Thank You, Public Sector Unions

Thank goodness for public sector unions.  The police union is what allows things like this to happen:

 

Aw, shame on me.  I'm picking on the one fat cop in America, right?

Yes, Timmy, you should run for it.  No way he's digging the taser out from under there.
OK, two fat cops doesn't constitute enough evidence to condemn an entire union.  Let's do a Google search:

Ugh!  Well, I guess I should have seen that coming.  Raises the question- if they're not required to be even remotely physically fit, what else aren't they required to be?  Sober? Sane? Sighted? Present?  I can tell you one thing, if this guy showed up at the recruiters

then the LGBT community would require any department in the country to hire him immediately.  And so they would.

This is the world the liberals have created for us.  One in which they want us to turn in our guns and be defended solely by the protectors shown above.  And then they wonder why we "bitterly cling" to our guns. No wonder they scoff at the NRA's proposal for armed guards at every school; they're envisioning the "diversity hire" in the bikini.  Put that way, it is a laughable plan.

Funny how this is the reality liberals have carefully crafted for us while what they show in their "Progressive Hollywood" movies is:

But wait, there's more irony!  Their templates for chiseled squared-away lawmen, Bruce Willis and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, are among the few outspoken conservatives in Hollywood.

He Hit, She Hit

I tend to think that most people would not know what to make of this.

What does it mean for a woman to not be a woman?  Or, put another way, not a real woman?

Of course, a less subtle (and possibly less effective meme) is this:

Maybe she's not considered a strong woman.  Maybe she's considered unruly.  Misbehaved.  But is she considered a bad person, a person of low character, because she has not always kept her temper in check?

Do you remember that episode of COPS where the man had hogtied his irate wife with a phone cord until the police could show up?  Did you feel sorry for her?  Did you wonder what whether that was necessary?  I don't know if there was such an episode.  I do remember an episode in which a skinny man had been trussed up by his larger wife, and the cops had a difficult time stifling their laughs.  I wonder whether it would have seemed as comical to either the viewers or to the police if the situation had been reversed.  Would they have rushed to cut her free?

Aaron Norris writes here:

According to a Penn professor who studies these things, every American man has about a 28 percent chance of being struck by a woman at some point in his life (in related news, the number of girls ages 10 to 17 arrested for aggravated assault has doubled in the last 20 years). And yet no one seems to take the phenomenon that seriously.

Girl power, yo.  If you accept the progressive viewpoint that men and women have no fundamental differences--that their anatomical differences are incidental-- do you think of both of these as equivalent:  (1) A man strikes a woman, and she strikes him back.  (2) A woman strikes a man, and he strikes her back.

Are they the same?

Is it always the larger or stronger of the two that is morally bound to not hit on danger of being a bad person?

Neither Random Nor Senseless

Liberals seem to delight in putting unfathomable doggerel on the back bumpers of their Priuses.  Last time I explored a Gandhi quote; up this week is another perennial favorite:  "Practice Random Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty."  Anne Herbert is taking responsibility for the homily, although her story has changed over the years.  Originally, she claimed to have thought of it while reading various stickers on the back of her car.  Now she claims to have scribbled it on a menu during an acid flashback.  Whichever version is true, here's why I wouldn't take the blame- er, credit for that one:

"Random Kindness."  Okay, so you're walking down the street with a spare sandwich in your hand and you come across a pair of homeless people.  One of them is happily eating a sandwich he had procured on his own.  The other looks quite hungry.  Should you really dig out a coin to flip to determine to whom to give your sandwich?  That would be random.  Gotta do what the bumper sticker says.

Another example:  You're on deck on a cruise ship.  Nearby a passenger falls overboard.  As he's desperately treading water you throw him a Pop Tart.  "Throw me a rope!" he screams.  "Sorry," you reply.  "I rolled the dice and they came up a four and a three, which means Pop Tart!  Enjoy your random act of kindness!" 

Is all this randomness starting to sound a little evil?  Maybe it's because you can't help but notice that flipping a coin to determine whether to be kind or not was the signature move of villain Harvey "Two-Face" Dent in Batman as well as the bad guy in No Country For Old Men.

That's really my point: Random is the one thing no act of kindness should ever be.  "To each according to their need, from each according to their ability" is a dreadful way to run a government or an economy but it's a pretty good philosophy for an individual's acts of charity toward their fellow man.  Whether it's a free meal, helping someone carry something heavy or just a smile of encouragement, give it to the person who needs it, not the random person the dice told you to.  And certainly don't hurl breakfast treats at the drowning.

"Senseless Acts of Beauty."  I struggled so long trying to wrap my mind around that one that I even wondered if they really meant "centsless" as in "free of charge."  But finally I decided that the reason liberals so frequently make no sense themselves is because they literally have no idea what is "sense."  And, by extension, they have no concept of the lack of sense.

Here's an example of an act of beauty that does make sense:  When we bought our new house it came with a planter in the front yard.  My wife planted flowers in it and they're beautiful.  She asked me what kind of flowers I like, and she included those.  The neighbors walking their dogs compliment her on them (thus indicating their enjoyment) and I myself enjoy looking at them every morning when I leave for work. Thoughtful, sensible use of a feature of our property to create beauty.

Here's what she could have done instead:  Scatter peanuts around the empty planter and place a Havahart live animal trap in the middle.  Eventually she would catch a squirrel.  My wife could then reach through the bars of the cage and apply lipstick, mascara, and other cosmetics to the poor creature, thus beautifying it, before releasing it back into the wild.  That would be completely senseless, so according to the bumper sticker that's what she should have done.

Notice what the concepts of acting randomly and senselessly have in common:  A lack of conscious, rational thought.  And that's really the hallmark of the modern liberal, isn't it?  "It's better to feel than to think" is their fundamental credo.  And so, upon analysis, Anne Herbert's little gem probably exhorts exactly what she intended:  "Be More Liberal and Do Less Thinking."  It's great advice for getting Democrats elected.  And it sounds pithy and cool to all the people who have already stopped using their brains.

But as for me, I'll take my wife's flowers over a tarted up squirrel any day. And if I ever find myself bobbing helplessly in the ocean, I pray I'll get some actual help instead of being pelted by Pop Tarts.

Be The People Show with Dr. Carol Swain

Dr. Carol Swain is a professor at Vanderbilt University, and she is an outspoken advocate for  conservative perspectives.  According to Wikipedia, she earned her law degree from Yale and her Ph.D. in political science from UNC.  The Wiki article summarizes:

Carol M. Swain is an American political scientist and professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University. Her fields are race relations, immigration, representation, evangelical politics and the US constitution.

Dr. Carol Swain has an interesting show: The Be The People Show.  Here's an excerpt below, and you can follow this link to some more thought-provoking excerpts.

Please spread the word, check it out, tell people who are looking to promote conservative voices in a time then there isn't a party that is really standing up for conservatism.

Boston Killers Tamerlane and Joker Apprehended

I was guessing that this could've been a pair of sickos that just liked the carnage.  While I may have been partly right, it turns out to be very religiously and politically charged.  Don't worry though, this still won't be enough for progressives to talk more about how radical Islamists (which are not all Muslims) DO NOT WANT PEACE than how fundamentalist Christianity makes people want to blow up abortion clinics (it certainly couldn't have anything to do with little humans being mangled and tortured-it takes a real crazy to could be upset by that).  No, if anything progressives will tighten their belts and remind us that Islam is a religion of peace including the kind of Islam that believes that Israel has no right to exist (i.e. most Palestinians).

The two Chechen brothers Tamerlan (presumably named after the 14th century khan who outdid Stalin and Hitler in mass murdering--he mainly killed infidels) and Dzhokhar (no, CNN does not want you to pronounce this how you would think it should be pronounced--they're wrong) Tsarnaev were apprehended--one dead, one alive--as you most probably have heard by now.  At some point, the Joker will be possibly moved into Obama's legal regime of indefinite detainment where he will not be waterboarded on the record.  All records of alleged waterboardings may be requested and after a few years of waiting you will get a bunch of papers with all useful information redacted.  I repeat, no waterboardings will be conducted officially, and you can hand your hat on this because redaction is the best disenfectant in this administration.

I may not have been that far off though.  The Tsarnaevs did brag to their carjacking victim that they produced the carnage, so they weren't far removed from the mindset of wanting to make a splash, become especially infamous, the way that Klebold and Harris hoped their homemade bomb would far outdo the Bath School Disaster of 1927.  Yeah, a couple of real badasses.  You know who we are, buddy?  We're the ones who killed that boy and two women by setting a bomb and then running away.  Yeah, we're badasses.  We showed your paper tiger government.  We also set a box of puppies on fire in the woods.  Your government will be too late to save them!

Hey, I could've been as far off the money as Chris Matthews.  Boy, these guys never tire of being wrong.  Matthews suggested that it was a rightwing protest against Tax Day.  I wonder if he googled at some point to see if there was a Tamerlan or Dzhokhar was in the local Tea Party roster.  Never hurts to hope.

I'm still not holding out for this being part of a larger network.  The Fort Hood attack didn't appear to be part of a larger coordinated attack, but a single Muslim radical conducting his own private jihad.

I wonder if the activist liberal teachers in Texas will try to convince the Texan parents' children that Tamerlane and the Joker were freedom-fighters?  What is really the difference after all between an insurgent who causes collateral damage and a jihadi that targets a busload of children--or for that matter, a Serbian fighter organizing gangrapes of Bosnian women. Tomato, to-mah-to. (Some might ask whether the children killed in drone attacks under Pres. Obama--far more than the number of children lost in Newtown--are necessary and acceptable losses for freedom; will it ever be asked on CNN?)  Maybe these two brave Chechen freedomfighters can be studied in school during Islamic History Month.

An Eye For An Eye

"An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind." -Mahatma Gandhi

Liberals so dearly love that quote that they've had it printed up as a bumper sticker and adorn their Priuses with it. Of course they do, because it is not only completely wrong, it's completely backwards.

Why do people wear safety glasses? In my case, I do it to protect my vision. To lessen the chances of damage to one or both of my eyes.  I fully understand the connection between my actions and potential eye damage, especially when operating machinery. But what if one of the ways for my eye to be damaged was as a repercussion for me damaging someone else's vision?  Suddenly, instantly, everyone else's eyes become exactly as precious as my own- because they literally are.

Now let's turn that around: Here in the US, there's no "eye for an eye." If the injury was willful you can try to get the DA to press criminal charges which they may or may not. Even if they do, it's likely to get pled down to simple assault.

That leaves the civil courts as one's only recourse. You can sue the guilty party and hopefully collect some money from them.  Did you know that in Washington, D.C. the median award value for loss of an eye is a paltry $162K?  Nearby Maryland is a little better with $231K, which is closer to the national average.  Remember that your lawyer will take a third of that and the Feds half of what's left. You could end up with much less than $100K for a life-altering event. Having vision in only one eye can severely limit job prospects, romantic prospects, and in some states make it very hard to get a driver's license.

And this assumes that the person who blinded you is a homeowner with insurance!  What if they're not?  What if it's just a homeless person with a pencil?  You will never receive any sort of compensation and if they're caught your attacker will get at most a few years in prison.  In California not even that.

Here is the point at which the liberals ask "yeah, so? How is blinding some homeless guy going to help anyone?"  They ask this because they know it wouldn't help the attacker or his victim (except possibly in a Schadenfreude way) and thus proves their point that Gandhi was right.  What they're completely missing (and willfully so) is the effect proportional justice has in preventing crimes to begin with.  With our current system, why  shouldn't a career criminal go downtown, pick out a yuppie, and poke their eye out?  No reason at all other than innate human squeamishness.  And that squeamishness is perhaps being overcome considering the recent spate of attacks that have left victims blind:
Brooklyn Teen Blinded
Mother Blinded By Drunken Thug
Woman Blinded By Boyfriend
Man Blinded and Paralyzed In Bar Fight

Those criminals might very well have thought twice about committing these crimes if they knew it was their own eyes they were effectively destroying.

Perhaps I should put this bumper sticker on my car: "An eye for an eye guarantees personal accountability and thus ensures the fewest people possible are blinded."  Not quite as catchy-sounding, certainly won't appeal to the libs, but it is at least true.

So, which world do YOU wish to live in?  Gandhi's world where vast numbers of people can poke your eye out with little repercussion or my world where everyone treasures everyone else's eyes as much as their own?  The bad news is that you already live in the former- you never even got to choose because decades ago legions of drug-addled brain-damaged hippies came along and made the choice for you.

bullying and the gay cause

I had learned heard about Amanda Todd long after most of the to-do had blown over, but I was reminded of her when I started hearing about Rehteah Parsons, a girl who decided to end it after she was gang-raped while unconscious and humiliated with revealing photos circulated by the perpetrators. So I came across this:

You know what's strange about this "meme" is that bullying and anti-gay seem to be treated as synonyms by the press, in deference to Dan Savage's "It Get's Better."  There was a kid set on fire in some stupid stunt, and it got national press -- what was the thing said about it?  Possible hate crime, possible bullying.

Bullying causing teen suicides?  We need training materials to teach kids that homosexuality and gay parenting is normal.  That's the remedy.  Not training kids that it is wrong to bully kids for any reason.  I read not too long ago about a kid being mercilessly teased for being fat, and she had a rare disorder.  (Must have been all those religious folks with their anti-gluttony sermons.  We should outlaw sermons on gluttony as hate speech.  We should teach kids that its fabulous to be fat.)

I even read about a school murder where a kid was taunted and brought a gun to school.  It was the gay kid who was doing the taunting (at the encouragement, it seems, of school personnel) but it still showed up in a list of lethal anti-gay bullying episodes.

But for the most part, the hype has been about gay bullying.  I didn't even hear about Amanda Todd until I came across somebody's "meme" about her.

I knew of kids that got bullied in elementary and middle school.  They weren't bullied because they were effeminate.  They were bullied because they seemed a little weird and seemed vulnerable.  One was weird because he had Asperger's.  It's well known that many kids are targeted for their ASD-related social awkwardness now but I mainly hear about is anti-gay bullying.  It's that kind of bullying that matters.  Bullying  wasn't new when I was a kid.  My mom was bullied in school (for being white) and my dad would've been bullied every day if he hadn't had a mean punch.   Now teen suicide, I believe, has gone up considerably since the 60s, but being so persecuted that one wants to die is not a recent thing.  And I'm not saying something shouldn't be done about it, but it's not a new problem, and it's not unique to effeminate boys or kids with same sex attractions.

I read a while back about a group of teenage miscreants who went around looking for someone to beat up.  They settled on a gay person eventually, but they had tried targeting a Hispanic boy earlier.  They weren't looking to purge the world of gayness.  They were just looking for any excuse to say, "Well, lookie what we have here..."  And this is what most bullying is about. Kids don't do it for their parents approval or to fit their parents agenda.  They do it because they decide to victimize someone so they look for something that makes a victim stand out.  He could just be wearing funny clothes or walking funny to show up on their radar.

This is why the use of "bullying" as a rallying cry to use state/federal authority and money to normalize homosexuality appears to be exploiting tragedies to further a political agenda.  But lately, we've seen a lot of tragedy being exploited to provoke government intervention.

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/rehtaeh-parsons-amanda-todd-rcmp
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/17/rehtaeh-parsons-family-blasts-those-publicly-supporting-alleged-rapists/
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/04/audrie_pott_and_rehtaeh_parsons_how_should_the_legal_system_treat_nonconsensual.html
http://personalliberty.com/2013/04/18/mainstream-newspapers-fall-in-line-to-condemn-gun-grab-defeat-in-senate/

Blaming Boston on the Bill of Rights

In other news Jay Mohr has blamed the 2nd Amendment for the Boston Marathon incident. Without that Amendment, the culture would be less apt to be violent and anti-American revolutionaries and lunatics would be less apt to make explosives.

It is now known that, like the Columbine killers, Adam Lanza was interested for years in having a high body count.  In the end, he did outdo the Columbine rampage.  The Columbine duo resorted to handheld weapons after their homemade bombs failed to detonate.  Perhaps this is why Lanza avoided making a bomb and opted for shooting as a first resort.  Like the Columbine kids, Lanza had a backup plan.  Pistols.  Yes, if the rifle had jammed or run out of ammo, he was ready to start firing with a much more common gun for both murder and self-defense (but especially murder).

The Boston bomber also opted for a bomb as first resort.  Fortunately, the terrorist was not very good at what he did, assuming that terrorists try to maximize destruction of either persons or property.  Then again, a terrorist generally tries to maximize public terror for intimidation.  Floyd Corkins (no, I didn't make up that name) was in a certain sense a homegrown leftist terrorist.  He wanted to intimidate, not the public at large necessarily, but social conservatives everywhere.  In the wake of the hatemongering of Southern Poverty Law Center, he wanted to really stick it to the "Hate Crowd", but in particular he wanted to see the people he hated humiliate themselves and beg for mercy one by one as he rampaged through the gun-free municipality of Washington D.C.  (Corkins had illegally walked the guns into D.C.  Why, oh why, won't killers just obey the law?)

This Boston attack to me most resembles a serial killer.  Not that it couldn't be someone with a political agenda. It could.  But a motivated person could have planned a higher body count.  Something big.  I think more likely we have some sicko (or a pair of sickos) that gets excited over the carnage.  He loves to see the mangled bodies in the news.  Then again, maybe he's an amateur terrorist like Chris Dorner.  Dorner declared war on the LAPD and managed to kill a policeman's daughter and her fiance.  Rather than take out who he saw as the guilty parties, he decided instead to terrorize policemen by putting them in fear of their families being targeted.  Not exactly a serial killer... More like a vengeance killer, but crazy and cowardly all the same.

Apparently, in Jay Mohr's mind, the climate of hate that drives people like Floyd Corkins and Chris Dorner is fueled by the 2nd Amendment.  Our 2nd Amendment liberty to be armed against tyranny supposedly leads to a culture of violence.  No, it's not the ultraviolent video games, not the ultraviolent entertainment, not the ultraviolent music.  No, it's our liberty that's the problem.  Spoken like a true liberal, Jay.  That's just the kind of thinking that Chris Dorner praised and expounded in his manifesto before his killing spree.

Seidman's Anti-Constitutionalism: Liberalism vs. the Senate

When Louis Michael Seidman publicly recommend that we give up entirely on the Constitution, there was so much that was wrong with his statement that it was overwhelming.  As much as I want to put together a comprehensive response to his nonsense, I think it is more realistic to start with his first example of the "archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions" of the bedrock of our republican liberties:

Consider, for example, the assertion by the Senate minority leader last week that the House could not take up a plan by Senate Democrats to extend tax cuts on households making $250,000 or less because the Constitution requires that revenue measures originate in the lower chamber. Why should anyone care? Why should a lame-duck House, 27 members of which were defeated for re-election, have a stranglehold on our economy? Why does a grotesquely malapportioned Senate get to decide the nation’s fate?

This "malapportioned" criticism of our bicameralism is at least as old as early 20th Century Populism (the terrible 17th Amendment) and was adopted by Progressivism, and has remained embraced by Progressivism since progressives realized that direct representation is a beautiful path to progressive oligarchy (if they had studied de Tocqueville more closely, they could've realized this sooner).  Here's Bloomberg.com stating this common liberal criticism in relation to the recent gun ban defeat.

The proposal’s demise, in a 54-46 vote, is a testament to legislators’ continuing fear of the gun lobby. It also illuminates a political equation that grows more unbalanced, especially in the Senate, every year. The votes of Wyoming’s two senators, representing 580,000 citizens, effectively cancel the votes of California’s two senators, representing 38 million. The votes of Illinois, with a population of almost 13 million, are voided by those of Alaska, with little more than 700,000.

Is this genuine ignorance of the purpose of our bicameral system or is it willful obtuseness, cynically counting on the general ignorance of the American system? (What good is public education if it can't be used to make a more servile populace?)  This is EXACTLY why we have a Senate, so that popular opinion can't be swayed to force federal rules on states that don't agree with them. NOTHING is stopping Connecticut from making its own ill-advised gun bans in the wake of Newtown.  If a community-sized state like that can't get behind it, why should we have a federal ruling?

The counties with real communities that live close to the land seem to be more red.

Liberals generally DESPISE the 10th Amendment because it is an affront to centralization of power.  The 10th Amendment is offensive.  You can't force you right ideas on the public without centralization of power.  And liberals know what is good for the country.  And for this reason they often get enraged when their answers can't be imposed at the federal level.

The 17th Amendment is meant to allow the states a chance to protect their.  Look at the arguments against the Senate, and if you take the arguments seriously, the meaningful conclusion is that we should only have the House, because anything other than direct representation is undemocratic and therefore bad.  Progressives think of state sovereignty as antiquated at best, and at worst, racist.

But do you doubt that if the Senate had passed the gun ban that most liberals would have disliked this use of the "malapportioned" Senate when they couldn't get the "correctly" apportioned House to pass it first?  Absolutely not.  Obama is busy shaming conservatives for not letting the liberals to use the Senate to override the rules each state sets for itself.  "Why does a grotesquely malapportioned Senate get to decide the nation’s fate?"

Budget: The House has passed budgets several times since the Republicans took it in 2010.  THe House is supposed to control the purse strings because of its more direct representation. That's the Constitution again for ya. In spite of Seidman criticizing the "grotesque" malapportionment of the Senate, he flatly rejects this principle as silly in the very same paragraph. The House is supposedly closer to the will of the people, and the Democratic Senate has rejected the will of the people repeatedly.

Let's look at a part of that paragraph again:

Why should a lame-duck House, 27 members of which were defeated for re-election, have a stranglehold on our economy? Why does a grotesquely malapportioned Senate get to decide the nation’s fate?

Seidman criticizes that outgoing members of the House get to still vote.  Why should those lame-duck obstacles to liberal domination get all the power, when liberals really ought to be able to override the Constitution and use the "grotesquely malapportioned Senate" to do an end run around the House of direct representation?  Both houses should be at their disposal to impose a progressive agenda on the public!

No, the "grotesquely malapportioned Senate" is one of those "archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions" of the Constitution, EXCEPT when it is used to override the will of the People for a good cause, like overriding the statutes of those stupid Red States with less crime.  (That's Michael Moore's criticism--why do those stupid red states have most of the guns when they have less crime from which to protect themselves?  Hmm...)  Liberals to the rescue!  They will override local laws for the general good!

Seidman obviously doesn't like that there are so many Republicans in the House, and doesn't mind the "grotesquely malapportioned Senate" subverting them.

But Seidman criticizes the whole concept of having ultimate laws for government written down in the form of a written Constitution.  He argues we can govern based entirely on unwritten traditions and unwritten rules, and yet he seems to want to get rid of the Constitution mainly avoid having to follow our longstanding American traditions and rules whenever it suits progressive purposes.  More on that at another time.

because the only wealth created has to first be taken from us

Government Says Right Wing is the Source of Rampages and Home Terrorism

conservatism vs. the "Religious Right"

I don't know if it would be accurate to call it a "pet peeve" of mine but ... I recently visited a Faceblücher page for conservative atheists. It may not seem like it but I am sympathetic with the problems many atheists have with religion and various religious ideas. What I found was a place for libertarians to mock religion. Big turnoff. It's also disappointing to me that some religious conservatives can't find some common ground beyond "this country was founded on religion" and seem to go out of their way to unnecessarily alienate agnostics and many 2nd generation Americans of other cultures. I personally might feel that my common sense ideas is rooted in the religious traditions in which I was raised, but the appeal to common sense is the broadest appeal. So I simultaneously want to explore the ability of religious people to not have their religious culture squelched in the name of "freedom" but I also want them to realize that there is a larger world. And I would like to explore how libertarians and secular conservatives can choose community-imposed values over federally-imposed values. There is a lot of room for Big Tent thinking without rejecting social conservatism for "Big Government libertarianism."

that's their culture

Exactly.

Macklemore's *Same Love* Wags the Dog

The invocation of federal power to change a simple fact of marriage that has transcended time and space, age and and geography and religion and ethnos (apparently for no good reason other than a sort of bigotry that has no root in any particular doctrine) has theme music now.

It's not particularly good rap, passable but mediocre, it gets by mostly on its heartfelt liberal sentimentality.  But it's certainly not its sentimentality I object to--it is, after all, music.  Macklemore's Same Love sets progressive talking points to rhythm.  It's almost the musical version of a Michael Moore agitpropumentary, minus the total surrender to cynicism.

Some examples:

The right wing conservatives think it's a decision
And you can be cured with some treatment and religion
Man-made rewiring of a predisposition

Where to start?  Conservatives tend to operate from either a fundamental intuition that things are the way they are for a reason (radicals on the other hand reject tradition as anything other than a cornucopia of ideas to conveniently either embrace or jeer at) or a fundamental caution that mucking with some very basic things could have far-reaching unintended consequences.  Progressives instead say, "If you can't prove to me something will go wrong by pushing the red button, I'm pushing it."  And if things do go badly after pushing the red button, they will claim total ignorance as to the causes (though they will imply that traditional religion is partly to blame).

But the familiar trope of the social conservative having nothing more to say than "the laws of Moses say so, and since I believe every word as written, God obviously hates gays."  Yes, to the progressive, there is The Enlightenment (non-Christian liberals), there is Safe Christianity (the increasingly progressive, so-called "mainstream" churches and the liberation Catholics), and then what remains outside these are various shades of Westboro.  If liberals are capable of more sophistication than that, they have been jolly good at hiding it in recent years.

And God loves all his children, is somehow forgotten
But we paraphrase a book written thirty-five-hundred years ago

Another liberal trope: You either jump on the progressive (scientific! it's oh so scientific!) bandwagon that there is absolutely no downside at all to either homosexuality OR divorcing marriage completely from its roots in making the sexes get over their differences in order to raise children.  There is no in-between (none that progressives care to discuss).

You are either for love or for hate.  It's really as simple as that.  Oh, and remember that progressives pride themselves on avoidance of black-and-white thinking.  Liberal social scientists are trying to build a whole social science around this--liberals love nuance, and conservatives like to be told simple stories that leave them ever-so-satisfied.  (They don't actually admit this; they utter many disclaimers; but if you read what they have to say about the "conservative" brain, this is is what the reader is left thinking.)  And it's largely due to their different brains.  So it's all very scientific that it's the conservatives that are black-and-white thinkers.  Unions good, corporations bad.  Community organizer good, business exec bad.  White people racist, other people not.    Religion bad, communism good.  Republicans greedy, Democrats altruistic.  Churchgoers dogmatic, liberal college professors open-minded.

Yes, if a Christian doesn't renounce that "for this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife," he or she has evidently forgotten that God loves all his children.  In fact, you can't be a good Christian if you don't believe that there is a point to promoting only men and women committing to each other to make families.  Because if you do:

If you preach hate at the service those words aren't anointed
That holy water that you soak in has been poisoned

Yes, the words are not from God and the holy water is poisoned because what is contrary to equating one love with another is hate speech.  Shades of Westboro, yep.  To revisit the progressive dismissal of doctrine as subjective cloud-gazing:

But we paraphrase a book written thirty-five hundred years ago

Yes, either the Bible is a terrible book (as Dan "It Gets Better" Savage loudly and proudly preaches) or everyone is misunderstanding it if it seems to go against liberal doctrine.  (And if you find yourself making both claims in the space of an hour you have mad liberal skillz.)   Yes, people have paraphrased the Bible and rewritten it to make Jesus say things about homosexuality he never said, or so we're told.

America the brave still fears what we don't know

Caution over the fundamental and universal is labeled fear.  It's even given a disorder-like name:  homophobia.  Yes, it's boiled down to calling someone "chicken" if they don't fall in with the progressive order.  You call yourself a brave American?  Then throw caution to the wind, say "What could go wrong?", and hoist the Equal Sign flag.  Yes, prove your courage by giving in to the shame game.  Being "courageous" certainly won't hurt your chances in the entertainment business and being "cowardly" will hurt you big time.

Look up the stuff on "conservative brain" and you will see disclaimers about brain plasticity.  (Don't worry, conservatives, you can become open-minded even if you weren't "born that way"...)  However, brain plasticity does not come up because it is supposed that there is no kind of homosexuality that one isn't predestined to.

And you can be cured with some treatment and religion
Man-made rewiring of a predisposition

Yes, Virginia, there are no ex-gays.  And I can prove it to you.  Here is Joe.  He claimed to be cured of homosexuality and then he had a bout of recidivism.  So he was born that way.  Therefore, neural plasticity plays no part in sexual preference and same-sex attraction.  (If you've been to college and have been trained in the art of "freethinking," these inferences may well make sense to you.)

Also, implicit in this liberal talking point is the conflation of same-sex attraction and homosexual behavior.  If you are at all attracted to the same sex then you were born to be fabulously gay at all times.  Also implicit is that if it's a predisposition, particularly a genetic or epigenetic one, it must not be at all a negative thing -- which is an absurd inference.  Challenging the neural plasticity of our brains to overcome negative predispositions is not a bad thing in general.  It's only seen as a bad thing if the concept of 'negative' is out of step with the liberal program.  The way things are going, people will no longer be permitted to pursue conversion therapy if they want it (already outlawed in CA by our liberal overlords), and yet they will be able to have their sex change paid for by society.

Conservatism in a nutshell

Here's a healthy chunk of conservatism in a nutshell:

New Cultural Object Lesson at University: Stomping on the Name of Christ

Yes, the university issued a CYA statement that no student was suspended, but the hubbub is essentially about the student being initially suspended by the teacher for refusing to participate (you see, the student returned the piece of paper with "Jesus" written on it instead of stomping on it when he was told to--this apparently was considered lack of participation).

The teacher has since come forward to claim that the student seemed to threaten him after the class was over.  Does it seem strange that this information hasn't come out sooner?  And the teacher claims to be a Sunday School teacher.

First of all, not all church leaders and participants believe the way most evangelicals or fundamentalists do.  And as strange as it may seem, not everyone has the same significance about the name of Jesus.  In traditional Christianity, God has exalted the name of the man from Nazareth because he was no ordinary man, and the name that refers specifically to this man is considered holy.  But a Sunday School teacher may still not be necessarily orthodox.  Ironically, the beliefs of the teacher are not relevant (except possibly to refute that the teacher is promoting atheism in particular); it is rather the religious beliefs of the student that are important here.

Why not ask the students to draw a picture of Jesus and spit on it?  C'mon, folks, it's just a picture of Jesus, not Jesus himself, so what's the big deal?  Why not explore the symbolic value of art by having the students dunk a crucifix in urine (as it has been done in government funded art)?  Why not have the students burn an inexpensive paperback Bible and then discuss their feelings about the matter?  The teacher could then tell the students how superstitious it is for them to feel that God is mad at them for burning a sacred text.  Are those appropriate object lessons?

Here is one atheist's take on it:

If you’ve come to this site and jumped down to the comments section to say “The professor didn’t make students stomp on MUHAMMAD or ALLAH!!!”… just save it. If that’s what you think this is about, you are so desperately missing the point of everything that we can’t have a meaningful discussion about the merits of this lesson.

Actually, that seems like a very meaningful point to discuss.  It's apparently very ethnocentric to assume everyone is Christian in any other situation, and since the power of symbols apparently can't be explored effectively without inducing some trepidation in the mind of the participants, let's ask point-blank what the students' beliefs are.  Each student can make a sacrilegious act against whatever symbols they grew up revering.  Buddhists can write down a sacred name of a boddhisattva that has saving grace, and be asked to step on that name.

Absolutely, let's have an exercise where the name of Mohammed (may he be blessed) is written on a piece of paper and stomped on.  I think the reason this atheist doesn't even want to go there and dismiss it before it can be meaningfully discussed is that he knows what would happen.   There would be an outrage, possibly a violent reaction, by Muslims, and then liberals would bend over backwards excusing the reaction and condemning the offenders -- like the reaction to the video that was wrongly blamed for the terrorist attack in Benghazi.  And it would be stated as obvious that exploring the power of symbols does not necessitate any encouragement of sacrilege.

Muslim outrage is prima facie evidence that someone has done something insensitive, while Christian outrage is not.

What I think should happen here is that President Obama should call this offended student to ask how he's holding up, just as he asked Sandra Fluke after a radio show host called her a bad name, and then our President should go to the U.N. and publicly announce that "the future does not belong to those" who would desecrate the name of Christ.