativism modern man has made Christianity incomprehensible.  He has made philosophy incomprehensible.  He has, in fact, made civilization itself incomprehensible.  For, if there is no right or wrong, it can be no better than barbarism. 

Relativism also makes the existence of religion writers incomprehensible — and, increasingly, the writers themselves uncomprehending.   

Originally published at The American Thinker:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/american_christians_and_moral.html

                                                         Contact Selwyn Duke       

Whenever criticizing grammar and punctuation, you run the risk of being labeled punctilious.  Worse still, since even many good writers involved in Internet journalism disgorge the odd typo, there’s the chance you will come to be regarded as an expert on the glass-house real estate market.  Yet there’s no doubt that the much lamented decline in journalism is about style as well as substance.  And, just occasionally, you encounter an example of it that demands some attention.

Such is a Channel 13 Action News (ABC) article titled “Las Vegas Mayor Goodman rejects Obama invitation,” a piece that is, you might say, plagiarism proof.  It brings to mind that oft-heard journalistic advice that, put loosely, instructs one to write at an eighth-grade level.  Only, I didn’t know it referred to the eighth grade in Mexico — when writing in English.  That is to say, it’s obvious the piece was not penned by a native English speaker.

The article is so bad that it’s impossible to print all the errors contained therein without running afoul of Fair Use Doctrine.  So, since I don’t write for The New York Times and my name isn’t Zachary Kouwe or Jayson Blair, I’ll just say that I counted nine major mistakes (and I’m omitting much) in the 333-word piece and will present the most glaring examples.  I won’t provide corrections, however, as these excerpts speak for themselves.  And if a reader can’t hear what they say, I suggest that he has a future at ABC News.    

First we have, “Mayor Goodman has more important things like attend budget meetings during a major shortfall than meet with President Barack Obama . . . .”

Next we have two typos in one sentence: “Mayor Goodman not backing down after the president used Las Vegas the example of where not to go . . . .”

Then we have this mangled, convoluted head-scratcher, “Invitations Mayor Oscar Goodman respectfully or depending on your point of view not so respectfully declines.”

And finally there is the second-to-last line, “What do you think about Mayor Goodman rejecting to meet with President Obama?” the closest thing to pidgin English I have ever seen from a news outlet — and this includes foreign sources such as those in India.  

Oh, I should mention that the piece has no by-line, which saves the “writer” not only embarrassment but also a possible visit from the INS.

How did such illiterate scribbling make it into print?  Did an ABC reporter wheedle his landscaper into writing his news piece?  Is the listing Lamestream Media so financially strapped that they’re hiring illegal labor?      

Jesting aside, it’s no stretch to say that this is the result of America’s affirmative-action mentality.  And, if you think it’s much ado about nothing, know that it reflects a society to which standards increasingly mean nothing.  We are creating generations of ignorant, shiftless slackers, people who are only eternally vigilant about seeking pleasure.  And think about this: If many modern Americans cannot adequately perform even simple functions, how can they tackle complex problems?  How can we expect them to be able to solve our budget and financial woes or create healthy families?         

We are descending, pell-mell, toward Idiocracy.  But, hey, man, like, you know, I get ABC’s drift, you know.  So what’s my problem?  Well, my bad, dude, my bad.  Yo, yes, we can! 

Many years ago, I was told a story by a woman I knew whose son had been diagnosed with “A.D.D.”  She said that she finally had to take from her boy a book a therapist had given him about how an A.D.D. child acts.  The problem?  Her son was reading it and then imitating the behavior of the child in it!

Then I remember when someone I know well told me about her 13-year-old’s reaction to being confronted about his misbehavior.  He said something to the effect of, “Well, mom, you know, I’m at that age.”  But how did he know he was at “that age”?

There is also all the anxiety adolescents are supposed to feel over the “changes in their body,” and we’re told about how tough it is to be a teenager.  I don’t know, but I remember my teen years well, and I experienced no such thing.  I knew I was moving toward manhood and was happy about it.  And whenever the topic might have arisen, it was apparent that my friends were happy about it, too.  Why wouldn’t we have been?  If you think it’s tough becoming bigger, stronger, faster and better each and every day, try the other side of that hill, when you have to trade in the rollerblades for a Rascal scooter. 

This brings me to the book The Catcher in the Rye, which is in the news again after the death of its author, J.D. Salinger.  Like so many others attending high school in the early 1980s, I had to read Catcher.  Now, I guess I was “supposed” to relate to it, but I never did.  I didn’t experience teen “angst,” and I didn’t think everyone was a phony, either.  Furthermore, if any of my friends related to the book, they certainly never said anything about it.  Nor did any of my friends — or the teens I would work with later in life — exhibit angst or a preoccupation with the phoniness of others.  In fact, I think the young are better epitomized by a starry-eyed idealism, where they expect some virtue, heroism and idealism in others.  For sure, the millions of youth who chanted “Yes, we can!” in 2008 expected those things (although it’s rumored that many have now become Holden Caulfield).

Now, mind you, I don’t imply that Catcher tells us nothing about people in their adolescence.  I simply say that its popularity — just like the other social phenomena I mentioned — tells us even more about a civilization in its twilight.    

For one thing, there was a time when telling kids how they were “supposed” to behave meant drawing from Sunday school or the Bible, not the Kinsey Institute or the DSM-IV.  We taught the morals we expected, not the misbehavior to be expected (and, by inference, accepted).  This makes sense, too, as morality needs to be taught.  Problems just happen naturally.

Unfortunately, they can also be induced unnaturally.  I believe that much (not all) of the modern narrative about the problems of youth is the projection of adults.  It doesn’t well reflect teens as a group because it only reflects certain former teens as individuals, people who, though now grown, may sometimes just be repressed adolescents themselves.  Even insofar as Catcher goes, who really made it popular?  Do you think kids would be reading it today if educators hadn’t made it a staple of curricula?  Of course, in all fairness to Salinger, he did write the book for adults — and those adults then made it popular among the kids.

Ironically, while Catcher was once the bane of traditionalists, it now finds a few foes even among the left.  For example, Oberlin College English professor Anne Trubek is quoted as saying that the work is “not so contemporary anymore” and that “most American teenagers will find it rather tame and sort of laughable the things that were once considered so controversial.”  She says that Holden Caulfield is not such a “universal voice for American teenagers” because he’s an “upper-class white man.”  Then, echoing the last point I made, she opined that since all classics are man-made there’s “[no] reason why we couldn't do the same with some of the things that have been written in the last 10 years.”  Yeah, hey, why not get with the times?  Or, is the problem that we’ve long been getting with the times and away from the Truth?

If this sounds oh-so absolutist, understand that for all our modern talk about letting kids spread their wings and not imposing values, we certainly do preach messages.  We diagnose children with A.D.D. and then tell them how A.D.D. kids “should” act, or we tell them how they “should” feel about their changing bodies.  We say it is a given that they’ll be rebellious and angst-ridden.  We create a blockbuster movie with strong anti-corporate, anti-Western and pro-feminist themes.  And we preach messages for a very simple reason: It’s almost impossible to do otherwise.  Society and its art and literature will always project values, either explicitly or implicitly.  The only question is, what should those values be?     

This brings us to an important point: Moderns have lost sight of the purpose of art and literature.  And this is why, for instance, people will offer that tired old defense of rap music and say, “Hey, they’re just tellin’ you what’s goin’ on out there [in the streets].”  Now, I could point out that this standard would justify the showing of porn and snuff films to kids, too; after all, sex and serial killing are “goin’ on out there” also.  But the point is this: If something is supposed to tell you what’s going on out there, it’s not called art.

It’s called news.

And there is a reason why people complain about the news: It’s not exactly uplifting.  Yet one of the purposes of art is to do just that, uplift man, not degrade him.  Is this disputable?  Do we want our art to lower us morally?

Our lips will answer no, but our actions say otherwise.  The art we create today seems not just like the fruits of Holden Caulfield, but of seventh-grade ne’er do wells who mock the straight-laced A-student until he crumbles or sinks to their level.  G.K. Chesterton alluded to this with a quip that could be applied to all the arts, “Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves.  But the artists find it harder.”

In point of fact, anything wholesome today is mocked as a goody-goody (G rating?) work and dismissed as simplistic.  For instance, consider the remarks of an aging and quite liberal Stephen Talbot, the fellow who played tow-headed troublemaker Gilbert Bates on Leave it to Beaver.  Obviously very embarrassed by his association with the show, he took pains to emphasize that it contained stereotypes and was completely unrealistic.  Unrealistic?  Perhaps, but what work is completely realistic?  Is the current practice of consistently bucking stereotypes — of portraying thoroughly anomalous characters (e.g., masculinized women) — realistic?  The point is that artistic license exists and should be used responsibly.  This means to promote good, not evil; to elevate, not degrade.

So realism is a poor excuse for degradation.  After all, in real life, we all must answer nature’s call, but does this mean we must show television characters using the toilet?  Yet we seem to believe that we must show them washing their dirty laundry.  And the end result of this philosophy is that Hollywood is using the whole world as a toilet.

So what is the purpose of art?  To entertain?  That’s fine, but its higher calling is to teach lessons about good and evil and to encourage virtue.  It is supposed to reflect Truth.

Once this is understood, it becomes clear why moderns can benefit from reading millennia-old Greek classics, works about long-dead people written in antiquated ways.  Truth transcends time, place and people.  And this brings us to our problems today.

Because the West has fallen victim to moral relativism, it no longer believes in transcendent Truth.  Thus, stripped of the eternal yardstick that should govern art and curricula, we use emotion as the yardstick and try to provide what makes a given group “feel” good.  This is why we hear about how something isn’t relevant to most because it’s about an “upper-class white man” or was penned by “dead white males.”  It’s why we try to give each group its particular flavor, such as feminism for girls and afro-centrism for blacks.  It’s why we talk about the times and not Truth, saying that a work is no longer “contemporary.”  It’s why education has degenerated to a point wherein all we can do is give everyone a lie that, supposedly, he can relate to.  But this tragically misses the point: Everyone needs the same thing, Truth.   Thus should our goal be to relate it — and help everyone to relate to it. 

Doing otherwise is pointless.  After all, if morals are relative, how could it be wrong to not be contemporary or sensitive to feelings, or to be provincial?  More significantly, though, if we accept the relativistic lie that all is taste and we each have our own flavor, we’ll never be able to relate to the same things or, tragically, to each other. 

Thus does relativism yield division.  If you want brotherhood, seek Truth.

Origianlly published at The American Thinker web site

                                                             Contact Selwyn Duke

                                          Selwyn’s website is www.SelwynDuke.com

One thing we get with our mother’s milk today is revulsion for what civil-rights lawyers call “invidious” discrimination.  For the civil-rights lawyers who attained their status through the invidious discrimination known as affirmative action, the parenthesized word means “likely to create ill will” or “offensively or unfairly discriminating.”  Now, the problem with judging invidiousness is that it requires you know what fairness is.  For instance, it certainly creates ill will when Americans are rejected simply because they’re too white or too male (yes, it makes sense — think San Francisco), but the government doesn’t trouble much about that.   

We also have an unfair progressive income tax that evokes ill will in high wage-earners.  But although I’m no fan of such taxation, at least it reflects a moral principle that, when applied privately and justly, is valid.  After all, I think most of us have at times given someone down on his luck a break. 

And this is what Barack Obama’s healthcare overhaul is supposed to be about, giving those in need a break.  Now we learn, though, that the breaks will be offered, well, most invidiously.  In a sweetheart deal struck behind closed doors — you know, during that transparent process being covered by No-SeeSpan — unions will receive a special dispensation from healthcare taxes the rest of us will have to pay.  The New York Post’s Carl Campanile reports on the story, writing:

[The deal] will save union employees at least $60 billion over the years involved, while others won't be as lucky — they'll have to cough up almost $90 billion.

The 40 percent excise tax on what have come to be called "Cadillac" health-care plans would exempt collective-bargaining contracts covering government employees and other union members until Jan. 1, 2018.

Moreover, Campanile tells us, “the value of [union] dental and vision plans would be exempt from the tax even after the deal expires in eight years . . . .”

It gets even more invidious, though.  While the 40 percent tax will be levied on plans worth $8,900 or more for individuals and $24,000 or more for families, “The threshold will be even higher for certain plans with many older workers and women — a move to benefit unions with a high proportion of female membership . . . .,” wrote Campanile.

Ah, the change of Obama’s utopia: From each according to his political means, to each according to the party’s political needs.

Speaking of change, how about the language manipulation evident in describing a healthcare plan with the name “Cadillac”?  Haven’t we been told that everyone’s entitled to the best healthcare, that it’s the most basic of needs?  So why is this right, this need, being cast as a luxury through association with a high-end car? 

Answer: to grease the skids for tax discrimination against those who obtain something approaching the healthcare plan Congress enjoys. 

Speaking of which, when the politicians foist Obamascare upon us, they will benefit from discrimination exempting them from it.  So while I don’t know for how long “Cadillac” health plans will be available, congressmen will still have their Rolls Royce plan.

And now they’ve deemed a few more groups more equal than others.  Let’s understand clearly the model they’ve created.  If you’re a non-union auto worker earning $45,000 a year, you’ll be subject to the 40 percent tax on comprehensive health plans; if you’re a union auto worker earning $45,000 a year, you won’t be.  And even though men die younger than women and are more likely to suffer work-related injuries, the fairer sex will get a very unfair break.  My, were I cynical, I’d think that Obamascare has little to do with fairness and a lot to do with union and feminist lobby clout.  But perish the thought.  An idea like that could create some ill will.

This is why it’s a pipe dream to think that the government can or will ever make the world fair.  The EEOC investigates discrimination — but only the kind it deems “invidious.”  Title IX is used to guarantee equality of the sexes in education — except when the inequality hurts boys.  Hate-crime laws don’t actually outlaw hate — they just give politically favored groups extra protection.  This is the pattern.  So is it surprising that the government is creating favored groups once again, this time in healthcare?   

And there’s a lesson in this, one taught well by legendary economist Milton Friedman.  Refuting the idea that big government is more virtuous than the “greedy” free market, he once asked why we would assume that political self-interest is somehow more noble than economic self-interest.  In reality, the discrimination of the market is far more palatable than that of the government.  Sure, the market isn’t perfect; it will compensate a rap thug with a 500-word vocabulary more handsomely than a person of substance.  Nevertheless, I trust the judgments of the 300 million people who are market — rendered when making purchases and pronouncements — more than the judgments of 535 ruling elites, imposed when making law.  Economically determined discrimination is less scary than politically determined discrimination.   

Besides, at least the market doesn’t slap us in the face with the pretense of charity, perhaps the scariest thing of all.  As C.S. Lewis once wrote, “It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

Speaking of conscience, even before the sweet union deals, the Amish were granted a break from healthcare mandates.  Yet are matters of conscience only for the irresistibly quaint?  So, now, on top of all the other discrimination, the government will determine whether your religious beliefs are sincere enough to warrant exemptions from “your body, Uncle Scam’s choice” legislation. 

Really, Obamascare itself, just like the man it’s named after, is invidious.  Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Diane Crimestein and the rest of their co-conspirators are invidious.  Big government is invidious.  And my will has become awfully, awfully ill.  Let’s just hope an ill wind of public discontent blows the right kind of discrimination through the halls of government this November.

                                              Selwyn’s site is www.SelwynDuke.com                                                          

                                                           Contact Selwyn Duke      

Originally posted at The American Thinker:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/obamas_healthcare_discriminati.html

Of all the responses to the devastation in Haiti, the most copy-worthy is televangelist Pat Robertson’s claim that the earthquake was divine retribution.  In making his case, he told a story about how Haitian leaders long ago made a pact with Satan, promising to serve him if he would help vanquish their French oppressors.  The Devil delivered, said Robertson, but the consequence is that the nation has ever since been cursed, with one disaster befalling it after another.  It was reminiscent of when the late Jerry Falwell said — and Robertson agreed — that those who have authored America’s descent into sin were partially responsible for 9/11. 

Not surprisingly, the response today is much as it was back then.  Robertson has been roundly criticized in media, by the left, right and center.  Yet there’s something more troubling than his remarks.

Just for the record, I don’t share Robertson’s theology.  While I do believe there can be such a thing as the wrath of God, I also know that God has both ordained will and permissive will.  The former, of course, is when God intervenes and makes something happen; miracles, in the typical sense, fall into this category.  And many have believed in divine intercession.  For instance, Ben Franklin once said, “the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this Truth, that God governs in the Affairs of Men.” 

In contrast, permissive will is when God allows other forces — such man’s free will — in the Universe free rein.  I believe most events fall into this category, although I’m certainly not inclined to argue about what percentage of all happenings they might be.  I’m also not inclined to argue about the category into which the Haitian earthquake falls.  I’ll simply note that disasters, like death, touch the Hades-bound and holy alike.  I’ll also point out that Robertson’s story about the Haitian rebels’ pact with Beelzebub seems more urban legend than cause of urban devastation.  Yet more ridiculous than the televangelist’s comments is something inherent in the criticism of him. 

Many lambasting Robertson are Christians who believe in miracles and sometimes pray for God’s intercession.  Yet, while they believe He may reward and rescue us, they certainly don’t seem to believe that He would apply the rod.  Now, many would say this is because He is loving God, not a vengeful one; of course, others might say a loving father knows that love involves discipline.  But I’d like to focus on a different matter.

Why do people take such umbrage at Robertson’s remarks?  Now, I don’t ask why they disagree; to reiterate, I part ways with him theologically myself.  Yet I’m not offended.  I don’t act as if his commentary is as bad as a phony reverend screaming “God d*** America!” from the pulpit — which, I should emphasize, isn’t just saying that God has punished America.  It is asking Him to damn America.  And let us be clear: Damnation in Christian thought is something infinitely worse than sending a natural or manmade disaster our way.  It is wishing on your target the worst thing possible: eternal separation from God.  We should also note the context of that esteemed man of the cloth’s remarks.  He was saying that 9/11 was our just deserts, that, as he put it, “America’s chickens have come home to roost.”  Only, unlike the pastoral admonishment of Robertson and Falwell, he spewed the words with venom.  And I don’t remember the chickens in the media condemning him as they did those two men.  But I digress.

The larger point is that there is nothing un-Christian about a belief in God’s wrath.  The Bible is replete with examples of it, such as Noah’s Ark and the great flood, and Sodom and Gomorrah.  And when the Crusades (which, mind you, were a response to Moslem aggression) weren’t successful, medieval Christians viewed it as punishment for their sins.  They then aimed to purify themselves, and piety movements arose all across Europe.

Yet, while many view this thinking as backward and superstitious, it isn’t always because they scoff at the idea of the supernatural; as I said, millions believe in miracles.  Rather, it is because so many believe they have nothing to purify.

Truth be known, what really angers people is the implication that we could be deserving of such punishment.  It’s just a very unfashionable idea in our I’m-OK, you’re-OK, self-esteem-and-candy culture.  Yet the belief reflected by this anger is far more contrary to authentic Christianity than anything Robertson has said.

Central to Christianity is the idea that we’re deserving of the worst punishment — of damnation itself.  As the Bible says, “All have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God.”  Yet we won’t necessarily get what we deserve because God is merciful.  But this doesn’t mean He would not, under any circumstances, administer lesser punishment.  I suppose you could say it’s much like the difference between a pagan Roman father and a good Christian one.  As the paterfamilias, the former had the authority to even kill his children if it suited him.  Thankfully, no average father today would contemplate such a thing, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t put hand to hindquarters on occasion.

Also, before one judges a Christian harshly for speaking of God’s wrath, it’s important to understand the idea within the context of Christianity.  As the one who gave us life, God has the right to take it away.

But He doesn’t.

Upon leaving this fold, we pass on to eternal life.  And if God takes people from this world but then invites them into His kingdom, is it not a blessing?  Now, I well understand that this sounds ridiculous to secular ears that find the very concept of an afterlife silly.  But we’ve all heard of the importance of putting yourself in another’s shoes, of understanding his “perspective.”  There’s nothing sillier than judging someone’s intentions — what’s going on in his mind — without trying to grasp the world view shaping that mind.

Most interesting, though, is the modern man’s belief in his own sanctity.  Some would say this problem is a result of a lack of introspection, but, in a way, it’s also a result of nothing but introspection.  And this is largely a function of moral relativism.  I’ll explain.

The question here boils down to what you use to judge your moral state.  If you use Moral Truth — that is, something existing apart from man that constitutes perfect moral law — you will always find yourself wanting as you can never be perfect, never measure up to it.  Sure, not everyone has the same grasp of morality; some are blind to many of its elements; some see elements that aren’t there.  Some are blind to many of their own faults.  Nevertheless, it’s hard to believe in Truth, in perfection, and also believe that you truly reflect it.

But if there were no Truth, there would be no morality.  After all, if there is no external reality on which to base right and wrong — if, as the Greek philosopher Polybius said, “Man is the measure of all things” — it is simply an invention of man.  This is why relativists shy away from the term “morality” and instead prefer “values,” which usually refers not to divine or “natural” law but to social constructs.  But, then, what are values?  What are we really talking about?  What are we actually using as a yardstick for judging “moral” state?  It then could only one thing, emotion — consensus or individual.  This accounts for the popularity of the animalistic credo, “If it feels good, do it.”

But then, whose feelings should hold sway?  A person could use those of the wider society, and there certainly is social pressure to do so.  And given that our relativistic, feel-good culture has dumbed down standards to rubber-stamp what is pleasurable (part of which is sin), our collective set of values is far from perfect.  Thus, it’s easy to view yourself as “OK” relative to it.

More significantly, though, if values are relative and feelings carry the day, why should we defer to other people’s feelings?  After all, I’m a person just as you are.  Why should you be the arbiter of my “moral” standard?  Don’t impose your values on me, you intolerant oaf. 

The individual then uses his own emotions as the yardstick for what his relativistic mind can only call morality.  Then, since his “morality” is just a reflection of himself, he will conform to it perfectly.  This is the process by which one deifies himself.  It is when he finds the only kind of being this side of Heaven who could establish moral standards: the god “within.”  And then don’t dare suggest that he deserves punishment, for that is an offense against the perfect.  Is it any wonder that many so-called Christians today no longer believe in Hell?

Of course, not everyone descends into complete self-delusion.  But the more relativism blinds our eyes to the yardstick that reveals imperfection, the more we start to mistake our warts for marks of distinction.

I don’t think the Haitian earthquake, 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina was divine punishment.  But I do know this: It is not dangerous to believe that God would wash away wickedness with a great flood.  It is very dangerous to believe it wouldn’t matter anyway, because we can walk on water.

                                                           Contact Selwyn Duke  

"I was born with a chronic anxiety about the weather," said John Burroughs in 1877.  Today, anxiety about the weather is more common than ever, although it’s not inborn but cultivated in schoolrooms, through television sets and by lying, rapacious ex-vice presidents.  And I have anxiety about the weather, too — especially when it’s being used to promote a destructive agenda.

This brings us to Climategate, the scandal everyone is talking about and that inspired British journalist James Delingpole to write “it's [the climate con is] all unravelling now.”  I only wish I could be so optimistic.  Sure, we have the smoking gun of the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia, which provide evidence that we “deniers” were only denying a lie.  And the erstwhile head of its Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones — a con man with a science degree if ever there were one — had to resign in disgrace.  But don’t for a moment confuse a smoking gun with a coup de grace, or being sacrificed for the team with waving the white flag.  I say this because I long ago realized something about man’s nature, something that may sound like a gross exaggeration: If a person has a strong enough vested interest in believing 2+2=5, he will surely insist it is so — in the face of all evidence to the contrary.  But before I talk about who the real deniers are and what is being denied, let’s discuss the ugly reality reaffirmed by Climategate.

Here is the lowdown in a nutshell: Governments have used billions of dollars of our money to fund fraudulent science, which, in turn, is used to justify policy that would steal untold billions more from us through taxation and the handicapping of the private sector.  This will, of course, stifle the creation of wealth, but it will also be a transfer of it.  But this would not be so much from the rich to the poor; it would be from the poor and middle class to the rich and well-connected.  Carbon-credit con men such as Al Gore will add to their many millions, while subtracting from the many millions some of the latter’s few dollars.  It would move us toward a situation in which we’d have two Americas, as John Edwards might say.  One would be a lying, covetous ruling class of John Edwardses.  The other would be the masses, who would be perpetually mired in serfdom. 

Yet defeating the climate con won’t be easy, because it isn’t just money that drives the con men.  In fact, many of them are so married the climate con that they have become one with their misguided notions.  Call it the Zen of Being Wrong.     

One reason not to do wrong is that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  Obviously, Bill Clinton, John Edwards and Tiger Woods would never have felt the urge to lie about their affairs if they had never had affairs.  Of course, the lying was immoral, but this is how one sin leads to another.  A transgression leads to a lie, which leads to a full-blown cover-up, etc.  And the deeper you dig that hole, the harder and more painful it is to climb out of it.

In the case of the climate con artists, the pain would be great and the price steep.  Their creed has been likened to a religion, and in many ways it is.  They aren’t global-warming theorists.

They are global-warming fundamentalists. 

They have invested so much of their time, energy, emotion, ego and reputations in the climate con that to relinquish it would be to relinquish themselves; to call it a lie is to call their lives a lie.  It’s just a bit like asking a Jihadist to give up Islam.  These are not people who subscribe to AGW theory; they have submitted to it.

Then you have those who are using this religion to make money — and they and the true believers are often one and the same.  These are the carbon-credit capitalists, the green-technology givers and greenback grabbers.   

And we have to add to this the fact that all these people had become science’s Torquemadas, inquisitors bent on stifling inquisitiveness.  Al Gore told us “The debate is over” as he and his co-religionists strove to root out heresy and sought to destroy the “deniers.”  Thus, they have no reason to expect mercy.  Surrender is simply not an option.

So forget about icebergs; the meltdown the climate con artists fear is that of their reputations, egos, finances and faith.  Scientists or not, to admit error is not merely the alteration of a hypothesis to them; it is the loss of religion and meaning, the end of empire, the fall of Rome.  It is complete and utter personal destruction.

Yet destruction is precisely what the climate-change con men would visit on the economies of nations in their delusional grip.  Other lands, such as China and India, will never yield to such insanity.  They may pay lip service to it, though, especially if doing so will encourage us to more thoroughly handicap ourselves.  Then they can laugh and rise to prominence while we become the most recent great civilization to descend into backwater status.

As I write this, the climate-change con artists are meeting in Copenhagen, where useful-idiot communists are protesting in the streets while their standard bearers, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Zimbabwean strongman Robert Mugabe and Bolivian President Evo Morales are railing against free markets and beating the red drum. Do you really think these folks care about the environment? The green that really concerns them is your money — and I do mean your money. Because if there is an “international” agreement to fight the phantom of climate change, you can bet your depreciating bottom dollar that we Americans will pay the freight. We are, after all, the world’s biggest energy suckers.

The question is, are we just the world’s biggest suckers?

Chavez, Mugabe and China are betting yes. And if we want to make fools out of them, we’ll cause radical climate change — to the political climate in Washington in 2010. It’s probably our last chance to prove who the fools really are.  

                                                         Contact Selwyn Duke

Contrary to what my title indicates, I probably judge Barack Obama more harshly than most reading this page.  I don’t think he is just a misguided ideologue or merely a creature of expediency.  I believe, practically speaking, that he is an evil man.  That is to say, while he is largely ignorant like so many others, he has developed an affinity for evil.  He mistakes it for good.

Yet, to be blunt, Obama doesn’t alarm me as much as the average American.  To explain why, I’ll present something Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero said 2000 years ago when lamenting Julius Caesar’s rise to dictator:

Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions . . . .  Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the ‘new, wonderful good society’ which shall now be Rome’s, interpreted to mean ‘more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.’ Julius was always an ambitious villain, but he is only one man.

Barack Obama is only one man.  A bad man, yes, but he is a symptom more than a cause.  Without millions of fawning Americans, he would just be a community agitator, vainly preaching Alinsky principles from a soapbox.  Of course, he is a symptom that exacerbates the underlying problem, and symptomatic treatment — to ease immediate pain and hardship — is certainly in order.  But it is only the worst of physicians who focuses only on symptoms while ignoring the cancer eating away at the patient’s midst.

Some of us lament the presence of self-professed communists such as Van Jones — and other assorted intellectual mutants, such as Cass Sunstein and John Holdren — in government, and how we elected a man who broke bread with self-professed communists such as Bill Ayers.  But why complain now?  We’ve had self-professed communists such as Bill Ayers — and other assorted intellectual mutants, such as Ward Churchill, Cass Sunstein and John Holdren — in academia for many decades.  And good Americans still donated money to universities and still sent their most precious possessions, their children, to them. 

So, should it be any surprise that millions of these children would, knowing nothing and feeling all the wrongs things, flock to the polls and cast votes for people just like their teachers and professors?  You may say that their parents knew nothing of these universities’ true nature.  But it was their place to find out.  And Obama did not create the modern academy.  He is more a creation of it.

We also criticize Obama for saying “We no longer are [just] a Christian nation” and while speaking in Turkey that “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation.”  But can we really say he’s wrong?  Has Christmas not become completely commercialized?  How many of us say grace with our families before meals?  How many of us pray every day?  How many Americans subscribe to the modern perversion of the “separation of church and state” idea?  How many of us say “God Bless” upon parting?  Have the majority of American “Christians” not descended into moral relativism?  It is here that some will call me a religious nut.  All right, but I simply note that a Christian nation would actually practice Christianity and that if we are satisfied to be only nominally Christian, it lends weight to the argument that we’re not actually Christian.  Of course, we certainly can condemn Obama for attending a pseudo-Christian church and being part of the problem, but he didn’t create our secular age.  He is more a creation of it.

One thing Obama certainly did help create is the tea-party phenomenon.  It is the largest, most impressive grassroots movement I can remember and I truly hope it grows beyond what even the most zealous reader would prefer.  Yet, when I hear the protesters complain about the violation of the Constitution, I have to wonder we they’ve been.  Did they miss the activist 1947 “separation of church and state ruling”?  Have they learned about FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society?  Don’t they realize that the federal government long ago exceeded its constitutional bounds?  Where is the constitutional mandate for Uncle Scam to involve itself in and/or fund housing, food stamps, farm subsidies, Medicaid, global-warming research, mass transit, and school sports programs?  The fact is that most things the federal government has its claws into are none of its affair.  Thus, to only now complain about constitutional
trespasses is like having finally noted the invasion of Poland when the Nazis started bombing Great Britain.

We also have to ask how serious most Americans really are about respecting the Constitution.  Here’s a little test for them: Are you willing to give up your Social Security in the name of constitutional adherence?

I thought so.

The average American has his version of acceptable constitutional violation, Ruth Bader-Ginsburg has hers, and Obama has his.  And Obama didn’t create the “living document” mentality.  He is more a creation of it.

Then there is our putrid popular culture.  Effete Hollywood types — such as the Obama sycophants in this bizarre Harpo Productions video — thuggish rappers, MTV stoner types and the rest of our decadence czars helped galvanize the youth and propel the empty vessel to victory.  Yet, while entertainment is a bastion of the left, it’s not entirely a creation of it.  The reality is that we, the people, empowered them.  We watched their movies; laughed at their salacious jokes; were titillated by their prurience; and tolerated their mainstreaming obscenity, homosexuality and gratuitous violence.  We allowed our children to dress in their ghetto styles and imbibe pure and utter filth.  Like with so many other things, we helped create our entertainment — a major symptom of spiritual malaise — and then it helped induce many secondary symptoms.  And one of them is Obama.

Of course, nothing is more associated with that symptom than the Shill Media, but I think you know what’s coming.  Who bought the mainstream papers for all those decades, watched the nightly news and bought all the lies?  “How could people know?” you ask?  Well, some certainly knew — and some of those knew better than others. 

Like Cicero, I’m sure I sound quite condemnatory, but I’m not here to lay a curse or consign anyone to Hell.  I don’t want to be found guilty of the George Bernard Shaw mistake G.K. Chesterton criticized most colorfully when he wrote:

It is not seeing things as they are to think first of a Briareus with a hundred hands, and then call every man a cripple for only having two. It is not seeing things as they are to start with a vision of Argus with his hundred eyes, and then jeer at every man with two eyes as if he had only one. And it is not seeing things as they are to imagine a demigod of infinite mental clarity, who may or may not appear in the latter days of the earth, and then to see all men as idiots. 

In reality, for us to have avoided that ever-repeated pattern of civilizational decline, the common man would have to be a very uncommon man, something, in the least, like a sublime moral philosopher.  And, certainly, no person will have, metaphorically speaking, a hundred industrious hands, a hundred all-seeing eyes or even come close to enjoying demigod-like mental clarity.  Yet a nation doesn’t have to resign itself to being blind and crippled, either.  We can usually manage one more hand and eye.

Truth be known, when we elected Obama, the nation said “Look, ma, no hands!” with its eyes closed.  It required corrupted judgment to be blind to what Obama was.  Note that “corrupted” is different than “corrupt.”  When saying a computer file is corrupted, there is no implication that it’s evil; rather, it simply means it no longer functions as it should. 

This partially explains why facts often don’t matter today.  Just as correct input may not yield correct output if fed into a malfunctioning computer, all the necessary facts may not yield a correct conclusion when processed by a corrupted mind.  And anyone with a properly functioning virtue file would have sensed the lack of same in Obama.  After all, there were so many indications, from his radical associations to his tolerance for infanticide (that’s what you call a clue) to the fact that he once allowed his then two-year-old daughter to listen to rap to his empty sloganeering.  Yes, we could’ve . . . known.

Yet my point here is not about the average person, who isn’t reading substantive commentary anyway. It’s that even most of us who oppose Obama and are political are just political, content to fight the battle with one hand and one eye.  So many of us — this includes readers and commentators — are satisfied with boilerplate; it’s Alinsky this and Alinsky that, San Fran Nan, Afghanistan and the Taliban, this bill and that political shill.  This isn’t to say there’s not a place for such things, as many do need a course in politics 101.  But if we want to have any chance of winning the war, we must move on to graduate work and fight it on the deepest levels, the spiritual and cultural.  We must scrutinize ourselves and evaluate how we have been complicit in empowering the culture that spawns Barack Obamas.  We must remember that those of us who are engaged are a minority weighed against an apathetic majority.  A few stones however, can be substantial enough to tip the scales against a million pebbles.  But this can only happen if we so greatly increase the weight of our virtue that it outweighs the vice that is everywhere.

I once heard a man of the cloth put it perfectly, saying “Everyone is in a different stage of conversion.”  Every thought we contemplate, word we utter and action we take move us closer to or further away from perfection.  And it’s always time for another hand and another eye.

Perhaps you’ve heard the tragic story of David Reimer.  Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1966, David was the victim of a botched circumcision that left his penis charred beyond surgical repair.  His parents Ron and Janet, no doubt beside themselves, were confused about the best way to proceed.  Then, one day, they saw a man named Dr. John Money on television.

Money was talking about his theory of “gender neutrality,” which states that “gender identity” is learned rather than innate.  The idea was that the sexes were the same except for the superficial physical differences; this implies that if a child were altered so as to superficially resemble the opposite sex and was raised as one of its members, he would be happy with that sexual identity.  Hearing this, the Reimers hoped they had found their salvation.

They took their boy to Money, who told them that their son’s penis could not be restored and that he stood a much better chance of living a happy life if “sex-reassignment surgery” (in reality, reassigning sex is about as possible as reassigning species) were performed and he was raised as a girl.  The Reimers agreed, and the surgery was performed when the boy, who would be named “Brenda,” was 22 months old.

In reality, the kindest way to describe Money’s theory is fanciful.  His idea of “gender neutrality” was still in vogue when I was a youth, and “vogue,” in the most frivolous sense, is the correct term.  It was always more style than science; it was something that I, even as a teen, knew was bunk.  Yet who would listen to people such as me?  We were old-fashioned, behind the times.  And it didn’t matter that Money was Alfred Kinsey redux and believed pedophilia was lovely if it was for “love.” It didn’t matter that David and his twin brother, Brian, said that Money sexually abused them during photo shoots.  He was a “doctor,” a Ph.D. on the cutting edge of a brave new world.

Only, David (“Brenda” at the time) wanted nothing to do with that world.  Although he was never told he was a boy, had been surgically altered, was dressed and raised as a girl and was regularly seeing Money for therapy, he resisted his “gender assignment” from the outset.  He acted like a boy, played with boys’ toys and objected to seeing Money from the age of seven.  It wasn’t going well — and it wouldn’t end well.

At the age of 14, in a rare commendable act of teen rebellion, David threatened suicide if he were forced to continue with Money’s prescriptions.  This prompted his parents to finally tell him the truth about his condition.  With his eyes opened, he then replaced his estrogen treatments with male hormone therapy, took the name “David,” started living as a boy, underwent reconstructive genital surgery and later married a woman who already had children.  Yet the damage had been done.  His tormented life which began in such a tragic way came to a tragic end: he did commit suicide, at the age of 38.

Dr. Money, too, is now dead.  Yet he died with his ideological boots on; not only did he fail to repent, he fraudulently portrayed David’s case — the one for which he was most famous — as a success for years after its failure was obvious.  This, and his refusal to ever own up to the failure, only increased the chances that other children would be thus scarred.

As a testimonial to how quickly fashions pass away, Money’s theory has joined him in the grave.  The stake through its heart came in the 1990s, with brain research and an improved understanding of intrauterine development proving conclusively that the sexes are different even within the womb and the skull.  These new findings expressing old wisdom were related as revelation, reflecting the idea that nothing is truly valid until vindicated by “science.”  So there was no collective mea culpa from the psychological establishment for clouding reality and misleading generations of naïve parents.  They just continued without missing a beat, as if it were a matter no more significant than recommending the wrong size shoes for the kids.  Worse still, they have now moved on to their next mistake.

We have heard about the curious case of Caster Semenya, the 18-year-old South African runner who has been competing as a woman.  Semenya has become the focus of suspicion (I’ll use masculine pronouns, as I’m convinced this individual is a boy who experienced abnormal intrauterine development) because of his masculine physique, deep voice, development of facial hair, male mannerisms and the fact that he has been winning races by wide margins.  As a result, a battery of medical exams to determine his true sex has been conducted, although the results have not been officially released.  Yet the real story here is not what investigation may tell us about Semenya.  It is what our reaction to Semenya tells us about ourselves.

This is reflected in comments found throughout the Internet.  For instance, consider “JimBob” posting under this Daily Mail piece, who said, 

“Why is everyone talking about genetics? What about Caster’s own mind - if she believes within herself that she’s female, then she is.”

Echoing this sentiment here, “Green Is Good” wrote,

“SHE identifies HERself as a female. Done.”

Then, back to the Mail, “Livio” opined,

“This is a clear case of gender identity discrimination. What if she is a man who identifies himself as a woman?”

That’s interesting.  What if you’re a lunkhead who identifies himself as intelligent?

Yet it isn’t sufficient to just dismiss this with sarcasm, as this isn’t the rambling of only a few twisted minds. 

What these posters are expressing is the handiwork of today’s Dr. Moneys, “transgender” theory.  This is the idea that your “gender” can be whatever you want it to be — male, female, both male and female or neither, etc. — that it isn’t limited by biology.  If you have a problem with this, bravo, but then you should have a problem with the word “gender” itself.  Why? 

Because its current usage (it used to apply only to words) was originated by people such as Money for the purposes of facilitating the relation of their theories.  Understand that while many people use “gender” as a synonym for “sex,” that is not its social sciences definition, which dictates that it refers to social rather than biological differences.  Yet people love to use this and other elements of the lexicon of the left.  It’s a fascinating phenomenon.  If you replace a simple, one-syllable word such as “poor” or “sex” with impressive sounding terms such as “underprivileged” or “gender” for ideological reasons, people, oblivious to the underlying agenda and wishing to sound sophisticated, will glom onto them.  You see, simpletons, who are relatively rare, prefer simple words.  And the only other group that does is rarer still: true intellectuals.  But I digress.     

So, returning to Semenya, many people express the shocking idea that his actual sex should have no bearing on whether he should be allowed to compete with women.  It’s that modern phenomenon — image is everything, reality is negotiable.

This notion has so taken hold that we’ve recently heard of two stories out of Britain wherein young boys, ages 12 and 9, showed up in school earlier this month as “girls,” sporting girls’ clothing and ponytails and bearing feminine names.  And the schools are kowtowing to them, telling other pupils that they’ll be punished if they don’t handle the “sex change” “sensitively.” 

Yet sensitivity is not for the other children, who are upset and confused.  In just the way that David Reimer’s body was mutilated in deference to yesterday’s latest theory, their minds must be mutilated in deference to today’s. 

Now, even if someone subscribes to “transgender” theory, it is striking that he would allow a child who is too young to decide to have sex decide what sex he should be.  How did we get to this point?

These parents, like Ron and Janet Reimer before them, are listening to the respected social scientists of their day.  These “experts” tell them that there is something called “gender dysphoria,” which is the persistent feeling that one is a member of one sex trapped in the body of the other.  It’s enough to convince many parents, such as those of German Tim Petras, who received female hormone “treatments” at age 12 and now goes by the name of Kim.  Yet on what basis is this diagnosis really made?

Feelings.

It is truly reflective of this age, where relativism has obviated reason.  That is to say, if there are no absolutes, no Truth to use as a yardstick for judging among feelings, the feelings themselves become the ultimate arbiter.  Then, of course, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a Fig Newton if it feels like one.

But one of the problems with emotion is that it is by its very nature irrational.  And if anyone would defend an emotion-based diagnosis such as “gender dysphoria,” note that it’s brought to us by the same psycho-babblers who have given us something dubbed “body dysmorphia.”  This is this persistent feeling that a certain body part, such as an arm or leg (or multiple body parts), doesn’t belong on one’s body.  And if you think it isn’t taken seriously, know that doctors have amputated healthy limbs on this basis.

Be shocked — that is, unless you accept “gender dysphoria” as legitimate.  Then you’d better be introspective.  For what is the difference?  Why would you accept the emotion-based diagnosis of gender dysphoria but not the emotion-based one of body dysmorphia?  Why are the feelings of those who suffer from the latter invalid but the feelings of those who suffer from the former a credible arbiter?  Both groups have persistent feelings that their bodies aren’t as they should be.  Both groups cannot bear to live in their bodies as they are.  Both groups want to have their bodies altered.  And both groups have found “experts” willing to put them under the knife.  Sure, it strikes us as the most horrid malpractice when a doctor amputates healthy body parts, such as a pair of legs.  But, then, should we view it any less dimly simply because those healthy body parts are between the legs?
Lamentably, today the answer is often yes, and this speaks volumes about our society.  That is, we’ve all heard that old stereotype of a lunatic, the guy in an asylum who thinks he is Napoleon.  Now the asylums have largely been emptied, and I think I know why: we’ve turned the outside world into an asylum.  What was once only acceptable to a small group within the scariest of walls — detachment from reality — has now been mainstreamed.  You can be a man who thinks he is a woman, yet no straitjacket is slapped on you.  It is slapped on the mouths of those who dare say self-image isn’t reality.

And that is the point: there is something called reality.  When feelings tell one he is, or should be, something he is not or shouldn’t be — a girl, a legless man or Napoleon — the sane conclusion is that you’re confronted with a psychological problem, not a physical one.  It may be intractable, and it is certainly easier to mutilate the body than cure the mind.  But you cannot mutilate reality, only obscure it.  If a man loses his genitalia in an accident, does he cease to be male?  Or, if “gender” is a continuum as today’s Moneys say, is he less male?  Did David Reimer cease to be a boy because he was mutilated and given estrogen against his will?  Of course, the “experts” would say the answer is no, since he never saw himself as a girl. 

Again, though, feelings cannot be the arbiters of reality.  After all, I may have hypertrichosis like Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, undergo operations to create a snout, paws and a tail, howl under the moonlight and change my name to Spot.  Yet am I sane if I call myself a different species?

So what are we to conclude about “gender” science?  Decades ago its “experts” said society could turn your boy into a girl if it felt like it; now they say he can turn himself into a girl if he feels like it.  Is it just a coincidence that Dr. Money’s “gender neutrality” theory accorded with his day’s feminist claim that sex roles should be discarded because the sexes are essentially the same?  Is it just a coincidence that the current “transgender” theory accords with our day’s homosexual claim that sex roles should be discarded because everyone and his values are essentially different?  It is at all possible that these theories have less to do with sound science than the spirit of the age?   

We have gone from the proposition that “gender” can be whatever society says it is to the proposition that it can be whatever the individual says it is without ever stopping to wonder if the second idea is just a crank like the first.  But most won’t wonder because today we place more faith in doctors than doctrine, and today’s doctors say that eternal common sense and yesterday’s doctors’ nonsense are wrong.  Yet the most significant thing that distinguishes them from Dr. John Money is that they are still alive — and their theory is not yet dead.

News aggregator DrudgeReport.com is currently linking to a YouTube video of a government schoolteacher instructing young students to praise Obama in song. While this is shocking, there is an even bigger story here. Consider this: the video’s “views” counter listed only 363 views as of 1:04 p.m. EST on Sept. 24.

But at the same time it had 2,279 comments. 

What’s wrong with this picture?

Obviously, those figures should in the least be reversed. After all, since the number of comments on high-traffic YouTube videos generally represents only one-half of one percent to three percent of the total views, we can estimate that the Obama worship video had in excess of 200,000 hits at the time. But what accounts for this? Is it a technical glitch? I doubt it.

But why would YouTube cook the statistical books? 

Because the exposure a video receives is based on its number of views. And YouTube — owned by leftist leviathan Google — wants to suppress negative information about Barack Obama and the left in general.

In other words, if a video receives tremendous traffic, it appears on YouTube’s “Popular” videos page or its “Most Viewed” page. This means it will get infinitely more exposure — it will be seen not just by the people who have driven it onto the front page but also those who wouldn’t normally know about it. But YouTube likely doesn’t want you to know about the Obama worship video. So, perhaps, like a sleazy car dealer dialing down an odometer, they dial down the hit counter to a point where the video languishes in the recesses of the site. 

To get a better grasp of this problem’s magnitude, know that I have a friend who is a frequent YouTube visitor. He logged on early this morning and watched the Obama worship video. He says that at approximately 11 a.m. the views counter seemed to reflect the actual number of hits, with a total of at least 196,000 (and probably more). But what then no doubt happened is that YouTube’s censors realized that Drudge had linked up to the video and got busy with their usual voodoo. 

So I tracked the video a bit myself. Now, remember that it had 363 hits at 1:04 p.m. Here’s what I found. 

• Approximately 1:25 p.m.: the video still supposedly had only 363 hits but had 2,500 comments. 

• 1:39 p.m.: still only 363 hits but 2,668 comments.

• 2:16 p.m.: 363 hits but 3,018 comments.

You get the idea.

If you find it hard to believe that YouTube would be so blatant and sloppy about its censorship, understand that it’s practicing it by rote at this point.

It’s nothing new.

In fact, my aforementioned friend reports to me that YouTube had been doing this all throughout the 2008 campaign, suppressing pro-John McCain and anti-Obama videos while showcasing pro-Obama and anti-McCain works. 

And for another specific example, he mentioned a Britney Spears video titled “Circus.” When it was issued late last year, it was immensely popular and was prominently featured by YouTube (currently has 56,371,680 views). Yet it quickly was “disappeared.” What was its trespass?
It featured circus animals.

The obvious conclusion is that YouTube’s commissars received complaints from animal-rights wackos —and these were reflected in the video’s comments section, actually — and decided it wasn’t fit for young, impressionable eyes. Of course, this is the same company that regularly features all manner and form of lewd, perverted behavior on its main video pages.

And all this from a subsidiary of the company whose informal motto is “Don’t be evil.”

As for the Obama worship video, know that if this exposé gets traction, YouTube will do damage control and allow the video’s stats to reflect the truth.

Oh, I checked the Obama worship video one last time at 2:52 p.m. It still had 363 views.

A little while back, talk show host Michael Savage had to endure an attack on his character when the British government associated him with terrorists and other criminals and banned him from traveling to the U.K.  But on Saturday, August 22 the attack — or at least an attack — was brought to his own shores when a computer hacker damaged his website by sneaking into its server through a feedback portal, forcing technicians to shut it down for nearly an hour.

The attack came on the heels of sharp criticism leveled at the U.K. by Savage over its release of Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, prompting the host to speculate that the British government might have ordered the hacking effort in retaliation.  Drew Zahn writes of Savage’s suspicions at WorldNetDaily.com:

“Why on the day of the worldwide furor over the release of the Lockerbie Bomber by [British Prime Minister] Gordon Brown would Michael Savage’s website be hacked?” the radio host posited. “We cannot say who did this, but would it not be a possibility that the Brits themselves ordered this hack-attack?

“Why?” Savage asked WND. “Because the evidence that they placed me on this list with real murderers and terrorists was a political favor to some Islamic nation can be found in the recently discovered e-mails, hidden until now by the Gordon Brown government. Their own e-mail chain on banning Savage states, ‘There is no evidence of Savage advocating or inciting violence,’ yet, by including Savage on this banned list it would ‘help provide a balance of types of exclusion cases,’ in other words, the list would not only contain radical Muslims but also a white male conservative.”

Whoever orchestrated the attack, it makes MichaelSavage.com the latest in a long line of traditionalist websites victimized by hacker intrusion.  The Daily Telegraph, Glenn Reynold’s site Instapundit.com, HughHewitt.com, PowerLine.com, JihadWatch.com and Bill O’Reilly’s website were all victims, just to name a handful (Michelle Malkin discussed how 27 traditionalist Hosting Matters blogs were simultaneously taken down here).  Additionally, NewsWithViews.com, which publishes my work, seems to have been attacked more than once.  In fact, just earlier this year I received a phone call from its publisher informing me that the site’s email account was being targeted and that I’d have to contact them via a different address.

And it seems as if cyber attacks are right out of the left’s playbook.  In fact, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (USDHS) issued a report in January of this year stating that left-wing extremists were likely to increase the use of such attacks during the next decade.  Moreover, the left’s strange Islamist bedfellows use this tactic quite liberally as well, as evidenced by a 2008 attack on a Dutch hosting company that affected more than 200 websites; it followed in the wake of anti-Islamist commentary such as that in Dutch politician Geert Wilder’s movie Fitna.  I should also mention that the attack on JihadWatch.com was traced back to Turkey, and one of the intrusions Malkin cited originated with computers in Saudi Arabia.

In light of this history, it wouldn’t surprise me if the attack on Savage’s site was the handiwork of Islamists, perhaps in a Muslim country, perhaps in Britain.  And what we can know for sure is that if Islamists are not the culprit, their leftist facilitators likely are.

Whatever the case, cyber attacks are far from harmless.  They are a type of virtual vandalism that causes the target to incur reparative costs.  Moreover, there is also the possibility that if such costs become too high for a hosting company, it might refuse to host the targeted site, which would cause the webpage to disappear from the Internet until it was able to find hosting services elsewhere.

Now, harking back the USDHS report, it isn’t surprising that the left would have no compunction about using cyber attacks.  And we cannot truly appreciate the threat posed by the left unless we understand why.

The left is morally relativistic at its core, meaning, its members generally don’t believe in Absolute Moral Truth.  Because of this, there is nothing to govern their agenda except for their own desires, their own feelings.  That is to say, a person who understands that we are meant to govern ourselves with that eternal, unchanging moral yardstick called Truth realizes that the end does not justify the means.  Sure, he isn’t perfect, but he understands that he cannot just “follow his heart,” that his emotions aren’t the arbiters of reality.  This is why Saul “the Red” Alinsky instructed his followers to force their adversaries (that means traditionalists) to live up to their own principles.  You see, he understood that we actually have some.

But the left proceeds largely unencumbered by morality.  Whatever helps them achieve their immediate goal — instituting faux marriage, inuring people to abortion, stifling anti-Islamist dissent or whatever it may be — is justifiable in their universe.  Their “values” originate from within and change with the winds of convenience.  Thus, while traditionalists fight abiding by Queensbury Rules, their enemies proceed no holds barred.

Of course, we can never take this leaf out of the left’s book, as it would require a complete abandonment of morality.  But we also have to be careful that we don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.
Know thy enemy.

With relativistic people, there is no such thing as a true axiom, yet you’d never know it listening to our modern mantras.  We hear things such as “Our strength lies in our diversity,” “Religion has caused all the wars in history,” and “Everything is a matter of perspective” proclaimed with theological assurance.  Of course, the last supposition is contradictory, and embracing it renders moral supposition itself meaningless.  Regardless, it’s natural for man to make sense of the world by “profiling” elements of reality.

Many of our assumptions pertain to race, and one is always uttered in the wake of stories such as the recent Henry Louis Gates affair.  What happens is that, referring to race, people will reflexively say something akin to the following, “Well, we still have a long way to go.”  Even conservatives pay homage to this self-evident provisional “truth,” only, they add a qualifier so it goes something like, “We still have a long way to go, but . . .,” with the caboose being “we’ve made great strides,” “we’ve come a long way” or some variation thereof.  It’s obligatory, after all.  It’s how you polish up you credentials as a person who “understands the problem.”

It’s also reflective of a hang-up.  Oh, this isn’t to say I believe we’ve achieved perfection in racial attitudes, perish the thought.  It is to say, however, that seeing a failure to achieve perfection in an area as a characteristic problem is far more of a problem than what ostensibly needs invasive and aggressive remedy.  It usually yields a cure worse than the disease.

Understand that bigotry is simply a manifestation of one of the Seven Deadly Sins: wrath.  It is not the end-all and be-all, the source of all our woes.  It is not, relatively speaking, even a major problem (although, it waxes when we let the Sharptons, Jacksons and Obamas of the world stir the pot).

If this statement raises eyebrows, perspective is needed.  If we were otherwise perfect and called the ether home, any extant bigotry would rightly stick out like white sheets at a Black Panther meeting.  Yet we are far from perfect.  We exhibit not just one element of wrath but also its other manifestations and the rest of the deadly sins — greed, lust, sloth, pride, envy and gluttony — to varying degrees.  So the question is not whether bigotry exists and is a problem, as this is true of every sin.  It concerns whether it is a characteristic problem.

In other words, if we were to constantly lament our lacking math ability, it would imply one of two things.  It either stands out in reality, making us pay it some mind, or it stands out only in our minds, in which case we are detached from reality.  If the former, it would have to pale in comparison to the mathematical achievement of other nations or to our ability in other areas, such as English and history.  So the question is, does our obsession with bigotry meet one of the last criterion’s two elements?

No rational person can make the case that we rank high on the world’s bigotry scale, not on a planet in which racial and ethnic patriotism reign supreme.  Many don’t realize that this is in fact man’s default state, but the irony is that it’s because they’ve fallen victim to something they might be wont to preach against: “ethnocentrism.”  The fact is that man is tribal by fallen nature, and there is little in the way of political correctness outside the Western world.  In fact, far from being taught that it’s wrong to discriminate, many groups are taught that it’s wrong to not place your “people” first.  Such a thing can make you a pariah.

The reality is that we kill ourselves talking about bigotry, but much of the world kills others because of it.  We’ve all heard about this, from the Balkan ethnic cleansing in the 1990s to the Ruandan genocide in which hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were murdered by Hutu tribesman, who happened to refer to them as “cockroaches.”  Oh, I should mention that no hate-speech charges are in the offing.

But, okay, we’re better than the monster in another country, but maybe bigotry is the worst monster roaming our countryside.  Except that, well, believing this requires the most incomplete of moral compasses.  Let’s now contrast this manifestation of wrath with the rest of our national sins.

It’s obvious where we should start.  Given that we have sexual imagery and innuendo everywhere, classes in pornography and “sexology” in colleges, and stories of children re-enacting Caligula’s court in schools, can we really make the case that bigotry is a greater problem than lust?  What about greed?  Well, given the Bernie Madoffs of the world, the recent Wall Street woes, rapacious government officials and the long-accepted maxim about the lust for money being the root of all evil, it just may rank a bit higher as well.  Sloth?  Our welfare state and handout-and-entitlement mentality.  Envy?  Class warfare.  Gluttony?  We have more obese people than the rest of the world combined.  Pride?  Given how people are loath to admit error — think Obama and his refusal to apologize to the Cambridge police — and the super-size egos that abound, this trumps bigotry also.

This lack of perspective is no small matter, as it leads to much destructive social engineering.  Just think about race-based quotas, affirmative action and set asides.  Consider the assumption that relative racial homogeneity within a business or organization equates to racial animosity in its leaders’ hearts, or how largely white neighborhoods are targeted with “low income” housing because, well, we all know there just must be unjust discrimination. 

And think about how Obama, Gates and so many others will just assume that white police are bigoted because “We still have a long way to go.”  All the while we have schools teaching perversion, profligate government spending, illegal aliens “undocumented” into legitimacy, criminals who go unpunished, slackers who are rewarded, heroes who are derided and traitors who are exalted.  We have caricatured virtue and vice, exaggerating some parts to grotesque proportions while ignoring others.  The result is that we misdirect our scalpel during “corrective” surgery, slicing off healthy tissue while allowing cancerous tumors in our midst to grow unfettered.

Not only does this selective moral blindness numb us to our real national sins, it also allows the reprobate the illusion of righteousness.  In fact, while the stereotype of the self-righteous oaf is of a rightist religious zealot, a far more fitting candidate is the loopy leftist lunkhead.  He is the one who will parade about defining favored vices as virtue, worshipping sex and mammon, secure in his own saintliness because he utters nary a racial joke and bears nobly that newly-minted white man’s burden.  The modern leftist is like a Nazi who thinks he is good because he is hygienic and punctual. 

Yet this leftist conception of virtue is as shallow as it is narrow; its definition of goodness doesn’t seem to involve love for what one defends as much as equal-opportunity hatred.  As to this, I have long observed something: liberals treat blacks like people; the problem is that they don’t treat people like people.  That is to say, they treat blacks like everyone else, but they treat everyone pretty shabbily.  With Torquemada-like zeal they advance the dogma that we must treat all people equally, but much is missing from that prescription.  Equally at what moral level?  You can treat people equally by killing them all with the same expedition and ferocity. 

So here is the left’s implied standard: you may curse people out generically for five minutes with seething hatred, just don’t utter one racial epithet.  You may let everyone starve, just don’t give one race a morsel of food another cannot digest.  You may corrupt all races with vile hip-hop anti-culture, just don’t imply that it is more corruptive than anything else.  This is our national hang-up, our racial Puritanism.

Leftists don’t realize it, but with their obsession, they are reminiscent of a group from the past which they view with utter contempt and mockery.  And while it’s generally not true that authentic Christians were hung-up on sex, the people in question could be thus described.  These were individuals who would, and I’ll be delicate, affix mechanical devices to boys to prevent a certain normal physiological reaction.  (No, this was not medieval times but those of the “Enlightenment,” and the instigators were at least as likely to be physicians and scientists as churchmen.)  I guess they figured that they “still had a long way to go.” 

Now, people weren’t wrong to preach chastity just as we aren’t wrong to preach charity.  But among the legitimate moralists of the day were those who caricatured the virtue, thereby perverting it, just as we do today with racial brotherhood.  The question is, will you and I be voices of reason or, in obeisance to the age, insist that all racial talk is “dirty”?  If the latter, then we will be deserving of the mockery when people two centuries hence laugh at how “repressed” we were.

When Barack Obama said that the Henry Louis Gates affair was a teaching moment, he spoke truly.  But the key is ensuring that the right things are taught and the right people learn. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to happen.

There is no need to rehash the events of July 16 chapter and verse.  We all know about how the Harvard professor flew into a rage of racial accusations and haughty posturing after Sergeant James Crowley appeared at his Cambridge home to investigate a report of a possible break-in.  We’ve heard that Gates called Crowley a “racist” and said he was being targeted because “I’m a black man in America.”  We know how Barack Obama stirred the pot, saying at a press conference that he didn’t know all the facts but then averring that the police “acted stupidly.”  And we also know that it’s a foot-in-mouth moment Obama wishes he could do a Groundhog Day on, and that he fancies a beer a substitute for an apology.

Moreover, the obvious points have already been made.  We know that the police were simply following procedure in requesting Gates’ identification and asking that he step outside his home.  It has also been mentioned that, far from the police racially profiling the man, he and Obama applied that technique in assuming that the white police officer was bigoted and/or acting stupidly.  And, in keeping with last point, some of the boldest commentators even have hinted that bigotry may lie in the hearts of Gates and Obama.  Yet no one has thus far dared expose the pretense.

I didn’t need the Gates affair, eye-opening for some, to understand the nature of a Gates or of Obama.  Immediately upon learning of Gates’ existence, I knew he was another one of the president’s many, many bigoted men.  And even before Obama dared stray beyond the guiderails of the teleprompter and commented on the matter, I knew that another one of the president’s bigoted men stared back at him every day in the mirror.

In reality, I knew this even before learning of yet another one of the president’s bigoted “men,” Sonia “Wise Latina” Sotomayor and even, actually, prior to being bombarded with the bile of his most notorious bigoted man, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  I knew it for a very simple reason. For all intents and purposes, politically liberal blacks are by definition bigoted.

This is true virtually to a man.

Of course, we all know what is coming.  Many will say that I’m prejudiced for painting all the members of such a large group with the same brush.  But let’s note that “prejudice” in the negative sense denotes an unfavorable opinion about a person, group or thing that has no basis in reality.  For instance, the Wise Latina had her foot-in-mouth moment when she said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” However, if this had a basis in reality, it would not be a prejudice.  So let’s examine whether or not my assertion has that basis.

I’ll begin by emphasizing two things, the first of which will make it seem as if I’m being politically correct and the second of which will disabuse the reader of that notion.  First, it goes without saying that there are blacks who aren’t bigoted — they also aren’t liberal.  There are my two favorite economists, Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell; the man I want as president, Alan Keyes; talk show host Larry Elder; minister and head of B.O.N.D Jesse Lee Peterson; and many, many others.  Between this ideological set and politically liberal blacks is another basic group, one epitomized by Colin Powell.  While its members are weak sisters philosophically, it wouldn’t be fair to describe all of them as bigoted.

Now for the second thing: even putting the Keyes and Powell groups together, percentagewise they are part of a very small minority.

Now let’s move on.  In the movie Boyz N’ the Hood, the father character, played by Laurence Fishburne, gives a motivational speech about how the presence of alcohol and gun stores in South Central L.A. is the result of a white conspiracy.  Note that he is cast in the film as the wise patriarch, a voice of reason.

Of course, this is Hollywood, but it’s also a case of art imitating life.  We long ago learned about the large numbers of black people who believe the AIDS virus is the result of a white conspiracy to wipe out blacks.  And this paranoia also explains countless everyday interactions.  For instance, some years ago there was the story of that public official who used the word “niggardly” at a meeting, and I documented the woes of Illinoisan David Gonzalez, who, replying to a query, told a black co-worker that a symbol he was wearing was a clan badge (Scottish clan, a symbol of ethnicity).  In both cases, the men were targeted by bigoted leftist blacks who were sure they were prejudiced.

Then there is bigoted Obama man Attorney General Eric Holder, who mentioned that he also was “profiled” by the police in this nation of cowards.  Now, I don’t doubt that he believes he was unjustly targeted, but, then, I know something else: I’ve been “profiled” as well.  I could tell you about a couple of incidents in which I was pulled over simply because I was in the wrong place, in the wrong kind of vehicle and, in one case, the wrong age.  This, not to mention that I was the wrong sex — remember, the police view men much more suspiciously than women because, like some other groups, they commit an inordinate amount of the crime (note that the complaints of profiling we hear always involve black men).  Then there is that esteemed academic Professor Gates, who was sure that Sgt. Crowley was a “‘racist’ police officer.” And there are many other such examples.

Now, why would anyone read bigoted motives into innocent things?  It’s not always a Machiavellian playing of the race card, I can assure you.  There is another reason. We’ve all had experiences with those who are prejudiced against an individual.  It might have been a mother-in-law who just couldn’t stand her son’s wife, or a person who, after years of marital conflict, was fatally biased against his spouse.  And when you thus hate someone, it’s so often the case that you view him through colored glasses.  His trespasses are then never innocent mistakes, are they?  And are his errant comments ever just slips of the tongue?  No, they’re the result of evil motives, a desire to target you for attack.  The thinking is, “You know, that’s just the kind of thing that scum of the Earth would do!”  In reality, we’d do well to bear in mind that you should “Never attribute to malice what is better explained by stupidity,” but the prejudiced person will never distinguish between the innocent and insidious.  For hatred is like darkness: the more there is, the less you can see.

It is no different with politically liberal blacks.  Gates, AIDS conspiracy theorists, the niggardly-and-clan police and many others are just sure that those who “offended” them are bigoted because, well, that’s just what white people do.

Also note that the demonization of whites is part of leftist dogma (I refute this here).  This was apparent even four decades ago when feminist Susan Sontag infamously proclaimed, “The white race is the cancer of human history.”  And the idea gains ever more currency.  In fact, I have encountered numerous whites who have expressed such sentiments, including a man online recently who wrote that he was “ashamed” to be white.

Yet, if such anti-white loathing is present among leftist whites out of a sense of being “oppressors,” how much more prevalent is it among leftist blacks, who view themselves as the oppressed?  The answer is that it’s common enough — and accepted enough — so that another one of the president’s bigoted men, Reverend Joseph Lowery, was given the podium and allowed to pray for a day “when white will embrace what is right” during Obama’s inauguration.  Oh, and Obama didn’t say he was sorry for that, either.  It just seems that he only apologizes to those he considers alien when they reside overseas.

Then we have that old political observation about how blacks are actually quite conservative culturally.  This evidenced itself just last November when 70 percent of blacks voted for California’s Proposition 8, which defined marriage as the union between a man and woman, versus only 49 percent of whites.  Now, while the phenomenon of black cultural conservatism is certainly exaggerated a bit, we have to ask, why would such a group vote Democrat 95 percent of the time?  The answer is race.  There is a strong feeling in the black community that the Republicans are the white party, which is no doubt why Screaming Howard Dean played upon this stereotype in 2008.  And to rise above this — as Alan Keyes and the other fine gentlemen I’ve mentioned have done — is to transcend leftist politics itself.

As for politically liberal blacks, the reality is that they are consumed by race.  They live and die with it, eat it and breathe it.  As an example, consider a certain affirmation black women sometimes utter to young black boys: “You’re going to grow up to be a strong, young black man!”  Now, this isn’t designed simply to reassure the lads that they’re not going to go the way of Michael Jackson.  There is another reason.

Everyone tends to define himself in some manner, viewing some particular status as central to his being.  This should be “child of God” but usually is something else; it could be the quite wholesome identity of “father” or “mother,” or it could be “policeman,” “doctor” or “athlete.”  Then again, it could also have to do with one’s group. In the case of politically liberal blacks, they identify so closely with their race that there simply is little, if any, separation between them and it.  As an example of how this manifests itself, consider Congressman Sheila Jackson-Lee’s 2005 statement during a House discussion, “I came here as a slave; I now want the right to vote!”  Now, just for the record, this woman isn’t 175 years old.  But was it just a manner of speaking?  Well, when I gave a talk about so-called racial profiling at a Toronto symposium some years back, I took questions afterwards and one I fielded was from a black student.  He began by passionately saying, “There was a time when you and I couldn’t drink out of the same water fountain . . . .”

He was about 16 years old.

Rest assured, it’s not that these folks had a Shirley MacLaine vision of a past life.  It is that identification.  In their universe, “I” am the group; the group is me.  Anything that has happened to the group has happened to me, and any characterization of the group is a characterization of me.  The latter is, by the way, one reason why people (of any group) exhibiting this phenomenon cannot abide any criticism of their group.  Their self-image is so intertwined with the image of the collective that anything diminishing the latter diminishes the former.  This helps explain why such people will jump through hoops to rationalize away unflattering facts about their groups.  It sheds light on why individuals such as Obama can say that blacks get stopped by law enforcement disproportionately while ignoring the reason for it: they commit crimes disproportionately.  The black person who has amalgamated group and self cannot acknowledge this fact because, in his mind, it would be tantamount to saying that he was criminally inclined.  It would make him feel like less as a person.

Now, there is a funny thing about hang-ups.  Many of us have them, but we usually don’t recognize them as hang-ups.  We don’t realize that our hang-ups are just that: things that seem all-important and ever-relevant because they’re blown out of proportion in our minds and hearts.  Rather, we think they seem all-important because they are so.  And here is the crux of the matter: because we believe this, we assume other people have recognized their importance as well and thus must also make them a priority.  In other words, blacks who place race at the center of their being will assume that whites would, recognizing the importance of this factor, follow suit.

This perspective explains a lot.  It explains why a black man who hears a white guy utter a word that sounds vaguely like a racial epithet or who is asked to step out of his home by a white cop reads bigoted motives into the situations.  It explains why many blacks, despite being advantaged by an affirmative-action society, believe they’ve experienced great “racism.”  Is it real or is it Memorex?  When you interpret all the normal bumps and stumbles of human interaction as expressions of bigotry, you certainly have experienced great “racism.” That is, at least in your own mind.

Couple the above perspective with the fact that many blacks are told from toddlerhood on that the white man has kept them down (just think of the kids in Jeremiah Wright’s church), and it explains something else.  We’ve all heard the leftist shtick about how only whites can be “racist,” which is based on the convenient interpretation that being so requires power, something only whites possess (untrue itself).  Of course, since “racism” was originated by leftists to facilitate their arguments, they can define it any way they want.  This is why I avoid the term and instead try to use “bigotry” — I reject their lexicon.  Yet, this language manipulation is driven by something real, something substantive, and it harks back to what I said earlier about prejudice.

You see, when you view the object of your hatred as truly evil (“white devils,” anyone?), then, in your eyes, your feelings aren’t actually prejudice, are they?  They cannot be because you will view them as having a basis in reality.  In other words, you can’t be “racist” because, by gum, you have a right to hate evil.  And this is of course a common failing of man; other people may be wrong to hate, but, well, we’re different.  We have a reason to despise our bogeymen.

Of course, because I wrote this essay, many people will hurl that r-word at me.  But who really is prejudiced?  Who really has drawn conclusions that have no basis in reality?  If I’m wrong in what I’ve said, then, sure, perhaps it is me.  If I’m wrong, then you may have reason to suspect I’m hung-up.  But if I’m right, then I have just explained for you the Gateses, Lowerys and Wrights of the world — and the Obamas.  If I’m right, it means we have put someone who is hung-up — and perhaps hateful — in the White House.

While the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding was good cinema, it was also a big fat Hollywood fiction.  With Greece’s fertility rate of 1.36 children per woman — well below the replacement level of 2.1 — “big” is not a modifier demographers would associate with today’s Greek families.  In fact, a more accurate film might be called My Big Fat Muslim Wedding. 

Worse still, Greece is no anomaly.  Long ago the cradle of Western civilization and more recently one of its backwaters, it’s now part of a phalanx of Western demographic failures.  In fact, while it may seem counterintuitive to those weaned on the stuff of Malthusian nightmares, the West is facing a population implosion of historic proportions.  And the statistics are staggering.  As I wrote when reviewing the documentary Demographic Winter last year:

. . . the number of children in the world is already declining . . . .  Birthrates are now below replacement level . . . in approximately 70 countries; in Western Europe, the figure is 1.38, and in northern Italy and parts of Spain it is below 1.  As a result, Europe’s 65-year-olds now outnumber her 14-year-olds, and one German province had to close 220 schools in 2006.  Children were present in 80 percent of U.S. households a century ago; that number is now 32 percent.

Although pondering demographic malaise conjures up the image of sterile Western swingers, note that this phenomenon is, in a measure, manifesting itself worldwide.  Take Eastern Europe, for example.  Russia, with its birthrate of 1.4 children per woman, is experiencing a population decrease of 700,000 a year.  With an even lower birthrate of 1.22, some Lithuanian officials are concerned about the eventual disappearance of their population.  And this is mirrored in other Eastern European nations; Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Czech Republic and the rest are all turning in similar numbers.

The picture is no better in developed Asian nations.  Although they’re still stuffing people into Tokyo subway cars like sardines, Japan’s rapidly graying population contracts with a birthrate of 1.22.  South Koreans may have far more reason to bring children into the world than Kim Jong-il’s captives, but their 1.2 still can’t match the latter’s 2.0.  And Hong Kong, not to be outdone — but perhaps soon undone — comes in second to last in the world with a birthrate of 1 even (only Macau ranks lower).

Even more surprisingly, the developing world is now following our lead.  For example, Uruguay, Kazakhstan and Algeria have birthrates of, respectively, 1.94, 1.88 and 1.82.  And while millions of illegal aliens still stream across our sieve-like southern border, believe it or not, even Mexico’s birthrate is plummeting muy rapido.  As professional demographers have been telling us since the 1970s, the whole world is poised to experience a demographic winter. 

Yet, isn’t this good news?  Aren’t we dodging a real-life Soylent Green scenario of cramped, elbow-to-elbow living, strained resources and wilderness existing only in memory?  This certainly has been the prevailing view for quite some time now, but there is another, more ominous side to this story.  To quote demographer Phillip Longman, “The ongoing global decline in human birthrates is the single most powerful force affecting the fate of nations and the future of society in the 21st century.”
Let’s first discuss economic implications.  Normally, a civilization can be represented with a population pyramid standing right-side-up, with the youngest people at the bottom and the age increasing as you move up (okay, we’ll forget pharaoh buried underneath).  So the aged would be at the very top, with lots of youngsters down below to do civilization’s heavy lifting.

When birthrates collapse, however, this pyramid is turned on its head, with the elderly outnumbering the very young.  This usually means hardship, as the young often have to care for their elders.  Specifically, though, in our nation it means that the burden of paying an ever-increasing social security bill will fall on ever-dwindling young shoulders.  Worse still, it can create a vicious circle: as the young pay progressively higher taxes, the financial strain makes it even less likely that they will have children.  It’s a recipe for the winding down of a civilization toward the nadir of non-existence. 

Yet there are problems even when social programs are removed from the equation.  The young and vibrant are the worker bees; they are the inventors, innovators and creators of wealth.  They drive the economy.  Of course, the elderly may take jobs out of necessity or boredom, but they can match the economic engine of a peak-working-years population little more than they could match it on the athletic field.  This is part of the reason why famed economist Adam Smith taught that decreasing population correlates with economic depression.

Now we come to the death of the West.  Many of you know that Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi, the face of 1980’s terrorism, has been relatively well-behaved for nigh on 25 years now.  Of course, this may be because Ronald Reagan effected a bomb-induced attitude adjustment in 1986.  Yet, such punitive action, while sometimes necessary, seldom yields a permanent change in behavior without a permanent change in vital signs.  It didn’t scare Saddam Hussein or the Taliban sufficiently, that’s for sure.  (Of course, they don’t wear dresses, either.)  But is faint-heartedness on the part of Gaddafi the reason?  Or is there another factor?  Well, a clue can possibly be found in something he once said:

“There are signs that Allah will grant victory to Islam in Europe without swords, without guns, without conquest. We don’t need terrorists, we don’t need homicide bombers. The 50 million Muslims will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.”

Is this Gaddafi wearing pragmatist’s clothes?  Perhaps he realizes that the West is voluntarily committing civilizational suicide, and all he need do is stay out of its way.
If so, he simply notes what civilizations from the good to the bad to the ugly always have understood, that their success largely hinges upon their ability to replenish that invaluable resource: people.  For example, the ancient Romans at one point became obsessed with the idea that they weren’t creating enough babies; Joseph Stalin, hardly a pro-lifer, outlawed abortion; and the Nazis had their Lebensborn program.  And even today governments are taking note of the problem.  To name a handful, Russia, Poland, France and an Italian town are offering citizens substantial monetary incentives (i.e., cash and sometimes tax breaks) to be fruitful and multiply.  Yet it isn’t working — and for good reason: a cultural problem cannot be solved with a political solution.  Why, even demographically correct Augustus Caesar, who wielded absolute power, could not remedy the birth dearth among Roman nobility.   

This almost universal concern is warranted because a people is like a species: a failure to reproduce leads to extinction.  Now, this doesn’t mean that neutron bomb-like cityscapes lie in the West’s future.  More likely is that its peoples will be dominated — and supplanted — by other cultures.  Oh, its new master may not be Islam; it may be China, India or, even more likely, different groups in different parts of the West.  The point is that while the Third World and Asia are following in our footsteps, they are far healthier demographically and may be able to recover.  But we may soon be at the point of no return.

Now the question is, does this matter?  If you listen to the left, our demographic demise is something to be ignored when possible and applauded when not.  As Kathryn Joyce did in an incredibly snide and stupid article titled “Missing: The ‘Right’ Babies,” the concern about the West’s baby bust is often chalked up to just “old-fashioned race panic.”  The left’s implication is that cultural suicide is our civilization’s comeuppance. 
The irony of this is that the people extinguishing themselves are leftists, people who aren’t enlightened enough to understand that their “enlightened” values will die with them.  Whether tomorrow brings us a Chinese hegemon, a worldwide caliphate or, more likely, a bipolar or multi-polar world, it may be a place ruled neither by the virtues of Christendom nor the values of those crucifying her.  For when the people who birthed political correctness disappear, they won’t be able to reproduce it any more than little baby libertines.  Of course, also true is that the West’s glorious triumphs, such as its unprecedented respect for human rights, would also fade into history.
And this is something mature people consider.  Would the world be a better place with China as the dominant force?  If you have trouble with that one, ponder how the Chinese are currently raping Africa as they zealously exploit the continent’s resources.  They are making European colonialism look beneficent.
Mature people also do something else — they acknowledge facts.  And what bothers me about the current debate over population is the steadfast refusal to do so.  If you believe that man is a pox upon the planet, be forthcoming.  If you think he needs to cut his numbers by 90 percent, make your case.  If you want a “Planetary Regime” to control world population — which Obama’s science czar John Holdren wrote about — stand and be counted.  But, as liberal icon Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “You’re entitled to your own opinions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.”  Before debating where we should go, there must be an acknowledgement of where we are.
And where is this?  It’s a phase civilizations have seen before, eerily illuminated by setting suns of their own design.  For example, even 2000 years ago, Greek weddings weren’t all that big and fat.  As Greek historian Polybius wrote circa 140 B.C. when lamenting his civilization’s decline,
“In our time, all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and general decay of population . . . .  This evil grew upon us rapidly, and without attracting attention, by our men becoming perverted to the passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idle life.”
When I ponder our materialism, promiscuity, frivolity and selfishness, our abortion-mill archipelago that churns with Nazi-like efficiency, it occurs to me that perhaps the leftists are right — just not for the reasons they think.  It’s not sins of our past that haunt us but those of our present, and maybe the euthanizing of Western civilization is, after all, our comeuppance.

We’ve all heard about the little dust-up between Black Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Harry Alford and Democrat senator Barbara Boxer during an Environment & Public Works (EPW) hearing on “green” jobs. Boxer, the chairman of the EPW committee, was trying to refute a report commissioned by Alford’s organization stating that the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act — which I’ll call “cap-and-sap” — would actually cause a net reduction in jobs. So, marshalling her arguments, she cited many sources that support cap-and-sap — among them the NAACP and the leader of 100 Black Men of America.

This didn’t sit too well with Mr. Alford. He responded, “Madam Chair, that is condescending to me. I’m the National Black Chamber of Commerce, and you’re trying to put up some other black group to pit against me . . . . All that’s condescending, and I don’t like it. It’s racial.”

In a later interview, Alford was even more pointed in his criticism, saying that his Boxer match was “like being in Mississippi in 1945” and “vile Jim Crow.” He described the essence of the senator’s comments thus, “Colored boy, what are you doing with this sophisticated report?”

Well, Mr. Alford, tell us how you really feel.

Now, although I had never heard of Alford before this brouhaha, I like what I see; he seems a stand-up fellow, down-to-earth, commonsensical, sincere and spirited. In other words, the antithesis of a liberal. I also could not agree with him more on cap-and-sap. I go even further in fact: it is part of a destructive agenda often animated by diabolical motivations. Nevertheless, I must do something that is a first for this scribe: defend Barbara Boxer.

At least, that is, a little bit.

Lest I be misunderstood, I think Boxer is the worst politics has to offer — this makes her the worst of the worst. And I can certainly see why she would have irked Alford, as she was not only condescending, she was her usual imperious, supercilious, paternalistic self. And this is par for the course. Remember when Boxer chided Brigadier General Michael Walsh simply because he abided by military protocol concerning the addressing of those of higher rank and called her “ma’am”? It was a pathetic display. But, then again, the general did err. It takes a bit of detachment from reality to view Boxer as any kind of superior. There are better things to call her.

Yet, having said all this, a good man can be wrong and, well, you know what they say about a broken clock. So, I ask, was her approach during the hearing truly reflective of bigotry?

It was certainly racial. Boxer never would have cited the NAACP had a white man been locking horns with her. But everyone seems to be missing the pink elephant in the middle of the room: Alford isn’t the president of the Chamber of Commerce.

He is the president of the Black Chamber of Commerce.

I’ll illustrate this fairly obvious point further. Let’s say I’m head of an organization called the Catholic Chamber of Commerce and I appear before the right honourable Senator Boxer. Now, would it be surprising if, in an effort to sway me, she cited opinion rendered by the Catholic League and Opus Dei? Or should I accuse Boxer, a Jewish woman, of anti-Catholic bias? Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure the woman is anti-lots of things; regardless, it wouldn’t be just to accuse her of bigotry simply because she inferred my passions from my associations and built her argument around them. After all, if you’re going to define your organization based on a characteristic, you cannot blame people for viewing you through its prism.

I’ll also point out that during Alford’s opening statement he said the following, “that [the projected disparate impact of cap-and-sap] worries me and my members because the black community suffers mightily when the economy goes south.” Of course, Alford’s emphasis on the black community reflects a special concern for it; given this, however, is it surprising that Boxer would counter by citing entities that lay claim to having the same special concern?

The answer is obvious. Despite this, however, many of my ideological brethren are now using the EPW incident to paint Boxer as a bigot. And, insofar as this goes, I regret to say that they’re guilty of intellectual dishonesty. Oh, I do understand the overwhelming temptation. The senator and her leftist ilk wrote the book on playing the race card and using Stalinist tactics to destroy opponents — and they do it for the most specious of reasons. There are the examples of Bill O’Reilly and golf commentator Kelly Tilghman, who innocently used a variation on the word “lynch” during commentary about blacks; there was university student Keith John Sampson, who was persecuted simply for reading an anti-Ku Klux Klan book; and then there was the pillorying of Rush Limbaugh over his analysis of black quarterback Donovan McNabb’s boosters. These are just a sampling of numerous instances where the left sent lynching parties after those they hated for only one reason: because they could.

Thus, just as when Hillary and Bill Clinton were accused of bigotry while campaigning against Barack Obama, the Boxer controversy is an example of liberals being mauled by a hoary and horrible monster of their own design. And many conservatives relish the chance to give the left a taste of its own medicine because, well, now they can.

Yet it takes a good dose of rationalization to convince oneself that something only racial is “racist.” This may be easy for the left, but for those on the right it probably takes a bit more effort. After all, many liberals are so detached from reality, so solipsistic and relativistic, that they mistake their feelings for Truth. They have the lie on retainer. Conservatives, on the other hand, embrace it only occasionally, as a consultant.

Another difference between the right and left is that we traditionalists know we’re called to be better than that. We know that the Truth will not only set us free and carry the day when the last chapter is written, but that it’s all we have. The lie will never serve us like it does the liars. That is, unless, as they have done, we make it our master.

And the Truth is the point. Whenever we peddle that lie called the race card, we contribute to the mass delusion and lessen the chances that the Truth will be known, all for some momentary political gain. We trade something beautiful for thirty pieces of silver. Liberals make this a practice, and it’s why they’re contemptible. But, remember, silver is all they have.

As for my friends on the right, for the moment, I could be even madder at you. After all, your trespass is the greater. You forced me to defend Barbara Boxer.

When I first heard that radio host Michael Savage had been banned from traveling to England along with an assortment of Moslem terrorists and other miscreants, my first thought was that the public relations arm of the politically correct thought police had struck again.  It only made sense.  Given how Britain is now bedeviled by Islamic jihadists, it had a legitimate reason to keep their most zealous fellows from the nation’s increasingly volatile Moslem masses.  Yet the spineless Neville Chamberlain bureaucrats charged with this task — whose credo seems to be “peace through capitulation” — would never want to be seen as singling out Moslems.  So they traded a man’s reputation for peace in our time.

Now this analysis has been vindicated with the release, under a Freedom of Information law, of shocking documents showing that the U.K.’s Home Office did in fact ban Savage to “balance” the Moslem personae non gratae.  Writes the Daily Mail:

One message, sent by an unidentified Home Office official on November 27 last year, said that ‘with Weiner [Savage’s birth name], I can understand that disclosure of the decision would help provide a balance of types of exclusion cases’.

The documents include a draft recommendation, marked ‘Restricted’, saying: ‘We will want to ensure that the names disclosed reflect the broad range of cases and are not all Islamic extremists.’

And it appears the decision involved officials in the highest levels of government, perhaps even extending to Prime Minister Gordon Brown himself.

The documents also contain a rather explicit admission that banning Savage was unjust, with another unidentified official warning, “I think we could be accused of duplicity in naming him.”  This could be a smoking gun in a defamation lawsuit Savage has filed in which he is seeking £100,000 in damages from Jacqui Smith, the former secretary of the Home Office who recently resigned in disgrace.  At the helm of the bureaucracy when Savage was banned, Smith impugned him in a press release issued in defense of the action, saying that the host was “seeking to provoke others to serious criminal acts and fostering hatred which might lead to inter-community violence.”  But with the newly-released documents, her claim that she truly viewed Savage as a threat seems like nothing but air.

However the case plays out in court, there is no doubt that Savage was sacrificed to fill a quota.  The host addressed this in his usual inimitable style, telling WorldNetDaily.com, “The name Dreyfus comes to mind.  They have attempted to destroy my reputation to avoid offending those Muslims who want to destroy them!  The Warsaw ghetto comes to mind, where some Jews threw other Jews into Gestapo hands to live another day.”

Yet every aspect of this case smacks of political correctness and expediency, starting even with the appointment of the villain in the story, Jacqui Smith, herself.  Just recently, in a development as shocking as the documents vindicating Savage, she admitted incompetence, saying, “When I became Home Secretary, I’d never run a major organization. I hope I did a good job but if I did it was more by luck than by any kind of development of those skills.  . . . every single time that I was appointed to a ministerial job I thought that [I wasn’t up to the task]. I didn’t sleep for a week in 1999 when I got my ministerial job.”

Ain’t political correctness grand?  Like Sonia Sotomayor, Joycelyn Elders, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and so many others, it’s obvious that Smith was an affirmative-action appointee.  She held her position because of chromosome configuration, not qualifications.  So you could say that the Savage story is one of a bureaucrat chosen by quota who then chose a victim by quota.

This ought to give all of us pause.  You may rest secure in the knowledge that you’re not as controversial as Savage, but understand the implications of quota selection.  Whether you’re favoring a person or persecuting him, the standard is the same: you’re selecting him not based on what he has done but what he is.  And who will be chosen based on a profile next time?  Can you be sure that what you do and say will save you when what you are is precisely the sacrifice needed?

And, really, some would say it is this utilitarian approach of the Home Office that is most unsettling.  It reminds me of the old saying, “The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.”  If Smith and her comrades had hated Savage, then, in a strange way, it perhaps would have been a bit more noble.  After all, in their own minds — twisted though they are — they just might have believed they were dispensing justice.  But the situation in question here was quite different, as it involved cold, detached calculation.  Of course, some of these bureaucrats may also harbor deep hatred, but of what we can be sure is that they certainly don’t love their fellow man enough to view him as anything but a pawn, a means to an end.  These are the kind of people who operate gas chambers by rote.

This is just one reason why I wish Michael Savage Godspeed with his lawsuit.  The hate-speech tyrants have spent years using the perpetual motion machine of bureaucracy to persecute those without the means or will to fight back.  And even when the Smiths of the world meet resistance — such as when Canadian journalist Ezra Levant was targeted after republishing controversial Danish cartoons of Mohammed in 2006 — the best their victims can usually hope for is Pyrrhic victory.  Levant won his case, for instance, but had to endure an emotionally draining, two-year investigation and spend $100,000 on legal fees.  As he said, the process is the punishment.  So let’s hope Savage can give the unthinking thought police a taste of their own medicine.

Most importantly, however, figures such as Savage and Levant stand in the vanguard.  The ultimate goal of the thought police’s minions in government, Hollywood, the media, academia and various homosexual and Moslem advocacy groups is not to restrict us to our own borders.  It is to restrict us within them, and with every victory their iron burka descends ever lower over those who speak Truth.  And if the powerful in the media can be silenced, the rest of us won’t stand a chance.