Are universities interested in discovering truth? Not if the truth is not politically correct. Consider this story reported by the radically-leftist, government-run BBC.
Excerpt:
James Caspian wanted to write a thesis on “detransition” as part of his master’s degree in counselling and psychotherapy at Bath Spa University.
He said it was rejected by the university’s ethics committee because it could be “politically incorrect”.
[…]Mr Caspian, a counsellor who specialises in therapy for transgender people, told Radio 4: “I was astonished at that decision.
“I think that a university exists to encourage discussion, research – dissent even, challenging perhaps ideas that are out of date or not particularly useful.”
He says he wanted to study people who had swapped gender and then changed their minds after coming across evidence of a growing number of people who regretted having the surgery and finding no research had been done into the subject.
His proposal was rejected by the university’s “ethics committee”. How come?
“The fundamental reason given was that it might cause criticism of the research on social media and criticism of the research would be criticism of the university and they also added it was better not to offend people,” he said.
According to the Times, it was rejected because “engaging in a potentially politically incorrect piece of research carries a risk to the university”.
Life Site News notes that there is no problem with the author’s bias – he is progressive on transgender rights:
Caspian is decidedly pro-“transgender.” According to his bio, since 2001 he has been a Trustee of the Beaumont Trust, a British charity “dedicated to education about and support of transgendered, transsexual and cross-dressing individuals.”
A perusal of Beaumont Trust’s website reveals it to be very friendly to “transgender” ideology. For example, one piece on the site inveighs against “internalized transphobia,” the “T” parallel to “internalized homophobia” (an idea used to rationalize homosexuality as a natural and normal “orientation”).
This story shows the real priorities of the university, especially on social and moral issues. If the university is not a place to discover truth, then why should we give them any respect in our society? It’s one thing to spend money to get an education, and something else entirely to spend money to get an indoctrination.
Someone asked me about what I thought of Australia’s experience banning the use of handguns for self-defense against criminals, and so I thought I would link to an article from The Federalist, then explain what peer-reviewed studies say about the issue.
The argument, as Vox’s headline puts it, is “Australia confiscated 650,000 guns. Murders and suicides plummeted.”
The piece, along with many gun control advocates, cites a Harvard University study whose conclusion begins with this line: “It does not appear that the Australian experience with gun buybacks is fully replicable in the United States.” Not a great start for Vox’s angle, but I digress.
The study doesn’t conclude that “murders and suicides plummeted” in Australia after the 1996 gun ban, as Vox claims in its headline. Instead, it focuses solely on firearm-related murders and suicides.
After the gun ban, violent crime rates were up:
Yes, as with the gun-happy United States, the murder rate is down in Australia. It’s dropped 31 percent from a rate of 1.6 per 100,000 people in 1994 to 1.1 per 100,000 in 2012.But it’s the only serious crime that saw a consistent decline post-ban.
In fact, according to the Australian government’s own statistics, a number of serious crimes peaked in the years after the ban. Manslaughter, sexual assault, kidnapping, armed robbery, and unarmed robbery all saw peaks in the years following the ban, and most remain near or above pre-ban rates. The effects of the 1996 ban on violent crime are, frankly, unimpressive at best.
It’s even less impressive when again compared to America’s decrease in violent crime over the same period. According to data from the U.S. Justice Department, violent crime fell nearly 72 percent between 1993 and 2011. Again, this happened as guns were being manufactured and purchased at an ever-increasing rate.
So although you have fewer firearm-related deaths when you disarm law-abiding civilians, violent crime increases, because there is now NO deterrence to criminals. Even a criminal with a knife can rob, rape and murder someone who is unarmed.
What about suicide rates?
Look:
The Australian gun ban’s effect on suicide in the country isn’t any better. While Vox repeats the Harvard study’s claim that firearm-related suicides are down 57 percent in the aftermath of the ban, Lifeline Australia reports that overall suicides are at a ten-year high. The Australian suicide prevention organization claims suicide is the leading cause of death for Australians 15 to 44 years old. So, while Australians kill themselves with firearms less often, it seems they don’t actually take their own lives any less often than before the ban.
So, overall suicides are not down, people simply found other ways to kill themselves. So the gun ban had no effect on the overall suicide rate. But it did raise the violent crime rate. Should we be surprised by this? Actually, this is consistent with peer-reviewed research.
Australia has seen a rise in gun crime over the past decade despite imposing an outright ban on many firearms in the late 1990s.
Charges for crimes involving firearms have increased dramatically across the island nation’s localities in the past decade according to an analysis of government statistics conducted by The New Daily. It found that gun crimes have spiked dramatically in the Australian states of Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania. In Victoria, pistol-related offenses doubled over the last decade. In New South Wales, they tripled. The other states saw smaller but still significant increases.
Experts said that the country’s 1996 ban on most semi-automatic firearms has actually driven criminals to those guns. “The ban on semi-automatics created demand by criminals for other types of guns,” professor Philip Alpers of the University of Sydney told The New Daily. “The criminal’s gun of choice today is the semi-automatic pistol.”
[…]Regardless of the reasons for the jump in gun crime, the numbers reveal the true size of Australia’s illegal gun market. “Taken together, the data suggests that despite our tough anti-gun laws, thousands of weapons are either being stolen or entering the country illegally,” The New Daily said. “The fourfold rise in handgun-related charges in NSW in the past decade points to the existence of a big illegal market for concealable firearms that seems to have been underestimated in the past.”
If you take guns away from law-abiding people (which is what Australia did), then only criminals will have guns. And that means that the criminals will become bolder in the face of their disarmed victims.
The peer-reviewed research
Whenever I get into discussions about gun control, I always mention two academic books by John R. Lott and Joyce Lee Malcolm.
I think that peer-reviewed studies should be useful for assessing gun control vs gun rights policy. The book by economist John Lott, linked above,compares the crime rates of all U.S. states that have enacted concealed carry laws, and concludes that violent crime rates dropped after law-abiding citizens were allowed to carry legally-owned firearms. That’s the mirror image of Dr. Malcolm’s Harvard study, which shows that the 1997 UK gun ban caused violent crime rates to MORE THAN DOUBLE in the four years following the ban. But both studies affirm the same conclusion – more legal firearm ownership means less crime.
One of the common mistakes I see anti-gun advocates making is to use the metric of all “gun-related deaths”. First of all, this completely ignores the effects of hand gun ownership on violent crime, as we’ve seen. Take away the guns from law-abiding people and violent crime skyrockets. But using the “gun-related deaths” number is especially wrong, because it includes suicides committed with guns. This is the majority (about two thirds) of gun related deaths, even in a country like America that has a massive inner-city gun violence problem caused by the epidemic of single motherhood by choice. If you take out the gun-related SUICIDES, then the actual number of gun homicides has decreased as gun ownership has grown.
For a couple of useful graphs related to this point, check out this post over at the American Enterprise Institute.
The House of Representatives today approved a pro-life bill that bans abortions from after 20-weeks of pregnancy up to the day of birth.
The vote for the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act broke down on mostly partisan lines with Republicans supporting the ban on late-term abortions and Democrats opposing it. The House approved the bill on a 237-189 vote.
Should the Senate approve the bill, President Donald Trump would sign the pro-life bill into law.
And I have to highlight one of the Republican lawmakers who made his stand for the unborn. This is to correct the view that Republicans don’t understand the pro-life issue, and don’t really support it. At least in the House, they are pro-life, for real.
Excerpt:
During the debate on the bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks, Congressman Sean Duffy gave what may be one of the most passionate defenses of the pro-life position ever seen on the floor of Congress. Duffy took on the claim often made by Democrats who support abortion saying they stand for the defenseless and voiceless.
“I’ve listened to the floor debate day after day .. about how they fight for the forgotten, they fight for the defenseless, they fight for the voiceless. And they pound their chest and stomp their feet. You don’t have anyone in our society that’s more defenseless than these little babies,” he said. “And we are not taking — I believe in conception. I know my colleagues can’t agree with me on that. Can’t we come together and say we are going to stand with little babies that feel pain, that survive outside the womb? Ones that don’t have lobbyists and money? Don’t we stand with those little babies?”
“If you stand with the defenseless, with the voiceless, you have to stand with little babies. Don’t talk to me about cruelty in our bill — when you look at little babies being dismembered, feeling excruciating pain, if we can’t stand to defend these children, what do we stand for in this institution?” he added.
Sean Duffy is a Congressman from the great state of Wisconsin. I don’t think that any pro-lifer would be more passionate. I was not able to find a video of this speech. If anyone does, please let me know so I can update the post.
Although the medical consensus is that the unborn feel pain after 20 weeks, some experts think it is even earlier:
Another bombshell dropped during the hearing came from Dr. Maureen Condic, who is Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Adjunct Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Utah School of Medicine. She testified that the unborn child is capable of reacting to pain as early as 8-10 weeks. This is when most abortions in America take place.
The Stream has an article up about a child that was delivered at 22 weeks and is doing very well.
Excerpt:
At 22 weeks and four days along, Danielle Pickering gave birth to her baby boy Micah.
Now 5 years old, Micah has become a face of the late-term abortion debate.
On Tuesday, the U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, a bill that would ban abortion after 20 weeks, the point when “pain receptors (nociceptors) are present throughout the unborn child’s entire body,” according to the legislation.
Video:
Deliver the child, and put her up for adoption! It’s the right thing to do. Plenty of married couples out there looking to adopt.
Let’s be practical about this
Even if this bill doesn’t pass in the Senate, it will be useful to see who doesn’t vote for it. Any Republican who doesn’t should be primaried by a pro-life Republican candidate. And primarying fake pro-lifers actually works: remember what happened to Renee Ellmers after she blocked pro-life leglislation? I blogged about it here. Ellmers was replaced in the primary with someone much more conservative, who was also endorsed by the National Right to Life. He had a 100% pro-life rating from 2014 from Project Vote Smart. And he won the general election against the Democrat. His current Heritage Foundation conservative score is 89% conservative. And he voted for the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act that is the subject of this post.
This is what we have to do – force the votes, primary the fake conservatives, win the elections.
