Tag Archives: Censorship

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How would allowing gays to marry affect your life?

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Here’s a post from Legal Insurrection, a prominent law blog.

Excerpt:

King & Spalding has withdrawn from representing the House of Representatives with regard to the Defense of Marriage Act.  King & Spalding was hired after the Obama administration abruptly — and disingenuously — changed its legal position recently.

The attempts to intimidate, both politically and sometimes physically, supporters of traditional marriage are nothing new.

The strategy is to define the traditional marriage view as bigotry on par with racism.  Once you accept that premise, then everything else follows and is justified.  Even expressing a legal view that there is no federal constitutional right to same sex marriage — a view expressed under oath by Elena Kagan — now constitutes hate speech.

There were numerous boycotts of businesses owned by people who supported Prop. 8 in California, including a boycott organized by an association of law professors.

Taking it one step further, there was a widespread campaign to demonize and boycott Mormon-owned businesses in the wake of Prop. 8 in California…

[…]Now the intimidation has moved beyond political supporters of Prop. 8 and Mormons, and into an attempt to deprive pro-traditional marriage groups of their counsel of choice.  As Jennifer Rubin points out (via John Hinderaker), the attempt to intimidate lawyers into not representing pro-traditional marriage clients is part of a deliberate strategy, not a haphazard reaction.

[…]Would such lawyers and staff now be afraid to express their views on the subject, fearing a backlash against their individual careers much as King & Spaulding feared a backlash?  If representing the pro-traditional marriage view is unacceptable for the firm, would there be a hostile work environment for such people?

Dennis Prager wrote more about how same-sex marriage affects society back in 2008.

Excerpt:

Outside of the privacy of their homes, young girls will be discouraged from imagining one day marrying their prince charming — to do so would be declared “heterosexist,” morally equivalent to racist. Rather, they will be told to imagine a prince or a princess. Schoolbooks will not be allowed to describe marriage in male-female ways alone. Little girls will be asked by other girls and by teachers if they want one day to marry a man or a woman.

The sexual confusion that same-sex marriage will create among young people is not fully measurable. Suffice it to say that, contrary to the sexual know-nothings who believe that sexual orientation is fixed from birth and permanent, the fact is that sexual orientation is more of a continuum that ranges from exclusive heterosexuality to exclusive homosexuality. Much of humanity — especially females — can enjoy homosexual sex. It is up to society to channel polymorphous human sexuality into an exclusively heterosexual direction — until now, accomplished through marriage. But that of course is “heterosexism,” a bigoted preference for man-woman erotic love, and therefore to be extirpated from society.

Any advocacy of man-woman marriage alone will be regarded morally as hate speech, and shortly thereafter it will be deemed so in law.

Companies that advertise engagement rings will have to show a man putting a ring on a man’s finger — if they show only women fingers, they will be boycotted just as a company having racist ads would be now.

Films that only show man-woman married couples will be regarded as antisocial and as morally irresponsible as films that show people smoking have become.

Traditional Jews and Christians — i.e. those who believe in a divine scripture — will be marginalized. Already Catholic groups in Massachusetts have abandoned adoption work since they will only allow a child to be adopted by a married couple as the Bible defines it — a man and a woman.

Anyone who advocates marriage between a man and a woman will be morally regarded the same as racist. And soon it will be a hate crime.

Indeed — and this is the ultimate goal of many of the same-sex marriage activists — the terms “male” and “female,” “man” and “woman” will gradually lose their significance. They already are. On the intellectual and cultural left, “male” and “female” are deemed social constructs that have little meaning. That is why same-sex marriage advocates argue that children have no need for both a mother and a father — the sexes are interchangeable. Whatever a father can do a second mother can do. Whatever a mother can do, a second father can do. Genitalia are the only real differences between the sexes, and even they can be switched at will.

And what will happen after divorce — which presumably will occur at the same rates as heterosexual divorce? A boy raised by two lesbian mothers who divorce and remarry will then have four mothers and no father.

We have entered something beyond Huxley’s “Brave New World.”… Our children and their children will pay the price.

Check out this vandalism at a Catholic church by supporters of same-sex marriage. The vandalism says “where is the love?” I don’t think that the vandals showed much love for those who disagree with same-sex marriage, though. And sometimes the consequences for disagreement can be much worse than vandalism.  It can mean legal consequences, sensitivity indoctrination, vandalism, or even violence. What’s sad is that the well-meaning young leftists, who think what they are doing is compassionate, are actually encouraging this coercion.

How would allowing gays to marry affect your life?

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Ezra Levant on the new Sun News television network

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Ezra Levant
Ezra Levant

Learn about the new Sun News television network and Ezra Levant’s new show “The Source”. Sun News launching in Canada on April 18, and it should provide some much needed diversity to the close-minded, economically ignorant climate of big government spending that dominates the news media up north.

Excerpt:

Do you want to get the Sun News Network on your TV? Then you’d better ask for it. Because we go live in less than two weeks. April 18th is the launch. And you don’t want to miss a minute of it, I can promise you that.

And maybe pick up the phone and add the power of your voice to your efforts.

If we were the CBC or CTV, you wouldn’t have to ask for the channel. It would be forced on you. In fact, under Canadian broadcasting law, every cable provider must carry CBC and CTV, and every single cable subscriber (that would be you) is forced to pay for it, whether you watch it or not.

These two companies have had a combined 30-plus years of this mandatory indoctrination — and taxation. As if the CBC’s billion dollars a year wasn’t enough, they ding you for 54 cents a month on your cable bill, whether you ever watch them.

It’s the David Suzuki tax. The Peter Mansbridge tax. It’s the Alberta-bashing tax. The gun registry tax. It’s a tax to pay for your own indoctrination.

We’re the Sun — a privately owned company. We don’t have the power of taxation. Which is fine. We’ll win our viewers the old fashioned way — by broadcasting interesting things that people want to watch.

That’s what’s so remarkable about the CBC-CTV duopoly. Despite all the subsidies and mandatory broadcasts, Canadians so often choose to get their news elsewhere — including a news station headquartered in the Deep South of the United States, called CNN. They’re headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, the cradle of the Confederacy.

It’s a pretty damning indictment of Canadian TV news that a TV station in the heart of Dixie manages to draw more eyeballs than local offerings. Imagine if the biggest-selling newspaper in Canada were USA Today. How lame would Canadian newspapers have to be to allow that to happen?

One day, the CBC and CTV will have to compete on an equal footing with Sun News Network. One day the CBC won’t get the Sun’s entire annual TV budget — $20 million — in a single week. Seriously, do the math: with a billion dollars a year, the CBC burns through the Sun’s yearly expenses every seven days.

That’s a state broadcaster for you. And that’s why they have big government built right into their DNA: without big government and high taxes, they’d have to get real jobs.

[…]That’s my real beef with Canadian TV news today. Not that it’s liberal, which it generally is. But that it has such a dreary consensus. On everything from gun control to Omar Khadr to global warming, CTV and CBC are like Tweedledee and Tweedledum. There is the official, “acceptable” view that gets on the air, and everything and everyone else can go pound sand.

In this video, Ezra Levant explains his new show, and the vision of Sun News.

My understanding of Canadian news media from my Canadian friends is that all the mainstream media news channels ever talk about is how much taxpayer money to spend on various whiny special interest groups. They just talk and talk about stimulus spending, “equalization payments”, welfare, subsidies for green energy companies and so on. The political debates are big whining sessions where the progressive political parties complain that the other progressive parties aren’t spending enough money on the poor fill-in-the-blank group. The majority of the people vote for left-wing parties like the Liberals and the New Democrats and the Bloc Quebecois, because the majority of the people get an economically ignorant view preached to them by the news media. They have been taught by the media to choose policies based on 1) their feelings, 2) greed for their neighbor’s money and 3) international opinion, especially the UN. They can’t think for themselves, and they are accustomed to depending on government to give them handouts.

Sun News will compete against the ultra-liberal networks like CTV and government-owned CBC. Unlike CBC and CTV, the Sun News network will feature center and center-right perspectives on the news, and will cover issues that the mainstream news networks cannot touch. (Yes, in Canada every province has anti-free-speech censorship panels that go after pastors and Christian business owners who offend left-wing groups with their inconvenient free speech). There really isn’t any free speech in Canada, the whole country is run like a liberal university campus with speech codes, where the governing leftists collect taxpayer money that is then used to silence dissenting voices, like those of Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn. They really need some different points of view so that they can be more open-minded and tolerant. They just get offended too easily because they only know one way of thinking about the issues and they find disagreement offensive.

News

How do secular leftist professors feel about Christian students?

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From the Alliance Defense Fund.

Excerpt:

The late American philosopher Richard Rorty (d. 2007) in describing his assessment of the role of university professor wrote:  “When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures.  Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization.”  The re-education imperative is one that he, “like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.”  Rorty explains to the “fundamentalist” parents of his students:  “we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable.”  He helpfully explains that “I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.”

The sociologist Alvin Gouldner in his book The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class set forth a number of the historical developments that were decisive in the formation of the revolutionary intellectual class.  Among the factors is the process of secularization which de-sacralizes authority and enables challenges to theological traditions.  Another factor was the extension of non-church public schooling.  The colleges and universities in particular generate “dissent, deviance, and the cultivation of an authority-subverting culture of critical discourse.”  And the school teachers at all levels conceive and fulfill their tasks as representatives of (the abstract) society as a whole (whatever that is), thus distanced from and with no allegiance or obligation to the values of the parents of their students.  A related factor is the structure of the new educational system:  “increasingly insulated from the family system,” thereby situated to serve as “an important source of values among students divergent from those of their families.”  In both form and content (which are not so neatly divisible, by the way) the state educational enterprise has been leveraged to missionary ends, further undermining parental authority and replacing its formative function.

Law Professor Samuel Levinson has with welcome candor revealed that it is not due to his sympathy for certain religious students that he prefers that public grade schools grant limited exemptions to those students with conscientious objections to portions of the curriculum.  Rather, such measures are calculated to mollify those religious students, thereby keeping them in the secularizing environment of the government school where they are likely to have their views transformed.  With just enough solicitude for such students’ interests, they may be convinced to stay put, and thus be “lured away from the views—some of them only foolish, others, alas, quite pernicious—of their parents.”

To push these [Christian] students from the public schools . . . will assure that they will in fact be educated within institutions that are, from my perspective at least, far more limited, and indeed, “totalitarian” than anything likely to be found within a decent public school.  My desire to “lure” religious parents back to the public schools thus has at least a trace of the spider’s web about it.

And there’s more than a trace of irony in his assigning “totalitarian” levels as he plots means to manipulate the worldviews of children by coaxing them to remain in institutions designed for that very purpose.  Spider’s web, indeed.

I was just having a conversation with a couple of left-wing Christians on Facebook who were telling me how Christianity was compatible with left-wing politics. They have no idea what they are talking about – they just don’t know what they are up against. They are the ones who vote for more funding for public schools, thinking they are innocuous.

One of the reasons that kept me from marrying is that I didn’t meet anyone in university who took this threat as seriously as I do. If you believe that children should be influential for the Christ, then reading that excerpt should scare you. But if babies are just for baby pictures, then it’s not really a big deal. But it’s a big deal to me.