News

Is the news media biased when reporting on gay scandals?

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Dr. Michael Brown explains his view by comparing the reporting of the Ted Haggard scandal with the Larry Brinkin scandal.

Excerpt:

According to published reports, when Larry Brinkin was arrested two weeks ago, the police found… [CENSORED BY WK]. Yet the media has barely reported this terribly disturbing incident.

But, you ask, who was Larry Brinkin? He was “a central figure in the gay rights movement,” a man who was so influential that, “The San Francisco board of supervisors actually gave a ‘Larry Brinkin Week’ in February 2010 upon his retirement.” It was Brinkin who first used the term “domestic partnerships” in a legal dispute, marking a watershed moment in gay activist history, yet news of his alleged crimes against infants and children, not to mention his alleged White Supremacist leanings, has received very little media attention.

Is there a double standard here? Imagine what the media would be doing if Brinkin had been a conservative Christian leader.

When evangelical leader Ted Haggard fell, the media was quick to pounce, suggesting that this exposed the corrupt nature of evangelical Christianity as a whole. And media leaders have done this repeatedly whenever there has been a scandal connected to an evangelical (or Catholic) leader, and the news is blared from the headlines. But where, I ask you, is the outrage or the front page news when a gay leader commits atrocities such as those allegedly committed by Larry Brinkin? And why isn’t the media claiming that Brinkin’s transgressions expose the corrupt nature of gay activism as a whole?

The failure of a Christian leader is considered endemic and representative; the failure of a gay leader is considered an aberrant exception. Why the unequal treatment?

[…]The answer is that Brinkin’s arrest has received relatively little media attention because he was a gay activist leader, not a conservative Christian leader, and there is no hiding the mainstream media’s pro-gay, anti-conservative Christian bias. And because Brinkin’s arrest has not been widely reported, the general public has not been confronted afresh with the horrors of child pornography.

[…]Brinkin, for his part, was no smalltime player, with the San Francisco Examiner describing him as an “iconic San Francisco gay activist who brought the nation’s first domestic partnership lawsuit in 1982.” And he was, after all, a respected, long-term leader within the Human Rights Campaign, the world’s largest gay activist organization. Why hasn’t the HRC been tarred and feathered the way evangelicals (or Catholics) are after one of their leaders falls? Why the inconsistency?

I reported on the Larry Brinkin scandal in a previous post.

News

Scottish court orders man to pay £39,500 to woman after failed cohabitation

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From the Scotsman.

Excerpt:

A LANDMARK Supreme Court ruling, in which a man has been ordered to pay his former partner compensation after they separated, could open the doors for thousands of claims from unmarried couples who split up, a family lawyer has claimed.

In yesterday’s judgment, the Supreme Court ruled that Angus Grant should pay Jessamine Gow £39,500 after the cohabiting pensioners’ relationship ended.

The right to compensation for unmarried couples became available under section 8 of the Family Law (Scotland) Act 2006, but had not been tested in the Supreme Court until yesterday.

[The ruling] does create a precedent that could allow unmarried couples to seek financial compensation similar to that available to divorcing couples, but without the assumption of an equal division of assets.

Last night, a family law expert warned that it could affect thousands of couples and lead to a rush for “cohabitation agreements” – a kind of pre-nuptial for the unmarried – from people planning to move in together.

[…]Robert Wright, professor of economics at Strathclyde University, said: “It will make people rethink cohabitation, rethink marriage. It might lead to people waiting longer, so we could see less cohabitation, less marriage and less fertility.”

Are people responsible for the damage caused by their own free decisions? According to the court, they are not.

Dina sent me this UK Daily Mail article by Melanie Phillips, which comments on this story.

Excerpt:

The relentless war against the family in Britain continues in the highest court of the land. Baroness Hale, the veteran ‘lifestyle choice’ radical who, as a member of the UK Supreme Court, is the country’s top female judge, has called for cohabiting couples to be given more legal rights.

[…]For sure, cohabitation often results in hardship, very much more so indeed than marriage. Cohabitation breaks down far more frequently than marriage, and even more so after the birth of any children. Cohabitation is therefore one of the most significant factors behind Britain’s catastrophic and galloping phenomenon of mass fatherlessness, the single most important cause of so much misery and harm for both children and adults, and the major cause in turn of unquantifiable damage to society.

If people want to avoid the hardship they very understandably fear will result from the absence of legal protection under cohabitation, they can choose to get married. That’s what marriage is for. To bestow this legal protection upon cohabitation is to turn the ratchet of family breakdown another notch. First you undermine marriage by removing the stigma of ‘living together’, illegitimacy and unmarried motherhood; then you turn the ratchet by hymning the sanctity of ‘lifestyle choice’ and the social acceptability of cohabitation as an alternative to marriage; then you turn it again by bestowing the benefits of marriage upon un-marriage, thus incentivising a socially destructive phenomenon which will create yet more misery and harm.

Lady Hale’s call is not for justice in family life but gross injustice. It is yet another boost to our rights-without-responsibilities, something-for-nothing, me-first culture which has already advanced the destruction of family life in Britain, created regional deserts of social and moral breakdown and made victims out of the most vulnerable.

My biggest concern about this is the message that it sends to men who are already turning away from the responsibilities of marriage. Men already have to contend with no-fault divorce, a massive repression, etc. which causes them to doubt the reasonableness of marriage at this time. This ruling will push them even further away from relationships with women, by making even cohabitation threatening financially. I don’t think that the judge in this case realizes the incentives that are being created by this decision. When men see that relationships with women that go beyond just sex are becoming more costly and risky, they will stop doing that. Why take the risk of being cleaned out financially? My prediction is that this short-sighted ruling will push men and women further apart, so that sex without any structured relationship becomes the norm, and children have even less of a stable environment in which to grow up.

People are more inclined these to complain that men need to “man up” and get married, but it is important to consider what the incentives are for men. Are we doing a good job of educating men with practical skills, encouraging job creators with lower taxes and less regulation, and lowering the legal risks of marriage for men? Are we encouraging women to understand men and to respect them, which is the main thing that men are looking for in a marriage? Are we encouraging women to be chaste so that men are encouraged to perform at a higher level to earn a woman’s commitment to him in marriage? If we are not giving men incentives to marry – or even to cohabitate – then we mustn’t be surprised when men decide that other things are more rewarding than marriage.

News

How states can resist Obamacare, and the benefits of doing so

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From the American Spectator, a look at what states can do to block the implementation of Obamacare.

Excerpt:

Although the voters can put an end to the madness on November 6, the states don’t need to wait until Election Day to take aim at a point of vulnerability that remains in place despite the Court’s latest caprice. They can refuse to implement the law’s insurance exchanges.

[…]The law calls for the states to set up these new bureaucracies, whose ostensible purpose will be to provide “marketplaces” in which people with no employer-based health insurance can shop for coverage at competitive rates. Now that the Court has upheld the individual mandate, these insurance exchanges constitute the key to the success or failure of the law. They are also its Achilles’ heel.

How’s that? Well, as the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon succinctly puts it, “Without these bureaucracies, Obamacare cannot work.” And, oddly enough, the law doesn’t actually require states to set up these “marketplaces.” Moreover, there is no rational incentive for them to do so. If a state sets up an exchange, it then must pay for it, which won’t be cheap. Cannon writes, “States that opt to create an exchange can expect to pay anywhere from $10 million to $100 million per year to run it.” This is a burden that the states, most of which are already in deep financial trouble, are not likely to embrace with enthusiasm.

The federal government can set up its own exchanges, in theory, but Obamacare stipulates that Washington would then be required to pick up the tab as well. And, as Cannon goes on to point out, “The Obama administration has admitted it doesn’t have the money — and good luck getting any such funding through the GOP-controlled House.” And it gets worse. If the federal government is forced to set up an exchange, it faces yet another huge problem. As Sally Pipes and Hal Scherz write, “The text of the law stipulates that only state-based exchanges — not federally run ones — may distribute credits and subsidies.”

Thus, if a state refuses to set up an exchange, the feds have no real ability to do so either. The states have an opportunity, therefore, to shoot a poison arrow directly into Obamacare’s Achilles’ heel.

[…]”Resisting the implementation of exchanges is good for hiring and investment. The law’s employer mandate assesses penalties — up to $3,000 per employee — only to businesses who don’t satisfy federally-approved health insurance standards and whose employees receive ‘premium assistance’ through the exchanges.”

In other words, a state that declines to set up an exchange will protect the businesses of that state from avoidable and job-killing penalties. This reality has apparently begun to sink in. There has been a noticeable decline in enthusiasm for exchanges among states that had begun work on them shortly after Obamacare passed.

The article notes that a bunch of governors and legislatures in conservative states have already taken steps to resist implementing Obamacare, including Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, who is an Oxford-educated expert in health care policy.