Minnesota for Marriage Warns: Keep Your Beliefs to Yourself

John Helmberger at Minnesota for Marriage writes:

As we’re sure you remember, just last year 1 man-1 woman marriage supporters were told often and loudly “not to worry,” that there was “no real threat to marriage.”

Now, only months later, Minnesotans face August 1, 2013—the day when gay “marriages” will begin in Minnesota after proponents successfully spent over $2 Million to convince the Minnesota Legislature to force gay “marriage” on the state. Turns out there was a threat to Marriage after all.

Gay “marriage” supporters are hailing August 1st as an historical day for their misguided view of what “equality” means, while over 1.4 Million Minnesotans who continue to believe in 1 man-1 woman marriage recognize that a gender-neutral society is not good for anyone (especially children) and that our state will be facing the consequences of what a few legislators forced on us for years to come—including a very clear and present threat to Minnesotans’ right to religious liberty.

Big WHOPPER of the Year: “The Gay ‘Marriage’ Bill Protects Your Religious Liberties”

Last year, gay “marriage” supporters told us there was no threat to our traditional definition of marriage…and now gay “marriage” starts in MN on August 1st. This year, they are hailing the gay “marriage” bill as a colossal “win” for religious liberty.

This WHOPPER reveals 3 things:

Gay “marriage” supporters know that religious liberty is important to ALL Minnesotans so they knew they had to pretend that religious freedom would be protected in order to get the Legislature to force gay “marriage” on the state;

A grave misunderstanding and lack of respect for people of faith by gay “marriage” proponents; AND

The real bigotry is against people with deeply held beliefs about what Marriage really is.
The result? Now over 1.4 Million Minnesotans are considered the legal equivalent of “bigots” and have NO protection to live out their beliefs in the public square.

The gay “marriage” law allows churches and SOME religious organizations to define marriage as only between 1 man and 1 woman. But, people of faith know that living out your beliefs means living what you believe OUTSIDE the walls of your church.

Gay “marriage” supporters and their allies in the MN Legislature seem to think that Minnesotans with deeply held religious beliefs about Marriage will be content to believe that marriage is the union of 1 man and 1 woman in the walls of their church and then stay SILENT about those beliefs outside those walls.

So, the MN Legislature passed the gay “marriage” bill with no protections for people outside the walls of their church. The MN Senate had the chance—and refused—to protect the religious liberty rights of Minnesotans outside their church walls.

Now Minnesotans with the deeply held belief that marriage is the union of 1 man and 1 woman cannot act on this belief in the way they do their business or the way they practice their profession.

The Minnesota Department of Human Rights has already confirmed our worst fears: There is NO religious liberty protection for people of faith in the public square.

The Department states specifically that nonreligious organizations are NOT exempt from the law and that nondiscrimination laws can (and will) be used as a weapon to punish people of faith. For example, if a Christian, Jewish, or Muslim florist refused to provide flowers for a same-sex “wedding” based on his religious beliefs, the same-sex couple can “file a claim with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights against the entity that discriminated against them.”

Bottom Line? The gay “marriage” lobby and their allies in the MN Legislature view Minnesotans of faith as “bigots” and will punish them accordingly using MN Human Rights laws—forcing men and women of faith to choose between their livelihood and their convictions.

That is not acceptable.

We Know What’s Coming…

Though it’s impossible to know all the consequences of creating a genderless society by enacting gay “marriage,” we do know one thing for sure: Like clockwork in states that already have gay “marriage” (or even states with only civil unions or other legal arrangements), people who have deeply held beliefs that marriage is only the union of one man and one woman become marginalized and are punished as bigots by state laws. Over 1.4 Million Minnesotans could be impacted in this way.

Here are just a FEW of the examples:

New York:

· New York town clerks resign rather than be forced to sign same-sex “marriage” licenses against their Christian beliefs.

· Robert & Cynthia, New York farm owners, face a discrimination complaint, including significant fines and penalties if found in violation of the state’s anti-discrimination laws, and potentially having to choose between their beliefs and operating their business.

New Mexico:

Elaine Huguenin fined over $6000 for discrimination when she refused to photograph a same-sex ceremony based on her religious beliefs.
Massachusetts:

David & Tonia Parker were given no right to opt their kindergartner out of instruction on gay “marriage” or even get prior notice of such instruction—despite their religious beliefs. David was even arrested for refusing to leave until the school provided him some accommodation for his family’s beliefs.
Vermont:

Jim & Mary O’Reilly, B&B owners, were sued for discrimination and forced to settle the case due to significant economic loss to their business after they refused to provide their services to a same-sex wedding because of their deeply held Catholic beliefs.
Colorado:

Christian bakery owners face a discrimination complaint for refusing to make a cake for a same-sex ceremony—they may be punished with fines or even jail time!
Washington:

Barronelle Stutzman, a florist for 30 years, faces a discrimination lawsuit by the ACLU and the State of Washington for refusing to do the flowers for a gay “wedding” based on her Christian beliefs.·
D.C.:

Catholic Charities shuts down adoption/foster care program due to same-sex “marriage” law.
·

We know this state-sanctioned discrimination is en route for Minnesota’s men and women of faith—yet the vast majority of Americans (and Minnesotans) believe that religious liberty SHOULD be protected in the public square—check out the latest POLL.

How Can YOU Be Prepared?

We’ve heard from many of you in the wake of the gay “marriage” law passed by the MN Legislature. We are hearing about the concerns for protecting your right to religious liberty from churches and business owners around the state. We hear and understand your concern—particularly in light of the announcements made by the MN Human Rights Department. We are working with allies both locally and nationally to provide you with all the information you need about what your rights are and what you can do to protect yourself.

Need Help?

If you need information about how to protect your religious liberties or if you are facing litigation because of your belief that marriage is only the union of one man and one woman, contact us for help:

Info@MinnesotaForMarriage.com OR Family@mfc.org
612-200-9662 612-789-8811

Remember, you are not alone! Over 1.4 Million Minnesotans believe as you do, and national allies like Alliance Defending Freedom work to defend individual religious liberties nationally.

Coleman Young, Liberalism, Unions and Dems Drained Detroit

How Coleman Young Ruined Detroit

by John Hinderaker at PowerLine:

Many observers, including us, have written about how Detroit’s slavish devotion to liberalism, unions and the Democratic Party ruined that once-great city. But one malefactor stands out above all others: Coleman Young, former organizer for the UAW, whom the union booted for being too radical, and who went on to become Detroit’s long-time mayor. A reader with first-hand experience recounts Young’s role in Detroit’s downfall:

I listened to some of your appearance the other day on the Bill Bennett show on my way to work. I would have loved to call and offer my two-cents worth on the situation in Detroit, but can’t afford the time to sit on hold for an extended period. Maybe when I retire in a year or two.

A little biographical detail to set the stage: I am not a native Detroiter. I grew up in the Upper Peninsula, went to undergraduate school in Ann Arbor from 1970-74, spent a few years in California sowing wild oats (no seed grew, thank goodness) and moved back to Michigan and into the Detroit area in 1978. It has been home ever since. As a youngster, I viewed Detroit from afar, as a college student I watched TV and listened to radio daily from Detroit while seldom actually going into the city, and as a resident I have lived in several of the suburbs but never in the city. I have watched the slow motion train wreck over several decades.

Listening to the discussion on the Bennett show, it was pretty clear that everyone gets it that the unions were probably the single biggest economic factor in the decline of the city. However, there was elephant in the room that no one seemed to want to talk much about and that is the role of race in the culture and politics of the current situation. I would submit that it was also a huge factor in the decline of Detroit and will, sadly, probably be the factor that will derail any rebound. The politics of race in Detroit are poisonous and I lay that at the feet of Coleman Young.

Young was far left, a fellow traveler of the CPUSA through membership in affiliated organizations and was deeply involved with the UAW. He was Mayor of Detroit for 20 years, from 1974 to 1994. I believe he made a cynical decision to make Detroit a majority black city, largely for his own political benefit. Whites had left the city in large numbers following the riots in ’67, but Young, I believe, was happy to see them go and subtly let them know they weren’t really wanted there anymore. The higher the black to white ratio in the city, the tighter was his grip on power.

In his years in power there were two techniques he used to cement his power and influence. One was to pack the city payroll with supporters, a tried and true tactic of municipal governments everywhere. However, his deep ties to the union movement opened the door for a huge amount of influence in compensation negotiations resulting in the high wages and generous benefits, including pensions, which are plaguing the city now.

The second technique he used was to keep race relations at a boil. When I moved here in 1978 the Detroit metro area was almost unbelievably segregated. Most suburbs, with a few notable exceptions, had only tiny black populations. Almost all the blacks in the metro area lived in the city and almost all the whites in the suburbs. My first drive up Jefferson Ave from the center of the city into the Grosse Pointes was eye opening. Within 3-4 blocks it changed from a filthy street with abandoned buildings and rundown store fronts covered with graffiti and protective steel gratings to a tree lined avenue with large well maintained homes with immaculate landscaping. There was a virtual Maginot line at the border of Detroit.

Young was a master of exploiting this divide and creating friction with the “suburbs” (dogwhistle for “whites”) and regularly used this to foster a “them (white) vs us (black)” mentality in his voter base. He was always the guy standing up to “the suburbs” and they loved him for it. He was mayor for life. Sadly, this technique was extremely effective, to the point where it not only worked on blacks in Detroit, it also worked on the whites in the suburbs. To this day, almost twenty years after Young left office, the animosity is such that any cooperative endeavors between Detroit and its surrounding communities are always fraught with a significant dose of racial politics. Blacks always think that whites want to take over and whites don’t see any benefit in doing anything that helps the city.

While the racial segregation of the Detroit metro area has eased over the years, this has actually worked to the detriment of the city. Over the past several decades crime has gone up and services have declined, making the city a much less desirable place to live, as population figures confirm. The vast majority of that population loss, I believe, has been the black middle classes who left the city for the suburbs. It is perfectly understandable that they want to move their families to where the streets are safer and services are better, most notably the school districts. The result is that the city is now largely populated by an underclass that is very poorly educated and pretty much only capable of working at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. Functional illiteracy has been estimated at nearly 50% and over a third of the population is on welfare. It is a tragedy and it will be a primary factor in keeping the city from any meaningful rebound, at least in the next couple of decades. The human capital is just not there to rebuild an economic infrastructure capable of lifting the city out of its financial difficulties. (Digression: if current lawsuits filed by pensioners to protect their interests are successful a huge proportion of meager city operating finances will be untouchable and other city services will suffer enormously in the future, digging an even deeper hole for the city.)

However, the legacy of Coleman Young will be another major and perhaps even more deleterious contributing factor. The animus still runs deep between the city and any outsiders. In the current situation, the emergency manager (although black) is seen as an agent of the State government which is currently in the hands of the Republican Party (and therefore white). Understanding the Coleman Young school of politics one would expect that the voters in Detroit would react negatively to “white people” trying to take over and disempower them and this is exactly what is happening. There is very little cooperation from the city with what is going on. Dave Bing, the current mayor, has been vilified for not being sufficiently confrontational and those city officials fighting the State and the Emergency Manager every step of the way have lots of support from the populace.

One illustrative example: Belle Isle is a city park on an island in the Detroit River. Years ago it was in fact a jewel of the city. Now it is dilapidated, overgrown and generally very disreputable looking. The State offered to take over the operation of the park on a long term lease basis. The State would rehab the property and foot the bill for staffing the park. The hue and cry from the city was immediate and overwhelmingly negative and the idea was swept into the dustbin rather quickly. This proposal was such an obvious win for the city, reducing city expenditures, improving infrastructure and quality of life for Detroit residents, and it was attacked vociferously based strictly on racial politics. Sadly it played out pretty much exactly as I expected when I first heard about the proposal. Thank you, Coleman Young.

So, to make a long story short, I am afraid that I have to agree with your assessment that it will probably be more difficult for the city of Detroit to rebound than the country of Greece. At least two huge hurdles need to be surmounted and I am skeptical about either.

Detroit was a better place in 1908, but to be fair, it is not the only city of which that could be said.

Corruption = Public Employee Unions

The Government Scandal (You Haven’t Heard Of)

from the Center for Policy Analysis:

By now it is well-known that public employee contracts with generous wages and benefits are bankrupting state and local governments across the country and encircling the necks of future generations with an anvil of debt. What is almost completely unknown is that union officials who negotiate lavish contracts for government workers are often paid to do so with taxpayer dollars, says Clint Bolick, a research fellow with the Hoover Institution and the director of the Goldwater Institute’s Center for Constitutional Litigation.

•This is part of a widespread practice called “release time,” in which public employees are paid full-time wages and benefits by taxpayers, yet they report and answer not to government officials (or taxpayers) but to their unions.
•In turn, release time can be used for lobbying, campaigning, soliciting grievances, union recruiting, and negotiating for higher wages and benefits — all at the taxpayer’s expense.
The practice was exposed in a 2011 report by Goldwater Institute investigative journalist Mark Flatten. He found that the City of Phoenix’s seven public employee union contracts included 73,000 hours of release time, at a total cost of $3.7 million. Most other cities around the nation, he found, also have release time. So does the federal government, which calls it “official time.”

•In 2011, taxpayers funded 3.4 million hours of union work at a cost of $156 million.
•Among those diverted to union work from their government jobs are 17 air traffic controllers (16 of whom are paid six-figure salaries to do so) — a wasteful extravagance that came to light when air traffic controllers were furloughed as part of the Obama administration’s response to the federal budget sequester.
•Since then, it was reported that part of the backlog in processing claims at the Veterans’ Administration is attributable to union release time.
Source: Clint Bolick, “The Government Scandal (You Haven’t Heard Of),” Defining Ideas, July 11, 2013.

John F. Kerry, A WHOLE LOT OF NOTHING!

A whole lot of nothing can only produce a whole lot of nothing is an ongoing truth. One of the lowest of nothings in the world of American politics, John F. Kerry, the present American Secretary of State, who follows Hillary Rodham Clinton in the post produces a “whole lot of nothing” thing called a peace conference dragging together not for the very first time officials of Israel and their perpetual opponents.

Mr. Kerry should be forever known for his treachery, his dishonesty, artistry in feigning war wounds and advertising his butt as source for his heroism along the distant rivers of Vietnam. He’s the one who through his ‘cherished’ medals over a fence to demonstrate his hate for America on television…..but later suggested it never happened in the name of other ambitions.

John Podhoretz writes the following in the New York Post:

Kerry’s pathetic peace talks
By JOHN PODHORETZ

Back in the 1960s, dorm rooms across America featured a cutesy wall poster that read, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” The similar question to be asked in light of the big-nothing event this week in Washington is: “What if they gave peace talks and nobody cared?”

You may not even know that so-called “peace negotiations” began yesterday between Israel and the Palestinians under the stage management of Secretary of State John Kerry.

There was a time when you would have known — oh, would you have known. The fact of the talks would’ve screamed at you from the front pages, would’ve begun every nightly newscast, would’ve been the subject of every editorial, every op-ed, every talking-head panel.

ReutersHeaded nowhere: Secretary of State John Kerry in Washington yesterday with the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, Tzipi Livni and Saeb Erekat.Now? Bupkis. That’s the Yiddish word for “nothing,” and it’s the mot juste for what’s going on here.

The urgent need to negotiate a peace between the two parties has always been based on a widely held theory that has been utterly discredited by recent history. The theory held that instability and tension in the Middle East was driven by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so solving it was the key to moving forward in the region.

Who on earth thinks that now? The Arab world has been on fire for 2 1/2 years now as a result of events and circumstances having absolutely nothing to do with Israel or the Palestinians. For more than two years, Islamists and would-be democrats and military-junta types in Egypt have been enmeshed in a titanic roundelay in which Israel does not figure.

Syrians are locked in a horrifyingly bloody civil war in which all the violent dysfunctions of the Arab world are now in play.

For once, no one is blaming the Jews, or acting as though the way to calm the storm is to create a Palestinian state.

(Many of those who preached this false gospel actually don’t want the storm calmed: They want Assad to fall in Syria, and they want the streets of Cairo to remain under siege so that neither the Army nor the Muslim Brotherhood feels it has the right to dominate Egypt.)

Meanwhile, back over where the peace talks are going to be happening, the Palestinian Authority is saddled with an increasingly dysfunctional government. The president, Mahmoud Abbas, can’t find himself a prime minister to run the place. The man in the job, the respected economist Salam Fayyad, quit earlier this year; his replacement lasted all of two weeks. The post is unfilled at what we are told may be a hinge moment in world history.

So, yeah.

Abbas has been governing illegally since 2009, after he canceled an election he feared he would lose. And this is the man — politically compromised at best with no one credible to back him up — who is going to make a highly complex deal with the Israelis? Please.

The Palestinian political system is cleaved in two, just as the land controlled by the Palestinians is divided. The Palestinian Authority rules over the West Bank; Hamas rules over the Gaza Strip. They hate each other.

Hamas has no interest in a deal with Israel; its stated purpose is the destruction of the Jewish state. And the Palestinian Authority has made it clear for the greater part of two decades that it can only accept a deal with Israel in theory, not in practice.

So here we are: Civil war in Syria, Egypt on fire and John Kerry trying to broker a deal with Palestinians who can’t deal and an Israeli prime minister who seems willing to go along with the charade (including releasing more than 100 terrorists from prison, a move the Israeli public hates) to make nice with the new man at Foggy Bottom.

This summer spectacular is already a bigger bomb than “The Lone Ranger.”

jpodhoretz@gmail.com

ObamaMarxism’s Tentacles Envelope Xcel

Ron Binz’s Rules for Radicals

An Obama appointee with an agenda to bypass Congress..

President Obama’s rule-makers have amped up major regulators like the Environmental Protection Agency and now they’re turning to more obscure outposts. Take the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, which oversees electric transmission and interstate pipelines. Or used to.

Now FERC has deputized itself as a Wall Street regulator. This month the commission squeezed Barclays BARC.LN -5.74%for $435 million for alleged energy-market manipulation, the largest penalty in FERC’s history and more than all of its previous fines combined. Another $410 million fine will soon hit J.P. Morgan, according to a Journal scoop.

Yet that will seem minor if the next FERC chairman is Ron Binz—the most important and radical Obama nominee you’ve never heard of. An electric regulator in Colorado from 2007 to 2011, Mr. Binz is the latest Presidential nominee who doesn’t understand the difference between making laws and enforcing them.

No, that’s unfair. Mr. Binz doesn’t care about the difference. In a recent interview with the Association for the Demand Response and Smart Grid trade group, reflecting on the lessons of his Colorado job, he nodded at the “judicial role” of regulators. But then he mused about their “legislative role” too: “I saw the commission not simply as an umpire calling balls and strikes, but also as a leader on policy implementation.”

This philosophy is especially troubling for a commission like FERC, which is supposed to be an even-handed arbitrator independent of the executive branch. FERC’s narrow legal obligations include protecting the affordability and reliability of the U.S. power supply and electric grid—goals that are in more than a little tension with Mr. Obama’s anticarbon program. The law is a nuisance when you think you’re saving the planet.

.Mr. Binz was supposed to fill a similarly neutral role in Colorado when then Democratic Governor Bill Ritter appointed him chairman of the public utility commission. Prior to his tenure, that job consisted of consumer protection and ensuring that electricity was low-cost. But Mr. Ritter wanted to do something about climate change, and Mr. Binz told the Denver Post in 2007 (using the third person) that “There’s an expectation that the chair will carry a banner for the new administration.”

Mr. Binz became the point man for legislation that would all but force several Denver-area coal plants to convert to natural gas though they weren’t slated for retirement. He even negotiated terms directly with the Colorado power company that it was his responsibility to regulate, Xcel Energy XEL +1.04%.

Mr. Binz assured Xcel that it could pass on to rate payers, with a guaranteed return, whatever capital investment was necessary to replace the working coal assets. Documents obtained by the Colorado Mining Association under a state open records law show that Mr. Binz promised “extraordinary cost recovery.” In a March 2010 email, he wrote that “I think it’s more nearly a self-fulfilling prophecy—the larger (and faster) the cost burden in the Company’s approved plan, the stronger the basis for the Commission to adopt extraordinary regulatory measures to assure the Company’s financial health.”

In other words, the more Xcel spent in the name of the Ritter-Binz political agenda, the more Mr. Binz would use the discretion he gave himself in the law he wrote to give Xcel favorable treatment. When Stockholm syndrome set in with Xcel and the company took the deal, Mr. Binz exulted that “the eagle has landed.” It was great for everyone except the consumers involuntarily funding it.

Mr. Binz would almost certainly commandeer the same extralegal powers at FERC to perpetrate similar abuses, regardless of congressional intent. “Regulation needs to shift from its backward-looking focus on costs, to a forward-looking emphasis on value and desired societal outcomes,” he says. In a 2012 report for the consultant Ceres subtitled “What Every State Regulator Needs to Know,” Mr. Binz added that “Both regulators and utilities need to evolve beyond historical practice,” and he encouraged utility commissioners to expand their mandates to include his subjective conception of the “broad societal benefits” of low- or no-carbon power.

FERC was a sleepy regulator until the Obama Presidency, but it has statutory powers that could be turned into anticarbon weapons, such as the authority to impose fines of up $1 million per day for what it claims are violations. They also include the power to block energy mergers and the construction of terminals, pipelines and transmission.

You can bet that Mr. Binz will be creative and political, and don’t be so sure his only target is coal. At an Edison Foundation panel this March, he called natural gas a “dead end” technology because “on the carbon basis, you hit the wall in 2035 or so.” He added that “We have to do better on carbon than even natural gas will allow us to do.” This is unusual in that the greens usually pretend to support gas to make outlawing coal seem more reasonable. Mr. Binz let the mask slip.

Mr. Binz is part of the White House’s damn-the-voters strategy of imposing through regulation what Congress won’t pass, and now he wants to glide into FERC without protest. But the Senate’s advice-and-consent role is especially important because a FERC chairman has broad powers, much like a CEO’s, even if other commissioners dissent—and the chairman is not supposed to carry Mr. Obama’s banner. Mr. Binz’s record and methods deserve far more scrutiny than they have received.

Detroitism NOT an Uncommon Urban Disease

19 U.S. Cities Have Proportionately Bigger Workforces than Bankrupted Detroit
July 30, 2013

Detroit declared bankruptcy due in no small part to $3 billion in unfunded public employee pensions owed to a sprawling city workforce that kept growing even as the city’s population shriveled. But a Washington Examiner analysis finds that 19 major American cities have even bigger ratios of such workers to residents.

The Examiner used the Census Bureau’s 2011 Annual Survey of Public Employment and Payroll to rank every U.S. city with a population of 200,000 or more. Some of those cities managed to get along fine with comparatively few municipal employees:

•San Diego has 9,501 municipal employees for 1.3 million residents, or one for every 137 residents.
•But others like San Francisco have a bureaucracy seven times as large, with one of every 28 of the city’s 800,000 residents on the city payroll.
•San Francisco’s 28,660 workers, with an average salary of $91,000, come in a long tail of different job categories, including 2,000 health employees — not including city hospitals –1,843 welfare workers, 2,872 judicial and corrections officers, 1,081 parks workers, and 1,171 in “other government administration.”
•San Francisco’s 4,266 transit workers do not include Bay Area Rapid Transit employees presently striking for a 21 percent pay increase.
•The city with the leanest government is Bakersfield, Calif., which has 1,410 employees for 348,000 residents, or one for every 246.
•Bakersfield’s population has quadrupled in the last 40 years, and its public employee workforce may have lagged behind.
•The city is one of California’s most conservative and the largest that employs the lowest sales tax allowed by state law.
Washington, D.C., ranks first in the nation, which is no surprise to residents who recall the dramatic growth of the municipal workforce in the 1980s under then-mayor Marion Barry. But D.C. also has the distinction of providing services that in many other places are often split among multiple levels of government, including state, local and county authorities.

Source: Luke Rosiak, “Exography: 19 U.S. Cities Have Proportionately Bigger Workforces than Bankrupted Detroit,” Washington Examiner, July 22, 2013.

Prager: Liberalism Loosens Ones Evil

LIBERALISM MAKES IT EASIER TO BE BAD

by Dennis Prager

Tuesday, July 30, 2013
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There are many liberals who lead thoroughly decent lives. And there are conservatives who do not.

But that is not the whole issue.

There is something about liberalism that is not nearly as true about conservatism. The further left one goes, the more one finds that the ideology provides moral cover for a life that is not moral. While many people left of center lead fine personal lives, many do not. And left-wing ideals enable a person to do that much more than conservative ideals do.

There is an easy way to demonstrate this.

If a married — or even unmarried — conservative congressman had texted sexual images of himself to young women he did not even know, he would have been called something Anthony Wiener has not been called — a hypocrite.

Why? Because conservatives — secular conservatives, not only religious conservatives — are identified with moral values in the personal sphere, and liberals are not. Liberals rarely called Bill Clinton a hypocrite for his extramarital affair while president. George W. Bush would have been pilloried as such.

Simply put, we do not generally judge personal conduct the same when it comes to liberals and conservatives.

Both liberals and conservatives know this. As a result, as noted, liberal social positions can provide moral cover for immoral behavior in a way that conservative positions cannot.

Though there are many sincere liberals, it is likely that this ability to provide moral cover for a less than moral life is one source of liberalism’s appeal.

I first thought about this when I saw how the left-wing students at my graduate school, Columbia University, behaved. Aside from their closing down classes, taking over office buildings, and ransacking professors’ offices, I saw the way in which many of them conducted themselves in their personal lives. Most of them had little sense of personal decency, and lived lives of narcissistic hedonism. Women who were involved with leftist groups have told of how poorly they were treated. And one suspects that they would have been treated far better by conservative, let alone religious, men on campus.

My sense was that the radicals’ commitment to “humanity,” to “peace,” and to “love” gave them license to feel good about themselves without having to lead a good life. Their vocal opposition to war and to racism provided them with all the moral self-esteem they wanted.

Consider the example of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. He had been expelled from college for paying someone to take his exams. His role in the death of a woman with whom he spent an evening would have sent almost anyone without his family name to prison — or would have at least resulted in prosecution for negligent homicide. And he spent decades using so many women in so public a way that stories about his sex life were routinely told in Washington. Read the 9,000-word 1990 article in GQ by Michael Kelly, who a few years later became the editor of the New Republic.

When this unimpressive man started espousing liberal positions, speaking passionately about the downtrodden in society, it recalled the unimpressive students who marched on behalf of civil rights, peace and love.

It is quite likely that Ted Kennedy came to believe in the positions that he took. But I also suspect that he found espousing those positions invaluable to his self-image and to his public image: “Look at what a moral man I am after all.” And liberal positions were all that mattered to the left and to the liberal media that largely ignored such lecherous behavior as the “waitress sandwich” he made in a Washington, D.C. restaurant with another prominent liberal, former Senator Chris Dodd.

In addition to knowing that liberal positions provide moral cover for immoral personal behavior, liberals know that their immoral behavior will be given more of pass than exactly the same behavior would if done by a conservative.

Women’s groups provided Bill Clinton with enormous moral capital because he supported their feminist agenda. One leading feminist famously said she would be happy to get on her knees and pleasure Clinton thanks to his pro-choice position on abortion.

Conservative politicians have the same sex drive as liberal politicians, the same marital problems and the same ubiquitous temptations and opportunities. And some will therefore engage in extramarital sex. But every conservative politician knows that should he be caught, his positions on issues not only do not provide moral cover for his conduct, those very positions condemn it. There is no benefit to the conservative sinner in being a conservative. There is great benefit to the liberal sinner in being a liberal.

Reviewing the Importance of Being Human

Mark Waldeland sent the following:

Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism by Robert P. George:

“Any healthy society, any decent society, will rest on three pillars. The first is respect for the human person — the individual human being and his dignity. Where this pillar is in place, the formal and informal institutions of society, and the beliefs and practices of the people, will be such that every member of the human family, irrespective not only of race, sex, or ethnicity but also of age, size, stage of development, or condition of dependency, is treated as a person — that is, as a subject bearing profound, inherent, and equal worth and dignity.

“A society that does not nurture respect for the human person — beginning with the child in the womb, and including the mentally and physically impaired and the frail elderly — will sooner or later (probably sooner than later) come to regard human beings as mere cogs in the larger social wheel whose dignity and well-being may legitimately be sacrificed for the sake of collectivity. Some members of the community — those in certain development stages, for example — will come to be regarded as disposable. Others — those in certain conditions of dependency, for example — will come to be viewed as intolerably burdensome, as “useless eaters,” as “better off dead,” as Lebensunwertes lebens (“life unworthy of life”). . . .

“The second pillar of any decent society is the institution of the family. It is indispensable. The family, based on the marital commitment of husband and wife, is the original and best ministry of health, education, and welfare. Although no family is perfect, no institution matches the healthy family in its capacity to transmit to each new generation the understandings and traits of character — the values and virtues — on which the success of every other institution of society, from law and government to educational institutions and business firms, vitally depends.

When families fail to form, or too many break down, the effective transmission of the virtues of honesty, civility, self-restraint, concern for the welfare of others, justice, compassion, and personal responsibility is imperiled. Without these virtues, respect for the dignity of the human person, the first pillar of a decent society, will be undermined and sooner or later lost — for even the most laudable formal institutions cannot uphold respect for human dignity where people do not have the virtues that make that respect a reality and give it vitality in actual social practices.”

What Is Religious Freedom?
by Robert P. George

What Is Religious Freedom?

When the US Congress passed the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998, it recognized that religious liberty and the freedom of conscience are in the front rank of the essential human rights whose protection, in every country, merits the solicitude of the United States in its foreign policy. Therefore, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, of which I became chair yesterday, was created by the act to monitor the state of these precious rights around the world.

But why is religious freedom so essential? Why does it merit such heightened concern by citizens and policymakers alike? In order to answer those questions, we should begin with a still more basic question. What is religion?

Religion as Right Relation to the Divine

In its fullest and most robust sense, religion is the human person’s being in right relation to the divine—the more-than-merely-human source or sources, if there be such, of meaning and value. In the perfect realization of the good of religion, one would achieve the relationship that the divine—say God himself, assuming for a moment the truth of monotheism—wishes us to have with Him.

Of course, different traditions of faith have different views of what constitutes religion in its fullest and most robust sense. There are different doctrines, different scriptures, different ideas of what is true about spiritual things and what it means to be in proper relationship to the more-than-merely-human source or sources of meaning and value that different traditions understand as divinity.

For my part, I believe that reason has a very large role to play for each of us in deciding where spiritual truth most robustly is to be found. And by reason here, I mean not only our capacity for practical reasoning and moral judgment, but also our capacities for understanding and evaluating claims of all sorts: logical, historical, scientific, and so forth. But one need not agree with me about this in order to affirm with me that there is a distinct human good of religion—a good that uniquely shapes one’s pursuit of and participation in all the aspects of our flourishing as human beings—and that one begins to realize and participate in this good from the moment one begins the quest to understand the more-than-merely-human sources of meaning and value and to live authentically by ordering one’s life in line with one’s best judgments of the truth in religious matters.

If I am right, then the existential raising of religious questions, the honest identification of answers, and the fulfilling of what one sincerely believes to be one’s duties in the light of those answers are all parts of the human good of religion. But if that is true, then respect for a person’s well-being, or more simply respect for the person, demands respect for his or her flourishing as a seeker of religious truth and as one who lives in line with his or her best judgments of what is true in spiritual matters. And that, in turn, requires respect for everyone’s liberty in the religious quest—the quest to understand religious truth and order one’s life in line with it.

Because faith of any type, including religious faith, cannot be authentic—it cannot be faith—unless it is free, respect for the person—that is to say, respect for his or her dignity as a free and rational creature—requires respect for his or her religious liberty. That is why it makes sense, from the point of view of reason, and not merely from the point of view of the revealed teaching of a particular faith—though many faiths proclaim the right to religious freedom on theological and not merely philosophical grounds—to understand religious freedom as a fundamental human right.

Since its establishment by Congress, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom has stood for religious freedom in its most robust sense. It has recognized that the right to religious freedom is far more than a mere “right to worship.” It is a right that pertains not only to what the believer does in the synagogue, church, or mosque, or in the home at mealtimes or before bed; it is the right to express one’s faith in the public as well as private sphere and to act on one’s religiously informed convictions about justice and the common good in carrying out the duties of citizenship. Moreover, the right to religious freedom by its very nature includes the right to leave a religious community whose convictions one no longer shares and the right to join a different community of faith, if that is where one’s conscience leads. And respect for the right strictly excludes the use of civil authority to punish or impose civic disabilities on those who leave a faith or change faiths.

From the perspective of any believer, the further away one gets from the truth of faith in all its dimensions, the less fulfillment is available. But that does not mean that even a primitive and superstition-laden faith is utterly devoid of value, or that there is no right to religious liberty for people who practice such a faith. Nor does it mean that atheists have no right to religious freedom. Respect for the good of religion requires that civil authority respect and nurture conditions in which people can engage in the sincere religious quest and live lives of authenticity reflecting their best judgments as to the truth of spiritual matters. To compel an atheist to perform acts that are premised on theistic beliefs that he cannot, in good conscience, share, is to deny him the fundamental bit of the good of religion that is his, namely, living with honesty and integrity in line with his best judgments about ultimate reality. Coercing him to perform religious acts does him no good, since faith really must be free, and coercion dishonors his dignity as a free and rational person.

Just Limits on the Freedom of Religion

Of course, there are limits to the freedom that must be respected for the sake of the good of religion and the dignity of the human person as a being whose integral fulfillment includes the spiritual quest and the ordering of one’s life in line with one’s best judgment as to what spiritual truth requires. Grave injustice can be committed by sincere people for the sake of religion. The presumption in favor of respecting liberty must be powerful and broad. But it is not unlimited.

Even the great end of getting right with God cannot justify a morally bad means, even for the sincere believer. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the Aztecs in practicing human sacrifice, or the sincerity of those in the history of various traditions of faith who used coercion and even torture in the cause of what they believed was religiously required. But these things are deeply wrong, and should not be tolerated in the name of religious freedom. To suppose otherwise is to back oneself into the awkward position of supposing that violations of religious freedom (and other injustices of equal gravity) must be respected for the sake of religious freedom.

Still, to overcome the powerful and broad presumption in favor of religious liberty, to be justified in requiring the believer to do something contrary to his faith or forbidding the believer to do something his conscience requires, political authority must meet a heavy burden.

What Is Conscience?

But conscience has burdens proper to itself as well. To understand the nature of conscience and the ground of its claim to freedom, we do well to turn to John Henry Newman, the great nineteenth-century English intellectual. Newman understood human beings as free and rational creatures—creatures whose freedom and rationality reflects their having been made in the very image and likeness of God.

Newman’s dedication to the rights of conscience is well known. Even long after his conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism, he famously toasted “the Pope, yes, but conscience first,” as he put it in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875). Our obligation to follow conscience was, he insisted, in a profound sense primary and even overriding. Is there a duty to follow the teachings of the pope? Yes, to be sure. As a Catholic, he would affirm that with all his heart. If, however, a conflict were to arise, such that conscience (formed as best as one could form it) forbade one’s following the pope, well, it is the obligation of conscience that must prevail.

Many of our contemporaries will be tempted to see in this their own view of conscience—as an interior, self-liberating referral of grave moral questions to our “feelings” or untutored intuitions as “autonomous” beings. But Newman, the most powerful defender of freedom of conscience, held a view of conscience and freedom that could not be more deeply at odds with such a view. Let Newman himself state the difference:

Conscience has rights because it has duties; but in this age, with a large portion of the public, it is the very right and freedom of conscience to dispense with conscience. Conscience is a stern monitor, but in this century it has been superseded by a counterfeit, which the eighteen centuries prior to it never heard of, and could not have mistaken for it if they had. It is the right of self-will.

Conscience, as Newman understood it, is the very opposite of “autonomy” in the modern sense. It is not a writer of permission slips. It is not in the business of licensing us to do as we please or conferring on us “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Rather, conscience is one’s last best judgment specifying the bearing of moral principles one grasps, yet in no way makes up for oneself, on concrete proposals for action. Conscience identifies our duties under a moral law that we do not ourselves make. It speaks of what one must do and what one must not do. Understood in this way, conscience is, indeed, what Newman said it is: a stern monitor.

Contrast this understanding of conscience with what Newman condemns as its counterfeit. Conscience as “self-will” is a matter of feeling or emotion, not reason. It is concerned not so much with the identification of what one has a duty to do or not do, one’s feelings and desires to the contrary notwithstanding, but rather, and precisely, with sorting out one’s feelings. Conscience as self-will identifies permissions, not obligations. It licenses behavior by establishing that one doesn’t feel bad about doing it, or, at least, one doesn’t feel so bad about doing it that one prefers the alternative of not doing it.

I’m with Newman. His key distinction is between conscience, authentically understood, and self-will—conscience as the permissions department. His core insight is that conscience has rights because it has duties. The right to follow one’s conscience, and the obligation to respect conscience—especially in matters of faith, where the right of conscience takes the form of religious liberty of individuals and communities of faith—obtain not because people as autonomous agents should be able to do as they please; they obtain, and are stringent and sometimes overriding, because people have duties and the obligation to fulfill them. The duty to follow conscience is a duty to do things or refrain from doing things not because one wants to follow one’s duty, but even if one strongly does not want to follow it. The right of conscience is a right to do what one judges oneself to be under an obligation to do, whether one welcomes the obligation or must overcome strong aversion in order to fulfill it. If there is a form of words that sums up the antithesis of Newman’s view of conscience as a stern monitor, it is the imbecilic slogan that will forever stand as a verbal monument to the “Me-generation”: “If it feels good, do it.”

Freedom, Justice, and Duty

Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr., responded in his Letter from Birmingham Jail to those who criticized his program of civil disobedience as mere willful law-breaking:

I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

King turned not inward to his own feelings of being aggrieved by the law, not to the intuitions of his autonomous self, and not even to a claim of his own rights. Instead he turned to “moral responsibility”—to obligation, to duty. He, like Newman, understood this as a duty to principles of justice we did not create, but to which we must respond. As the Declaration of Independence teaches us, prior to any laws made by men are the immutable standards of justice—standards by which we judge whether the laws are just and can rightfully command our obedience.

These standards, of the equal dignity of all human persons, of their equal freedom, and of the accountability of government to the people, apply not just to our own laws but to those of other nations as well. As the United Nations recognized in its 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, religious freedom is an essential principle of justice, in all nations and in all ages. Our Congress said the same in the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. All of us have a duty, in conscience, to work for the religious freedom of all men and women everywhere.

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He is the new chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. This essay, adapted from his new book Conscience and Its Enemies, represents his own opinions. He is not speaking on behalf of the USCIRF.

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Obamalings are Primary Propagators of Racism in America!

I would not have chosen the following title for this Kevin McCullough’s piece from Town Hall. If the Racist Obamalings are honestly and dutifly exposed for their sins against tolerance and corrupting traditional American values by trumping up hate against white males and anyone else intellectually associated with them, their crimes will clearly be their downfall.

Racism and sexism against white males and their associates have been institutionalized by hate groups, led by NOW, the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, the feminist clergy, the American university and their allies in the press for more than a generation. No one dares examine the lefty Jewish ACLU interests and methods to sabotage the Christian community and its teachings whenever and whereever possible. The country has always been immune to God, so their Marxist pundits declare.

Besides, playing golf on Sundays eventually might begin to outbore going to Church as gangland and other drug violence and corruption sweep the nation. Those who preach and pastor might find more intelligent, more spiritual, more classical, more persuasive arguments for the nation’s Godfearing past to return to our present.

Usually good people abhor trash and Obama dishonesty and deviousness. The insidious Lefty racism and its sisterhood feminism at long last, is only now being exposed.

Truth and it freedom of speech might score a victory or two over Lefty racism in the country sooner than Mr. McCullough believes.

WHY AMERICAN RACISM IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DEFEAT

by Kevin McCullough at Town Hall:

Despite all of the genuine hopes, by millions of people, of every tribe and tongue from every corner of this planet, an excruciatingly sad reality is being made perfectly clear.

The issue of race–and more specifically America’s brand of racism–will never be defeated.

As the father of a multi-racial family, this reality strikes at the disappointment my soul feels about many things in our nation today, but none more personal.

Some who see the headline to this piece will immediately assume I’ve taken a position in this fight. Because I merely observe what is evident, and state my observation publicly. Some whites will believe I am attacking them. Many African-Americans will believe I am championing their grievances. The truth is neither, the truth is both, and the truth will never be admitted.

For it is impossible to cure a societal sickness, when parties don’t wish for it to be cured!

And while there are some pockets where racial bias presents itself in the white to black reality of our culture, the overwhelming abusers of race, the manipulators of skin color, and the purveyors of hate based on ignorance and ill will–are actually those who claim they are fighting against it.

The case of Travon Martin’s death is the complete evidence of that last assertion.

No where, was there an ounce of evidence that the man who shot Travon followed him, reported him, or defended himself against him–even for his very life–based on the color of Travon’s skin. Yet “civil rights ‘leaders'”–who in reality have more moral authority being a clown in a local circus than thoughtful and genuine purveyors of racial understanding–manipulated every element of fact in the case to convince the sleeping media–who refused to do their homework–that the man who shot Travon was racially motivated, racially biased, and hateful of races different than his.

None of which was proven in the elongated case, coverage during, or clownery following the conclusion.

Simply put, the Sharpton, Jackson, Holder, and Obama rhetoric–though stating it was dressed in compromise–actually was intended to incite further anger, resentment, and furtherance of the untruths told for months in the case.

So if the “civil rights ‘leadership'” is throwing gas on the heated embers, how else will those–who choose not to investigate facts for themselves but accept these voices wholesale–react?

The accumulation of power in the minds of the four leaders mentioned above is more important than truly trying to find resolution, understanding, and accuracy.

Another bit of evidence in the matter is that when voices of reason do speak (i.e. Lisa Fritsch, Charles Barkley, Dr. William Cosby, et. al), based on seeing the facts for themselves and then urging calm they are shouted down. Or in Dr. Cosby’s case–“Reverend” Jesse Jackson in a moment of candidness–utters desires to remove Cosby’s anatomical manhood.

Also readily evident to any who would be honest is that when there are voices who point out that current solutions being touted for suffering neighborhoods are not working, squeals of “racism”, come the same grievance inciters. So when a popular commentator on the largest news network points out the inconsistency of punishing a Latin American man harshly for an accidental death, while more or less ignoring the character, grooming, and integrity of African-American men who go on killing rampages in wholly African-American controlled neighborhoods is at a minimum hypocritical.

The truth–the cold hard truth–is that this cadre of voices (Sharpton, Holder, Jackson, Obama, et al.) benefit far more by practicing racism in theory, rhetoric, and actions, than by ever seeking honest resolutions. They continue to be propped up by those who keep themselves intellectually shallow of fact. And a handful of media outlets–mostly operated by NBC–seem to pander on the issue instead of seeking intellectually rigorous, heartfelt, passionate solutions to the problems that face the nation.

This combination of dishonesty, access, and support now furthers racist outcomes and those involved are directly contributing to the anger, vandalism, and violence that follows in its wake.

As the father of a son whose skin is darker than any of the men mentioned in this article, my fear is what consequences he faces, because of their vanity, selfishness, hubris, and greed.

See in order to end racism, you must not merely tolerate people who are different than you–but begin to truly honor, serve, and love them.

And it is the absence of honor in the character of today’s “civil rights ‘leaders'” that betrays their true intention: to practice racism, and to profit from it for themselves indefinitely.

Making it an issue that appears at present nearly impossible to defeat.

What the Ditzies are Programmed to Rationalize

The human animal is a piece of genetic material hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years in the making. The male has been born with an instinct to be a killer, is natively curious and driven to build his nest or create something satisfying for himself, his mates and offspring, to make meaning to his life while craving to be free to do his thing which includes by Nature protecting his gains.

The female is born ditzy moved by feelings uber alles including facts, reality, dimension, for she is not in love with building much of anything except security for herself and therefore her children. Protection, not liberty governs her being.

And therein lies the rub. If educated properly the human male can control his chances of becoming violent. But the ditzy will always haunt the human female whether educated or not…..She prefers peace to discussions of issues and usually, nearly always prefers to leave the scene rather than listen to an idea outside of her tolerance or realm. She may not speak for days or ever again to those who made her upset over whatever. Feelings matter…reason does not….as a rule.

She can always rely on a Marxist government to supply her with food, shelter, and protection. Gals overwhelmingly loved Socialist Adolph Hitler in January 1930.

If an issue is a matter of solving a problem, guys, with the usual exception of the lefty ones, driven genetically to solve problems usually probe for the correct, the better material for building an answer. Truth usually trumps feelings….with the obvious exception of America’s 44th president, Barack Hussein Obama, the champion of feminists and racists and feelings of his own.

The left is by Nature ditzy for it is a collection of feminized wants and needs….it has never cared about liberty…..only amassing power to control and provide security to make females feel equal to their males…..the age old battle between the human male versus the human female.

Please read carefully the following writings of a feminist mind analyzing the results of the Martin-Zimmerman clash.

A feminist writer, E. J. Graff owned to writing the following:

“MY CHILD WILL FACE A HATRED THAT I HAVE NEVER KNOWN”

I’m a white woman married to another white woman. How do we explain what happened to Trayvon to our black son?

After George Zimmerman walked free, we finally showed our 10-year-old the Jackie Robinson biopic, 42. He had trouble sleeping. So did we.

We’re white. He’s African-American. In the past, when we’ve tried talking with him about what’s wrong with the N-word—a word so coolly slung in his favorite songs—he’s told us that “no one cares” about that race stuff any more. He can think that because he’s grown up in a Cambridge, Mass., bubble, where his family—two white women raising one brown boy—is boringly ordinary. He knows plenty of other brown and black kids—on our block, in his school, on his sports teams—with at least one white parent, whether by birth, remarriage, or adoption; often enough the parents are two women or two men. In his daily life, “all that race stuff” can easily seem like ancient history.

But he’s stopped saying that since he watched 42, and heard the N-word used in its native habitat, flecked with the spittle of hate and contempt. It was painful. But it gave us the opening we needed to talk seriously about race, including the gut-wrenching Zimmerman verdict. He hadn’t known about the trial—Whitey Bulger, Aaron Hernandez, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev have dominated the crime news up here in Boston recently—but we had to find a way to tell him. Because although he doesn’t know it yet, it was a trial about him.

So we put on the movie. Had I watched 42 before my little Bruins-loving man came into my life, I would’ve found it cheesy. I would’ve rolled my eyes at Robinson’s ideal and admiring bride; I would’ve yeah-yeah-yeahed as, one by one, his teammates stepped up to fight others’ prejudices. And I would’ve had no patience with the simplistic depiction of racism as meaningless ignorance easily overcome by real contact with black people, rather than as the structurally entrenched enforcement of a damaging caste system in which some humans profited from other humans’ debasement.

But with my boy sitting next to me, visibly miserable to learn what Jackie Robinson faced, and knowing that Trayvon Martin had been shot and killed in the same town—Sanford, Fla.—where the movie showed Robinson threatened by the Klan, 42 left me in tears. Our son told us that he didn’t like the movie, and asked if we could turn it off. But we can’t in good conscience launch him unprepared into a world where there are still George Zimmermans walking free. He needs to understand this sickening history, both the unreasoning white hatred and the white allies who stand up to it. The past isn’t over, as Faulkner wrote. It isn’t even the past. We watched it all the way through.

Afterward, our sweet-headed boy—a child who’s terrified of spiders and loves fart jokes—was especially upset by the fact that Robinson had gotten hate mail from strangers, that his life was threatened for playing baseball with white men. He kept asking us: Who wrote those letters? Did the police catch them and put them in jail? Why not? We’ve worked hard to undo his outsize fear of “bad guys” and burglars, to teach him that most people are good, to understand that the police and the law are there to protect us. So it was painful to say: Some of those letters were probably written by cops.

When he wanted to know why the jury let Zimmerman off, we didn’t have the words to explain reasonable doubt to a 10-year-old. He wouldn’t understand phrases like poor prosecution, indifferent investigation, or “stand your ground.” We couldn’t articulate the probability that by refusing to consider race, the mostly white jury was probably influenced by parts of their brains they don’t know are there, or to explain that hidden biases could have influenced both Zimmerman and the jury to perceive a young black man in a hoodie as a potential menace, whereas a young white man, similarly reedy and with a hood up to keep out the rain, might get the benefit of the doubt. How do you explain that sometimes these attitudes grow not out of overt hatred but because of the more subtle biases, nearly undetectable except by social scientists and neurologists, lodged in American neurons so deeply that most of us don’t even know that they’re there?

When he asked whether black people “do most crimes”—no, it breaks down more by poverty than by race, but African-Americans are convicted at a higher rate and sentenced more harshly—it broke our hearts. Where would he get such an idea? From the ether. From TV, movies, and video games. The subtler biases about race are poisons in the cultural water, even in the People’s Republic of Cambridge. When he angrily asked why President Obama didn’t just pass a law stopping things like what happened to Trayvon Martin, we did not have the heart to tell him that President Obama gets threatening hate letters, just as Jackie Robinson did.

Watching him suffer through the movie, and struggle afterwards to talk about the pain it caused him—no parent intentionally puts their child through this kind of misery. But at age 10, our boy is already more than 5 feet tall. His feet are a men’s size 10. He’s a full head taller than the other kids in his grade, and as sturdy as a linebacker. I have no doubt whatsoever that my little man is, at best, two years away from the day when some people start locking their car doors as he walks alone down the street, or from the moment when police will more quickly see him as a suspect than a victim—yes, even here in Cambridge. I feel sick about it, but my little man walks around in a skin that will attract fear and unreasoning contempt, and since we will not always be there to protect him, we have to prepare him.

He was upset when I mentioned that when my white uncle and African-American aunt first married in 1958—the same year Mildred Jeter married Richard Loving—their marriage was illegal in more than 20 states. So I told him that one of the things I love most about our country is that, again and again, we’ve realized that we were mistreating particular groups of people and have then worked hard to make it better. African-Americans, women, immigrants, Jews, now lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people, and soon, I hope, Muslims: My most passionate patriotism springs from that imperfect but steady effort to transform our social climate from hatred to welcome.

Still there’s something horrifyingly vulnerable about being unable to protect my child from a kind of hatred that I have never faced—and that he doesn’t yet really grasp is out there. As close as we may be to our African-American and biracial friends and family, my wife and I haven’t been followed around stores or had strange children curiously touch our hair. We may exchange exasperated glances with other black kids’ parents (of whatever races) when coaches mix up the names of the African-American kids on the team, but it’s not happening to us. And while we may work hard to ensure that he has black adults in his life, and black men close enough to lean on, it’s scary to know that he has to walk into this without a parent who can intimately identify.

When he asked, we told him that, yes, dangerous and threatening words had been flung at us—dyke, homo, goddamn lezzie, phrases that came out so fast I could feel again how deeply they’re seared into us. We explained how we had felt and responded when such words were said, and how long it had been since we’d heard them. He might be alone, in our family, in facing race prejudice, which will become so much keener and more dangerous in just two or three years. But I felt, for a moment, that we were able at least to give him a model of facing down mistrust and even hatred without letting it sink you.

He didn’t want to sleep alone that night, so we let him camp out on our bedroom floor. As he got ready for bed, my little guy started a chant of “USA! USA! Except 20 states!” No, I corrected him. “All the states are OK now. They fixed their laws. Black and white can be married anywhere in the country.” I knew I was telling a little (if you’ll excuse the phrase) white lie: Voter ID laws and the disenfranchisement of felons disproportionately affect black people; mini-DOMA laws ban recognition of his moms’ marriage in half the American states. But there are limits to what you can load onto a 10-year-old in a single day.

Further comment: This Ms sure feels good about herself and what she has achieved…..up to this point. She claims to love her boy…..and that the law should favor the feelings of her boy rather than depend upon truth and evidence beyond a shadow of a doubt a crime had been committed.

The verdict of our peers stands truthfully as the facts were declared……but lefties, tyrants and Marxists don’t care about justice based on truth as presented before one’s peers. They prefer to dictate by feelings.