Media Still in Denial on Mob Attack

I understand the reluctance of many Detroiters to admit that racism in the black community exists at levels that could explain the monstrous attempted murder of Steve Utash last week.  Even as sensible a commentator as Frank Beckmann hit the guard rail pretty hard on Friday when he wrote this about the mob attack on Utash:

All the evidence — including the eyewitness account of the story’s heroine, retired nurse Deborah Hughes — indicates that the brutal assault on Utash was not based on his race. Though one juvenile has been charged by Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy with a hate crime.  (“Detroit must learn to respect itself”).

Oh, sure, except for that. But to reach that hate-crime charge required evidence, such as this kid telling police he attacked Utash based on his race – why isn’t Beckmann counting that in his tally of “all the evidence”? 

As for Deborah Hughes’s “eyewitness account” of what she saw while occupied trying to save Utash’s life, she says she didn’t hear anything, but everyone was yelling at once.  But what does evidence of racial animus look like?  Pointy hoods?  

My interest in all this is not to see hate-crime prosecutions. I don’t even support hate-crime laws.  If there’s any good to be found in the horror the Utash family is going through, it’s that there’s now a bright light shining on the hidden and deadly pathology of racism in the black community – too bright a light even for the media’s bushel baskets to cover.

Not that they won’t keep trying.

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The Do-Nothing Congress Does Something

Here’s some cheering news.  From the New York Times: 

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday said it would bar an Iranian diplomat nominated as United Nations ambassador from entering the country, in a rebuke to Iran at a time when the United States is engaged in delicate negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear program.  (“White House Says No Visa for Iran’s U.N. Envoy”)

The Times being what they are, (no pun intended), they’re trying to make this the president’s idea, but it was almost all Congress’s doing.  The original bill was sponsored by “Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, and Representative Doug Lamborn, a Colorado Republican.”

The main thing is, Iran’s gesture of contempt in trying to send one of the original 1979 embassy hostage-takers to the United States to show they can insult us on our own soil has been stopped.

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‘It Was Vigilantes!, Slow Response Times!’ Take 2

In an astounding piece of delusional journalism, Brian Dickerson at the Detroit Free Press is rehabilitating the savages who attempted to murder Steve Utash as “vigilantes.”

People don’t feel the need to take the law into their own hands when they can count on police to enforce it, and even those predisposed toward criminal behavior are less likely to assault or steal from their neighbors if they know they’re certain to be apprehended and punished . . .

. . . It’s hardly rocket science to understand that citizens who have been urged to take up arms may come to see themselves as the city’s de facto first responders. What happened to Utash suggests that too much is left to chance when citizen-soldiers supplant trained police officers on the front lines.  (“Detroit - where vigilantes are the face of the law”).

Is that what this mob of 12 to 30 assailants were? “citizen-soldiers” who saw themselves as first responders enforcing the law by punching and kicking a lone, unarmed white motorist nearly to death?

Dickerson has no right to this level of muddled thinking. When Detroit Police Chief James Craig has, on numerous occasions, recommended that citizens arm themselves, it was against the threat of armed or otherwise violent home invaders, carjackers, or other violent criminals – NOT passing motorists involved in a traffic accident who immediately pull over and check on the injured person.

What foolishness.

What amazing, blind, and inexcusable self-deception.

###

Cool! Is That for Strangling Babies?

I guess they just mean to kill us with irony.

Reportedly, at the high-level gift exchange at the Vatican between Pope Francis and President Obama, the president received a copy of the Holy Father’s Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, and a rosary that the Pope had blessed.

We don’t know yet how Obama got rid of the Pope’s book, but he thought it was fitting to pass on the rosary to the most ardent Catholic he could think of – Nancy Pelosi. Paul Kengor at The American Spectator thinks he knows why:

Pelosi, after all, fancies herself an authoritative Catholic, and hasn’t hesitated to so represent herself to Obama and to the nation at large. She considers herself an expert on matters like ensoulment; that is, when life begins. In an August 2008 interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, she was asked by Tom Brokaw “When does life begin?” Pelosi proceeded to speak for her Church’s Magisterium: “I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is, over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition. And Senator — Saint Augustine said at three months. We don’t know. The point is that it shouldn’t have an impact on a woman’s right to choose.”

It certainly doesn’t impact that “right” in the eyes of this particular Catholic. Pelosi has a unique sense of the sacred when it comes to abortion, which she describes as “sacred ground” to her. Asked last summer why she refused to support a bill banning late-term abortions, Pelosi said: “As a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me.” (“Nancy Pelosi Accepts Margaret Sanger Award …And then calls Catholics like the Pope “dumb.”).

Pelosi recently proved what a “respectful Catholic” she is when she used an appearance at Planned Parenthood to insult pro-lifers – of whom the most visible earthly proponent for 40 years has been the current occupant of the Holy See: “When you see how closed their minds are, or oblivious, or whatever it is — dumb — then you know what the fight is about.”

As Kengor writes,

Planned Parenthood rewarded Pelosi for her ardor and sense of the sacred by bestowing upon her “its highest honor, its esteemed Margaret Sanger Award. Pelosi, of course, was thrilled, and Obama was no doubt thrilled for her (as he surely was for Hillary Clinton when she won the award in 2009).”

Neither Pelosi nor Obama in their grateful words to Planned Parenthood commented on the full breadth of Sanger’s “remarkable” work, such as her 1926 speech to a KKK rally in Silverlake, New Jersey or her penchant for “race improvement,” the driving motivation for her championing of birth control. The Planned Parenthood matron wanted to advance what she called “racial health,” and lamented America’s “race of degenerates.” This meant purging the landscape of its “human weeds” and “the dead weight of human waste.” For Sanger, this included a special “Negro Project” that the racial eugenicist had in mind for a particular group of Americans.

The Negro Project was dear to Sanger’s heart, as shown by an odd December 1939 letter she wrote to Dr. Clarence Gamble of Milton, Massachusetts. The Planned Parenthood foundress alerted the doctor: “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”

The secret is still safe, which is how Planned Parenthood has successfully

annihilated countless millions of unborn babies, particularly (and disproportionately) African-American babies. In that, it is truly extraordinary. And it all began with Margaret Sanger. She is a progressive icon to liberals, a saint in the feminist church. They revere her.

Lessons from history don’t impress progressives much, as history makes them impatient; that’s why they’re always champing to get to the far side of it – well clear of the “wrong side of history” – where everyone is still, as Pelosi would phrase it, “dumb.”  But never looking back (except to fumble out the occasional bit of obscure commentary from Senator Augustine) doesn’t protect progressives from being hypocritical and obtuse; it only protects them from knowing they’re that way.

Perhaps Pope Francis, well aware that the progressive aversion to the past, and lack of insight into the future, blinds them to everything but the present moment, selected his gifts to the President of the United States accordingly. I can’t say I exactly see the significance in giving a rosary to a president who is ostensibly protestant – but I do know the rosary is linked in Church tradition to the triumph of St. Dominic over the Albigensians, a dualistic religion teaching “principles that led directly to the very extinction of the human race.” That obscure history hardly recommends itself to the modern progressive mind. No intellectuals call themselves Albigensian any more. On the other hand, the occasional advocate for the extinction of the human race may still be found in a college classroom, at the EPA, or implementing the Affordable Care Act.

More directly significant, Pope Francis’s other gift, the Evangelii Gaudium, contains language that’s meant to reach the progressive mind, such as:

“It is not ‘progressive’ to try to resolve problems by eliminating a human life.” (214).

Not that I expect Obama to read that, or even hang onto the book.

As for the Pope’s rosary, I don’t think Obama had returned to the United States with it before Pelosi’s appearance before Planned Parenthood. Too bad. She could have showed it off to her Planned Parenthood friends, a dismal number of whom are Catholics every bit as ardent and informed as herself. Then again, the sight of a rosary is bound to be offensive to Planned Parenthood members, isn’t it? It’s too closely associated with the army of pro-life Catholics who have deployed rosaries outside clinics in their “closed-minded” and “dumb” efforts to interfere with the onward progress of Mother Margaret Sanger’s blessed work.

“It is not ‘progressive’ to try to resolve problems by eliminating a human life.”

One of my old bosses, a Catholic, returned from a family vacation to Rome a few years back with a gift for me of a rosary blessed by John Paul II during a general audience.  I won’t say I’ve prayed it much, but I’ve kept it in its case, right in my study, and wouldn’t think of giving it away. It’s been in the hands of a man I admired very much, and who may be a saint someday. I wonder where Obama’s rosary is right now?

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Heard From: Detroit’s Scribes, Pharisees, and Hypocrites

Race is not important, a Chicago newspaper editor assures us. That denies the obvious: America is the most race conscience society in the world. We learn that fact every day from black caucuses, black unions, black ministers, black teachers, black music, black art, black poets, black salon owners, black public employees, black names, black police officers, and black media. We learn it in stories written by members of the National Association of Black Journalists.

We talk about everything black except black mob violence and lawlessness. That is taboo.

-- Colin Flaherty, “White Girl Bleed a Lot”

Within hours of last Wednesday’s brutal mob attack on Steve Utash, Detroit’s scribes, Pharisee, and hypocrites were at work explaining away the attack’s reasonably inferrable racial motivation as anything but racial. As we described the other day at American Thinker, police, city officials, and the media all sang off the same hymn sheet that what happened was a “vigilante style attack.” (“Justice, Detroit Style”).  It was not a vigilante attack, unless the crime being avenged was “driving while white.”

Detroit News columnist Laura Berman explains away race as a motive in favor of frustration at slow police response times.  Sounds plausible: who hasn’t stopped for a minor traffic accident, waited around forever for the cops to show up,  and finally just tried to beat the driver to death?  At least race-baiting Darrell Dawsey sees racism all over this story --just not in any of the thugs who broke Utash's head.   He says, “The real motivation may not have been that Utash is white, just that he was there.” True, Utash was there, unfortunately for him and his family – and so were at least 30 other people,*-- and none of them are in a coma.  Now, I wonder what made Utash different . . . . ? As far as Dee-Dee’s concerned, blaming this on angry blacks can be tossed as a “fictional narrative.”

One media bright spot is that Rochelle Riley, a black columnist for the Detroit Free Press, and as reliably orthodox a liberal as ever knee-jerked her way through the issues of the day, surprised us all on Sunday by featuring in her column the comments of Jerry Carr, a 58-year-old black man who used to live in Detroit, and now lives in Grosse Pointe Woods, telling the truth about the Utash attack. Says Carr:

“Was this a hate crime? One of my friends said, ‘You’re doggone straight it’s a hate crime. That’s a no-brainer.’ If a black motorist was in Clinton Township and hit a little white boy and a crowd of white people beat him into a coma, they would have had to bring in the National Guard.”

Riley continues:

Carr said Detroit needs a dialogue, not between black people and white people, but between black people and black people. He said his oldest son earned a perfect math score on the SAT, attended University Liggett in Grosse Pointe Woods, Cranbrook in Bloomfield Hills and MIT in Cambridge, Mass., but the only place he was called the n-word was at a school in Detroit.

Is an admission like this in the Free Press a revolutionary event? No more so than the invention of the wheel. Now maybe things can get moving again.

Author Colin Flaherty says that we talk about everything black except “black mob violence and lawlessness,” which is taboo. I’m going one step farther and saying the mob violence and lawlessness are emblems of black racism, the mention of which is the real taboo.

Jerry Carr is right that the dialogue that’s really needed is the ones blacks need to have among themselves, not that I expect it’s close to being started. For one thing, it’s going to require black leaders with the moral authority to attempt it, and owning a bullhorn isn’t enough to qualify. If the the black community’s liberal majority have anyone suitable, none of the rest of us know who they are.

For a half century black leaders have been telling their constituents, and lecturing the rest of us, that no attention need be paid to concerns about black racism, because in comparison to white racism it barely exists, or because the concept of black racism is a categorical impossibility. To enforce the taboo, whites who call attention to black racism are condemned as -- racists. When an instance of black racism becomes unmistakably apparent, as it did last week in Detroit, it’s denied. According to Colin Flaherty, who wrote an entire book on the unreported instances of racist black violence against white victims, ‘Deniers always say the same thing: One, it does not exist. Two, here is why it does exist.”

When they’re finally caught and identified, I expect most of the men and boys who mobbed Steve Utash will turn out to be semi-literate, astoundingly ignorant of the universe beyond the ghetto, and utterly disconnected from community concerns that deniers like Laura Berman want to think are the sources of their frustration.

But even if they’re ignorant, they’re not stupid, or at least not completely stupid. What little they know, they know. And what they know is what they’ve heard hollered by the loudest and most insistent voices in their world.  This mob’s “senseless” behavior isn’t senseless at all unless we agree to discount all that’s been repeated to them their whole lives by, if I can borrow from Colin Flaherty’s list, a social collective of indignant black ministers, teachers, rappers, public officials, matriarchs, grandmatriarchs, and neighborhood elders who never stop talking about the community’s unquenchable grievances against the majority race.

Factor that in, and there’s an evil straight-line logic to an attack like this. That’s why recognizing the attack as a hate crime, as Jerry Carr’s friend did, is a “no-brainer”; it’s why thousands of metro Detroiters also understood what happened last Wednesday the first moment they heard about it, while two days later the cops, the press, and the mayor were still frantically playing Hide the Race-Card.

And what Detroit’s young black males have been told, and who’s been telling them, is what makes it repulsive when certain of Detroit’s black clergy amble up, sheep-suits zipped tight, pretending to speak for the harmony of the races, and expecting us to believe that all their past hollering about justice has ever been anything but color-blind.

Take the Rev. Horace Sheffield III (please) who “issued a statement Saturday, urging Detroiters to take to the streets of the neighborhood to search for those who beat Utash.”

Sheffield’s far from Detroit’s worst when it comes to keeping racial resentment stoked, but he does his part. If Sheffield thinks there’s an advantage in it, he’ll enthusiastically kiss up to the hate-mongering racist Louis Farrakhan. When asked once how he could be so supportive at a public event where Farrakhan was laying down his usual anti-Semitic hate, Sheffield, (who, bear in mind, is a Baptist pastor), explained himself this way: “We need someone to give us direction. I believe we have a leader here that can organize us.” Farrakhan? The day Baptists need to get direction from a Jew-hating Black Muslim is the day you know Jesus has left the building.

But it’s not just Sheffield who does this.  Detroit’s black clergy are nearly universal in deferring to “Minister Farrakhan” as the black community’s counterpart to the Apostle Paul.

Like Sheffield, the Rev. David Bullock of Greater St. Matthew Baptist Church also imagines he can combine the Christian gospel with black nationalist race-war theory. He can’t; no one can. Trying only leads to him babbling things like, “for many, it wasn’t until the killing of Trayvon Martin that the racial war actually hit home,” or dropping the usual dark hints about “the truth of the experience of the masses of Black Americans in America” (guess what? If you’re black, the “truth of the experience” is really going to piss you off!). Naturally, Bullock condemns criticism of Obama’s incompetence in office as racist, because

[t]he collective memory of slavery, segregation and degradation at the hands of a perverse and pervasive racist culture provides a tool for translating these innocent words into deep racially charged generalizations the majority culture has long attributed to African Americans.

Embrace Bullock’s racist gospel if you want, but then please don’t tell us it’s meant to lead to racial peace and understanding. One Bullock media project takes a look at the “STATE OF NIGGADOM” in America. A sample:

In this Mini - DocU Series, we confront regular Black American's confronting the reality of failed Black Bourgeoisie solutions to the race problem and demanding - We Gotta Do Something!

Invariably, exactly what blacks “gotta do” is left to the resentful imaginations of the hearers, a brotherhood that enfolds members of Utash’s would-be executioners; sure, maybe they’ve gone astray, but they’re still fellow victims of the depredations of the “majority race.”  And didn’t they take to the streets? Didn’t they do something?

Bullock, in the wake of the attack, in order “to mend any bruised racial feelings” – (and to camouflage his race-obsessed opportunism) – announced that he was starting “a benevolent fund for Utash’s family and would ask other local pastors to join him.”

Struggling to keep up with Bullock’s showing off, Rev. Sheffield said the community needs to do more to track down those responsible -- as if there weren’t already too many people on the streets around Morang and Balfour looking to settle scores. But it’s what Sheffield said next that simply must be preserved forever in the International Hall of Irony:

Consequently, I am calling on all activists, march organizers, protest promoters, representatives of the people, speech makers, candidates for public office, ancestral worshippers, talk show hosts, and protectors and defenders of Detroit to prove that we equally deplore injustice and unbridled brutality no matter what color the victim is or of the one committing it.

Is it just me, or does that same list keep popping up?   The only category in Sheffield’s list that I don’t recognize as significant contributors to black racism are the “ancestral worshippers.”   And that’s only because I can’t figure out who the hell Sheffield’s talking about.

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*According to the earliest, less filtered reports in the Detroit News last Friday, from 20-30 people were in the crowd surrounding Utash as he was beaten – a number that has since vanished and been replaced by numbers of a dozen or fewer.   Colin Flaherty describes a similar occasion in his book where a mob of twenty black people stole a white person’s bike, but only four persons actually put their hands on him.  Consequently, “the local newspaper said only four people were involved.  This kind of math happens a lot.”

“And They Cast Him Out”

America has exchanged a toothless regime disapproving of sodomy in the privacy of one’s own bedroom for an iron-gloved tyranny forbidding disapproving of sodomy in the privacy of one’s own mind.

I think that’s what they mean by a “bad bargain.”

Friday’s NRO has a fine analysis of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich’s being hounded out of his employment as an Unmutual:

The various tendencies that operate under the general heading of “gay rights” have had an extraordinary run of it in the past several years, in both the political and the cultural theaters. We now have a constitutional right to commit homosexual acts (Lawrence v. Texas), while Facebook offers at last count 56 different gender options to its users (trans with or without asterisk, genderqueer, neutrois, and two-spirit among them). Having won the battle in California, the sore winners are roaming the battlefield with bayonets and taking no prisoners. Mr. Eich’s donation had been a matter of public record for some years, but Eros is a jealous god, and he will have blood from time to time. Mr. Eich’s elevation to the chief executive’s position provided occasion for critics within his firm and without to make an example of him.

This is, of course, pure poison. This is not a matter of law but one of culture, and not a question of means but of ends. . . .

. . . .The nation’s full-time gay-rights professionals simply will not rest until a homogeneous and stultifying monoculture is settled upon the land, and if that means deploying a ridiculous lynch mob to pronounce anathema upon a California technology executive for private views acted on in his private life, then so be it. The gay agenda of the moment is, ironically enough, to force nonconformists into the metaphorical closet. If through the miracle of modern medicine you end up with five sets of mixed genitals, you’ll get your own section in the California civil-rights statutes; cling to nearly universal views about marriage for a few months after it’s become unfashionable, and you’re an untouchable.

Please read the rest here.

It now occurs to me that last Sunday’s Gospel (John 9) also was about someone expelled by corrupt moral authorities for a thought crime.  The Pharisees hated Jesus and were determined to get a man born blind, whom Jesus had healed, to agree with them that “this man is a sinner.”  When the man refused to do it, they expelled him from the synagogue – after first scolding him for daring to teach them anything. 

Good lesson there. 

###

Dearborn 7-Year Old Worried About Church-State Interference

At one point we wondered if Majed Moughni was for real, but now it appears he’s just interested in self-promotion. That, and burnishing his Muslim props as one way to drive up business for his personal injury law firm.

Nothing else explains his dangling this absolute non-story in front of the Islamic Affairs desk of the Free Press just to get his picture in the paper.

A flyer headlined “Eggstravaganza!” was given to students this week at three elementary schools in the Dearborn Public Schools district, which has a substantial number of Muslim students. The flyer described an April 12 event at Cherry Hill Presbyterian Church in Dearborn featuring an egg hunt, relay race, and egg toss. It asked students to RSVP “to secure your free spot” and included images of eggs and a bunny.  (“Muslim parents upset over school flyer promoting church's Easter egg hunt”).

“Some Muslim parents,” Free Press readers are told, think this is a violation of the separation between church and state.

“It really bothered my two kids,” said parent Majed Moughni, who is Muslim and has two children, ages 7 and 9, in Dearborn elementary schools. “My son was like, ‘Dad, I really don’t feel comfortable getting these flyers, telling me to go to church. I thought churches are not supposed to mix with schools.’ ”

Well, that kid’s quotation sure sounds authentic. And I’m sure it was merely Niraj Warikoo’s oversight not to mention, along with Moughni being a parent and a Muslim, that he’s a lawyer and a controversy-loving figure in Dearborn. And even if Moughni’s 9-year-old actually does use expressions like “I really don’t feel comfortable,” and has a well-formed theory on church-state relations, I don’t see why Moughni’s first fatherly response was to call the media. Why not just explain to the little tykes that getting a festive-colored flyer at school isn’t the same thing as being “told” to go to church, and that Easter egg hunts have nothing to do with the Christian religion – regardless of where they’re held. (Believe me -- if they did, Obama would damned sure never tolerate them at the White House).

If I were Moughni, I’d be more concerned that my kids are so easily upset by flyers with eggs and bunnies on them and why, considering they’re only second- and third-graders, they’re so obsessed that Dearborn schools remain secular.

I’m not going to revive the tiresome topic of Dearborn schools’ countless accommodations of Islam – many of which could be reasonably viewed as instances of the very “mixing” of religion and public schools that Moughni says he finds so alarming. Aside from all that, no one in his right mind imagines that Dearborn schools are proselytizing for Christianity.

In other words, this whole thing is pure nonsense. And I suppose we can hope that Warikoo first got this assignment on April Fool’s Day.

But you, Majed?

Why you’re just a big, old phony.

###

Justified

On the more-guns, less-crime front, metro Detroit continues to disprove the myth that armed citizens cause more harm than good and are a poor defense against violent crime. Since last Saturday:

In Redford 

A Jet’s Pizza delivery driver fired shots at two men who attempted to rob him Saturday night when they posed as customers, Redford police said.

The driver was making a delivery to a residence in the 9900 block of Grayfield when one of the males grabbed him and the other produced a handgun and demanded his money. Police said the driver, who lawfully possesses a firearm, shot at the suspects, then fled the area and called 911. (“Cops: Pizza driver fires shots at Redford 'customers' who tried to rob him”).

In Detroit on Tuesday,

[A] man in his early 50s who repairs buses for the city, is the latest in a string of cases where Detroit residents have resorted to using weapons to fend off intruders. . . .the man heard a noise by a side window of his house and went to check about 10 a.m. He saw two men trying to break in and confronted them. A fight ensued and the man, who has a concealed-pistol license, pulled out a handgun and shot the other two men dead. (“Another Detroit crime victim uses deadly force to protect home”).

Also on Tuesday,

A customer with a handgun stopped a shoplifting suspect from slashing a security officer with a contaminated needle and syringe outside a Home Depot store in Roseville, police said. . . . [The] customer with a concealed pistol license saw the fight, pulled out his handgun and told [the suspect] to drop the syringe and get on the ground. [The suspect] stopped fighting and sat down in the parking lot, police said, but jumped up and ran when he heard approaching police sirens. (“Customer with gun stops man stabbing security officer at Home Depot, Roseville police say”).

In response to the Detroit shooting, the Detroit Free Press reports

If prosecutors decide that Tuesday’s killings on Dexter were justified, it would bring the number of justifiable homicides in Detroit to 10 cases so far this year.

A Detroit police spokesman said residents have a right to defend themselves.

Chief (James) Craig and the Detroit Police Department, along with the citizens of Detroit, are fed up. “We are sick and tired of being victimized by the criminal element in this city,” said Sgt. Michael Woody. “The citizens are protecting their homes and their property and their families, and they are well within their rights to do that.”

Ten justifiable homicides in Detroit alone since January 1.

Do you still think this never happens?

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Isn’t That Your House On Fire?

According to an editorial in Thursday’s Detroit News, “[g]ay marriage is coming to Michigan” whether we like it or not. (“Michigan gay marriage landscape is changing”).   The writer credits this to a swelling “national tide for extending marital rights,”  a metaphor suggesting that social progress is arriving by way of a natural catastrophe.   I suspect this editorial was written by Nolan Finley, who dislikes moral absolutes, and thinks the Republicans would be much better off abandoning the social issues.

Whoever wrote it, it includes this particularly irritating passage:

Those who protest that marriage as properly defined is between one man and one woman are correct — in the eyes of most religious faiths.

But for the interests of the state, marriage is not a religious institution. It is a civil contract. Denying the right of two people of the same sex to enter such a contract is difficult to legally defend without identifying a specific harm to the state.

To start with, this wildly overstates the distinctions between religious marriage and civil marriage,  suggesting they’re all but mutually exclusive, which they hardly are.  The truth is that in our society both religious and civil marriages have existed side-by-side for generations, and both forms of marriage have been universally understood to be binding agreements between two persons qualified to marry and of the opposite sex. For most folks the only real difference between a religious marriage and a civil one is that one couple has a “church wedding” and the other couple ties the knot at city hall. Both religious and nonreligious have taken for granted the validity of one another’s marriages all along – at least for the purpose raised here – that of being a binding contract between a man and a woman, and establishing the founding partnership of a family. Never, until about five minutes ago, (historically speaking) has civil marriage connoted the two persons being joined might be just as likely to both show up with campy veils and penises.

By trivializing the preference for traditional marriage as merely a credulous religious opinion, the News begs the question that there’s no more basis for limiting marriage to heterosexual couples than some arbitrary rule handed down by a capricious – and almost certainly non-existent – god. Because your belief in marriage as a union of a man and a woman is merely an article of your creed, you’ve no better chance of proving it empirically than you do the existence of the Archangel Gabriel or of the great fish that swallowed Jonah.   Looked at in that way, what right have you got to force your religion on the rest of us?

The same sorry reasoning is used by abortion advocates to deny the natural fact that life begins at conception as merely a religious opinion: the implication is that without all that religious mumbo-jumbo, modern scientific humanity is securely agnostic about when life begins – at least as long as we don’t consult biology, embryology, obstetrics, and a raft of other life sciences, not to mention every woman who ever came home from her doctor and told her husband, “We’re going to have a baby.”

What ought to be more obvious is that if the only impediment to same-sex marriage were religious scruples, then the practice would have been adopted long before now. Secular, and even atheist states are well known in our recent history. Yet none of them, even after either neutralizing religion or driving it underground, ever reverted back to the (we’re now told) perfectly obvious idea of starting families with couples of the same sex.

As the Detroit News sees it,

Denying the right of two people of the same sex to enter such a contract is difficult to legally defend without identifying a specific harm to the state. That harm has been elusive to identify.

The harm, which has been identified over and over again, is that it will destroy marriage, in which the state has always had an interest.  As for the harm being elusive to identify, you may as well say it would be elusive to identify what I will miss most if my house were to burn down. 

This is for certain: changing the definition of marriage means changing marriage; re-defining marriage by eliminating its central opposite-sex component means undefining it. Discarding the limiting terms of marriage with the idea of “opening it up”  is no more going to lead to a stronger and happier institution of marriage than having its walls fall down flat resulted in a stronger and happier Jericho.

When the editorialist talks about the unquestioned “right of two people of the same sex to enter such a contract,” he envisions a civil contract with no limiting principles whatever – not just those of sex.   All you need are two people (or more) and an agreement – no predetermined definitions of the nature of the contract permitted. 

When I say this is crazy I’m not making a slippery-slope argument – I’m making a bottom-of-the slope argument. On this logic, alone, there is no defense against agreements by any two “people” to make a contract and call it marriage.

Even mothers and sons?

Even the Koch brothers?

And just why not?

###

News from the Vatican

Obama admitted that ObamaCare did arise in his meeting with the pope's secretary of state, but said he reassured Cardinal Pietro Parolin that religious conscience was not affected by his namesake legislation.

It went unreported by U.S. media, but at that precise moment a bolt of lightning narrowly missed the American. Just kidding.  (“Who are you going to believe, Obama or the Pope?”)

-- Andrew Malcolm at Investors Business Daily.

Gall, Interrupted

Michigan’s gay wedding snake dance has been rudely interrupted by a Circuit Court of Appeals decision to extend indefinitely a stay of Judge Friedman’s ruling against the Michigan Marriage Amendment. (“Federal appeals court extends freeze on Michigan gay marriages”). The stay will remain in place at least until the state’s appeal of the decision has run its course, and possibly until the U.S. Supreme Court gets to rule.

Predictably, the media is reporting all this from the point of view of the 300 same-sex couples (read: “victims”) who rushed to get married on Saturday, and who now (Shocked! Shocked!) face waiting all that time find out if they’re legally married.

Of course, those 300 couples were perfectly well aware that they were rushing into relationships that might well turn out to be invalid. They knew perfectly well that the attorney general would file an appeal and request a stay. That’s why they hurried to take advantage of the handful of county clerks who opened up for unheard of Saturday hours to the sole end of issuing as many licenses as possible before a stay was ordered.

And the ACLU knew all this, too. Saturday’s mad rush to get same-sex marriages completed is part of their plan to prevail by foul means – or fouler – and hopefully outside of court. They’ll use those existing marriages to intimidate the attorney general, the governor, and Michigan’s elected (i.e., politician) state judges to just give up now rather than tangle with all conceivable manner of hairy cases they’re threatening. The Detroit Free Press describes how the ACLU is

preparing to launch legal challenges if the state doesn’t recognize the validity of the marriages of same-sex couples performed Saturday.

The challenges could come if the state refuses to grant benefits to a spouse in a same-sex marriage, blocks adoptions by those couples or hinders the joint filing of state income tax forms, Kaplan said.

“There are more than 1,400 state laws dealing with a legal civil marriage,” he said. “And if the state maintains that these marriages are not legally valid, we have a problem with that and we’ll explore a legal challenge against the state.”

Just like the ACLU, especially on the heels of a courtroom victory, to believe they can sue us all into gender utopia.

But I’ve noticed too that this penchant for resolving things through the judicial process only lasts until the instant they get what they want – after which the same lawsuit-happy bunch condemn further judicial intervention as an iniquitous barrier to social justice.

For instance, in complete disregard for the 2.7 million Michigan voters who passed the marriage amendment by a 59%-41% margin, advocates have “gathered more than 14,000 signatures on a petition calling on Gov. Rick Snyder and Schuette to drop the state’s appeal of Friedman’s ruling.”

“We’re asking Gov. Snyder to abide by the judicial ruling and order your attorney general to stand down. There should be no more wasting our taxpayer dollars and making phony cases about what families should look like with baloney science,” said state Sen. Gretchen Whitmer, D-East Lansing.

Senator Whitmer’s weak grasp on the state constitution doesn’t speak well for what I suspect is an even weaker grasp on on the national one.  She ought to know that the Michigan attorney general doesn’t answer to the governor: he works for the people of Michigan, in this case the 2.7 million voter majority who spoke plainly on marriage in 2004.  He made this powerfully clear on Tuesday when he wrote in the Free Press:

[I]n Michigan, the people rule. So, when 2.7 million Michigan voters support a constitutional amendment, that means something, and an attorney general is duty-bound to defend the wishes of the voters.

Regardless, Senator Whitmer sees no reason why her 14,000 shouldn’t trump our 2.7 million.   After all, her minority is on the “right side of history.”  And the rest of us?  Well, as  Judge Friedman said in conclusion of Friday’s opinion, to hell with the people.

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Unicorns Now, Unicorns Tomorrow, Unicorns Forever

Over at our local journalistas’ puzzle factory, Deadline Detroit, Allan Lengel is sure he’s spotted a similarity between Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette’s defense of the Michigan Marriage Amendment, and George Wallace’s defiant call for “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” (“Bill Schuette's George Wallace Moment”).   You will never learn from reading Lengel’s article exactly how an immensely popular state constitutional amendment that was passed to protect the definition of marriage compares with segregation. My guess is Lengel had simply worked his way through his alphabetical list of villains to the Ws,  and  here we are.  Next week he’ll be back around again comparing Julie Boonstra to Marie Antoinette.

Anyway, Lengel magnanimously recognizes that, for all Wallace’s bigotry, he recanted his segregationist ideas after becoming a born-again Christian.  For reasons he never explains (what can I say?  Lengel writes that way) he forecasts that:

Schuette will regret his crusade, much like Wallace did, once he sees beyond the Tea Party and his personal prejudices and religious beliefs. Bill, we’re talking about constitutional rights here. Separation of church and state.

You may not be able [sic] label Schuette a racist for fighting against gay marriage. But you might as well.

He’s operating on the assumption — much like George Wallace did — that it’s OK to try and prevent a certain group of people from having equal rights.

Hatred is hatred. Prejudice is prejudice.

The secret of all effective liberal argument is to conflate unlike things beyond where they can be untangled, and then dare an opponent to untangle them.  I’m not going to try.  Conflating Wallace-era racial segregation with a citizen initiative protecting an ancient social institution is stupid and obscene. Equating homosexuals denied an imaginary right to a made-up marital arrangement   – one never recognized by any tribe or civilization prior to the 21^st century – equating, I say, that with blacks being denied fundamental and well-established civil rights such as the rights to vote and to work -- is ludicrous.

Only a liberal would suggest that the custom and practice of marriage as exclusive to members of the opposite sex was a tyrannical idea dreamt up by the Tea Party, or forced upon utopian America by religious fanatics. Only a liberal, (like one person commenting on Lengel’s diatribe) would think it makes senses to accuse AG Schuette of “trying to drag Michigan back to the 1950’s,” as if same-sex marriage existed in Michigan until the Michigan Marriage Amendment was passed.

Only a very shallow liberal, and a secularist, would despise the reality of religious faith so completely as to think that it is a good thing for a believer to “see beyond [his] religious beliefs.” Religious beliefs have to do with ultimate things. The highest things. There is no seeing beyond them. Certainly leftist politics and its tawdry controversies are not “beyond” any religious beliefs worthy of the name. If a person claiming to be a believer does see beyond them, it’s because he’s really never seen them at all – just glanced briefly at them and then forgot them somewhere in the back of his overcrowded skull.

Meanwhile, Lengel is so focused on lambasting Schuette for being a reincarnated Wallace he forgot that he had already explained the Alabama governor’s abandonment of his segregationist ideas by – Wallace’s religious beliefs! – “when he became a born-again Christian and apologized to black civil rights leaders for his racist segregationist stand.”  I guess it was Wallace seeing beyond his earthbound regional politics, not his religious beliefs, that got Wallace’s mind right. 

And if you yourself simply hate religious beliefs, then don’t preach to us about the separation of church and state. The purpose of that doctrine was to protect the church, not the state.  The hatred and prejudice you harbor against believers renders you an unfit guardian of our rights.

Only a liberal would argue that you “might as well” label someone (Schuette) a racist for fighting against same-sex marriage after admitting that it’s probably not justified to do so.  (It isn’t).

Never mind Lengel’s adolescent rhetoric of indignation.  Hatred is not hatred, because hatred of wrong and injustice is not the same as hatred of what is good and true.  Prejudice is not prejudice.  Prejudice against empty cant and pulling down timeless structures of civilization by judicial insolence is not the same as prejudice based on race, or on a hypocritical and smoldering enmity towards believers in God and common sense. 

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‘That’s Between a Woman and Her Doctor’ – and the Rest of Us

The urgency of Sandra Fluke and Kathleen Sebelius to make sure that religious pro-lifers are financial contributors to abortion has almost nothing to do with wanting to guarantee there’s sufficient funding for the practice.  The point is that, even while abortion advocates unceasingly chant that what goes on with their private parts is none of our business, they do everything they can think of to make sure it’s our business to pay for it.  Kevin D. Williamson at NRO explains it this way:

I object to abortion as violence, including abortion actuated via relatively bloodless chemical means, and believe that it should be prohibited as a matter of humane principle. The use of actual contraceptives, such as condoms, and the question of what combinations of consenting adults do what with whom — by which I mean maintaining joint bank accounts and sharing dental plans, of course — may be of acute interest to the bishops but are not properly matters of prohibition by the federal government, the purpose of which is to protect property, thus enabling Americans to organize their lives as they will, rather than to move citizens about like chessmen on the theory that it does so for their benefit. There is not much that I would have be illegal — but any civilized society requires a great deal of breathing room between forbidden and compulsory.

The Left would not have it that way: Homosexual behavior is not to be tolerated, or homosexual unions recognized under law — rather, homosexuality is to constitute a special class of blessedness, and the failure to celebrate it is to be a sin, which in the liberal mind must be identical to a crime. It is not enough for religious conservatives, such as the ones who own Hobby Lobby, to tolerate the legal sale and use of things such as the so-called morning-after pill — rather, they are expected to provide them at their own expense. Abortions are not to be legal, but legal and funded by the general community, with those funds extracted at gunpoint if necessary.

This is not merely, or even mainly, a question of economics. A monthly dose of emergency contraception (which seems like a lot) paid entirely out-of-pocket would run less than the typical cell-phone bill. One does not suspect that Americans would find it very difficult to locate gay-friendly firms in the wedding-planning business. The typical first-trimester abortion costs less than an entry-level iPad — hardly an insurmountable economic barrier for a procedure that is, if we take the pro-choice side at their word, absolutely fundamental to a woman’s health and happiness.

The economics are incidental. The point is not to ensure that we all pay, but that we are all involved.

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America, Standing Small

Someone we like, Caroline Glick, has this to say about the situation in Ukraine in an interview at NRO:

Putin is thinking that under President Obama, the U.S. has abandoned its position of leader of the free world. As a consequence, Putin, Iran, and other aggressors feel free to advance their agendas unfettered by concern over how Washington will respond.

Since it is Obama’s withdrawal of the U.S. from its position of global leadership that has facilitated Putin’s aggressiveness, as well as Iran and its clients from Venezuela to Syria, only the U.S. can do something about it, by reasserting its primacy in global affairs and defending its allies and its interests.

As for America’s spurned and endangered allies, including Israel, they need to plan for the worst and develop the means of coping with the empowerment of these aggressors and plan to defend themselves in the absence of U.S. support, at least until Obama leaves office.

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Not Fade Away

You can forget about trying right up front to persuade folks that homosexuality is a good thing.  But if you can get them to think it is just another thing--meriting no more than a shrug of the shoulders--then your battle for legal and social rights is virtually won.

-- Marshall Kirk & Hunter Madsen

Doug Mainwaring, a gay man who blogs at American Thinker, is bringing to light a strategy dating back to the late-80s “to establish the ‘normalcy’ of gays and lesbians and secure broader acceptance and rights.” Harvard graduates Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen laid out in their 1989 book, After the Ball, a propaganda campaign (their term) in which “[t]he main thing is to talk about gayness until the issue becomes thoroughly tiresome.”

Mainwaring’s article is worth reading in itself, but there’s a part of what he wrote that bears quoting:

Let's return to an earlier statement:  "The main thing is to talk about gayness until the issue becomes thoroughly tiresome."

The most recent Pew Poll found that public acceptance of same sex marriage is now up to 54%.  Does this really reflect an enthusiastic embrace of the notion of same sex marriage?  -- Or --  Is a vast swath of the population just sick and tired of hearing about gays in the news day after day for the last few years?

Maybe they're also sick and tired of irrational accusations of bigotry and homophobia every time they try to enter into a reasoned discussion about same sex marriage.  Many who have been shut down for trying to engage in intellectually honest conversation, have concluded, "Why bother?  Just let them have what they want.  Maybe then they'll fade away."

Fade away?  Don't count on it.  There is never an end to progressive ideology.  Statists never have enough power and control.  This will never end until the very institution of marriage is obliterated from human civilization, in which case, we will no longer actually have a civilization.

I'm gay and I oppose same sex marriage because it is not marriage.  It is something else.  I, too, am tired of being labeled a "self loathing gay" and a "hater."  I am not.  But I refuse to be silenced by those who seek to manipulate and silence rather than enter into rational discussion.

Silencing techniques -- the modus operandi of the marriage "equality" activists -- will continue relentlessly until one day they discover that strategy no longer works.  But it is only each of us refusing to be silenced which will hasten the arrival of that day.

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In Like a Lion, Out Like a Clam

Earlier this month Lois Lerner refused for the second time to testify before a House committee about what she knows about the Obama administration’s siccing of the IRS on political opponents – an abuse of power in which she played a principal lead -- invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Jim Jordan, Republican Congressman from Ohio and a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government, wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week (“A Special Prosecutor for the IRS”), that the regardless of administration stonewalling the committee investigation  has uncovered evidence showing that  “the administration's version of the agency's targeting of conservative nonprofits seeking tax-exempt status—such as blaming local officials in the Cincinnati office or claiming that liberal groups were victimized along with conservative groups—is nonsense.”

The real news has been revealed at the Lois Lerner hearing on March 5 and in the report of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on March 11: "Lois Lerner's Involvement in the IRS Targeting of Tax-Exempt Organizations." The evidence brought to light in that hearing and report completely discredited Ms. Lerner's claims about her involvement in what went on. It also eviscerated the notion that liberal and conservative groups were targeted.

When Ms. Lerner appeared before Congress in May 2013, she made this statement: "I have done nothing wrong. I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations." But Ms. Lerner, we discovered, forwarded confidential taxpayer information to her personal email account in early May 2013, which is a violation of IRS rules. About the infamous "Be on the Lookout" targeting list—a document used to identify conservative groups for additional scrutiny—she told Congress that the criteria for screening tax-exempt groups for extra scrutiny never changed. In fact, she personally ordered it changed in July 2011 according to documents and testimony received by the committee.

Ms. Lerner was most certainly driven by politics. One email of June 11, 2011, shows that she directed her subordinate to focus on the issues surrounding the application of Karl Rove's group, Crossroads GPS. In another email of Feb. 1, 2011, she frets about the Supreme Court "overturning the ban on corporate spending" as it applies to nonprofits. (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission also overturned the ban on union political spending, but she expressed no concern about that.)

Yet, there’s more to this ugly story than that, because once again Attorney General Eric Holder’s politicized Justice Department has been deployed to assist in keeping the truth from coming to light. Writes Jordan,

Last May, and again on March 5 of this year, Ms. Lerner refused to answer the committee's questions about the IRS treatment of tax-exempt groups, asserting her right under the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. Yet we learned on March 6 in reporting by this newspaper that she had previously given an interview to the Justice Department and, according to her lawyer, spoke with no grant of immunity.

Ms. Lerner's lawyer claims she gave an interview to the Justice Department because she did not believe the Oversight Committee would treat her fairly. More likely, the reason is because Justice is friendly territory. The lead investigator is a substantial Obama campaign contributor, and Justice has already leaked that it doesn't expect to prosecute anyone. As to the claim that liberal groups were also victimized, our committee investigation has yet to hear from a single progressive group that received the systematic scrutiny and harassment faced by the tea party and other conservative groups.

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Now Heather Can Have 3 Mommies

Thanks to U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman’s eagerness to overturn the decision of 2.7 million voters, Michigan’s bridal salons and hip second-hand shops are abuzz with 2-for-1 sales on plus-sized wedding dresses.

The Detroit media’s jubilant reaction on Friday evening was only slightly more one-sided than when the Tigers win a pennant. It was 6:10 before Fox2 Detroit even mentioned that there was an opposing party in the case.

The case was brought by a same-sex couple demanding the right to marry and adopt one another’s children, Judge Friedman has found that the Michigan Marriage Amendment (MMA) has to go, because the amendment’s language defining marriage as “the union of one man and one woman” doesn’t “advance any conceivable legitimate state interest.”

Now maybe you thought, as I did, that regulating marriage, which necessarily includes defining marriage, is fairly obviously a legitimate state interest. But that, not-so-patiently explains His Honor, is where we’re all wrong -- at least if we’re going to push so far as to clarify that “marriage” means a union of persons of the opposite sex.  The way Judge Friedman sees it, there is simply no rational basis for concocting a novel and eccentric legal definition of marriage as a union of a man and a woman.  Of the process by which the MMA was adopted by a majority of Michigan voters, Judge Friedman says in the language from a prior case, that he “can only conclude that the government’s actions were irrational.”

Attorney General Bill Schuette has filed a notice of appeal, and I expect Judge Friedman’s decision to be overturned by the Sixth Circuit.

There’s a lot wrong with this opinion. Principally, Judge Friedman held a trial when none was needed. Trials are held to find facts, and in this case there were no facts in dispute, at least none that were material. All parties agreed, including the court, that the whole issue of the lawsuit stood or fell on the question of whether or not the MMA, as a matter of law, could withstand “rational-basis review.” The defendant State of Michigan, citing U.S. Supreme Court precedent, pointed out that, under rational-basis review, “a legislative choice is not subject to courtroom fact-finding and may be based on rational speculation unsupported by evidence or empirical data.”  (Emphasis added).  And the burden of proof stays on the party attacking the law,  – in this case, the  same sex-plaintiffs – who must meet “the burden to negative every conceivable basis which might support it.”  (Emphasis added).

Under rational basis review, a court does not judge the perceived wisdom or fairness of a law, nor does it examine the actual rationale for the law when adopted, but asks only whether “there is any rational basis for the classification.”  (Emphasis in original).  

But Judge Friedman didn’t want to be limited to asking that, or rather, he didn’t want to be limited to answering that with a simple no, because then he would sound irrational, if not starkly cray-cray. That the correct answer is yes is beyond obvious: In a state where marriage has always been restricted to opposite-sex couples, an initiative to resolve to leave that restriction in place has a rational basis, even if a minority of voters don’t agree. 

To avoid ruling as he should have, Judge Friedman did two things. First, he adopted the false reasoning of the plaintiffs that the MMA’s restatement of marriage as a union of a man and a woman is a positive effort to harm same-sex couples. (He also implies same-sex marriage as a “fundamental right” recognized in federal law, which it is not).  In other words, rather than ask if there’s any rational basis for Michigan continuing its (and mankind’s) timeless practice of defining marriage as exclusive to members of the opposite sex, the judge wanted to ask instead if there’s any rational basis for Michigan voters to pass an amendment aimed at discriminating against homosexuals.* 

Next, Judge Friedman held a trial in which both sides’ social scientists engaged in mutual attacks on each other’s dodgy studies of same-sex parenting.  At the conclusion of this trial he then decided which set of experts he found more credible. Not surprising, he picked the experts whose studies found no evidence that this whole kids-being-better-off-with-a-mom-and-dad thing had any basis in Science.

Science, mind you. No evidence whatsoever. 

Voila!   Most of Judge Friedman’s opinion consists of a hectoring argument, thanks to the fact-finding he was forbidden to engage in under rational-basis review,  that kids of same-sex couples don’t do any worse in school than kids of heterosexual parents.  He uses this factoid to re-examine the rationale of the law when it was adopted – which also runs afoul of rational-basis review – as he sets about criticizing and rejecting the rationales anyway.  The testimony of defense experts that it’s optimal for a child to be raised by opposite-sex parents – a rational speculation even without the need for empirical proofs – was dismissed out-of-hand by the judge as so much pseudo-science.     

Having brought forth this factual mouse after much labor, Judge Friedman makes it the basis for his intellectual pretense that the sex of the parties has no rational relation to the regulation of Michigan marriages.  Even if, for argument’s sake, the plaintiffs’ experts are right, there’s more to marriage than how kids do in school.  Remember that the State of Michigan doesn’t need to prove that the MMA is perfect, all-wise, or will be the first law in history that doesn’t make someone unhappy – it’s presumed to be constitutional if there was a rational basis for adopting it.  We’ll see if the Sixth Circuit comments on the way Judge Friedman shifted the plaintiffs’ burden to “negative every conceivable basis which might support” the MMA onto the defendant to make a factual showing that heterosexual child-rearing is better than homosexual child-rearing.  

The Sixth Circuit ordered a stay Saturday afternoon, but at least 4 Michigan county clerk’s offices opened on Saturday morning, which they never do, in order to hand out as many licenses as possible. Would it be cynical to speculate that the rush wasn’t because true love can’t be held back one more moment, than establish a fait accompli of same-sex marriages to complicate the matter when Judge Friedman’s opinion is reversed?

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*The thinking is analagous to that of the spoiled child who denounces her parents’ reasons for refusing to buy her a brand-new Camaro -- that the finances are impossible, that she doesn’t need her own vehicle, and that none of the other siblings  got their own cars – because the real reason is her parents hate her and always have.  The homosexual-rights movement has been brattiness on steroids. 

Hare Today, Gun Tomorrow

Plaudits to the Detroit mother who defended her home and two children last Monday by opening fire on a trio of teenage home invaders who kicked her door in.  (“Detroit woman opens fire when 3 teens break into home”).   When they disregarded her warning that she was armed, she drove them off with multiple shots from a semi-automatic rifle.  When one of the assailants went back in for a second try, she opened fire again.  None of the assailants was hurt; all three were caught.  This wasn’t their first home invasion.   Detroit Police Chief James Craig, who publicly endorses armed citizens as a deterrent to crime, said the mother did the right thing.  Craig said the mother’s armed response “sends a message.”  Since last Monday two more Detroiters sent even louder messages, both using lethal force to defend themselves.

One guy not likely to get these messages is Darrell Dawsey, whose latest hysterical tract promoting race war showed up just a day earlier on Deadline Detroit: “Why Shouldn't We Arm Ourselves Against Stand-Your-Ground Shooters?”  His article features a spoof press release by NRA that advocates lowering the legal age for gun purchase to 15 so that black teenagers can protect themselves from Stand-Your-Ground stalkers.  “’This would allow all law-abiding teenagers to enjoy the same gun rights and legal protections as adults in defending themselves from attackers.’”

Please keep reading at The Public Thing.

Maybe Michigan Doesn’t Want To Go Over the Falls

“It’s the state of Michigan that’s paddling against a Niagara of social change.”

- Detroit News columnist Laura Berman.

I know whenever I’m watching a picture where the heroes are desperately paddling upstream to avoid a deadly waterfall, I always root for the waterfall. Don’t you?

According to Laura Berman,  the lesbian couple adoption/same sex-marriage case going on in Detroit’s federal district court right now (“Michigan lags rest of nation in move to enact social change”),“is shaping up as a modern day Scopes ‘monkey’ trial that pits the force of modernity against tradition, science against religion.”

Berman wants the rest of us rubes to know that, whatever traditional notions we’re clinging to that there’s a link between parenthood and heterosexual behavior, science knows nothing of it.

Please read the rest at The Public Thing.

Dearborn: Still Home of the Brave

But how much longer Dearborn qualifies for membership in the Land of the Free is anybody’s guess.

How much guts should it need to fly an Israeli flag in Dearborn? I know I haven’t been willing to do it, though it’s occurred to me from time to time; I can’t guarantee the safety of my household.

But at least one Dearborn family, in which the husband is Lebanese-born, no less, has been willing to take the chance. With predictable results.

What the WDIV story doesn’t report is that the Dakhlallahs’ home is directly adjacent to Ford Road, where their Israeli flag was plainly visible to traffic passing through majority-Arab east Dearborn.  I pass that way myself on the way home from work, and was astounded to see that flag. 

And even more significant than its proximity to Ford Road, the Dakhlallahs’ home is directly across the street from Fordson High School, the first majority-Muslim high school in the country, and known in these parts, with good reason, as “Hezbollah High.” There couldn’t be a more provocative location from which to tempt Dearborn’s vindictive Jew-haters.

But I’m sure the Dakhlallahs had no intention of tempting anyone: they only wanted to show support for Israel, an expression they’re entitled to according to all that’s holy in America.

Unfortunately, most of what’s holy in America is being replaced with what’s holy in the Umma.  In Dearborn we’re expected to think twice about showing support for anything that might offend Muslims.

But speaking of flags, a few miles up the road from the Dakhlallahs’ house the Islamic Center of America has the past couple of weeks sprouted an impressively imposing black flag. Because I don’t read Arabic I won’t venture to translate the legend. (If you can, please let us know). In all likelihood, it says “Welcome to Dearborn!,” the city the mosque’s Iman Qazwini has described as the “Muslim capital of the West.”  Or perhaps it was raised for the significant commemoration of Ashura that took place on November 14; but I’m not sure it was flying then, nor why it would still be flying now.

Since 2001 Americans have come to associate the black flags of Islam with jihadi enthusiasm to make the rest of us slaves: we saw it at the beheading of Nicholas Berg, as a backdrop to the sermons of bin Laden, and when Muslim terrorists ripped down the American flag at the Cairo embassy last 9/11 and replaced it with a black Islamic flag.

Even other Muslims dread the sight of it at times. Sunnis in Afghanistan, where Shias were persecuted under the Taliban, worry about increasing power of Shias thanks to ever-interfering Iran. The appearance of Shias’ black Ashura banners weeks before the anniversary – when Ashura previously was banned under the Taliban – makes Sunnis nervous about the growing clout of the Shia minority. One Sunni spokesman says that “each black flag is reflective of Iran's evil intentions in Afghanistan.”

Which hardly says that the Islamic Center of America’s black flag reflects an evil intention. Nor justifies the stretch required to declare that Qazwini only shinnied up his flagstaff from sheer enthusiasm over Iran’s recent Munich-style triumph over America’s hapless president.  But the timing is a bit of a coincidence. The timing, and Hezbollah’s hailing of the agreement as “a major victory for Iran and to all the people of the region and it is a defeat for the enemies of these people.”

But, to quote Freud, (or was it Bill  Clinton?): “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” And I suppose sometimes a black flag is just a black flag.

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