Tag Archives: Indoctrination

News

Can same-sex marriage and religious liberty co-exist?

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UPDATE: Welcome readers from 4Simpsons! Thanks for the link Neil!

Maggie Gallagher has written an article in the National Review asking whether same-sex marriage will crowd out fundamental liberties, such as the religious liberty.

First, we need to understand that the public expression of religious convictions is a buffer against fascism, just like free market capitalism and the family unit.

Maggie writes:

Take “religious liberty.” Religious liberty is a deeply American solution to a perennial problem. It means that every individual has a right to pursue ultimate meaning without coercion from the government. Totalitarian governments repress religion because they recognize faith communities as competitors with the state’s power to define — or redefine — human rights.

But a funny thing happened on the way to defeating Communism. Religion has emerged as the sole institution standing in the way of a powerful neo-statist liberalism, in which equality doctrines are used not as a shield but as a sword — to legitimate state intrusion into once-private realms.

In practice, religious voters are the core of resistance to social liberalism, and they empower economic conservatism by providing a much broader base of voters for a center-right coalition government.

How will the left get rid of rights like the right to free speech, and the right of religious liberty, which stand in the way of their socialist road to fascism? Well, they might be able to use same-sex marriage.

Maggie goes on to wonder what the left will do in the USA, given what the left is doing in the UK:

Consider what is happening right now in Great Britain, our closest sister democracy and the one with the strongest free-speech tradition. How does the British government treat religious liberty when it clashes with “gay equality”?

Can the British government force a Catholic school to retain a principal who enters a civil union? Yes, it already has. How can that be, given British religious liberty? Well, the government says that if a religion teacher at a Catholic school enters a gay union publicly, he or she could be fired. But nobody else.

Can the government fine an Anglican bishop who refuses to hire an actively and proudly gay youth minister? Yes, it already has. (How is this justified by the above principle? I don’t know. I just know the government can do it, because it has.)

Consider this story from the UK Telegraph.

Religious groups are to be forced to accept homosexual youth workers, secretaries and other staff, even if their faith holds same-sex relationships to be sinful.

…Maria Eagle, the deputy equalities minister, has now indicated that it will cover almost all church employees.”Members of faith groups have a role in making the argument in their own communities for greater LGBT acceptance, but in the meantime the state has a duty to protect people from unfair treatment.”

But limitations on our rights because of same-sex marriage are already here, because of secularism. The denial of fundamental human rights, (which are illusory if God does not exist), is quite widespread in Canada and the United States. Atheists want to be happy, and they will sweep aside your Constitutional rights in order to get that happiness.

Consider the case of Julie Ward.

Ms. Ward was enrolled in a graduate program at the school and as part of her education was required to enroll in a counseling practicum. In that practicum, she was assigned a case involving a homosexual who needed help. Ms. Ward did not feel that she could affirm the student’s homosexual lifestyle because of her Christian beliefs, so she asked her supervisor what she should do. His advice was to refer the student to a counselor who had no qualms with affirming homosexual behavior. That is what she did, and it was all done before she saw the student. There was no counseling that took place between the two, there was no confrontation between the two, and there was no condemnation of homosexuality — just an honest confession of her deeply held religious belief.

Julea was summoned to appear before a disciplinary hearing and told that if she wanted to continue on with her graduate program, she would have to submit to a “remediation” program so that she could see “the error of her ways.” She refused to be forced into a re-education program designed to convert her from biblical faith, and as a result, she was kicked out of school. There’s your tolerance.

And consider homosexual indoctrination for 5-year olds. (H/T Stop the ACLU)

A California school district seems intent on teaching pre-school children to accept the homosexual lifestyle.

The Alameda Unified School District announced it was considering a supplemental curriculum to eradicate “homophobia” in kindergarten children. Brad Dacus, founder of the Pacific Justice Institute (PJI), said the meeting room for the public session earlier this week was overcrowded with angry parents.

“Nowhere at anytime did it give any protection for children being bullied because of their faith, their religion, their size, their race, ethnicity,” he points out. “It is only going to give this special anti-bullying protection for homosexuals and transsexuals.”

…Parents cannot opt out their children from the curriculum.

No wonder men don’t want to marry and have kids, and have the whole thing regulated by the government. If you can’t even pass on your worldview to your kids, or express your beliefs in public, because of all the left-wing cry-babies who are so intolerant that they can’t bear to hear other points of view, then why bother marrying and having children? If single women really wanted husbands and children, they wouldn’t vote Democrat (= anti-family).

Same-sex marriage activists believe in compelling celebration, respect and approval from Christians against their will and in violation of their human rights. If SSM ever became law, our entire society would be re-made so that no public expression of preference for traditional marriage would go unpunished.

Further study

Muddling Towards Maturity linked to two commentaries (one, two) by Chuck Colson listing the many examples of discrimination, including: the coercion of Christian business eHarmony to open up a business to homosexuals, suing people for refusing to facilitate weddings, suing doctors for refusing to provide therapy or in vitro fertalization, forcing adoption agencies to place children with same-sex couples, etc.

I documented the persecution of defenders of traditional marriage here.

News

Are the oceans warming?

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We actually have a pretty comprehensive way of measuring the changes in the temperature of the oceans. We use a submersible sensor called an “Argo Buoy” in order to do the measurements. Since 2003, 3000 of them have been taking measurements in all the oceans of the world. The purpose of the buoys is to provide scientists with confirmation that the globe is really warming. But all was not well.

But the Vancouver Sun reports: (H/T Commenter ECM)

So why are some scientists now beginning to question the buoys’ findings? Because in five years the little blighters have failed to detect any global warming. They are not reinforcing the scientific orthodoxy of the day, namely that man is causing the planet to warm dangerously. They are not proving the predetermined conclusions of their human masters. Therefore they, and not their masters’ hypotheses, must be wrong.

In fact, “there has been a very slight cooling,” according to a U.S. National Public Radio (NPR) interview with Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a scientist who keeps close watch on the Argo findings.

Well, maybe the climate models predicted some cooling?

The big problem with the Argo findings is that all the major climate computer models postulate that as much as 80-90 per cent of global warming will result from the oceans warming rapidly then releasing their heat into the atmosphere.

But surely the other models are being confirmed by observations?

Modellers are also perplexed by the findings of NASA’s eight weather satellites that take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily over the entire surface of the Earth, versus approximately 7,000 random readings from Earth stations.

In nearly 30 years of operation, the satellites have discovered a warming trend of just 0.14 C per decade, less than the models and well within the natural range of temperature variation.

But maybe if we wait for a while, scientists will discover new measurements that are the opposite of these measurements. The new measurements will confirm that global warming is real, that scientists need more grant money, and that socialists must take control of the economy right now in order to save us from the horrible Flying Spaghetti Global Warming Monster! Those 700 dissenting scientists? Paid off by big oil! All of them!

The polar ice caps were also paid off by big oil. How else do you explain their refusal to melt?

UPDATE: NASA study shows that solar activity is responsible for past global warming.

Commentary

Has the university become intolerant and close-minded?

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This article by prestigious McGill University ethicist Margaret Somerville is worth reading. (H/T Commenter ECM) She is one of the leading defenders of traditional marriage in Canada. She is a moderate social conservative. Here is a brief summary of her case against same-sex marriage. Her short article in the journal Academic Matters is about the intolerance of the leftist university elites against their opponents.

Here is the abstract:

In this edited excerpt from her Research and Society Lecture to the 2008 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, ethicist Margaret Somerville argues that universities are becoming forums of intolerance. Keeping the university as an intellectually open and respectful place is critical, she says, to finding the “shared ethics” essential to maintaining healthy, pluralistic democracies.

And here is an excerpt in which she discusses the impact of moral relativism on moral disagreements:

That is where political correctness enters the picture. It excludes politically incorrect values from the “all values are equal” stable. The intense moral relativists will tolerate all values except those they deem to be politically incorrect—which just happen to be the ones that conflict with their values.

Political correctness operates by shutting down non-politically correct people’s freedom of speech. Anyone who challenges the politically correct stance is, thereby, automatically labeled as intolerant, a bigot, or hatemonger. The substance of their arguments against a politically correct stance is not addressed; rather people labeled as politically incorrect are, themselves, attacked as being intolerant and hateful simply for making those arguments. This derogatorily -label-the-person-and-dismiss-them-on-the-basis-of-that-label approach is intentionally used as a strategy to suppress strong arguments against any politically correct stance and, also, to avoid dealing with the substance of these arguments.

It is important to understand the strategy employed: speaking against same-sex marriage, for example, is not characterized as speech; rather, it is characterized as a discriminatory act against homosexuals and, therefore, a breach of human rights or even a hate crime. Consequently, it is argued that protections of freedom of speech do not apply.

She illustrates with some examples:

We need to look at what “pure” moral relativism and intense tolerance, as modified by political correctness, mean in practice. So let ‘s look at the suppression of pro-life groups and pro-life speech on Canadian university campuses. Whatever one’s views on abortion, we should all be worried about such developments. Pro-choice students are trying to stop pro-life students from participating in the collective conversation on abortion that should take place. In fact, they don’t want any conversation, alleging that to question whether we should have any law on abortion is, in itself, unacceptable.

In some instances some people are going even further: they want to force physicians to act against their conscience under threat of being in breach of human rights or subject to professional disciplinary procedures for refusing to do so. The Ontario Human Rights Commission recently advised the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario to this effect.

Political correctness is being used to try to impose certain views and even actions that breach rights to freedom of conscience; to shut down free speech; and to contravene academic freedom. I do not need to emphasize the dangers of this in universities. The most fundamental precept on which a university is founded is openness to ideas and knowledge from all sources.

She spends the rest of the paper arguing for a system of “shared ethics” that grounds open, respectful debate between disagreeing parties. I hope this catches on before secular-left moves from censorship to outright violence, against those who would dare to disagree with them.

A short bio of Margaret Somerville

Margaret Somerville is Samuel Gale Professor in the Faculty of Law and a professor in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University and is the founding director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law. In 2004, she received the UNESCO Avicenna Prize for Ethics in Science and in 2006 delivered the prestigious Massey Lectures.