Mike Adams on Incest Equality

Mike Adams on the natural extension of the gay marriage argument:

Dear Governor Cuomo: 

I am writing to express my deep disappointment with your recent decision to push for an expansion of the definition of marriage – one that allows for marriage between a man and a man or between a woman and a woman. Most of your recent critics are writing because they think your crusade on this issue has gone too far. I’m writing because I don’t think it goes far enough. In fact, I think your approach to this issue reflects a fundamental narrow-mindedness that is almost as distasteful as your Pharisaic moral posturing and your constant media grandstanding....

Governor Cuomo, I want to get married. And I want to move my new wife to New York City so we can pursue our respective careers in education and art (she is a painter). But, unless your state becomes more welcoming and affirming, we won’t be able to do that because the woman I want to marry is my younger sister Jennifer.

It may shock you to hear from someone who openly advocates incest. But that is the way people used to react to homosexuality. In the case of homosexuality, the remedy for such a puritanical reaction has not been silence. It has been openness. Just as we talked about homosexuality constantly – beginning in the early 90s – we must now do the same with incest. There simply is no other way to make our lifestyle seem normal.

Under my plan tolerance of incest must begin in the public schools...

... Some have asked me whether I am concerned at all about the implications of marrying Jennifer. Specifically, they worry that once married to me she will try to bring a third party – one of her girlfriends – into the marriage. But I am okay with a three party marriage. I’m committed to marriage equality even if it means sharing a lover with my younger sister. Sharing is an integral part of the progressive vision.

The fools who support the deconstruction of marriage have no answer to the point that Adams is making. Once you deny natural law and millennia of tradition to expunge the inherent heterosexual nature of marriage, you open the box to stuff that would make Pandora's head spin.

Why restrict marriage to two people, or to two unrelated people, or to people at all? Siblings, parents and children, whole communities marrying, animals as spouses. You aren't species-phobic are you?

Let the bacchanal begin.

So much surveillance, for so little.

Mark Steyn:

How did all these Tsarnaevs-in-waiting wind up living in the United States? They were let in by the government, and many of them were let in in the years since 9/11, when we were supposedly on permanent “orange alert.” The same bureaucracy that takes the terror threat so seriously that it needs the phone and Internet records of hundreds of millions of law-abiding persons would never dream of doing a little more pre-screening in its immigration system — by, say, according a graduate of a Yemeni madrassah a little more scrutiny than a Slovene or Fijian. The president has unilaterally suspended the immigration laws of the United States, and his attorney general prosecutes those states such as Arizona who remain quaintly attached to them. . . . 

As for Major Hasan, who needs surveillance? He put “Soldier of Allah” on his business card and gave a PowerPoint presentation to his military colleagues on what he’d like to do to infidels — and nobody said a word, lest they got tied up in sensitivity-training hell for six months.

Our Obamaguardians need to sift the phone and internet records of hundreds of millions of Americans, ostensibly looking for any evanescent snippet of furtive pre-terrorist behavior, yet they ignored two f*cking letters sent to our government from the Russian government telling us that Tsarnaev was a terrorist.

So much surveillance, to what end? Dead and maimed Bostonians?

It all makes sense of course if one concludes that the ubiquitous surveillance of Americans doesn't really have much to do with terrorism, except of the government kind, directed at Americans.

But you'd have to be paranoid to think that, right?

Novella invokes the Lemon test

In defending the "separation of church and state"-- an unconstitutional phrase inserted into Constitutional law by a former Klansman who used it as part of the KKK initiation oath in Alabama-- Steven Novella invokes the Lemon Test:

The Lemon Test 

Based on the 1971 case of Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 612-13, the Court will rule a practice unconstitutional if: 

1) It lacks any secular purpose. That is, if the practice lacks any non-religious purpose. 

2) The practice either promotes or inhibits religion. 

3) Or the practice excessively (in the Court’s opinion) involves government with a religion.

The Lemon Test has been described as unconstitutional gibberish by a number of legal scholars and Supreme Court justices.

The Lemon test has been criticized and revived numerous times by the Court. Justice Scalia likened the Lemon test to a “ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad, after being repeatedly killed and buried.” It is “easy to kill,” allowing the Supreme Court to apply the test when the Court wishes to condemn a particular practice, ignore the test when the Court wishes to allow a practice, or simply refer to the test as a helpful guide. Lamb’s Chapel v. Moriches Union Free School District, 508 U.S. 384, 398-99 (1993) (Scalia, J., concurring). The inconsistent application of the test led to great uncertainty, and concomitantly chilled legitimate religious expression clearly outside the legitimate boundary of the Establishment Clause.

Is the Lemon Test unconstitutional gibberish?

Consider this: apply the Lemon Test to the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an Establishment of religion or prohibiting the Free Exercise thereof

The Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment clearly promotes religion. This violates prong #2 of the Lemon Test, which rules unconstitutional any law or government practice that "either promotes or inhibits religion".

According to the Lemon Test, the First Amendment is unconstitutional.

"The Time Has Come to Outlaw Human Cloning"

Wesley J. Smith:

Scientists recently announced that they had successfully cloned human embryos for the first time, using the same process that produced Dolly the sheep. 

[T]herapeutic cloning already poses an acute threat to human dignity. As Charles Krauthammer, who served on George W. Bush’s President’s Council on Bioethics, warned in the New Republic in 2002, creating cloned embryos for research—now accomplished—is “dangerous” because it reduces the cloned embryo to “mere thingness,” justifying “the most ruthless exploitation.” He went on to say: 

It is the ultimate in desensitization . . . The problem, one could almost say, is not what cloning does to the embryo, but what it does to us . . . Creating a human embryo just so it can be used and then destroyed undermines the very foundation of the moral prudence that informs the entire enterprise of genetic research: the idea that, while a human embryo may not be a person, it is not nothing. Because if it is nothing, then everything is permitted. And if everything is permitted, then there are no fences, no safeguards, no bottom.

The only effective preventative is to enact a comprehensive legal ban on human SCNT, not just the uses to which a cloned embryo may be put. Contrary to what the science intelligentsia, the biotechnology industry, and the mainstream media might claim, banning human SCNT is a step that is widely supported internationally. Indeed, in 2005, the General Assembly of the United Nations votedoverwhelmingly in support of a non-binding resolution calling upon member states “to prohibit all forms of human cloning.”
The devil will be found in how the term “cloning” is defined. In particular, we should be on the lookout for phony bans that actually legalize the SCNT process using human DNA. For example, many proposals would only outlaw “reproductive cloning.” But as we have seen, such a “ban” would not outlaw cloning at all, merelyone potential use that could be made of embryo made through cloning.

Outlawing human cloning would provide salutatory benefits. First, it would deprive cloning researchers of the funds to further perfect human cloning techniques. Outlawing human cloning would also be a clarion call to our scientists demanding that they stay within proper moral parameters as they serve society through the pursuit of knowledge. And it would protect women. Recall that human eggs are the essential ingredients in the cloning recipe. As I wrote here last month, the need for human eggs in cloning threatens a great “human egg rush.” 

But retrieving human eggs can be very dangerous to women’s health and fecundity. Banning cloning can thus prevent the further objectification of the female biological function. 

Finally, on a positive note, once human cloning becomes beyond the pale, we could begin to row in the direction of areas of biotechnology that are morally licit, freeing human and financial resources for the pursuit of the abundant avenues of moral andefficacious biotechnological research—such as adult stem cell research, genetically tailored chemotherapy, and other medical treatments. 

We can achieve remarkable biotechnology breakthroughs in this century without surrendering our ethics. Outlawing human cloning is the essential progressive act.
It is the ultimate in desensitization . . . The problem, one could almost say, is not what cloning does to the embryo, but what it does to us . . . Creating a human embryo just so it can be used and then destroyed undermines the very foundation of the moral prudence that informs the entire enterprise of genetic research: the idea that, while a human embryo may not be a person, it is not nothing. Because if it is nothing, then everything is permitted. And if everything is permitted, then there are no fences, no safeguards, no bottom.

Of course, a human embryo is a person, more than "not nothing", endowed by God with a right to life.

But Krauthammer  and Smith get it otherwise right. Human cloning is the literal desecration of man-- the manufacture of man. The purposes are likely to be ultimately as vile as the procedure-- the use of the manufactured person for tissue and organs, for vanity or slavery of every imaginable type. 

Ban it now. 

Progressives Made Their Beds; It’s Time They Lay In It

Derek Hunter from Town Hall:

Republicans must resist the urge to help with these “fixes.”
We just spent a month being lectured by arrogant know-it-alls about how Obamacare is “settled law.” So keep it settled. 

Obamacare is failing already, and it will continue to fail in more spectacular ways as we move forward, let it. 

Democrat wrote the bill, Democrats voted for the bill, a Democrat president signed it into law. It’s theirs. Make them live with it. As is.Do not change one comma, one letter. It’s settled law! This is what they wanted, this is what people voted for. If the full failure of Obamacare isn’t allowed to happen, if “fixes” are passed, it will live on in a money-sucking spiral of destruction that will lead to a complete and total government takeover of health care in this country – which is their goal.

It’s going to be painful, but it’s also going to be quick. And the pain will be nothing compared to the damage to the economy and our future if this Frankenstein’s monster is helped to limp into permanency. 

Meanwhile, this is also a chance for conservative groups to flex their muscles (and ample money) in a non-circular firing squad way. I have to address them directly now.
Set up a website as a clearinghouse for Obamacare failure stories. 

I know you don’t play nice with each other, but get over it. One website, not competing websites – and the focus has to be spreading these collected stories to the media, both national and local. I know you love adding to your email lists, but this can’t be about that. This has to be about spreading the truth the media will do its damnedest to ignore. 

Gather stories from any source possible, including user-submitted. Verify them and record the actual people going through them on video in 30- and 60-second clips. Then blast them out daily to every local media outlet in their area. And post new ones on the site daily. Go around the media like President Reagan used to. Overwhelm them into covering the truth. 

It’s going to take money, but this can’t be a fundraiser for you. Asking people for money is understandable in normal circumstances, but this is not a normal circumstance. Collect stories, film them and get them out there – that is the only purpose here. If you want to win, that is. If you’d rather be the voice of the conservative movement or the Tea Party group, then that’s your priority – not making the country a better place – and I can’t help you.

Republicans have to be united. Conservatives have to be united. If done right, this effort will have no spokesman on TV. It will be a conduit for getting real people with real Obamacare horror stories in front of any camera, at any time, anywhere in the country. It will be a major undertaking, a massive database and possibly the most important thing any or all of you can do over the next year. 

Progressives are unified and indignant. They are indifferent to the cost to both the country and individual, and the pain to the individual is, to them, irrelevant. This is about the concept. 

To protect their agenda, they will highlight any success story, no matter how dubious. Conservatives must beat them at their own game. They trot out personal stories constantly; we must do the same. If the president gives a speech touting Obamacare in Fresno, Calif., every reporter within 100 miles should be served up a menu of people suffering under it before Air Force One touches the ground. 

This is a winnable fight. It’s our fight to win. But if there’s one thing Republicans and conservatives excel at, it’s snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. 

Obamacare is a disaster, not just in code on a website, but in concept and construction. It survives if we allow it to survive. No more delays, no more defunds, and no more changes. Every unconstitutional change the president makes must be immediately met with a court challenge, even if it’s good. It’s his law. It’s his “medicine.” Make him take it.

I have a lot of sympathy for this approach. Americans voted for it by voting in the crooks and fools who enacted it.

Perhaps the Republican strategy should be to shove it down everyone's throats, and play it hard to Republican advantage. Make ordinary Americans understand what they did when they pulled those "D" levers in the voting booth.

Perhaps it would backfire. I suspect that Obamacare is a mess on purpose-- I think Obama's strategy is to wreck the medical system, so they can get single payer from the wreckage. A Cloward-Piven strategy, applied to our health.

But we can play the game too. Let it be wrecked, and make damn sure the American people know who did it, and lead the charge to drive them out of our government.  

Same sex... marriage.

Same sex marriage is gaining ground, fast. There's no question that the truth-based community is losing this fight. Some observations:

1) Gays don't actually care about marriage, in any significant numbers. Few gays marry, even where it is legal.

2) Homosexuals didn't devastate marriage. Heterosexuals have caused enormously more damage to marriage than gays have or can. Millions and millions of us have wrecked our marriages with selfishness, infidelity, and just plain stupidity. We made divorce easy and adultery commonplace. We reduced marriage from the sacrament that it is-- an image of the Holy Trinity (father, mother, and child)-- to a temporary legal arrangement, open to nullification for the most adolescent and venial of reasons.

3) The culpability of the gay marriage movement in the destruction of marriage lies more in the emerging victory of the pagan culture it exemplifies than in the specific damage it will cause. Same sex marriage will certainly degrade marriage, but gays will always be pikers compared to the degradation that heterosexuals have inflicted on marriage.

4) The pagans are winning because they have taken control of the culture. For the most part we are using their terms and logic. Checkmate.

5) The primary impact of the legalization of gay marriage will not be on marriage but on religious freedom. The legal imprimatur conferred to gay unions will rapidly lead to suppression of Christian praxis in the public square. Christians will be forced to collaborate with gay matrimony in innumerable ways-- Christian wedding photographers, florists, venue owners, musicians, teachers, government employees, churches and pastors will have to choose between livelihood and faith. It's already happening. It will be a tsunami when gay marriage is legal everywhere.

This use of government force to drive Christians from the public square by forcing us to deny our faith or lose our livelihood is already happening with the contraception mandate, and has been tested and refined in decades of legal assault on Christians in the courts on issues such as teaching of evolution and public displays of crosses and creches. This is the next step. The Christophobes used to call the police if we asked questions in school about Darwinism or put a manger on the courthouse lawn. Now the haters will call the police if we demur on the purchase of contraception or on renting our banquet hall for Bruce and Steve's wedding reception.

The gay marriage movement has nothing whatsoever to do with marriage of gays. It is an Alisnkyite checkmate--

Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

Gay marriage has everything to do with elimination of faithful Christians from the public square.

We cannot beat this by imitating their language and logic. When we use their terms, we have already lost. We are living in a rapidly de-Christianizing and paganizing society, ignited with astonishing evil, and marriage is being transformed to serve other purposes, like a cathedral turned to a brothel. No amount of debate and sociological exegesis will save marriage if we forget that marriage transcends law and civilization and cultural breezes. Marriage-- real marriage between a man and a woman-- is part of what it means to be human.

We have probably lost this fight and this culture already. But the truth remains: marriage is a sacrament. The life-long union of a man and a woman open to new life is the image of God with us.

What remains for us is to tell the truth, without compromise and without fear. 

"That simplifies our problem..."

Wisdom from the most decorated Marine in history, Major General Chesty Puller.

During the Korean War, (then) Colonel Puller, on being informed that his Marine unit was completely surrounded by the Chinese army at the Chosin Reservoir, replied:

"We're surrounded. That simplifies our problem..." 

Face it, fellow Christians and cultural conservatives. We're surrounded. We are on the HOV lane to paganism. We're now on the part with no speed limit. We are losing this culture war. Fast. We've been out-Gramsci'd.

This simplifies our problem. We can let go of spin, censoring ourselves, imitating our foes, straining to be politically correct. We of course should continue to fight in the political arena and in the cultural arena, but most important, we need to protect our families and friends and fellow Christians, and pray for our enemies, and we need to serve and love God.

We are surrounded by an increasingly pagan culture. But we've been here before.

It's how we started, actually.

Leftism as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy

Russell Taylor at Bogpaper:

Lefties, your work here is done

Leftists like their pet victims to be helpless, blameless and utterly dependent on their largesse, in order to wring the maximum feel-good value from them. Metaphorically, they want to prop the unemployed up in bed, give them a nice cup of tea, and tell them to rest up until they feel ready to face the world again. No pressure. Take as long as you like. This isn’t real compassion, because someone who gives a damn about others wants them to live fulfilling, independent lives. It’s more like Münchausen Syndrome by Proxy, where caregivers deliberately keep others in a state of dependency to feed their own pathological need to feel kind and attentive. When the Tories tell able-bodied layabouts to start pulling their weight, it does two things to lefties. On the one hand, it enables them to play David to the Right’s Goliath, which pleases them like nothing else. On the other, it threatens their little game and makes a mockery of their faux concern. Either way, they have an excuse for making a lot of noise. 

In the Magic Kingdom of the liberal imagination, people are paid to do whatever takes their fancy – be it noodling away in academia, shouting orders at proles, or sitting on their arses all day. The unemployed are living out the socialist dream of getting something for nothing, and the Left don’t appreciate their bubble being burst. The supersized state is the guarantor of this other Eden, and the Left takes any right-wing interference with its autonomy, or with the lives of its leisured inhabitants, as an act of war. 

Liberals like to cry their crocodile tears over those who can’t find work for love nor money, and bemoan the inability of the Tories to create full employment. Well, my sorrowful lefty friends, it was you who screwed the economy, destroyed jobs with the minimum wage, overregulated employers, then encouraged immigrants to take whatever jobs were left in the ruins. It was you who vandalised our schools, leaving young people ill-equipped for a working environment. It was you who helped millions of people get pointless degrees that left them unable to find jobs commensurate with their ‘talents’. And it was you who created the welfare system that discourages people from joining the workforce and stunts the growth of the productive sector with its expense. I’d say we could do without your suggestions. You’ve done more than enough already.

Love that last paragraph. To the people who gave us welfare and fatherless families and endemic unemployment and states whose governors are more likely than murderers to go to prison and feral violence in gun-control utopias and, well, Detroit-- the incarnation of liberalism-- your job is done.

You've done enough already.  

Thanks

Just a note to all of my friends regarding my posting. I'll be taking a break for a while on this blog. I'll still be posting on Evolution News and Views, but I feel that my efforts are better directed to the important issues raised on ENV (such as scientism, atheism and Darwinism) than on the political issues of our day, regardless of how serious and disturbing they are.

Thanks all for reading and participating, and you'll all be in my prayers.

Mike

Some racists are more equal than others...

The Racism of Bundy vrs. Biden and Reid

Snippet:

As reported by CNN: “His [Biden] remarks about Obama, the only African-American serving in the Senate, drew the most scrutiny."I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," Biden said. "I mean, that's a storybook, man."  

LA Times: And Reid didn’t apologize until 2 years later, 2010: “Harry Reid, the Democrat Senate Majority Leader and the national government's highest-ranking Mormon, has admitted now remarking apparently with some amazement on the nation's highest-ranking black Democrat as being notably "light-skinned" and having "no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one."

Dueling racist quotes is always a fun game to play with Democrats.

Bottom line: at least we Republicans don't elect our racists to national office.  

Thucydides on abortion

"Good deeds do not require long statements; but when evil is done the whole art of oratory is employed as a screen for it. (Thucydides)"

Actually, Thucydides wasn't referring to abortion, but his aphorism fits the abortion debate to a tee.

What we see in the pro-abortion argument is a tsunami of sophistry-- the euphemism of "pro-choice" to describe the killing of a child who is denied the fundamental choice of life, idiot assertions that human embryos 'aren't really human beings', the unmoored insistence that "a woman has the right to control her own body" (she does, unless she is killing someone), analogies between being pregnant and being tethered to an elderly violinist on dialysis, the bizarre insistence that a procedure that isn't successful unless someone dies is "health care", and the chant that the primary method of femicide in the world today-- abortion-- is essential to protect women's rights (sex-selective abortion has killed 100 million girls in Asia over the past few decades).

Killing children in the womb is wrong. The elaborate oratory to the contrary is a screen for evil. 

"Shut up", atheists explain

Loyal readers of this blog will be acquainted with Jerry Coyne's crusade to eliminate a course on the intersection of religion, philosophy and science.

Coyne has written threatening letters to the department chairman, the university administrators, and has sicced the Freedom From Religion Foundation to threaten litigation.

Which leaves the obvious question:

Because Coyne disagrees with the religious content of the course, why doesn't he ask Ball State to introduce irreligious content, or to offer another course that examines the intersection of philosophy and science from an irreligious perspective? Why doesn't Jerry Coyne demand equal time?

Why censor, when you can expand and deepen the conversation? If I were a student at Ball State, I'd love to take both courses, with a religious and irreligious perspective. I'd even prefer the irreligious one: I'm fairly acquainted with the religious view, and I'd love to see the irreligious perspective expanded and defended.

Yet none of the atheist censors demand the obvious: an explicitly irreligious course.

An atheist defender might point out that Coyne has used the perceived imbalance of the course to critique it. But that point is disingenuous. Coyne has insisted that the course be shut down, and has made no serious case for preservation of the course and addition of the atheist viewpoint. Coyne isn't demanding equal time. He's demanding that the course end. 

Now of course, Coyne might reply that it would be unconstitutional to present the irreligious view, just as he believes it is unconstitutional to present the religious view. But of course he doesn't believe that, and it's hard to see how a course that explored the relation between philosophy and science without invoking God would under any construct violate the Constitution.

Now, a Christian wag might suggest that atheists already teach atheism (evolutionary biology) and they would rather not expose their fragile ideology to a course that was explicitly irreligious and open to questions from students.

And that would be true, of course. Candor and public accountability are not in the atheist playbook. Atheists demand silence, not equal time.

The atheist crusade is not about education. It's about making you shut up. 

"I don't think you understand 'censorship'..."

23cal has some questions about my observations on atheist censorship of religious expression:

I don't think you understand "censorship", although you use it a lot because it has a negative connotation.

I understand it.

The way you use it, not allowing slander or libel is "censorship".

Technically true, but not relevant to atheist censorship of religion.

Of course, anyone who actually has the ability to think realizes that to label "stopping something that is illegal" as "censorship" is a pretty warped definition.

It's true that the word "censorship" evokes injustice, not mere enforcement of law.

However, I take into account the type of reader you try to appeal to and understand how you have a good chance of getting away with it.

What exactly is the "type or reader I try to appeal to"? I suspect you mean readers "who are poor, uneducated and easy to command". Why don't you just come out and say it. After my readers and I get done looking up all of the big words you use, we'll respond.

"Stopping something that is illegal", such as slander or libel, is the very point here.

Slander and libel are matters of statutory law, and enforcement is appropriate.

"Separation of church and state" isn't statutory law. It isn't law of any sort-- it's never been ratified by a legislature anywhere. It's an interpretation of the First Amendment adapted from a phrase from a personal letter of Thomas Jefferson, championed by a menagerie of atheists and other bigots and inserted into Supreme Court jurisprudence by an alumnus of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan who used the phrase for two highly successful anti-Catholic campaigns for the Senate in the 1920's and who was catapulted to fame in Alabama for his successful defense of a man who killed a Catholic priest in public in cold blood. It remains a hotly controversial interpretation, currently rejected explicitly or implicitly by at least four of the nine justices on the Supreme Court.

Again, I understand you have your own interpretation of the Establishment Clause,

I share my interpretation of the Establishment Clause with Justices Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, and Alito. Justice Kennedy agrees with my interpretation, on alternate Tuesdays.

My interpretation of the Establishment Clause is the same as that of the Founders who wrote the First Amendment, the voters who ratified, and the overwhelming majority of Americans throughout our nation's history.

but as far as legality goes we don't get to ignore decades of established jurisprudence and legal precedent...

"Decades of establishment jurisprudence and legal precedent" began in 1947 with Everson v. Board of Education-- the first Supreme Court ruling that inserted 'separation of church and state" into Constitutional jurisprudence.

Everson trashed 160 years of tradition and precedent and statutory law. Why is it that you only defend tradition and precedent when it suits your ideological agenda, even when the ruling you etch in stone itself overthrew a much longer and larger body of tradition and precedent?

and individually decide what laws mean. Allowing that to happen as you wish to do would result in chaos and anarchy.

What a stupid thing to say. The tradition and precedent in our country for 160 years was to allow such decisions to be made locally, by school boards and state legislatures. Did we have chaos and anarchy before 1947? What's wrong with local municipalities deciding on civic religious expression, as we did through most of our history? Many nations in the West allow civic religious expression. There's no chaos and anarchy.

What you advocate for the establishment clause, if applied to traffic laws, would allow each individual to determine for himself what is "safe", instead of the long established legal guidelines.

Of course I endorse enforcement of statutory law. "Separation of church and state" isn't statutory law. It's never been enacted by any legislature. It's an interpretation held by many secularists, and it's highly controversial, even on the highest courts.

Well, the courts--the ones with the legal authority to make the call---have made it in favor of separation and neutrality, and that the government--especially in the form of public schools--cannot promote one religion to the exclusion of others.

Court decisions have varied. Many decisions have been decided by the vote of a single justice. As I pointed out, four of the nine Supreme Court justices, including the Chief Justice, share my general views on the Establishment Clause. There is no consensus. Justice Scalia has excoriated current Establishment Clause jurisprudence, and Justice Thomas calls Establishment Clause jurisprudence "in shambles".

It is an openly contentious issue. Why do you atheists always fabricate a "consensus" when none exists. Why are you so afraid to admit that there's a real debate? You do it with all contentious issues-- evolution, global warming, the First Amendment. You insist on a fake consensus and demand that people who disagree with you just shut up and follow instructions. It's a kind of de facto censorship. Totalitarianism is an atheist tic.

That is exactly the case with the Cranston prayer banner. Under your usage of "censorship", not allowing someone to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater is censorship.

Yelling "fire" endangers people's lives, and is properly illegal, by statute.

Public prayer endangers no one, and is not outlawed by any statute. It is censored by litigation in courts, using highly controversial and dubious Constitutional theories.

Your claim that enforcing established law is "censorship" is goofy.

"Separation of church and state" isn't law. It's an interpretation, about which there is much debate. It is used in courts by bigots like you to impose censorship of religion.

If someone were taking out ads in the newspaper saying that Egnor is a pedophile thief who cheats on his wife and abuses his children, and the court made him stop running those ads because libel is illegal (assuming the claims aren't true, of course).......under your use of "censorship", you would have to consider this "censorship" in the same way taking down the prayer banner is "censorship".

One is enforcement of statutory law prohibiting slander, and one is an effort by atheists to shut people up. See the difference?

Would you want a judge to "censor" that ad? If not, exactly how does that differ from your statement, "When Eberhard sees a prayer he doesn't like, he wants a judge to censor it"? Isn't that exactly like, "When Egnor sees an ad he doesn't like, he wants a judge to censor it"?

Enforcing statutory law is not censorship. Using controversial and dubious interpretations of the Constitution in the absence of statutory law ratified by a legislature to shut people up is censorship.

You are certainly welcome to use "enforcing the existing law" as a new definition for "censorship", but it seems kind of weird.

"Separation of church and state" is not law. It is an interpretation of the Establishment clause that is rejected by most Americans and a large portion of the legal profession, including four out of nine of the current Supreme Court justices and including the Chief Justice. It emerged in jurisprudence as a residue of anti-Catholic bigotry, and has no basis whatsoever in the Constitution.

The use of such a tenuous interpretation with no standing whatsoever in statutory law or in the text of the Constitution in order to silence religious expression is censorship.

"Why are you the most beautiful thing on Earth?"

A beautiful reflection on being a new father. My wife and I have four kids, and I know exactly how this guy feels.

Parenthood is God's gracious gift to us-- a little shimmer of heaven loaned to us, albeit much too briefly (they go off to college before you know it!).

We are so blessed. Not even angels are privileged to participate with God in the creation of new life. 

Oops

A Dog Ate 2 years of Lois Lerner’s Emails. Now What?

Gangsters. But the most troubling thing is not that Democrats lie, violate the Constitution and break the law to gain power. That's a natural occurrence, like rain and snow, and we should be accustomed to it by now.

The most troubling thing is that the media and the American public are so in the tank for these thugs that they would dare telling a lie so blatant. They know they can get away with it. 

The Constitutional separation of church and state

Atheist attorney Doug Indeap, with my commentary:

Doug:

You observe that the Constitution founds the government on the power of the people and says nothing about god(s), but fail to recognize that that is a reflection of the very separation of church and state you otherwise deny. As I said earlier (and you largely ignore in your post), separation of church and state is a bedrock principle of our Constitution much like the principles of separation of powers and checks and balances. In the Constitution, the founders did not simply say in so many words that there should be separation of powers and checks and balances; rather, they actually separated the powers of government among three branches and established checks and balances. Similarly, they did not merely say there should be separation of church and state; rather, they actually separated them by (1) establishing a secular government on the power of the people (not a deity), (2) saying nothing to connect that government to god(s) or religion, (3) saying nothing to give that government power over matters of god(s) or religion, and (4), indeed, saying nothing substantive about god(s) or religion at all except in a provision precluding any religious test for public office. Given the norms of the day, the founders' avoidance of any expression in the Constitution suggesting that the government is somehow based on any religious belief was quite a remarkable and plainly intentional choice. They later buttressed this separation of government and religion with the First Amendment, which constrains the government from undertaking to establish religion or prohibit individuals from freely exercising their religions. The basic principle, thus, rests on much more than just the First Amendment.

You misrepresent the Founders motives for the Establishment Clause and the near silence of the Constitution on religion at the federal level. The clear intent was to prevent the federal government from interfering in religious expression. The American people were (and are) deeply religious, and most of the states had de jure or de facto extablished churches, and the Founders were intent on ensuring that freedom of religious expression was protected. There was obviously no intent to prevent government officials from invoking God, or in any way suppressing religious speech, either for government officials or for private citizens.

Here is President George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation, issued in part to give God thanks for... the Constitution:

WHEREAS it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favour; and Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me "to recommend to the people of the United States a DAY OF PUBLICK THANSGIVING and PRAYER, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:"

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to thethe service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed;-- for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enable to establish Constitutions of government for our sasety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted;-- for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge;-- and, in general, for all the great and various favours which He has been pleased to confer upon us.

And also, that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions;-- to enable us all, whether in publick or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us); and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

GIVEN under my hand, at the city of New-York, the third day of October, in the year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine.

(signed) G. Washington

A similar God-full Thanksgiving Proclamation was issued by Washington in his second term, two by President Adams, and two by President Madison. Jefferson declined, and Lincoln was the next, with similar proclamations thanking God issued by every president since.

Here are the eight Proclamations thanking God issued by the Contenential Congress from 1777 to 1784.

Doug's argument that the Framers intended to enjoin religious expression by government officials is piffle. In fact, the founders celebrated the Constitution and the founding of the nation with repeated government issued prayers and the passionate invocation of God's blessings.

The constitutional wall of separation between church and state is a rhetorical fiction employed by anti-Christian (and often anti-Catholic) bigots to expunge Christianity from the public square. It is a deep violation of the text and the spirit of the Constitution, which prohibits an Establishment of Religion explicitly to preserve the Free Exercise of religion.

Anti-Christian bigots have been using federal power-- a power specifically denied them in the Free Exercise clause-- to censor religious expression in schools, in courthouses and public buildings, and on public property. The goal is obviously not to protect religious expression but to extinguish it.

In place of genuine free religious expression, only secularism-- anodyne atheism-- will remain, the Establishment of which is the obvious goal of the anti-Christian/anti-Catholic bigots who assault religious exercise in every venue that will have them. 

Climategate II

A significant brouhaha about corruption in climate "science":

Climategate II And The Rise Of Climate McCarthyism

A climate scientist tried to publish a scientific paper in a leading climate science journal in which he suggests that the climate may be less sensitive to CO2 than generally claimed. His paper was rejected for explicitly political, not scientific, reasons.

Excerpt:

"I had not expect(ed) such an enormous worldwide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life," he wrote in his resignation. 

"Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship." 

The actions of this once-peaceful community, he wrote in his resignation letter, now reminded him of McCarthyism. 

Bengtsson, 79, quoted in the Daily Mail, said it was "utterly unacceptable" to advise against publishing a paper on political grounds. He called it "an indication of how science is gradually being influenced by political views." 

"The reality" of climate, he said, "hasn't been keeping up with the (computer) models."
Judith Curry, climatologist and chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, says the campaign against Bengtsson "a disgraceful display of climate McCarthyism by climate scientists, which has the potential to do as much harm to climate science as did the Climategate emails." 

Indeed, among warmists the only acceptable line of inquiry seems to be: Are you now, or have you ever been, a climate skeptic?

In an atmosphere like this, none of the "science" of "global warming" can be trusted. This is just Lysenkoism.

Even more disturbing is the silence of the scientific community about this breathtaking scandal. Silence is complicity, and suggests that scientists as a profession can't be trusted to tell the truth. 

"A History of Liberal White Racism..."

Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic tells the truth, remarkably, about the close tie between racism and liberalism-progressivism:

A History of Liberal White Racism, Cont. 

It's not that northern liberals cut a deal with southern racists -- the southerners were very much married to to the prospect of progressive reform. 

There is some sense that when we talk about the period leading up to the New Deal and beyond, that we are talking about progressives in the North making a tragic, yet necessary, bargain with white racists conservatives in the South. In fact what Ira Katznelson shows in Fear Itself is something a little more complicated. The white supremacists in his book are, indeed, for the most part, Southern. But they also are very much married to to the prospect of progressive liberal reform. It may break our brains a bit to imagine, say, a Southern white supremacist backing railroad unions. But that's actual history. 

And if you think about it, it makes sense. Ben "Pitchfork" Tillman and Tom Watson were populist and (ultimately in the case of Watson) white supremacists. The division goes back to the days of pre-slavery politics when the South was somewhat divided between planters and yeoman farmers. I say"somewhat" because on the issue of White Supremacy, there was no division.  

No character in Katznelson's book troubles the waters like Mississippi's governor, and then senator, Theodore Bilbo. Here is a man who, in one breath, can be hailed as "a liberal fire-eater" and then in another dubbed "a bulldog for protecting traditions of the South." Bilbo was a Klansmen who stumped for Al Smith. But black equality was a bridge too far. 

If Roosevelt's agenda belongs to us, so does the man who said this:

...it is practically impossible, without great loss of life, especially at the present time, to prevent lynching of Negro rapists when the crime is committed against the white women of the South." 

And then claimed that the United States was:

...strictly a white man's country, with a white man's civilization, and any dream on the part of the Negro Race to share social and political equality will be shattered in the end.

We can not part ourselves from the man who recounted a meeting with a delegation of back labor leaders like this:

Theodore Bilbo worked to block funding for Howard University, tried to initiate a "Back to Africa" campaign for colonizing black citizens, attempted to segregate the national parks, dismissed multiracial children as "a motley melee of misceginated mongrels," attempted to ban interracial marriage in Washington, D.C., and raged against antilynching legislation that would compel "Southern girls to use the stools and toilets of damn syphilitic women." And he did this as a progressive.

It is not enough to claim that "liberalism" has, somehow, changed meanings thus allowing us to disown the Mississippi Senator. On the contrary, the Roosevelt administration congratulated Bilbo on his win in 1940 pronouncing him "a real friend of liberal government." When Bilbo himself first ran for Senate he promised to "raise the same kind of hell as President Roosevelt." When he was up for reelection Bilbo promoted himself to be "100 percent for Roosevelt ... and the New Deal."

If the New Deal is ours, so is Theodore Bilbo. Acknowledging this part of our history wounds us. Class interests, in the liberal mind, has always been seen as the great uniter. And yet we see for whole stretches of our history race not simply race trumping class, but race effectively functioning as class.

Does it mean that the New Deal was worthless? No. Is the point that Roosevelt was a covert anti-black bigot? Nope. But it is part of our history. And it is as important to acknowledge this--just as, when the history of marriage equality is written, it will be important to acknowledge the Democratic Party's "evolution."

Segregation in the South was wholly a Democrat-Liberal-Progressive program. It is, along with slavery, the most ambitious social engineering project in American history, and Dems-Liberals-Progressives own social engineering. 

It's time to face the obvious truth: American racism was, and is, owned by Democrats-Liberals-Progressives. 

After it became obvious in the 1960's that the racist Democrat-Liberal-Progressive system of segregation was collapsing, the race-baiting social engineers substituted the Great Society and a system of racial spoils for Jim Crow. It was the same basic intent: use race and fear and big government to secure votes. Just like old times. 

It's worked pretty well. Ms. Coates needs to be careful not to give the whole game away. 

Phase Four in Climate Fearmongering

Anthony Watts:

Lexicon Shift Alert: global warming gets another name change

Back in 2010, I pointed out that White House science adviser John Holdren had made a shift in naming conventions for the twice renamed “global warming”.

It seems that another shift in the lexicon has occurred, again at the White House. 

Organizing for Action, President Obama’s campaign machine declared Tuesday that there was a new name. 

The Washington Times picked up on this shift, and I’ve updated the graphic to reflect the new name. There’s also a poll to choose/predict the next name after this one:

Choose Your Favourite BIG SCARY NAME For Phase Four In Climate Fearmongering


Climate Rambunctiousness

Terrestrial Thermoclime Transmogrification Apocalypse

Planet Death Watch 

Climate Derangement Syndrome

The Globeacaust 

Disrupt-n-warm-a-unsustainableness Globalaciously

Death Weather

Peak Weather

White Man's Wind

Irritable Climate Syndrome

Climageddon

Climate Gone Wild

Frankenclimate Anthropocalypse

Wetter Blitzkrieg 

Climate Jihad

Climatus Interruptus

I like Irritable Climate Syndrome, because it equates climate science research output with an unpredictable bowel movement.

P.Z. Myers: "I suffered far more...in having a cyst removed"

Dispatch from Moloch:

The horror! The video they don't want you to see!

P.Z. Myers:

[Emily Lett, who videotaped her own abortion, is] comfortable with the choice, she smiles through the procedure, and it’s so quick — having watched my wife go through three childbirths, the contrast is striking. I suffered far more than Letts in having a cyst removed last week, but what I went through was trivial compared to what women experience in labor. 

There is so much fuss over something that ought to be regarded as a fairly simple decision for most women.

Her child couldn't be reached for comment.  

"Mommy, this lollipop they gave me at the hospital tastes funny"

The article, with my commentary:

Belgian Parliament Posed To Approve Child Euthanasia Law

The Belgian Federal Parliament is reportedly about to expand its controversial "right to die" policies to include access to euthanasia for some gravely ill children.
A consensus among members of the legislative body has reportedly formed in support of legislation to allow children to choose to undergo euthanasia in certain dire cases, according to a report in the Belgian daily newspaper Der Morgen, as translated by the Paris-based news agency Presseurop. 

If child euthanasia is legalized in Belgium, the country would become the first in the developed world to have a law on the books allowing the practice, although the Netherlands has since 2005 not prosecuted doctors who perform euthanasia on some minors as long as the doctors act in accordance with a set of medical guidelines dubbed the Groningen Protocol...

The Belgian child-killing will no doubt resemble the Dutch protocol, which is used almost exclusively against children with spina bifida. The pretext for killing the kids is that they "suffer".

None of these children suffer pain on a regular basis. I've cared for kids with these problems for thirty years. Many are now adults, many are married, many have gone to college. They have handicaps, and when they are young they are sometimes a financial and social burden to adults who would rather be relieved of the burden.

Peter Deconinck, president of the Belgian medical ethics organization Reflectiegroep Biomedische Ethiek, has come out in support of expanding the practice to minors, as has the head of the intensive care unit of Fabiola Hospital in Brussels, who testified before a Belgian Senate committee. 

"We all know that euthanasia is already practiced on children," he told the committee. "Yes, active euthanasia." 

Though a majority of members of the Belgian Parliament are reportedly ready to pass the child euthanasia bill, Belgian Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard and many of the nation's Catholics are staunchly opposed to any expansion of legalized euthanasia. 

"We expressed our strong reservations regarding the decriminalization of euthanasia as early as 2002," Leonard said last week, according to Der Morgen. "First and foremost because we have excellent palliative care available today, and because we can rely on sedation, to the extent strictly necessary." 

The Christian Democrats may vote against the child euthanasia law, but New Flemish Alliance party members have indicated that they are willing to back the bill in order to ensure its passage, according to Der Morgen.

Few handicapped children suffer pain regularly. And no patient-- even the terminally ill-- need suffer intractable pain or fear.We have an armamentarium of narcotics and anxiolytics. Pain can always be relieved.

Euthanasia is simply killing. It is a form of abandonment-- disposal-- of people who are ill. It is not medical care of any sort. And killing handicapped children-- which is what this bill is really about-- is unspeakable.

What the Belgian doctors are talking about doing is what German doctors were hanged for in 1948.  

Drew Brees on his faith in Christ

New Orleans quarterback Drew Brees talks about his faith in Christ. It's wonderful that professional athletes who are Christians-- Brees, Tim Tebow,  Robert Griffin III, Aaron Rogers, among others-- seem increasingly to be willing to talk publicly about their faith in the Lord.



Personal witness by athletes is very powerful, and a wonderful influence, particularly on young fans.  

"Our childless dystopia"

A magnificent essay by James Bowman, about PD James' novel The Children of Men, a dystopia in which all mankind has lost through disease the ability to have children:

P. D. James’s 1993 novel, The Children of Men, was an insightful if not entirely satisfactory look at the world we know through the lens of futuristic-apocalyptic fiction. Her version of the eschaton is a sudden inability of human beings to reproduce themselves, beginning in 1995. This is the year called Omega, and the last people to be born, now in their twenties as the novel begins in 2021, are known as Omegas. Such near-future fiction is always an iffy thing, and all the more so if the predicted hour of apocalypse is near enough to be noticed when it doesn’t happen. 

And yet, in a way, James’s future has happened. As we now know, 1995 did not bring the demographic doom of the human race. And yet The Children of Men was much more accurate than most eschatological fiction, for it presents an exaggerated version of a problem — namely the gradual depopulation of the developed world through below-replacement fertility rates — that in the years since its publication has begun to seem rather scarily unexaggerated...

The central insight of the novel is that all ideas of social improvement and reform, all justice, hope, and love depend on the existence of future generations for whose sake all the good that we do is ultimately done. “It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society,” writes P. D. James, “but not in a world with no future where, all too soon, the very words ‘justice,’ ‘compassion,’ ‘society,’ ‘struggle,’ ‘evil,’ would be unheard echoes on an empty air.” Thus, it is not just coincidental that the parents of the first child born in twenty-six years are leading the only movement for reform. Without the ability to bear children, James tells us, we also lose the ability to care about anything but our own comfort and safety — which is what the Warden of England promises in return for his absolute and unquestioned power. There is much to be said for this view of things, but I wonder if it may work the other way around. When we start to care only for our own comfort and safety, do we lose if not the ability then the need or desire to reproduce?

Please read the whole thing. The nightmare James envisions fortunately is not upon us, despite the most consequential event in modern times-- the invention of the Pill. Contraception will be the demise of secular Western civilization, in some generations-- a century or two. It's effect on genuine Christian civilization and on Islamic and pagan civilizations remains to be seen. But we have seen in secular Europe a plunge in birth rates-- far below replacement-- that has never been witnessed in history, except for pestilence, famine or war.

The consequences of our pervasive self-gelding will reach to every cranny of life. It will ravage our social systems, our arts and sciences, our philosophy, our religion, and will transform even the banalities of our everyday lives. We do not yet understand what we have done. People like James and Bowman are beginning to explore it. It is a deep darkness.

Mankind's survival literally depends on the survival of worldviews that reject contraception. Those worldviews may be genuinely Christian or Islamic, or they might take a totalitarian form-- a world in which perpetuation of the human race is dictated by commissars and Five-Year Plans. We know only that it will not be secular hedonism. Whether anti-contraceptive worldviews will survive, and what form the triumphant worldviews will take, we cannot yet know.

Perhaps we would rather not know.  

Former ballet dancer endorses Holocaust-denying organization

What an embarrassment to his beloved father. Notice that this elitist atheist whose only claim to attention is his father's good name makes no actual reference to the Constitution. His bizarre allegation that the Founding Fathers (who hired chaplains and prayed daily in government gatherings) endorsed establishment of atheism is risible.

He is now a spokesman for a hate group that has tried to ban display of the Star of David at a Holocaust monument.

Watch the video, and then take a shower.

H.T. Jerry Coyne

Why just imagine atheism?

Jerry Coyne is at the Imagine No Religion 4 meeting.

Why just imagine atheism? Hold the 'Imagine No Religion 5' meeting in Poyngyang next year, and get a taste of the real thing.

And for INR 6, why not hold the meeting at a Siberian Gulag. INR 7-- rent Cambodia's Killing Fields.

Atheism has ruled several billion people in the 20th century, and it continues to blight the lives of more than a billion people in the 21st century.

Why just imagine atheism, when we've had so much of it?

Pescador de los Hombres

Saint John Paul II sings Pescador de los Hombres, one of my favorites.

Our beloved Holy Father had a pretty good voice! He brought so much joy, and he brought freedom and the Lord to so many.