Let’s Be Clear on ‘Legacy’ Preferences

Part of the Left’s grouchy reaction to the Supreme Court’s recent blow to race-based college admission practices has been to ask why “legacy” points for the kids of alumnae aren’t discriminatory as well.

As restated by Mark Rosenbaum, one of the ACLU lawyers who argued the case before the Supreme Court, the ban “unfairly keeps students from asking universities to consider race as one factor in admissions, but allows consideration of factors like legacy status, athletic achievement and geography.”

And high school marks and SAT scores, too. Rosenbaum apparently thinks the Supreme Court can only prohibit universities from considering race as a factor in admissions if they also prohibit all factors used to distinguish one applicant from another. Colleges must apply some criteria, and any criterion is by definition a standard by which something is to be judged, and judgment means discriminating between one thing and another.

But not discrimination based on race.

Leaving aside what Rosenbaum knows perfectly well, that the contestants in Schuette vs. BAMN never asked the court to rule on the “fairness” of legacy admissions or factors like athletics, liberals like Rosenbaum, Justice Sotomayor, and others are deliberately pretending America never crossed a legal and historic Rubicon expressly on the subject of discrimination based on race. Prohibiting the granting or denying of public accommodations based upon skin color was the entire focus of the Civil Rights era. America collectively adopted the proposition that race must not be a factor in anyone’s standing in society or before the law. It’s what we all agreed to, including the Left, who like to believe racial equality was all their idea.

At least the Left agreed until last week, when the new dogma was promulgated that we have to apply a racial standard to everything.

As Justice Sotomayor’s dissent was summarized in the Washington Post,

by passing a constitutional amendment forbidding consideration of race, [Sotomayor] wrote, Michigan had made it harder for minorities to reach their goals. Her example:

“A white graduate of a public Michigan university who wishes to pass his historical privilege on to his children may freely lobby the board of that university in favor of an expanded legacy admissions policy.”* But “a black Michigander who was denied the opportunity to attend that very university cannot lobby the board in favor of a policy that might give his children a chance that he never had and that they might never have absent that policy.”

But what Sotomayor ignores, is that every black Michigan university graduate “who wishes to pass his historical privilege on to his children” has the identical opportunity to lobby the university as the hypothetical “white graduate.” That’s because race doesn’t matter in legacy admissions policies.

And any university graduate might take issue with Sotomayor’s labeling alumni status as an “historical privilege,” as if alumni status is conferred on white kids as a door prize just for having white parents. Even in white families, like mine, there was no historical privilege: someone had to be the first one in the family to compete with the legacy kids and earn admittance to U of M (in our case, my brother), and then earn a degree to gain the status to pass on to his children.

To detour around this washed-out logical bridge, liberal megaphones like Media Matters are arguing that legacy admissions must be racial preferences, too.

According to The New York Times, "among legacy applicants for Princeton's class of 2015, 33 percent of those offered a spot were the children of alumni." And it wasn't just Princeton -- Harvard admitted about 30 percent of its legacy applicants, and Yale admitted between 20 and 25 percent. These "legacy preferences" can and should be considered a form of "racial preference," since those students are "overwhelmingly white and wealthy."

Except legacy preferences can’t be racial preferences, for the simple reason that they offer precisely the same advantages to black legacy applicants as to white ones. Obviously, the black Michigander -- or any other person of any race or sex who never attended that public university for whatever reason – isn’t going to be able to lobby that university for a legacy admission. On the other hand, President Barack Obama, to take one instance, can, and almost certainly will, use his status as a Harvard graduate to get his daughters admitted if that’s where they want to go.

The circumstantial test for discrimination (where there’s no direct evidence of it) means showing the disparate treatment of two persons otherwise so similarly situated that it’s reasonable to infer the disparity is explained by discriminatory animus. Because Justice Sotomayor’s hypothetical unfairly poses two dissimilar people – a white graduate of a public university versus a “a black Michigander who was denied the opportunity to attend that very university,” the comparison is misleading, and the resulting logic circular. The insinuation that blacks are being “denied” university admission because of race isn’t even an allegation before the court in this case: even worse, the suggestion is monumentally unfair to Michigan public universities, including the University of Michigan, which admitted its first black student in 1853. Justice Sotomayor then builds on that insinuation to explain the failure of her hypothetical Michigander to be admitted as “a chance that he never had and that [his children] might never have absent” the policy of race-based preferences. She ends up begging the whole question of the case to justify her own dissent.

Because no one’s offered a scintilla of evidence that legacy policies are being applied unequally based on race, liberals will object that the fact that the pool of graduates of elite universities is disproportionately white and wealthy, legacy admissions must represent a policy of “racial preference.” They may as well say that the overwhelming proportion of white children born to white couples shows a policy of racial preference. Clearly, as more and more qualified black applicants get into elite universities and graduate, it’s inevitable that the proportion of their children availing themselves of legacy admissions goes up, too.

This theory of discrimination is known as “disparate impact.” It presumes that, wherever facially neutral policies have a greater negative effect on minorities, a claim of discrimination can be made even without any evidence of any intention to discriminate. Liberals love the disparate impact theory because it can be used to attack virtually any unfair outcome in the life of a minority as the result of racism. Consider Brooke Kimbrough, the Detroit high-schooler who didn’t get into U of M because her grades and test scores weren’t good enough, and now figures that makes her Harriet Tubman: “I will make it my civic duty to document every noose of a rejection letter that the university produces to our black, brown and red bodies!” (Rally produced and directed by BAMN, of course).

What others have documented is that in the states that have gotten rid of racial preferences, the percentage of minorities who earn admission to elite schools and then graduate – and consequently make their own kids eligible for legacy advantages – goes up. Under the old race-based regime unprepared minorities were getting into top schools through preferences, and then flunking out in disproportionately high numbers.

Frank Beckmann cited The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education for the demonstrated improvement in outcomes for black students at University of Michigan as a result of ditching affirmative action:

In 2006, the year Michigan voters passed the ban on affirmative action for college admissions, the research revealed black students had a 67 percent graduation rate under the old rules of racial preferences, a finding that the journal called “poor” and “disturbing.”

Seven years after passage of Proposal 2 in Michigan, that number of African-American graduates had increased to 78 percent.

That’s a 16 percent increase after the school stopped using race preferences. (“Michigan must let affirmative action die”).

Research has shown that “the mismatch of students to their college academic requirements is responsible for blacks dropping out of fields like science and engineering at a rate twice that of white students.”

But the liberal scheme is to simply correct the disproportion by forcing equality of numbers through quota systems and race-based preferences. Writes Beckmann,

“The new scheme to impose racial preferences is to convince colleges, starting with the University of Michigan, to stop considering ACT and SAT test scores in determining the qualifications of applicants for college.”  Or better yet, go back the old quota system.  Putative victim Brooke Kimbrough boils it down: “U-M needed to ‘represent the state. Blacks are about 14% of the population, so [enrollment] should be 14% roughly.’”

Is that really the best thing for Michigan’s black students?

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While America Slept

Caroline Glick sheds light on Obama’s foreign policy at RealClearPolitics:

During his joint press conference in Manila on Monday with Aquino, Ed Henry from Fox News asked Obama to explain his foreign policy doctrine.

“What do you think the Obama Doctrine is in terms of what your guiding principle is on all of these crises and how you answer those critics who say they think the doctrine is weakness.”

Obama responded with his signature peevishness.

Before launching into a 900-word assault on a series of straw men to whom he attributed positions that at best distorted and at worst willfully misrepresented the positions of his critics, Obama muttered, “Well, Ed, I doubt that I’m going to have time to lay out my entire foreign policy doctrine.”

One thing that Obama did have the time do was signal to the Philippines that the US is no longer a reliable ally. After touting the new defense pact in one sentence, Obama proceeded to explain in the next that his administration cannot be expected to honor any commitment to defend the Philippines militarily.

Obama’s bloviations demonstrated why Henry’s question was so important.

For five-and-a-half years, Obama has not given a straightforward presentation of his foreign policy. Instead, he has tailored his foreign policy statements to what he thinks the public wishes to hear.

So for instance, in responding to Henry, Obama sounded an isolationist note, attacking imaginary critics for their automatic rush to arms in all circumstances.

Beyond being a gross mischaracterization of his critics, Obama’s remarks ignored the inconvenient fact that he sent US forces on a NATO mission to overthrow the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya without congressional authorization.

No Republicans forced his hand. Since 2004, Gaddafi had posed no threat to US interests.

And in the aftermath of Obama’s unauthorized war in Libya, the US ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were killed in Benghazi. Al-Qaida and other jihadist groups that benefited from NATO’s operation have taken over large swathes of the country and sunk it into ungovernable chaos. And the chaos and jihad in Libya has spread out to much of northern Africa, bringing death, forcible conversion, torture, arms proliferation and terror in its wake.

Although Obama’s 900-word rant obscured rather than explained his foreign policy doctrine, the Obama Doctrine is easily understood from his actual policies – including his military adventure in Libya.

Please read the rest of “Life Under the Obama Doctrine.”

‘We Are Offended, We Are Offended, We Are Most Grievously Offended’

Oh my!, Oh my!, Oh my!

Sarah Palin has the Left, including the Left’s religulous wing, angry at her again for something she said about jihadists at the NRA convention: “Oh, but you can’t offend them, can’t make them feel uncomfortable, not even a smidgen. Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.”

The reference to baptism is irreverent to the Christian religion, you see.  And if there’s one thing the Left never wearies of, that’s defending Christianity.

Okay, maybe not so much.

Like most of these little eruptions, the faux outrage doesn’t really reflect authentic grief at mistreatment of the sacred; it only reflects the next promising opportunity to slay the unslayable dragon who is Sarah Palin. And because the Left considers Palin’s unfeigned faith in God her most noxious trait, any opportunity to disfigure her image as a Christian woman will be exploited four ways from Sunday. That explains how out of proportion have been reactions to what was -- yes, I’ll say it – a harmless joke.

One outlandish response came from Andrew Sullivan. He describes the remark as invoking “torture in the context of a Christian sacrament. Not since the Nazis’ Deutsche Christen have we seen something so disgusting and blasphemous in the morphing of Christianity into its polar opposite.”

Oh, poo and pshaw. The Deutsche Christen were Nazified protestants malevolently adulterating the faith with the Third Reich’s crackpot racialism. Sarah’s not morphing Christianity into anything. She was giving a political speech at a secular organization, not evangelizing from a mountaintop about a new version of the gospel. To put it plainer than that, she wasn’t discoursing on the meaning of baptism, but talking about enhanced interrogation in response to the Islamist threat. She reiterated this in her response to the criticism, saying “Terrorists who want to annihilate Americans, innocent Americans, our children, whatever it takes to stop them. If I were in charge, I'd be stopping ‘em.”

Then, in “Sarah Palin’s Heresy”, Rabbi Menachem Creditor at HuffPo explains why he’s voting for Sarah’s excommunication.

When Sarah Palin commented, at this last week's national National Rifle Association convention, "...waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists," she did worse than offend, worse than degrade human beings, worse than stir up a group of weapon-advocates. She did so in the Name of God. The fact that the NRA would allow someone to promote fundamentalism at their convention is a violation of their civic responsibility and a threat to human rights on a national scale.

The Rabbi then proceeds to itemize all the world religions that hold water rituals in high esteem, beginning, (why doesn’t this surprise me?) with the “Muslim ritual ablution of Wudu” – the same ritual Major Nidal Hassan engaged in before traveling to Ft. Hood to slaughter as many infidels as Allah allowed as his personal act of worship.  Oblivious, the Rabbi instead condemns the NRA for tolerating “hatred garbed in religious symbolism.”

What’s really got the Rabbi worked up isn’t Sarah’s mention of baptism as such as that she endorses waterboarding, and worse, she’d doing it in order to “stir up a group of weapon-advocates.” But that scornful description aside, the Rabbi still believes this group of weapon-advocates have a civic responsibility to ban “fundamentalists” from its list of approved speakers. Does the Rabbi really believe that the NRA is subject to the Left’s draconian enforcement of a separation of church and state? Or even more puzzling, does he really believe that “baptizing” terrorists by waterboarding them is an actual example of Christian fundamentalism?

It’s the vanity of vanities to try explaining a humorous remark to the humorless, but I would like to say this about the Palin Blasphemy: first, it wasn’t “hatred garbed in religious symbolism,” it was a genuine metaphor.   For us lifelong English speakers, Sarah wasn’t really talking about baptizing terrorists. She was talking about waterboarding them.  What she said is no more a presumption upon the sacrament of baptism than it’s a presumption upon the Last Judgment when one Wild West gunfighter warns another he’d better prepare to meet his Maker. Second, simply using baptism in a metaphor is hardly holding oneself forth as speaking in the Name of God. Third, Sarah’s comment wasn’t an endorsement of torture. Like me and lots of others, we recognize a clear distinction between torture and what happens during waterboarding. It’s the Left that keeps calling it torture, and then accusing us of calling for more of it.

The Rabbi’s umbrage at the NRA’s allowing Sarah to speak – for which he holds them responsible for “a threat to human rights on a national scale” -- is notably outlandish. Does he really believe any of this?

I think I may be excused for doubting the Rabbi’s sincerity as he protests how obedience to the Jewish tradition compels him to speak out against this grave evil of Sarah Palin’s one-liner:

“All who can protest against something wrong that one of their family is doing and does not protest, is held accountable for their family. All who can protest against something wrong that a citizen of their city is doing and does not protest, is held accountable for all citizens of the city. All who can protest against something wrong that is being done in the whole world, is accountable together with all citizens of the world. (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 54b)”

Even conceding that comparing waterboarding to baptism actually qualifies as “something wrong,” doesn’t “something wrong” take in a whole lot more ground than just what Sarah Palin says in a speech to the NRA? Except for the Rabbi’s ecumenical bow to Muslim ritual, he manages to mention demagogues, torture, hatred, and killing “in the whole world” without ever mentioning the ugly religious aggressions of Islam. We do know that in spite of the Rabbi’s alarm at all the dying going on, no one dies during waterboarding. No one even bleeds from it, though the Rabbi somehow manages to blame Palin and the NRA for the way “blood saturates our streets.” If it does saturate out streets, it’s not being shed by enhanced interrogation techniques.

But speaking of real blood, not metaphorical – and LOTS of it -- I wasn’t able to find any protests from the Rabbi when Nancy Pelosi actually did trample what is holy last year:

Asked what the moral difference is between what Dr. Kermit Gosnell did to babies born alive and aborting those same infants moments before birth, Pelosi refused to answer.

"As a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when we talk about this," Pelosi said. "I don't think it should have anything to do with politics."

Nor did the Rabbi weigh in when fellow member of the cloth Anglican Rev Katherine Hancock Ragsdale actually did impute abortion with a sacramental quality:

Let me hear you say it: abortion is a blessing and our work is not done.  Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done.

I want to thank all of you who protect this blessing – who do this work every day: the health care providers, doctors, nurses, technicians, receptionists, who put your lives on the line to care for others (you are heroes — in my eyes, you are saints); the escorts and the activists; the lobbyists and the clinic defenders; all of you. You're engaged in holy work.

Rabbi, are you bothered at all with the formulary: “I abort thee in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost”? 

I do understand that some critics not from the Left, like Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist, have sincere reasons for disliking what Sarah said. But the Left has no business – none – pretending that they’re the defenders of the Christian faith, or that being good liberals makes them guiltless of the bloody crimes of their own ideologies.

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Al Sharpton, In Heels

Now that a single federal judge has decided Michigan will have same-sex marriage, it’s time for the next step. Under the guise of a coalition of concerned business leaders, the gay lobby is pressing forward to write special status for homosexuals into Michigan law.  As reported in the Detroit News,

Some of Michigan’s top business leaders are launching a campaign to expand the state’s workforce discrimination protections to include sexual orientation and gender identity.

Job providers from across the state have formed the Michigan Competitive Workforce Coalition, a partnership of business leaders and their companies, with the intention of working with lawmakers to update Michigan’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act (ELCRA). (“Execs want Michigan anti-bias laws for gay”).

No identity politics here, folks – it’s just all about the economy.

Who knows what subtle persuasions were brought to bear behind the scenes that has led us to this? What we do know is that, listed amongst the coalition’s “top business leaders” is Kerry Moss, executive director of ACLU Michigan, which is already an active player on behalf of homosexual activism.

Conspicuously missing from Thursday’s article are any examples illustrating that Michigan even has an invidious problem with workplace discrimination against homosexuals.  Oh, sure it happens sometimes, just like it happens more and more (and more) to encounter employees in virtually every conceivable context who are openly – often ostentatiously – gay. 

Yet the message in the Detroit News’s headline is that Michigan’s scaring away prospective gay talent (and let’s not forget prospective transvestite talent, too!) You might wonder why, if Michigan’s coalition of enlightened employers means to entice the nation’s gay talent to their companies, they’d start by pushing through a law meant  to expose themselves and every other Michigan employer to endless lawsuits for discriminating against them once they get here.

The truth is, re-writing ELCRA would be a drastic remedy for a problem that either doesn’t – or hardly – exists, not that it matters to whoever’s behind the Michigan Competitive Workforce Coalition.  This is only a gambit to sell  “discrimination protections” as the wedge that gets protected status for homosexuals under ELCRA. For all the hoopla about “equality” on the subject of homosexual rights, the News is correct in reporting that, “It is currently legal in Michigan to fire or refuse to hire someone because they are gay or lesbian.”  If you’re surprised to hear that, you can thank years of horrible coverage of this topic by a media 90% gay-friendly already, and 100% scared to death of their gay friends.

Homosexuals have never been defined as a “suspect class” under Michigan’s civil-rights statute. “Suspect class” is the term used in civil-rights law to define a minority group that has historically faced discrimination). By way of comparison, the granddaddy of all American anti-discrimination laws, the federal 1964 Civil Rights Act making race-, sex-, or national-origin discrimination unlawful, also has never defined homosexuality as a suspect class.  Among the reasons for this is that alternative sexual orientations are not immutable the way being male or female, black or white, are immutable.  Years of homosexuals comparing their plight with what  blacks endured in America has only accentuated the triviality of homosexuals’ demands.  

Some of these employers may have authentic business reasons for wanting to be perceived as gay-friendly, like wanting to target that market for their products.  But there are alternative ways to do that that don’t require fooling around with the state’s fundamental civil-rights statute.  They could advertise positions in any of the myriad media catering to homosexual audiences, or adopt company policies as unctuously celebratory of personal sexual deviance as any homosexual lobbyist could imagine.  I’m much more inclined to believe that they’re only coalescing now because there’s a rainbow-and-rhinestone gun being held to their heads.

Gay activists aren’t scheming to change ELCRA because they actually believe gays are too scared to move here and work. Winning protected status for homosexuality has been the holy[sic] grail of the gay lobby since forever. It’s certainly far more important than same-sex marriage, which was always only a freakshow that somehow (oh, yay!) turned out to be a thousand times more useful for capturing the sympathy of distracted Americans than a third decade of guilt-tripping everyone about AIDS and Matthew Shepard. Once your sexual preference wins protection as a suspect category, you (and any activist group you happen to be working with) have access to all of the wonderful legal weapons available to punish, or threaten punishment, for anything you can characterize as “discrimination” against you as an individual. 

It also means if you thinks it’s boring to work for the gay-friendly hipsters at Google or Blue Cross, you can pretty much look for work anywhere in Michigan knowing that if any employer dares dislike you for showing up at a business meeting in drag, you can sue his bigoted ass from now till Mardi Gras 2018. Every schoolroom, restroom, church sanctuary, voting site, rental property, workplace, government bureau, doghouse, outhouse, henhouse, or any other imaginable setting will be a hard target for anti-discrimination litigation from the highly sophisticated and lavishly funded gay lobby.  If you enjoyed Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and BAMN handling the nation’s race relations, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

Because we all know that the gay community never, ever, goes overboard when it comes to pressuring straight society to be more tolerant.

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Our Compliments to the Chief

Revolutionary?

Detroit Police Chief James Craig has been voicing his support for Detroiters who’ve defended themselves during home invasions by shooting the intruders. "I think it's a deterrent," Craig said in January, regarding armed law-abiding citizens. "Good Americans with CPLs translates into crime reduction, too."

At a meeting of the Detroit Police Commission on Thursday, Craig denied criticism from a community activist that he advocates vigilantism:

However, I do support the Constitution of this United States. I didn't write the laws or write the Second Amendment but I happen to be an advocate of self defense. Self defense when someone's faced with imminent, the emphasis on imminent threat to their life or someone else, they have the right to protect one's self.

I call this revolutionary because there are precious few examples in historical memory where respect is paid to the Bill of Rights in this most Democratic of failed one-party urban disaster areas. “Prior to Craig,” as Gus Burns at MLive writes,

“other Detroit police chiefs have taken an approach that every gun poses a threat, a sentiment exhibited by gun buyback events that sought to remove both legal and illegal guns from the streets in exchange for cash.”

On Thursday Craig was responding to specific criticism of his radical notions about good and evil.  “Ron Scott, founder of the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality, didn't like the use of Craig's language identifying ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ citizens, which he believes creates unnecessary divisiveness.” (Police Chief James Craig: 'The things I've seen in Detroit I have not seen in other places”).  Scott is a former Black Panther, and it shows, first in his thoroughgoing distrust of the police, and then in the endless skeins of incomprehensible syntax he can pump out.  If this is the way he talks, you can just imagine how he thinks.

So it isn’t much of a surprise that Scott disapproves of Craig’s straightforward moral distinction between armed good guys and violent, predatory criminals. Scott’s bursting-its-banks explanation includes this:

I don’t subscribe to that ‘good guy bad guy’ mentality. There are people who find themselves in situations and circumstances where they either begin to engage in underground activity, as a way of life, because of their direction or they’re people who are in the framework where at one time or the other they find themselves at odds with the law. Therefore, to use that as a hammer to hit upside somebody’s head, especially motivated by money coming from the federal government, specifically which creates that scenario, is nothing more than a continuation of the encroachment of the military state.

I speak 1960s, so let me translate: the criminals are victims, too, so don’t say they’re asking for it or you’re helping the Gestapo.

Ridiculous, yes. But Scott’s crazy recipe has been passed down through five decades of Democratic policy-making. It’s all there, from the bad old days of Detroit’s judges refusing to lock up violent offenders to the city’s tawdry love affairs with crooked politicians whose self-serving decisions make everything worse.

But that’s another subject. The point here is that, somehow, Detroit has ended up with a police chief who, if he weren’t commenting on only the latest instance in which a good guy or gal with a gun put a sudden end to a bad guy’s violent career, could just as effectively be recording spots for the NRA.

But we’d better not say that out loud. Some people like to think self-defense is their own new idea.

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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.

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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?

###

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.

###

*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?

###

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.

###

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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