The #FreeKate Case Is Typical
Posted on | July 6, 2013 | 57 Comments
There has been further Facebook ranting by Kaitlyn Hunt’s mother Kelley Hunt Smith this past week that I haven’t had the stomach to transcribe, but part of which involves her reiteration of some of her favorite themes: She feels her daughter is being “singled out” for prosecution; this prosecution is wrong because it is a consenting “relationship,” because the girls are relatively close in age, and because the girls went to school together. At one point in her long rant, KHS wrote:
“I will continue to fight for Kate, and to change the laws to actually protect teenagers from being prosecuted as felons for doing what 99.9% of teenagers are doing all over the world.”
Uh … “99.9% percent”? Are 99.9% of teenagers having sex?
No, actually not. According to one national study, “27% of youth ages 14-17 were sexually active during the survey year.” And that data was cited in a 2005 U.S. Department of Justice study about reported cases of statutory rape, which K.J. Copp called to my attention.
The study is quite relevant because it demonstrates that Kaitlyn Hunt (the 18-year-old Florida girl charged with two felony counts for having sex with a 14-year-old) is not being “singled out.” In fact, laying aside the same-sex nature of her case, it’s actually typical.
Seventy-six percent (76%) of female victims of statutory rape are ages 13-15, with 14 being the most common victim age (31%) in the cases studied by the Justice Department. And for 14-year-old victims, offenders were most commonly (43%) ages 18-20. In reported cases of statutory rape with a female victim age 14, only 20% of offenders were 25 or older. The age difference between Kaitlyn Hunt and her victim (44 months) was typical: 50% of statutory rape cases with 14-year-old victims involved a perpetrator no more than 5 years older.
Was Kaitlyn Hunt’s “relationship” with the 14-year-old “singled out”? Was this case unusual because it involved two high school students? No, not at all: Twenty-nine percent (29%) of the statutory rape cases studied by the Justice Department classified the relationship between offender and victim as “boyfriend or girlfriend” and another 62 percent were classified as “acquaintances.” Of cases involving 14-year-old victims, as we have seen, 43% of offenders were ages 18-20 and another 16% were 17 or younger; ergo, many of the offenders were also high school-age teenagers. It is estimated that more than 15,000 statutory rape cases are reported to U.S. law enforcement agencies annually, so the prosecution of Kaitlyn Hunt isn’t really unusual in any way.
Florida law doesn’t call the crime of which Kaitlyn Hunt is accused “statutory rape,” however. Instead, it’s “lewd and lascivious battery on a child,” but this is only a difference in legal nomenclature.
What is unusual about the Kaitlyn Hunt case is that her parents made such a big deal out of it, and managed to bamboozle more than 300,000 people into signing a petition that dishonestly portrayed Kaitlyn Hunt as a heroic martyr for gay rights, which she isn’t.
Kelley Hunt Smith says she wants “to change the laws to actually protect teenagers from being prosecuted as felons” for doing what her daughter did to a 14-year-old girl. However, isn’t it possible that one reason teenage sex is less common than she imagines — 27% rather than “99.9%” — is because age-of-consent laws make it a crime to have sex with younger teens?
And while 15,000 statutory rape prosecutions annually is a statistic indicating that such cases aren’t exactly rare, more cases would probably be prosecuted if not for the fact that most of the time, all the parent of a minor has to do is say, “Leave my daughter alone, you creep,” and that is enough to end the relationship.
Because it turns out there’s a reason they call it “jailbait,” after all.
What Can Elspeth Reeve Teach Us?
Posted on | July 5, 2013 | 148 Comments
The Pervert Party: Democrats for abortion had
a Texas girl hold a sign declaring: ‘If I wanted the
government in my womb, I would f*** a Senator.’
Liberalism is like a Swiss Army knife, a versatile tool that makes it valuable as a substitute for whatever its users otherwise lack. If you are stupid, but espouse liberalism, you will be praised by liberals as intelligent merely for so doing — Joe Biden and Al Sharpton, for example. If you are immoral, all you need to do to receive acclaim for your virtue is to become a liberal, as Ted Kennedy’s entire career attests.
This belief that every liberal is the moral and intellectual superior of others merely because he is a liberal has a profound effect not only in politics, but also within those fields of endeavor — journalism, academia and the entertainment industry — where the authority of liberalism has become hegemonic. Nothing else can possibly explain how an idiot like Chris Matthews remains on the payroll of NBC News, or why “Women’s Studies” departments stain the campuses of major universities, or why Joy Behar has a show-business career.
Liberals will themselves occasionally acknowledge this truth. When Mona Eltahawy went off on Max Blumenthal this week, she made the point that Blumenthal “does nothing but Tweet” — he is not, nor has he ever been, a prolific writer. Blumenthal certainly has never shown any merit that would recommend his work except that he is a liberal. Andrew Breitbart was right on target when he said that the only thing Blumenthal has ever done is use “Alinksy tactics” in his efforts to “destroy people” — cheap political “gotcha” journalism that serves no other purpose than to smear the Left’s chosen enemies.
In this, however, Max Blumenthal is not particularly unusual. Outfits like Think Progress and Media Matters employ scores of “journalists” who have never done any “reporting” other than to accuse conservatives of sexism, racism and/or homophobia. It’s as if they were seeking the Pulitzer Prize for finger-pointing and name-calling.
So when Mona Eltahawy denounced Max Blumenthal as a useless drone, an untalented do-nothing, that indictment encompassed many more such practitioners of progressive journalism. Max is not unique among those whose only real qualification as journalists is that they are liberals.
Conflating liberalism with virtue is an idea that has consequences, and among those consequences is the moralistic hubris of liberals. Believing that advocacy for liberal causes is synonymous with virtue, they are prone to an ends-justify-the-means rationalization of unethical tactics and even criminal violence in support of what they believe to be The Greater Good. This was how, after all, the 1960s “peace” movement gave rise to the hateful fanatical terrorism of the Weather Underground bombers — social justice as a license for murder.
And speaking of murder, why do liberals never pause to wonder how abortion became the sine qua non of their worldview?
Bela Kun and the Politics of Perversion
Ann Coulter was never more accurate than when she said in her book Godless that abortion is the sacrament of the Church of Liberalism. We beheld a bizarre testimony to this truth when pro-abortion protesters at the Texas Capitol began chanting “Hail Satan.”
What was going on was that the Texas legislature was considering a bill to ban abortion after 20 weeks, a proposal that should not really be controversial. Advances in medical science have made it possible to save the lives of premature babies, so that the criterion of fetal viability would certainly justify banning the murder of babies in utero who might be able to survive if they were delivered. The vast majority of abortions (more than 95%) are performed before the 20th week of gestation, so that the Texas law would do relatively little to limit the exercise of “choice.” Yet it is on this dubious battleground that Texas Democrats have, to nationwide applause from liberals, chosen to make their stand.
No one outside Texas had ever heard of Wendy Davis until the Democrat legislator decided to filibuster this legislation, a stance so wrong and unpopular that even a liberal Democrat like Kirsten Powers was moved to remark, “It’s amazing what is considered heroism these days.” And speaking of amazing . . .
Pro-life activists who supported the bill banning late-term abortions were at the Texas Capitol in Austin and began to sing “Amazing Grace,” a timeless and much-beloved Christian hymn:
I once was lost, but now I am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
Let’s ask: How could anyone be offended by this? What kind of person hates God so much they would object to “Amazing Grace”?
It is one thing, after all, to say that you do not share someone else’s particular religious belief, but quite another thing to say that their expression of belief is offensive to you. I may believe that Buddhists are fools and that Scientologists are deluded devotees of a charlatan, but I don’t run around deliberately starting arguments with them. Somehow, though, liberals have decided that Bible-believing Christians are their mortal enemies, and I think Matt Ross has properly located the historical origins of this anti-Christian animosity:
In 1919, Georg Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun regime in Hungary. He immediately set plans in motion to de-Christianize Hungary. Reasoning that if Christian sexual ethics could be undermined among children, then both the hated patriarchal family and the Church would be dealt a crippling blow. Lukacs launched a radical sex education program in the schools. Sex lectures were organized and literature handed out which graphically instructed youth in free love (promiscuity) and sexual intercourse while simultaneously encouraging them to deride and reject Christian moral ethics, monogamy, and parental and church authority. All of this was accompanied by a reign of cultural terror perpetrated against parents, priests, and dissenters.
Through the intellectual influence of the Frankfurt School’s cultural Marxism (Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, et al.) this attitude has been steadily woven into the ideological tapestry of the Democrat Party over the past half-century. The hegemonic dominance of liberalism within academia, journalism and the entertainment industry means that this radicalism — the embrace of perverse licentiousness and an implacable hostility to Christian faith — has been so widely diffused throughout our society that many Americans no longer even notice it, let alone question its original motives and purpose.
No one under 40 has any memory of when the Democrat Party did not stand for abortion, sodomy and socialism (not necessarily in that order) and the advance of political correctness within our educational system has deprived the young of the historical knowledge by which they might understand or critique modern liberalism. It is therefore remarkable — although seldom remarked — that mere opposition to the Democrat Party agenda is now classified as “hate,” as if buttf–king and baby-killing were synonymous with love.
Father of Lies, Party of Death
Rather than pursue that philosophical digression further, however, let us return to the scene Tuesday at the Capitol in Austin, where pro-lifers sang their hymn, for here we find an answer to the question: Who hates God so much that they are offended by “Amazing Grace”?
Abortion is wrong and its advocates are evil, and if their chants were meant in jest, there is truth in humor: Democrats want to kill babies, and thereby they make themselves servants of Satan.
BTW, Democrats chanting "Hail Satan" is no big deal. He is, after all, the spiritual founder of their party.
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) July 3, 2013
We may again digress briefly to note that the process by which Democrats became The Party of Death™ was fairly rapid. In 1960, when the Democrats nominated John F. Kennedy, his Catholicism was sufficiently controversial that Kennedy had to avow that he would not be taking dictation from the Pope. Ten years after JFK’s assassination, in its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling the Supreme Court manufactured a fictitious “right” to abortion, but this was not a partisan matter, and many Democrats strongly opposed it.
By 1992, however, the Democrat Party’s commitment to killing babies had become such a cornerstone of their national agenda that Pennsylvania Gov. Bob Casey was not permitted to speak in opposition to the party’s radical pro-abortion platform. Pro-lifers have since been purged, as Daniel McConchie explained last year:
If you tuned into the Democratic National Convention . . . and were momentarily confused as to whether C-SPAN was actually covering a huge abortion rally, you are not alone. The high-profile roles given to Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, NARAL Pro-Choice America President Nancy Keenan, Sandra Fluke, and Caroline Kennedy are the capstone of a two-decade-long effort to eradicate anti-abortion Democrats from the party. It is an effort that is nearly complete. An event hosted by Democrats for Life during the convention failed to attract a single politician currently in office.
Thus, in scarcely more than 50 years, Democrat have gone from being feared as too Catholic to being The Devil’s Own Party, whose adherents cheerfully offer their praise to Satan as they stand firmly in favor of killing the innocent unborn. And as every Christian knows, Satan is the “father of lies,” which brings us to Elspeth Reeve.
Ms. Reeve first came to public notice as a handmaiden of falsehood, and it is a testimony to liberalism’s influence in the field of journalism that someone so closely connected to an infamous act of dishonesty could still be employed by any reputable publication. Her disgraceful debut involved the notorious “Baghdad Diary” episode:
On August 2, 2007, the editors of The New Republic disclosed what they had learned in their July 26 chat with Beauchamp — that the “crypt keeper” episode didn’t happen in Iraq at all. They revealed also that Beauchamp had first made contact with The New Republic through one of the magazine’s yearlong researcher-reporters, Elspeth Reeve, who happened also to be Beauchamp’s girlfriend. . . .
Reeve left The New Republic just about the time (July 2007) it became evident that Beauchamp had fictionalized his atrocity tales, and one might have thought that the shame she had helped bring upon the profession of journalism would have rendered her radioactive, permanently persona non grata, as was the case with such liberal liars as Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair.
Nevertheless, The Atlantic has attempted to rehabilitate Elspeth Reeve, a fact I mentioned last year with a passing reference to her as the World’s Least Reliable Fact-Checker™ and now, in the case of the Texas abortion protests, she has disgraced herself anew.
Dishonesty, a Valuable Skill for Liberals
After video of the “Hail Satan” chant went viral Tuesday, Reeve presumed to fact-check it and generally deride conservatives who cited it “as proof of the depravity — or at least stupidity — of the pro-choice activists.” Before proceeding further with our inquiry into Elspeth Reeve’s competence as a fact-checker, let’s ask a few questions:
- Why is it that only conservative sites oppose abortion?
- Why do the words “liberal” or “Democrat” appear nowhere in Elspeth Reeve’s article? Is it really impossible to classify the general political orientation of those who think it necessary for abortion to be legal under all circumstances?
- Who assigned Elspeth Reeve to patrol the Internet, presuming to “debunk” messages on conservative sites?
You perhaps see the point: Reeve is doing the same kind of Alinksyite work as Media Matters and Think Progress do every day, and she seldom does anything else, because she has no “skill” except her liberalism. And in Swiss Army knife fashion, the universal tool of liberalism is made to serve as a substitute: If you are a habitual liar, being an outspoken liberal is accepted as proof of your honesty.
Reeve labels conservatives but does not label liberals, even though everyone knows that the only kind of people so evil as to protest in favor of abortion are liberal Democrats. However, Elspeth Reeve refers to them only as “pro-choice activists,” as if their political and ideological loyalties were unknown. But we need not be so mystified: The people who want to kill Texas babies are Democrats.
There are no Democrats who oppose killing babies, because Democrats have purged everyone who disagrees with baby-killing, and describing this policy agenda as “choice” is a purposeful deceit.
KILL BABIES! HAIL SATAN! VOTE DEMOCRAT!
Sodomy is still just an optional item on the Democrat agenda, but it’s probably only a matter of time before they make it mandatory.
Elspeth Reeve derogated conservatives for calling attention to the “pro-choice activists” who used a Satanic chant to mock pro-lifers, saying that only a handful of the “activists” took part in the chant, but one imagines that if a handful of Tea Partiers started chanting racial slurs, this would have been deemed newsworthy. Not content with dismissing the “Hail Satan” chant as trivial and insignificant, however, Elspeth Reeve then disputed the authenticity of the photo (shown at the top of this post) of bloodthirsty pro-abortion fanatics Texas Democrats having a young girl hold up a nearly pornographic protest sign:
However, it’s a fake. Or at least, it’s not from the Texas demonstrations. The photo was posted on a message board in December 2007. The anti-abortion crowd will have to stick with its five Satanists.
Oops! The World’s Least Reliable Fact-Checker™ strikes again: The photo is legit; Elspeth Reeve had read the date wrong on the message board; and she was forced to acknowledge her error.
Did I say “error”? I meant lie, because when you are engaged in a dishonest political propaganda campaign (which is all Elspeth Reeve’s “journalism” career has ever been) and you publish falsehoods in service of your deceitful purpose, this is scarcely an accident.
Is there an antonym for "accuracy"? Yes: "Elspeth Reeve" http://t.co/IpBbUxtUzx | The Fact-Unchecker -> @elspethrb
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) July 4, 2013
Liberals lie routinely, because they know if they ever told the truth, no honest person would support their wicked agenda. And if we fail to defeat them, it is because we do not boldly speak truth, or because we have let ourselves become confused by liberal lies.
Let me close by saying that the Texas legislature will convene again on Monday, as Thomas Umstattd Jr. says:
Where are God’s soldiers? Who will volunteer in the Army of the Lord?
THE EYES OF TEXAS ARE UPON YOU!
– – –
Southern, Conservative, American
Posted on | July 5, 2013 | 27 Comments
Interestingly, the poll also shows that Southerners (89%) are more proud of their country than people in the Northeast (81%).
Hell, yes. Freedom. ‘Murka.
‘Authentic Frontier Gibberish’
Posted on | July 4, 2013 | 153 Comments
The best comedy ever made? That’s a tough call, but if it’s not Animal House, then surely it must be Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles — and not just because I first saw it as a 15-year-old with my dope buddies Mike and Dave after we’d toked up some fine Colombian gold bud.
Even without the buzz, it’s one of the zaniest things ever captured on film, but that day in 1974, I quite literally fell in the floor in spasms of painfully hysterical laughter. There was no film tradition Mel Brooks did not mock, nor any taboo he did not violate. The humor was a madcap mix of everything you could possibly imagine — vaudeville innuendo, sight gags, fart jokes — perfectly aimed at an audience that had grown up reading Mad magazine and had more recently graduated to National Lampoon and George Carlin albums.
Kids who see Blazing Saddles today cannot possibly imagine how shocking it was to see it in 1974. Unfortunately, most younger people now have only seen it on cable TV, where it gets chopped to pieces, and younger viewers are jaded by having seen other comedies that followed through the gigantic holes that Mel Brooks punched through the wall of Things You Can’t Say or Do in a Movie.
One of the running gags in the movie is that everybody in the “peaceful town called Rock Ridge,” is named Johnson. After the bad guys have made their first violent raid against Rock Ridge, there is an emergency meeting at the town’s church. One of the speeches — if you can call it that — is given by Gabby Johnson, a grizzled old-timer who jabbers incomprehensibly but with much passion and angry gestures. After Gabby has finished making noises about these sidewindin’ bushwackin’ hornswagglin’ cracker croakers, Olson Johnson then stands up to address the assembled citizenry of Rock Ridge:
“Now who can argue with that? I think we’re all indebted to Gabby Johnson for clearly stating what needed to be said. I’m particularly glad that these lovely children were here today to hear that speech. Not only was it authentic frontier gibberish, it expressed a courage little seen in this day and age.”
For some reason, that came to mind today as I was reading President Obama’s statement about the military coup in Egypt. No, it’s not authentic frontier gibberish, but it is certainly as incomprehensible as anything Gabby Johnson said that day in Rock Ridge:
“Core principles . . . universal human rights . . . legitimate aspirations . . . the democratic process . . . we are deeply concerned . . . an inclusive and transparent process . . . Given today’s developments, I have also directed the relevant departments and agencies to review the implications under U.S. law for our assistance to the Government of Egypt.”
Exactly what the hell does this mean? Have the White House speech writers been replaced by a Random Platitude Generator, a computer program that automatically cranks out empty rhetoric, glittering generalities and vague diplomatic argle-bargle?
The new sheriff . . . Well, he’s failed to answer the critical question we now face in Egypt: “What are we going to do about these sidewindin’ bushwackin’ hornswagglin’ cracker croakers?”
As for me, I say we work up a Number Six on ’em . . . .
UPDATE: Linked by The Lonely Conservative — thanks! — and welcome, Instapundit readers!
The latest news out of Egypt is . . . well, it’s not really news: The Muslim Brotherhood hates Jews, John Kerry is a liar, and President Obama is a Stuttering Clusterf–k of a Miserable Failure.
Meanwhile, in the comments, I notice that some people are claiming Young Frankenstein is funnier than Blazing Saddles, which is proof some people smoked too much weed back in the day. You could have said Airplane or Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, and I’d have said, “OK, maybe.” But Young Frankenstein? No, sorry.
Whittle On Beating The Soft, Creeping Tyranny
Posted on | July 4, 2013 | 16 Comments
by Smitty
We need reform, and need to vote for reformers.
FLASHBACK: Breitbart to Blumenthal: ‘You’re a Despicable Human Being’
Posted on | July 4, 2013 | 26 Comments
Following up on the Mona Eltahawy meltdown, Donald Douglas is celebrating the 4th of July fireworks and I promised I’d dig up video of Andrew Breitbart’s epic shaming of Max Blumenthal at CPAC. Yeah, Andrew nailed Max for all time in 2010:
“You’re ridiculous. You are a joke. You’re a despicable human being. You are the lowest life-form that I’ve ever seen.”
Makes you want to order that DVD of Hating Breitbart, doesn’t it?
“Memories light the corners of my mind . . .”
Well, @MonaEltahawy Is Indisputably Correct: Max Blumenthal Is a Douchebag
Posted on | July 4, 2013 | 45 Comments
Mona Eltawahy: Almost as evil as Amanda Marcotte.
Not since Alec Baldwin went ballistic over the “toxic little queen” have we seen a liberal Twitter meltdown quite as spectacular as what happened to Mona Eltahawy on Wednesday. It had something to do with the coup in Egypt, about which my natural instinct was to make sarcastic references about the folly of Obama administration foreign policy and toward foreigners in general. Because they’re weird-looking and talk funny, that’s why. But I digress . . .
Mona Eltahawy’s career as a progressive journalist is a tribute to her infinite reservoir of hate. Unlike some liberals, she doesn’t stop at hating Republicans, conservatives and Christians. She also hates America, she hates white people, she hates Israel and she hates men. If hate were football, Mona Eltahaway would be the Super Bowl champion.
So, Mona the Hate Queen is a native of Egypt who moved back there in March in order to become as much of a pain in the ass to them as she has been to America. But then she had to go back to New York to face trial for defacing Pamela Geller’s anti-jihad posters. After the coup went down Wednesday, Mona was a hot property and she got on Twitter to explain what an exhausting day she had doing eight “media hits” (i.e., interviews on TV or radio). This was mocked by her fellow lefties as an act of journalistic self-promotion:
Driver heard me sighing & asked if I was ok. "Yeah, I'm just exhausted, we got rid of our president today I did 8 media hits." Him"WHAAT?!"
— Mona Eltahawy (@monaeltahawy) July 3, 2013
Some are willing to give all for the revolution: https://t.co/KpIe0Watd3
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 3, 2013
@FarahSaafan I know, rough way to come off an all expense paid trip to aspen
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 3, 2013
Mona's only objective in life is to promote Mona RT @jeremyscahill: Sacrifice: https://t.co/I5pYNfaXxp
— R. Tarar (@RabiaAhsinT) July 3, 2013
Rather than ignore such jibes, Mona reached into her infinite reservoir of hate and started dropping f-bombs like the RAF over Dresden:
.@jeremyscahill is 1 thing, but @MaxBlumenthal is a humourless cowardly bully who does nothing but tweet. Bring it u piece of cowardly shit.
— Mona Eltahawy (@monaeltahawy) July 4, 2013
Who the FUCK do these men think they are? @MaxBlumenthal fuck you. Wow.
— Mona Eltahawy (@monaeltahawy) July 4, 2013
I have ignored idiots like @MaxBlumenthal in the past, but every now and then, my 180K followers should know he's a moron. Yeah, Max: Diva!
— Mona Eltahawy (@monaeltahawy) July 4, 2013
I never waited for the left, proggie types to support us. I moved back to Egypt instead. Fuck your support if @MaxBlumenthal is your guy.
— Mona Eltahawy (@monaeltahawy) July 4, 2013
Was this tirade justified? Mona the Hate Queen’s point, as she subsequently explained, was about what she sees as a sexist double standard, whereby women are criticized as “attention-seeking” for doing the same kind of self-promotion that men do.
However, men don’t always get a free pass for self-promotion. Being a shameless self-promoter myself, I sometimes get irritated blowback from people who get tired of hearing me explain how wonderful I am.
What I think inspired the sarcastic jibes about Mona the Hate Queen is that rather than celebrating — “Woo-hoo! Eight media hits!” — she whined about how exhausting it was to meet the evidently insatiable media demand for her commentaries. And her eruption at her critics was a sort of feminist performance art: “Look at me repeatedly saying ‘f–k’ to men on Twitter! Praise my courage! Admire me!”
No decent person would ever praise or admire a monster like Mona Eltahawy, who rivals even Amanda Marcotte for Satan’s affection. Yet neither can anyone doubt that Max Blumenthal is a contemptible douchebag. He is to journalism what herpes is to sex. So at least for once, Mona Eltahawy spoke truth to power douchebag.
Hey, @AngryBlackLady just used @MaxBlumenthal and "decency" in the same sentence https://t.co/rUtfKStbHx First time EVER! @monaeltahawy
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) July 4, 2013
Andrew Breitbart always hated Max Blumenthal. There are scenes of Andrew’s epic CPAC confrontation with Max in Hating Breitbart. I’ll see if I can find a clip and embed it in an update. In the meantime, here is Mona Eltahaway looking weird and talking funny as she explains to CNN’s Jake Tapper that the military takeover in Egypt was not actually a “coup,” because that might be bad or something.
Russia Says ‘Nyet’ to Gay Adoptions
Posted on | July 4, 2013 | 28 Comments
Vladimir Putin signed a law yesterday that prevents gay foreigners from adopting Russian children and, in the course of researching a news article about it, I was somewhat surprised:
The government says the law aims to protect children from “dictated non-traditional sexual behavior” and cites “psychologists’ research” about stresses it says “are often experienced by children raised by same-sex parents.” . . .
Since his re-election last year, Putin “has embraced the Russian Orthodox Church as a moral authority and harnessed its influence as a source of political support,” according to the Reuters news agency. Russia does not recognize same-sex marriage, and Putin complained last month that protesters and journalists keep “pestering” him about the issue. Last week, Putin signed a controversial new law against ”propagating homosexuality among minors” . . .
You can read the rest at ViralRead, but my take on it is that this is not really about Putin pushing an anti-gay agenda so much as it is about Russians getting sick and tired of the non-stop agitation. And ironically, considering that it was the Bolsheviks who pioneered “political correctness,” Russian society now doesn’t have the kind of hegemonic institutional bias that acts as a filter on public discourse in the U.S.
Whereas we have a national meltdown over “homophobia” because a celebrity with a bad temper goes off on a gossip writer, it seems Russians haven’t been so endlessly tutored on this subject. They have become fed up with being told by international busybodies that they have to embrace the gay-right agenda. The Russian cultural elite is evidently not as monolithic as ours. So the phenomenon of the minority tail wagging the national dog (whereby the 97 percent of Americans who are heterosexual automatically flinch in fear of being criticized for being less than enthusiastic about gay rights) doesn’t work in Moscow as effectively as it does in the United States.
Now that Russia has actually made it illegal to promote homosexuality to kids, small wonder they banned U.S. adoptions of Russian children. These days, American education system scarcely seems to teach anything else except the gay agenda.
But maybe our public schools still aren’t teaching the gay agenda as thoroughly as some “activists” would prefer . . .
« go back — keep looking »