The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Anthropomorphic Lint Blames GOP

Posted on | September 9, 2012 | 7 Comments

by Smitty

Harry “Dingius Maximus” Reid remains among the worst politicians ever to beset this country. Breitbart:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) on Friday blamed Republicans for the poor August jobs report in which 96,000 jobs were added and the unemployment only went down to 8.1% because 368,000 people gave up, lost hope, and left the workforce in the bleak economy.
Reid said “while our recovery is still moving too slowly for many Americans, job growth would likely have been even stronger if Republicans had not blocked Democratic efforts to hire more teachers, firefighters and police officers.”
“The best way to speed up our recovery is for Republicans to stop their knee-jerk obstruction of every effort Democrats put forward, and start working across the aisle to find common ground,” Reid said.

 Update: linked at Hogewash

Category: Democrats, Harry Reid

VIDEO: Paul Ryan on ‘Face the Nation’ — ‘Offering the Country a Better Choice’

Posted on | September 9, 2012 | 3 Comments

Interviewed by Norah O’Donnell on CBS, the Republican vice presidential candidate stays focused and slams home his point:

“You know, what we have learned in this presidency, [President Obama] says one thing and he does another. He gave us four budgets, Norah, each of which had trillion dollar deficits, none of which ever, ever proposed to actually balance the budget. His allies in the Senate haven’t even given us a budget for three years. [The Republican House] passed budgets. We’ve led. Mitt Romney and I have offered a specific plan to prevent a debt crisis, to save Medicare and Social Security, to create jobs, to get us growing again. It’s a five point plan for a stronger middle class which is aimed to get us out of this weak recovery we have and get us back to growing our economy like we ought to. We got a troubling jobs report on Friday, Norah, that said for everybody who got a job, nearly four people stopped looking for a job. This isn’t working and President Obama’s rhetoric to the side, it’s just not working. And that’s why we are offering the country a better choice.”

This shows Ryan’s extraordinary discipline in staying on-message, while resistng the urge to throw in a clever “pudding” reference.

Category: CBS, Election 2012, Paul Ryan

If Dinesh D’Souza’s Thesis In 2016 Is Correct, Then Riddle Me This . . .

Posted on | September 9, 2012 | 13 Comments

by Smitty

Insty points to Polliwood, where 2016: Obama’s America is a major topic:My review of the documentary is here, but the Polliwood clip brings up another angle that has taken a while to form: if D’Souza is correct, then isn’t Obama the ueber-hypocrite for the ages?

I recall reading A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East and thinking, yeah: imperialism is a bastard’s game. The notion of a small clique of people in power dividing a larger population against itself to retain control is the antithesis of liberty. And yet, that was the consistent British game across multiple continents for a couple centuries. Bad British: bad.

And so BHO has made a political career out of surfing the waves of resentment to reach the Resolute Desk. And yet, hasn’t the purportedly evil British playbook been exactly what Obama has used since he was sworn in, twice? We’ve seen the verbal uniter act as the divider on, come to think of it, just about every issue: health care; the right to life; marriage; the economy; foreign policy.

Thus, Obama’s chief complaint does not seem to be that the evil British were squashing people under the bus of colonialism; rather, Obama’s complaint appears to be that it’s unfair when he’s not driving that bus.

Rule Obama! 
Obama rule airwaves 
Americans ever, ever, ever shall be slaves.

Update: check Belvedere’s response. I don’t know how comfortable I am with his argument:

In almost every place the British had colonies, there is civilization today. Unlike other nations, they gladly ’took up The White Man’s Burden’, as it were, and sought to improve the lot of the non-Western peoples they ruled over — and they succeeded in the vast, vast majority of cases. You can point to their foul-ups in the Middle East after World War I and rightly say ‘the Brits screwed-up’, but this can be explained by the twin failings of arrogance and idealism [ie: Leftism] that had invaded even Winston Churchill’s soul.

While worth noting, this does not amount to an end-justifies-the-means argument. If all you need to do is point to a little bit of good done, you can justify ObamaCare.

Category: Barack Obama

Paco Summarizes DNC Charlotte

Posted on | September 9, 2012 | 7 Comments

by Smitty

I have never witnessed a bigger convocation of hams, gigolos, end-of-careerists, unholy rollers, decaf Bolsheviks, infanticide fans, wholesale cutpurses, mythomaniacs, estrogen-obsessed juanita-one-notes, common frauds, philanderers, race-baiters and 10th-percentile IQs as I saw on display at this year’s Democratic National Convention. If the Mental Health Association of Central Carolina wasn’t there in force, handing out brochures and coupons, then it missed a great opportunity.

Category: Blogging

Be Ye Not Dismayed

Posted on | September 9, 2012 | 29 Comments

Smitty jumped on Dave Weigel for his “trolling” article, and I’ll let that stand, except to add that Weigel seems to be advocating that mainstream journalism adopt an even more stringently pro-Democrat “message discipline” — as if, for example, having Soledad O’Brein literally reading liberal blogs on the air at CNN is insufficient proof of their abject partisanship.

Really, Dave? I mean, is it the professional duty of journalists to ensure the re-election of Barack Obama? As part of that duty are they obligated not to allow themselves to be distracted by those “trolling” conservatives who aren’t in sync with that mission? Are you saying that the re-election of Obama is — as a neutral objective fact — such a good and necessary thing that journalists and broadcasters can in good conscience ignore any contradictory evidence?

Speaking of contradictory evidence, the economy sucks: After the anemic jobs report Friday, the dollar slumped, gold rose to $1,740 an ounce and Brent crude went to $114 a barrel.

C’mon, Dave: You worked for Reason magazine, so surely in your libertarian heart you understand economics enough to know that we’re seeing further proof of the failure of Keynesianism — as if further proof was needed. Whatever your cultural or policy differences with the GOP, you can’t believe that, in terms of pure fiscal/economic policy, a second Obama term would produce anything other than a further descent into the helpless slough of ’70s-style stagflation.

It’s still the economy, stupid, and it’s not the Republicans who are “trolling” with distractions to avoid that subject. Hell, for an entire week leading up to the GOP convention, the Democrats and their media pals were trying to persuade the nation that Republicans were preparing to nominate Todd Akin for president. And then the convention coverage was a weeklong blizzard of “fact-checking,” much of it of highly dubious neutrality.

RYAN LIED! RYAN LIED! RYAN LIED!

Good Lord, Dave, after that elaborate pompom-and-cartwheels partisan cheerleading routine by the MSM, you expect to convince us that a one-day flap over the Democrat platform is proof that the media are too easily distracted by GOP-friendly memes?

Anyway, this is only relevant insofar as it pertains to a discussion about media bias that Ali Akbar and I were having on our drive back from the convention in Charlotte. Except for one day at home last Monday, Ali and I have spent two weeks in Convention Hell together, a sort of Oscar-and-Felix pairing — “The Odd Couple Do Politics,” with me playing the slobby sportswriter and Ali as the fastidious photographer. Our perspectives are different: Ali’s background is as a partisan operative who was actually on staff at the 2008 GOP convention, while I come from a background where, as Mencken said, “The only way a reporter should look at a politician is down.”

Despite my political enthusiasms (an ex-Democrat, as I briefly explained four years ago), I view journalism from the inside out in a way that Ali does not. And so at one point as we were driving somewhere near Danville, I emphasized that criticisms of liberal media bias should be aimed at the bias, and not at the media, per se.

This was the point of an argument I had with Melissa Clouthier a couple of years ago: Conservatives do not help themselves by fomenting a generalized hostility toward journalism as a profession, and must realize that many of the worst offenders in terms of liberal bias are not actually professional journalists:

In case you didn’t realize it, the only claim [Chris] Matthews has to being a journalist is that he is a partisan Democrat. Matthews never worked a day as a reporter, never covered a city council meeting or a homecoming parade. After evading the Vietnam-era military draft by enrolling in the Peace Corps, Matthews moved to Washington and worked on the staff of various congressional Democrats before unsuccessfully running for Congress as a Democrat, later joining the White House staff as a speechwriter for Democrat Jimmy Carter, then spending the Reagan years as a top aide to Democrat House Speaker Tip O’Neill. Somehow, this ultra-political background as a partisan operative qualified Matthews for the job of Washington bureau chief for the San Francisco Chronicle. Such is the biography of the man who has been employed for the past 15 years as a “journalist” by NBC, hosting his own show on the network’s little-watched MSNBC cable franchise while appearing regularly on the broadcast network during coverage of major political events.

For his ludicrous imitation of a newsman — Ted Baxter had more credibility — Matthews is reportedly paid a salary of $5 million. It is a disservice to hard-working journalists who toil for comparative peanuts to scapegoat them for the sins of overpaid TV political hacks like Matthews or George Stephanopoulos.

Much of the bias in coverage we have seen in the current election cycle is a transparent attempt at bandwagon psychology, with major news organizations generally exaggerating the likelihood of Obama’s re-election, so as to persuade the low-information “swing” voter who tends to vote for the candidate he perceives as the likely winner. Beyond its effect on swing voters, this kind of coverage has the effect of encouraging Democrats and demoralizing Republicans, which probably explains Stanley Kurtz’s gloomy assessment:

To the extent that Republicans dismiss this convention as either a failure or relatively meaningless, however, I think we’re fooling ourselves.
This election could go either way. If Obama squeaks by, he will have done so with the help of a Democratic party that has taken a large, open, and disturbingly leftist turn. I think we’re missing the significance of that. It is completely accurate to say that the Democrats are pushing a bogus reformulation of the American way of life — slapping a bunch of flags on their Julia ad and turning classic conceptions of civic and religious community into covers for a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Unfortunately, this way of thinking is becoming the new normal in this country, and Obama and his convention have only helped to cement the change.
Conservatives can puncture these arguments all we like, but we can’t cut through the media filter.

I disagree. I do not believe that lies can so easily triumph over truth, no matter how willing the major media are to repeat the lies. At some basic level, amid all the controversy and spin, the truth is self-evident — even to those idiotic swing voters and, yes, even to liberal journalists themselves. It is not due to any sudden eruption of right-wing sentiment in the press corps that Obama’s Thursday night speech was almost universally panned by the media. If Obama’s lost Michael Tomasky . . .

Professional journalists, whatever their political biases, have a career interest in locating and reporting the truth. Their credibility is at stake, and there is a competitive advantage to being right. Despite their partisan sympathy for Obama, when he gave a lousy convention speech, reporters and TV talking heads were smart enough to realize they couldn’t portray this flop as a triumph.

The economy sucks — this is a neutral objective fact, and Obama’s attempt to explain this fact takes three forms:

  1. It would have been worse if not for his policies;
  2. It’s getting better; and
  3. Blame Bush!

Will voters accept these excuses? Given what Rush Limbaugh calls the “uncanny” resemblance between Obama’s speech and Jimmy Carter’s 1980 convention speech, I’m skeptical of any assertion that Obama’s excuse-making will easily carry the day, no matter what obstacles to truth the “media filter” creates. The latest polls showing a significant convention “bump” for Obama — both Gallup and Ipsos/Reuters now showing Obama ahead by 4 points — are certainly discouraging, but not entirely unexpected.

Look at the Real Clear Politics national poll summary and you see that between Aug. 16 and Sept. 3, a series of eight polls showed the race in a range between Obama +2 and Romney +1 — an 18-day neck-and-neck horserace — and now, in the immediate aftermath of the Democrat convention, Obama appears to be opening a lead.

Is this a temporary phenomenon, or a decisive break in the trend of a virtual tie? Probably the former, but only time will tell.

Polls are not the only metric of campaign success and, with 65 days remaining until Election Day, the Romney campaign has advantages that have not yet been fully exploited. When the Romney campaign announced it raised $100 million in August, the response from the Obama campaign was . . . crickets chirping.

Whatever amount Team O raised in August, past evidence suggests that they’re deep into a negative “burn rate,” spending money faster than they can raise it, creating the possibility that Romney might blow them out of the water with a massive ad blitz in the final weeks of the campaign. Democrats are seriously worried about that possibility.

The other thing I keep thinking about is the debates. The three debates in October will be the big chance for Romney to leap over the “media filter” and defeat Obama mano-a-mano, and I think those Republicans like Stanley Kurtz who are currently discouraged may be underestimating Romney’s chances of a decisive victory there.

Having been at the January GOP debate in Jacksonville, Florida, where Romney demolished Newt Gingrich — cleverly drawing Newt into a forensic ambush — I don’t doubt Mitt’s potential to score a debate knockout. If Romney brings his A-game and Obama doesn’t, the campaign might break sharply toward a GOP landslide.

In our brief interview Wednesday, Joe Trippi discounted the likelihood of the debates having a major impact on the race:

RSM: My thought is, it’s going to be about the debates. Do you feel that way?
TRIPPI: I don’t think so. I mean, if somebody makes a mistake in the debates, that’s gonna be pretty costly, but I think a lot of the — once you get into this kind of a polarized campaign, what tends to happen is that each side’s folks watch and cheer their guy on. There aren’t a whole lot of undecideds out there left to move in a debate, and so I a contrarian. I don’t really think the debates are going to matter unless somebody gaffes.

Well, OK, then: Republicans should pray for an Obama gaffe, and trust in the Almighty to deliver the “pretty costly” mistake that will take Joe Trippi by complete surprise. In the meantime, at least one Republican seems utterly undaunted — a guy named Mitt Romney, who just released this podcast message:

This week, Democrats met in Charlotte to re-nominate Barack Obama for President. They tried to recapture the spirit of 2008, when then-candidate Obama stood in front of Greek columns and made a lot of promises about how he’d make life better for Americans.
He was elected, but things did not get better. Under President Obama, we’ve endured the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression.
This week, after another Democrat convention filled with nice words and a lot of promises, Friday’s jobs report once again brought this administration back down to earth. The unemployment rate has now been above 8 percent for 43 straight months.
Nearly 47 million Americans are on food stamps – an all-time record high, and 15 million more Americans than when President Obama took office.
Nearly 60 percent of the jobs that have been created after the recession was officially over are low-wage jobs, and they pay less than $14 an hour.
And our national debt recently reached a staggering $16 trillion, an increase of almost $6 trillion under President Obama.
Americans are hurting, they’re paying a heavy toll for these years of drift and disappointment, trying hard to hang on for a brighter day. But when we looked to Charlotte this week for signs of hope from the party in power, what did we see?
We saw a party completely out of ideas. We didn’t hear one new idea for throwing a lifeline to the struggling middle class. Instead, we heard a stubborn defense of policies that haven’t worked.
We saw a president who once promised to unite us, double-down on the politics of fear and division. Four years ago, he said, “If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.” That was Candidate Obama describing the strategy that is now at the heart of President Obama’s campaign.
A couple days ago, the President was asked to grade his economic performance.
Words like “disappointing” and “dismal” come to mind. But instead, he chose “incomplete” – because that’s the best he can do as he asks the American people for a second term.
President Obama is hoping you’ll let him advance with an “incomplete.” But on November 6th, Americans should hold him accountable. I’m asking you to vote for the ticket that’s offering real solutions for the middle class, with a plan to create 12 million jobs over the next four years.
A weak economy and unprecedented debt may be the best President Obama can do – but it is not the best America can do. I commit to you that I will be the president this moment demands. Join our cause, and help us deliver a better future for all Americans this November.

Facts matter, and the fact of Obama’s failure is a truth too large to be easily concealed by any “media filter.”

 





 

 


Category: Barack Obama, Dave Weigel, Election 2012, Media Bias, Mitt Romney, Polls

@DaveWeigel Nearly Discovers Capitalism, Shrugs It Off As ‘Trolling’

Posted on | September 8, 2012 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

Ace seems kinda irritated with Weigel’s Slate piece about “How a small band of conservatives generated half of the Democratic Convention’s headlines”. Weigel goes on at length about another friend of this blog, the mighty YidWithLid:

Democrats did not expect to spend Wednesday arguing about the capital of Israel and the appearance of the word “God” in their platform. There were, reportedly, 15,000 members of the media in Charlotte, of whom maybe 14,980 could have given a damn about the party platform. On Tuesday night, when the Obama campaign and the DNC released its platform, none of the bigfoot media outlets in town spent time on the text.
No, it took until Wednesday morning for Jeff Dunetz, at the YidWithALid blog, to comment that “Democrats have removed this pro-Israel section from their platform.” (They had removed references to Hamas and references to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.) At 11:26 a.m., Weekly Standard reporter Daniel Halper published a story on the platform, making the same point. (He credited YidWithALid.)

What is this, if not capitalism? The media gatekeepers sit in their Jericho, throttling the information flow up from the Jordan river plane to Jerusalem. Us little blogger Rahabs, (not to be confused with the Sandra Fluke grande horizonatals) are helping to bring down the walls. Commerce will flow. Because there is a market. Go right ahead and belittle the blogs all you like, Dave. Capitalism will out, and it’s not preserving your architecture in the slightest.

If there wasn’t a market for all of the idiocy of the DNC, then no one would have paid attention.  That simple.

Disclosure: I’m doing Joshua Chapter 2 in Sunday School tomorrow.

Category: Ace of Spades, Blogging, Dave Weigel, Yid With Lid

FMJRA 2.0: September Rain

Posted on | September 8, 2012 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Kimberlin-Rauhauser Axis Targets Romney Campaign Staffer Bill Murphy

Just Doing My Job, Jerry

Democrat Transition Into Communist Party Continues Apace

Thank You, Everybody! (And Thank God)

FMJRA 2.0: Over The Mountain

Hide Your Kids! Hide Your Wife!

 

Breitbart in February: ‘You Want a Unity Speech? I’ll Give You a Unity Speech.’

#EmptyChairDay : Angry?

#EmptyChairDay : 100-Year Plant, Or 1000-Year Gripe?

 

Commies for Obama

Leave Barack Obama a Loan!

Poll: Most Voters Aren’t That Stupid

Cherokee People, Cherokee Tribe: Elizabeth Warren Can’t Hide Her Lies

Blogging 101: Headline Juxtaposition

DNC Platform Lets Hamas Off the Hook

Sociopaths and Democrats

@KatiePavlich Appreciation Post

DNC Charlotte: Obama’s Thursday Apotheosis Gets Rained Out

DNC Charlotte: Warming Up

LIVE AT FIVE: 09.06.12

World’s Youngest Blogger: Doggone Right, This Blog Works!

Domain Name Servers And You: Thoughts On Recent Intimacy

Top linkers this week:

  1. Hogewash (9)
  2. (tied) Lonely Conservative and Daily Pundit (6)
  3. Jackie Wellfonder (5)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline for submitting links to next week’s FMJRA is Friday, September 14.

Category: FMJRA Award

The Problem With Sexual ‘Rights’

Posted on | September 8, 2012 | 31 Comments

“Seizing on the triumphant narrative of the black civil-rights movement, liberals adopted the habit of framing political debates in terms of minority ‘rights’ versus majority ‘discrimination.’ . . . To disagree with a liberal, to oppose his latest policy proposal, is to invite comparisons to Bull Connor and Orval Faubus, so long as the liberal can make ‘rights’ the basis of his argument.
” ‘Rights talk’ allowed liberals a means of preemptively delegitimizing their opponents and thereby to avoid arguing about policy in terms of necessity, utility and efficacy. If all legal and political conflicts are about ‘rights,’ there is no need to argue about the specific consequences of laws and policies. Merely determine which side of the controversy represents ‘rights’ and the debate ends there.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “Gay Rights, Gay Rage,” The American Spectator, Oct. 17, 2008

Americans have been deliberately miseducated about their own laws and history, and the teaching of logic has been abandoned altogether, so that our arguments about public policy are crowded with distracting falsehoods and emotional appeals to a liberal mythology of “progress.”

Liberalism has no fixed goal. We will never reach a point at which the liberal will say, “enough.” Grant all his demands today, and tomorrow the liberal will return to demand more.

Take for example the federal budget, which is $3,796,000,000,000 for the current year. Could we go to our liberal friends and get them to specify an amount — say, $5 trillion — at which the federal budget would be big enough? If we could ever get liberals to stipulate some final number, some ultimate limit to the remorseless expansion of Washington’s power over us, then we might be able to negotiate a settlement. But what liberals demand is always more, and so it’s like negotiating with a shark about how much of your leg he will eat.

The same principle applies in law and policy. The liberal concept of “progress” fuels a remorseless shark-like hunger for more, until eventually we find ourselves watching an illegal immigrant being celebrated on the stage of the Democratic National Convention with rhetoric suggesting that only hateful bigots can be in favor of enforcing our nation’s immigration laws. (No one bothers to point out that the law Benita Veliz’s parents violated, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, was the legislative brainchild of Ted Kennedy.)

News From the Frontier of ‘Progress’

How did we get here? And where are we heading next? Let us examine another report from this past week’s convention:

Hundreds of delegates and supporters gathered at the Charlotte Convention Center today for the 2012 Democratic National Convention’s LGBT Caucus, with much reason to celebrate history. This year the Convention plays host to more than 500 LGBT delegates, more than any other Democratic National Convention ever. . . .
The caucus meeting focused on the many advances made in LGBT rights over the past four years, including the legalization of gay marriage in several states and the increased presence of gay and lesbian members in Congress.

In case you didn’t know, LGBT stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, the last category having recently made news elsewhere:

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered state prison officials to provide a taxpayer-funded sex-reassignment surgery to a transgender inmate serving life in prison for murder.
U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf ruled in the case of Michelle Kosilek, who was born as a man but has received hormone treatments and lives as a woman in an all-male prison. Robert Kosilek was convicted of murder in the killing of his wife in 1990.
Wolf is believed to be the first federal judge to order prison officials to provide the surgery for a transgender inmate.
Kosilek first sued the Massachusetts Department of Correction 12 years ago. Two years later, Wolf ruled that Kosilek was entitled to treatment for gender-identity disorder, but stopped short of ordering surgery. Kosilek sued again in 2005, arguing that the surgery is a medical necessity.
In his ruling Tuesday, Wolf found that surgery is the “only adequate treatment” for Kosilek’s “serious medical need.”
“The court finds that there is no less intrusive means to correct the prolonged violation of Kosilek’s Eighth Amendment right to adequate medical care,” Wolf wrote in his 126-page ruling.

The Eight Amendment? If a convicted murderer doesn’t have a vagina, that’s “cruel and unusual punishment”? As strange as this sounds, it is entirely logical if you accept the premise of sexual “rights” as understood by liberals. This was evident four years ago, when gay-rights activists resorted to terroristic intimidation against supporters of Proposition 8:

The gay rage in California can be traced directly to the Supreme Court’s 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision, which voided a Texas sodomy law because, as Justice Anthony Kennedy declared, “our laws and traditions in the past half century … show an emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex.”
The Lawrence ruling was the culmination of what Justice Antonin Scalia called “a 17-year crusade” to overturn the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision (which had upheld Georgia’s sodomy statute) and, as Scalia noted in his dissent, the Court’s “emerging awareness” argument was a disingenuous way to avoid actually declaring a “fundamental right” to sodomy. The legal effect was the same, however, and Lawrence was repeatedly cited in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s decision five months later mandating the legalization of gay marriage in that state.
If homosexuality is a right, and denying legal recognition to same-sex marriage is a violation of that right, then the rage of gay activists against their opponents is entirely justified.

Likewise, if “gender-identity disorder” is a legitimate diagnosis, and the medical community prescribes sex-change surgery as the only remedy, then denying this treatment to Michelle (neé Robert) Kosilek can indeed be construed as “cruel and unusual punishment.”

And is there anyone who doubts that, should ObamaCare be fully implemented, federal taxpayers will eventually be required to foot the bill to address the “serious medical need” of other such persons? The “right” to a government-provided sex-change may already be effectively a matter of law — sanctioned by court-ordered constitutional protection — unless Judge Wolf’s decision is overturned. If Justice Kennedy’s “emerging awareness” concept has the force of legal precedent, who can predict whither this awareness shall henceforth emerge?

Paved With Weird Intentions

In basing his ruling on science — accepting as valid the diagnosis of “gender-identity disorder” and the prescription of sex-change surgery as the “only adequate treatment” — Judge Wolf abandons our Constitution and the Anglo-American legal tradition in favor of the shifting consensus of contemporary experts.

What a majority of scientists believe about sexuality today is quite different from what they believed during the heyday of Freudianism a half-century ago, and who can predict what “discoveries” or theoretical innovations researchers will make in 10 or 20 years? Never mind that next year’s discovery may disprove this year’s consensus. The basic problem of this scientific approach to jurisprudence is that law is thereby deprived of permanence — judges are no longer applying a fixed and known rule to cases, but rather are permitted to re-write the law from the bench by reference to “rights” as determined by the latest theories of scientists.

To show how such an approach could lead to disastrous outcomes, we need merely examine the latest neurological research into the nature of another kind of “sexual orientation”:

[Canadian psychologist Hubert] Van Gjiseghem says what he and his colleagues mean by sexual orientation is a person’s inborn and unalterable sexual preference, irrespective of whether that preference is harmful to others or not. Currently, there is no significant longitudinal evidence that pedophiles can be made to not be attracted to children, and thus it can be defined as their orientation. And if pedophilia is a sexual orientation, that also means it’s futile to send pedophiles to prison in an effort to alter their attractions. . . .
Dr. James Cantor is the Head of Research in the Sexual Behaviours Clinic at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Canada’s largest mental health and teaching hospital. He’s also an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto’s school of medicine. He’s been working on better understanding pedophiles for about 12 years now using a variety of methods. . . .

If you’re going to read the whole article at Gawker, be prepared to cope with feelings of outrage at how the “born that way” theory of homosexuality has been extended to pedophilia.

The writer of the article, Cord Jefferson, is at pains to distinguish between the term pedophile and the term child molester and, although few parents will give a damn about such semantics, it is enlightening in this regard: The scientists interviewed by Jefferson are interested in determining how crime can be prevented by persuading pedophiles not to act on their “sexual orientation.”

Yet this possibility — that persons need not act on their idiosyncratic sexual impulses — is entirely rejected by the rights-oriented legal philosophy that inspired Justice Kennedy’s Lawrence decision or Judge  Wolf”s ruling in the Kosilek case. Both Kennedy and Wolf seem to presume that people have a right to satisfy their sexual desires, and there was an entire caucus at the Democrat convention dedicated to defending such rights.

If, however, the safety of citizens requires that certain sexual desires be sternly repressed, the objection of “rights” loses its force, and even such a liberal as Ta-Nehisi Coates is outraged by the tone of moral neutrality with which Cord Jefferson examines the claims of scientists about pedophilia as a sexual orientation.

Noel Sheppard notes that the Gawker writer is a “self-professed progressive,” and it is remarkable how the logic of progressivism inexorably leads to conclusions that even progressives find themselves compelled to reject — at least for now, that is.

Perhaps, as with homosexuality, our academic, legal, scientific and cultural elites can successfully destigmatize pedophilia, upending society’s moral consensus in such a way that our dread of child molesters is replaced by a horror at the benighted bigotry of those who fail to understand the science that proclaims that they’re “born that way,” and that this endows pedophiles with rights which no well-meaning person can oppose or criticize.

Oh, what wonders the “emerging awareness” provides!

(Via Memeorandum; hat-tip: Bob Belvedere on Twitter.)

 

Category: Crime, Gays, Science, Sex
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