How does the Left "square this circle?"

via CBD

Respect for Whose law?

God's, or the Supreme Court's? The Kentucky clerk who has been jailed thought she was upholding God's law.

Read more here.

Update: Here are the thoughts of Ace of Spades:

So gay marriage has gone from something that was illegal to something you can now be thrown into prison for opposing.

Do gay marriage opponents not wish to give the rest of us the slightest amount of time to evolve on this?

I can guarantee you that throwing people in jail willy-nilly is not convincing skeptics of the benevolence of the gay rights movement.

Calling out hypocrites

Joel Kotkin documents how the Silicon Valley tech companies

On a host of issues—from the right to privacy to ethnic and feminine empowerment and social justice — the effects of the tech industry are increasingly regressive.

...The share of women in the tech industry is barely half of their 47 percent share in the total workforce.

...the valley’s own African-Americans and Hispanics (who make up roughly one-third of the population) now occupy barely 5 percent of jobs in the top Silicon Valley firms. They have not done well in the current tech “boom”: Between 2009 and 2011, earnings dropped 18 percent for blacks and 5 percent for Latinos, according to a 2013 Joint Venture Silicon Valley report.

...Nor can we expect tech firms to go out of their way to train or develop too many American-born workers, of whatever race, for their jobs. Instead the industry’s elites seek to get their employees through H-1B immigrants, largely from Asia. These workers are likely to be more docile, and more limited in their job options than native born or naturalized citizens. Given that there is a surplus of American IT workers, this brings to mind not global consciousness but instead the importation of the original coolie labor force brought to California to build the railroads.

And what about the sensible liberal idea that the rich and corporations should pay their “fair share” of taxes? ...Facebook paid no taxes in 2012, despite profits in excess of $1 billion. Apple, which even the New York Times described as “a pioneer in tactics to avoid taxes,” has kept much of its cash hoard abroad to keep away from Uncle Sam.

...If these actions were taken by oil companies or suburban developers, the mainstream media would be up in arms. Yet by embracing “progressive” values on issues like gay rights, the tech oligarchs are trying to secure a politically correct “get out of jail free” card. Monopolistic behavior, tax avoidance, misogyny, and privacy violations are OK, as long as you mouth the right words about gay rights and climate change — and have the money and the channels to broadcast your message.

...None of this is to say that the tech elites need to be broken up like Standard Oil or stigmatized like the tobacco industry. But it’s certainly well past the time for people both left and right to understand that this oligarchy’s rise similarly poses a danger to our society’s future. By their very financial power, plutocratic elites -- whether their names are Rockefeller, Carnegie, Page, Bezos or Zuckerberg -- need to be closely watched for potential abuses instead of being the subjects of mindless celebration from both ends of the political spectrum.

Read more here.

Do babies have a right to be free from decapitation and dismemberment?

On March 20 I wrote about a woman who lured a pregnant woman to her apartment by posting an ad on Craig's List ostensibly to sell baby clothes. When the woman arrived, the other woman stabbed the pregnant woman and cut the baby out of her womb. This happened in "progressive" Boulder County, Colorado, where babies in wombs are not considered to be persons, so the woman will not be charged with the murder of the baby.

Matt Walsh picks up the story:

Yet most of the people insisting that gays have a right to cake will not argue for, and in fact will viciously oppose, the basic right to life for infant children. The dead bodies of children pile up all around us, and all these clowns can do is whine about their right to pastries.

It’s preposterous. Also, deplorable, barbaric, and evil. We have a right to PRODUCTS but a baby has no right to be free from decapitation and dismemberment?

...Unless it can be proven that the infant took a breath outside of the womb, the law does not consider her a person. Of course, the police report says the “fetus” gasped for breath, and emergency room personnel said she was “viable,” but none of this can be proven, so as far as Colorado is concerned, she wasn’t a person.

But why should her personhood be hinged on whether she took a breath outside of the womb in the first place? Are hospital patients who require ventilators not people? If I hold my breath, do I forfeit my humanity for those brief moments? And if breathing outside of the womb is the completely capricious standard for “personhood,” and if that made sense, which it emphatically doesn’t, then what was she if not a person?

...Indeed, as babies are explicitly excluded from basic legal protections and the most fundamental of human rights, the attention of the country focuses on a religious freedom bill, passed last week, which might, in some limited circumstances, interfere with a gay couple’s ability to procure baked goods. Liberals throughout the land are frantic over the prospect that homosexuals may possibly, in some potential situations, experience the moderate nuisance of a business owner declining to participate in their gay wedding.

Cakes for gay people, that’s the issue of the day. The widespread legalization of child murder? Well, why would anyone be upset about that?

...You need to understand how astonishingly incomprehensible progressivism is. In their minds, there exists the fundamental human right to a wedding cake, but not to life itself. If a man is refused a pastry, a crime against humanity has occurred. But if, in the womb, his spinal cord is severed, his body dismembered, and his lifeless carcass thrown in a dumpster, nobody can be accused of infringing on his liberty.

...So whatever supernatural force bestows us with our right to commodities, this omnipotent being did not, it turns out, also give us the right to exist to begin with. You have the right to have, but not to be, which seems like a logistical complication considering the minor difficulty of having something when you aren’t something. Might abortion be opposed, then, on the grounds that murdering a child will impede his right to eventually have his gay wedding catered by the business of his choosing?

I suppose that’s a path pro-lifers haven’t explored.

Speaking of which, interestingly, we’re told gays have the right to marry and buy cakes and so forth because gay is not a choice. And gay is not a choice, they say, because gays are gay from birth. And if gays are gay from birth, then the matter is genetic, and if it’s genetic then gays are gay even before birth. But if gays are gay before birth, then it would seem that they were them in the womb. In other words, whatever their nature is, their essence, they had that, they were that, in the womb. And if they are now what they were then, and were then what they are now, then either they’re people now and they were people then, or they weren’t people then and they aren’t now.

...The moment you say “I was X since before I was born,” you are admitting to the rather unavoidable truth that you were you before you were born.

...I’m picking on Colorado, but they aren’t unique in their horrific, cruel dehumanization of children. Babies aren’t considered people anywhere in the country. Planned Parenthood murders over 300,000 of these mysteriously unhuman creatures every year, and does so with not only the approval of the government, but with considerable financial support.

(However, destroying unborn bald eagles is still a federal crime, carrying a sentence of two years imprisonment. Apparently, an eagle is an eagle from the moment of conception.)

...In all 50 states, unborn children are offered fewer legal protections than pit bulls, polar bears, and spotted owls. Consequentially, about 60 million have been exterminated in this country since 1973, and not a single murder charge was handed down. Sixty million. Think of the Holocaust repeated every decade for one hundred years. That’s the body count we’re dealing with. Only, many of the German Nazis were eventually tried and executed for their crimes, while the American Nazis are treated to banquets with the president.

Read more here.

Child sex slavery

Sunshine Mary writes,

Our president is using your tax dollars to advance homosexuality in Africa, exactly as TBC said. How is that for a bit of American cultural hegemony and blatant racism? It’s almost like President Obama, whose own father was from Africa, thinks Africans are too stupid to govern their own countries and pass laws that reflect their particular cultural beliefs, laws which in part are meant to protect vulnerable African boys from the wealthy Western homosexual sex tourists who prey upon them.

Obama and his previous Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, have been promoting gay rights globally. Obama recently released a statement which is available at the Sunshine Mary blog.

Sunshine Mary asks,

But what about the human rights of impoverished African boys? Do they not deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and protected from pederast predators?

Welcome, but...

In international news, Putin says gay people will be welcome to attend the upcoming Sochi Olympics, but it probably would not be a wise idea for them to speak with underage people about gay rights while they are enjoying Russia's freedoms.

Hating homosexuals for the right reason

Speaking of satire, let's check in with Manhatten Infidel, who has another exclusive: a special message from A&E Television Network. An excerpt:

Though just between us you can ignore the PSAs. We’re only airing them because we’re afraid of GLAAD. We’re almost as afraid of them as we are of losing our profits from this redneck show that Americans, stupid people that they are, seem to love.

Also, we at A&E would like to reiterate that we do not hold Phil Robertson’s viewpoint on homosexuality. For the most part. We hate homosexuals too, but for the right reason: They charge too much when redecorating our summer homes in the Hamptons.

Obama's regulatory agencies discriminate against gays

Colorado has a shortage of donated blood. Gay men are not allowed to give blood, because, as Brandon Zelasko, who is gay, writes in today's Denver Post,

The FDA defends itself by claiming that I cannot give blood because it cannot find a question for the screener form that reliably identifies "a subset of MSM (men who have sex with men) ... who do not still have a substantially increased rate of HIV infection."

It bears repeating: The FDA discriminates because it cannot find the right question to effectively pre-screen donors.

Zelasko asserts,

Donor screening should focus on sexual behavior and any use of needles.

The FDA works under the premise that all gay men are, by default, promiscuous and engage in dangerous sexual behavior. My partner and I have been in a committed, monogamous relationship for nine years. That would be relevant information for the FDA to ask about.

All gay men shouldn't be allowed to give blood just for the sake of equality. There are certainly gay men engaging in risky sexual behavior who shouldn't be allowed to give blood, but the same can be said of straight men and women. The point is, the same standard should apply to everyone and my sexual orientation should not automatically disqualify me.

Drawing a line in the sand

Betsy Newmark observes,

I bet no GQ reporter would go asking any prominent Muslim what his or her religion felt about gay people.

Mark Steyn on the Age of Tolerance

Mark Stein is in a conflict with his editor at National Review. Stein wrote this weekend about the Duck Dynasty controversy,

What GLAAD is attempting would be called, were it applied to any other identity group, “cultural appropriation.”

In the broader sense, it’s totalitarian. While American gays were stuffing and mounting the duck hunter in their trophy room, the Prince of Wales was celebrating Advent with Christian refugees from the Middle East, and noting that the land in which Christ and Christianity were born is now the region boasting “the lowest concentration of Christians in the world — just four percent of the population.” It will be three, and two, and one percent soon enough, for there is a totalitarian impulse in resurgent Islam — and not just in Araby. A few miles from Buckingham Palace, Muslims in London’s East End are now sufficiently confident to go around warning local shopkeepers to cease selling alcohol. In theory, you might still enjoy the right to sell beer in Tower Hamlets or be a practicing Christian in Iraq, but in reality not so much.

It is not enough to have gay marriage for gays. Everything must be gayed. There must be Five-Year Gay Plans for American bakeries, and the Christian church, and reality TV. There must be shock brigades of gay duck-hunters honking out the party line deep in the backwoods of the proletariat. Obamacare pajama models, if not yet mandatorily gay, can only be dressed in tartan onesies and accessorized with hot chocolate so as to communicate to the Republic’s maidenhood what a thankless endeavor heterosexuality is in contemporary America.

Here are two jokes one can no longer tell on American television. But you can still find them in the archives, out on the edge of town, in Sub-Basement Level 12 of the ever-expanding Smithsonian Mausoleum of the Unsayable. First, Bob Hope, touring the world in the year or so after the passage of the 1975 Consenting Adult Sex Bill:

“I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.” Advertisement For Hope, this was an oddly profound gag, discerning even at the dawn of the Age of Tolerance that there was something inherently coercive about the enterprise. Soon it would be insufficient merely to be “tolerant” — warily accepting, blithely indifferent, mildly amused, tepidly supportive, according to taste. The forces of “tolerance” would become intolerant of anything less than full-blown celebratory approval.

Second joke from the archives: Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra kept this one in the act for a quarter-century. On stage, Dino used to have a bit of business where he’d refill his tumbler and ask Frank, “How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Sinatra would respond, “I dunno. How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Dean would say, “Be nice to him.”

But no matter how nice you are, it’s never enough. Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson, in his career-detonating interview with GQ, gave a rather thoughtful vernacular exegesis of the Bible’s line on sin, while carefully insisting that he and other Christians are obligated to love all sinners and leave it to the Almighty to adjudicate the competing charms of drunkards, fornicators, and homosexuals. Nevertheless, GLAAD — “the gatekeepers of politically correct gayness” as the (gay) novelist Bret Easton Ellis sneered — saw their opportunity and seized it. By taking out TV’s leading cable star, they would teach an important lesson pour encourager les autres — that espousing conventional Christian morality, even off-air, is incompatible with American celebrity.

Steyn's editor, Mr. Steort scolded,

By way of criticizing speech, I’ll say that I found the derogatory language in this column, and especially the slur in its borrowed concluding joke, both puerile in its own right and disappointing coming from a writer of such talent.

To which Steyn responded with a challenge,

It is a matter of some regret to me that my own editor at this publication does not regard this sort of thing as creepy and repellent rather than part of the vibrant tapestry of what he calls an “awakening to a greater civility”. I’m not inclined to euphemize intimidation and bullying as a lively exchange of ideas – “the use of speech to criticize other speech”, as Mr Steorts absurdly dignifies it. So do excuse me if I skip to the men’s room during his patronizing disquisition on the distinction between “state coercion” and “cultural coercion”. I’m well aware of that, thank you. In the early days of my free-speech battles in Canada, my friend Ezra Levant used a particular word to me: “de-normalize”. Our enemies didn’t particularly care whether they won in court. Whatever the verdict, they’d succeed in “de-normalizing” us — that’s to say, putting us beyond the pale of polite society and mainstream culture. “De-normalizing” is the business GLAAD and the other enforcers are in. You’ll recall Paula Deen’s accuser eventually lost in court — but the verdict came too late for Ms Deen’s book deal, and TV show, and endorsement contracts.

I am sorry my editor at NR does not grasp the stakes. Indeed, he seems inclined to “normalize” what GLAAD is doing. But, if he truly finds my “derogatory language” offensive, I’d rather he just indefinitely suspend me than twist himself into a soggy pretzel of ambivalent inertia trying to avoid the central point — that a society where lives are ruined over an aside because some identity-group don decides it must be so is ugly and profoundly illiberal. As to his kind but belated and conditional pledge to join me on the barricades, I had enough of that level of passionate support up in Canada to know that, when the call to arms comes, there will always be some “derogatory” or “puerile” expression that it will be more important to tut over. So thanks for the offer, but I don’t think you’d be much use, would you?

How dumb do you have to be to scold Mark Steyn, and not expect a devastating reply?

Will they form their own network?

Roger L. Simon writes,

The A&E Network’s suspension of Phil Robertson, star of the most popular reality show in the history of television, for espousing views on homosexuality identical to those found in the New Testament may not be the first PC lynching in the history of our country, but it is certainly now the most prominent. It is also a singular example of how political correctness, via cultural relativism, is used to undermine democracy and freedom of speech and is, at its core, fascistic.

Indeed, this event may actually have helped Robertson, expanding his brand and, ironically, hurting the causes backed by GLAAD, etc. They should take note. The best response to your enemies, especially if their challenge is not violent and based on their own heartfelt beliefs, is to treat them with respect and try to make them see the errors of their ways. You may not be able to do it but it is, dare I say it, the Christian way.

Beyond all this, however, the Duck Dynasty group has such a large TVQ these days, they don’t need A&E or anybody else. They could go off and form their own network. And now maybe they will.