Over the past decade, the Abbey has grown into one of the premiere gay watering holes in West Hollywood (if not all of Southern California).  When passing through the Southland, many of my gay friends insist on stopping by.  And as the establishment’s profile has increased, it has drawn an increasingly mixed crowd, including a good number of straight women.

This has not sat well with a good number of gay people.

Perhaps aware of the growing discontent of its core clientele or perhaps because of the reasons it offers, “The Abbey“, reports Simone Wilson of the LA Weekly

. . . is making a statement of its own: Until marriage is an option for everyone everywhere, ignorant straight chicks in penis hats are exiled from the building.

This will be the first all-out ban on bachelorette parties in the Los Angeles area. But WeHo patriots might be surprised to learn that in Chicago’s premiere gayborhood, bachelorette parties have been blacklisted for a few years now. Always one step ahead of us, that Boystown!

Given the complaints I have heard, I wonder if the management of the Abbey has decided to dress up their decision in politically correct rhetoric.  But, its reasons shouldn’t matter.  The Abbey is a private establishment and should be free to determine its clientele — and the types of celebrations it hosts.

And if straight women don’t like this decision, well, then, no one’s requiring them to patronize the Abbey.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Richard Bell sums it up, “Freedom of association is the American way.”  I might quibble a bit with his expression adding “one aspect of” between “is” and “the”.

Earlier this week at the LA Weekly, Patrick Range McDonald blogged about Tuesday’s celebration of “Harvey Milk Day in honor of the slain San Francisco supervisor who was one of the first gay elected officials in the United States”:

Milk was assassinated by former San Francisco supervisor Dan White in 1978. A few months before his death, he gave a stirring speech at the Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco.

Emphasis added.  Gay Freedom Day?  Freedom?  You mean, back then the watchword wasn’t equality?  Wonder when it changed — and why.

Freedom means the state leaves us alone to live our lives as we choose.  All too often, equality, under its current connotation, means the state attempts to equalize the results.  Modern conservatives much prefer the former notion.

Perhaps, the early gay movement had more in common with the conservative movement than today’s gay activists care to acknowledge.

Reader MV passed along this story of how non-discrimination laws might prevent an employer from choosing to hire only gay people:

A gay man in Manhattan contends he was fired because he objected to his boss’s biased hiring: The boss, he alleges, had a bias against hiring straight people.

Jamie Ardigo, 32, of Hoboken, is suing investor and entrepreneur J. Christopher Burch of New York for sex-discrimination and wrongful termination. Ardigo, who had been hired as HR director for J. Christopher Capital, Burch’s company, contends he was fired when he sought to change what he claims was Burch’s and the company’s discriminatory practices.

. . . .

[Fewer than four weeks after Ardgo "went to work for the company in early November 2011"] he says, he was seated in a meeting where Burch announced the fact that he hired only gay men because they were productive, and because he trusted them. Burch said the same thing, Ardigo asserts, on other occasions: “I witnessed it in meetings with the executive management team, where he’d blatantly state the fact that he only likes to hire gay men and beautiful women.”

And the problem is?

It is Mr. Burch’s company; he should be free to determines which individuals make the most productive and trustworthy employees.  And if he believes gay men to be more productive (and given some gay men I know it the field of finance, I have seen some grounds for that belief), the he should be free to hire them.

If he, however, chooses to hire only gay people, he gives his competitors an advantage — as they will be selecting from a much wider pool of potential employees.   That’s said, it’s his money he’s risking (not the government’s).

Now, Burch’s lawyer denies the allegations; this issue may never come before a judge.  That said, were Mr. Burch to prefer gay men in his office, well, bully for him.  The state should not be in the business of deciding how an entrepreneur selects his workforce.

Nine months ago, when writing about “conversion therapy,” I expressed my doubts about the effectiveness of this treatment, designed to “cure” people like us of our longings for same-sex intimacy and affection.

Despite those doubts, I believe, as I then wrote that, in a free society, “Christian groups have every right to set up . . . companies [offering such therapy, provided they do not coerce anyone to enter treatment.”  Even though in a subsequent post, I expressed the intention to address the issue of “coercion“, I have yet to do so.  Given that  many of those “coerced” to enter such treatment are minors, the issue is not as simple as it might first appear; should the state intervene to prevent this coercion, it would then be acting in loco parentis.

As a reader said when we were discussing the issue on Facebook, “It does get hairy for minors.”  On the one hand, I very much want to prevent any teen from experiencing some of the extreme treatments in such programs.  On the other, I fear the slippery slope created by any legislation removing parents’ rights to raise their own children.  Will the state then try to prevent parents from home-schooling their children or learning to hunt?

At the LA Weekly, Patrick McDonald writes about a bill pending before the California legislature to allow teens to opt out of therapies their parents choose;

Written by California State Senator Ted Lieu and sponsored by the gay rights group Equality California, Senate Bill 1172 would force psychotherapists to tell gay patients about the mental and physical harms of undertaking any so-called “gay therapies.” Therapists would also need the consent of a patient before moving forward with their dangerous work.

Most importantly, the bill seeks to stop all gay therapies of minors, regardless of the wishes of his or her parents. So you have to be at least 18 years old and sign off on treatment before a whacked-out therapist can do anything to you.

He goes on to detail some of the treatments to which young people have been subject.  The text of the legislation is here.   (more…)

Consistent with conservative principles as articulated by the Republican Party at least since its founding — and particularly in the post-Civil War era as well as in the last third of the preceding century (roughly synchronous with the rise of Ronald Reagan), we should favor laws which do not distinguish based on race, religion, sexual orientation or any other similar factor differentiating one human being from another.

We shouldn’t ask government to sanction our sexual orientation, but do ask that it not condemn it.  We don’t need validation from the state to live freely.  And it is not warranted for the state to punish us for our difference — nor for acting upon our sexual/emotional longings for affection and intimacy.

We ask simply to be treated as human beings with each individual retaining the right to determine his destiny.

And by not asking for privileges based on our difference, we make clearer our commitment to freedom (and indeed to the ideal of equality under the law), to the state leaving each man, each woman alone to determine his, to determine her own destiny.  At the same time, we reaffirm the principles which have made this nation great, have made it strong and made it a shining example for those seeking freedom from oppressive regimes and seeking to replace such regimes with more equitable administrations.

In short, by not asking for anything from the government, we lead by example, reminding all Americans that we don’t need favors from the state in order to seek out opportunities, fulfill our own destines and pursue our own happiness, on our own or together with individuals with whom we choose to associate as part of groups we choose to join.

More on this anon.

NB: Tweaked the text to make it a bit bolder.

Sobering, yet important video to wake you up from your Monday morning stupor….

(background on video at this link)

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Apparently in conjunction with Robert J. Samuelson’s thoughtful Sunday column, The global happiness derby, the Washington Post is running a poll today asking readers if they believe happiness should be the goal of government:

Even a significant major it of that paper’s readers (who would, I dare say, skew left along with its editorial direction) don’t believe governments should make our happiness their goal.

Now, to be sure, our Declaration of Independence defines the pursuit of happiness as a right; Mr. Jefferson thus did not define the right as happiness, but its pursuit, an important distinction.  It seems almost that it then becomes an aspect of another right, liberty — that governments should leave us free to pursue happiness.

Although, as Samuelson notes, some social scientists believe governments can promote happiness, the means of achieving that state of mind cannot be reduced to a crude formula.

Better he argues to ”leave ‘happiness’ to novelists and philosophers — and rescue it from the economists and psychologists who think it can be distilled into a ‘science’ and translated into pro-happiness policies”:

Creating an impossible goal — universal happiness — also condemns government to failure. Happiness depends on too much that is uncontrollable. For starters, personality. We all know people who seem blessed — stable marriage, healthy children, successful job — who are restless, grumpy and sometimes depressed. Meanwhile, others plagued by misfortune — sickness, shaky finances, family disappointment — persevere and remain upbeat.

Contradictions abound. Freedom, the ability to choose, is also essential to well-being, says the happiness report. But freedom permits people to do self-destructive things that reduce happiness.

And freedom also allows people to mend their ways and improve their state of mind. (more…)

On Monday, on Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Rhodes Cook found it noteworthy to point out

. . .that Romney’s share of the vote has steadily declined as the primaries have unfolded. He drew 41% in the six primaries held before Super Tuesday (March 6), 38% in the seven primaries that took place on Super Tuesday, and 30% in the two Deep South primaries in Alabama and Mississippi) held since then.

Yesterday, he finished with just shy of 47% of the vote in Illinois, running 12 points ahead of Rick Santorum, routing him, as one headline writer had it.  The Massachusetts governor won decisively in Cook, DuPage and Lake Counties, taking 57, 54 and 56 percent of the vote, respectively.  Unlike last week when Santorum outperformed the exit polls, this week, as Michael Barone noted, the former Massachusetts governor ran ahead of what had been “projected by the exit poll“.

He won well enough to change the dynamics of the race.  Instead of a slow crawl to the nomination, he should now start picking up the pace.

I was doing cardio at the gym when the returns started coming in and when the race was called.  I watched Mitt Romney’s speech, catching the words via closed captioning.  He seemed to largely repeat his economic freedom speech of the previous day.  One phrase stood out.  More on that anon.

Rick started speaking just as I was finishing my workout.  And he was still speaking after I had changed and returned home.  And still speaking.  Jennifer Rubin, who heard his words, thought, that in his overlong address, he was acknowledging that the nomination is not to be his: (more…)

Love the way Mitt keeps his poise as he faces a hostile question:

Another example of how calm the former Massachusetts governor is under fire, a quality which will serve him well should he become the Republican nominee and face an ever more hostility from the media and liberal activists than he currently faces.

Posting the vide, Santorum supporter Ed Morrissey (to whom I tip my hat for the video), observes that

Romney has struggled to connect with conservatives, but in this case he hits the nail on the head.  The woman uses the common, historically- and politically-illiterate argument that “pursuit of happiness” means a right to delivery of happiness.  Nowhere in the foundational documents of this nation does the right to achieved happiness exist — only that government will stay out of the way of citizens who seek it to the greatest degree possible.

In this case, the woman believes that free contraception will make her happy.  That conflicts, however, with people of faith who think that not funding or facilitating contraception will make them happy, for whatever motives they have.  The proper role of government in this case is to stay out of the way of both, (more…)

Shortly after reading about Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s economic speech in Chicago, I decided to read the address itself and see if a word search confirmed my hypothesis that the GOP presidential frontrunner emphasized the word, “freedom.”  Sure, enough the word,”freedom” occurred 32 times, (30 not counting the titles) in the prepared text.

This “word cloud” shows you just how central the word is to this man’s economic ideas:

Now, to be sure, this cloud does show that Mr. Romney also used the word, “government” a good deal (17 times by my browser’s count), but mostly to criticize state intervention in the economy:

The government does not create prosperity; free markets and free people do.

For three years, President Obama has expanded government instead of empowering the American people. He’s put us deeper in debt. He’s slowed the recovery and harmed our economy. And he has attacked the cornerstone of American prosperity: our economic freedom.

In response to these attacks, the Republican was going to tell us “why economic freedom is so critical – and how” he would “restore it in order to get our economy growing again”.  He found that the ideal of liberty distinguished American culture:

But one feature of our culture that propels the American economy stands out: freedom.

The American economy is fueled by freedom.

Free people and their free enterprises are what drive our economic vitality.

He went on to detail some of the damage regulators do and took the incumbent to task for the crony capitalism he practices: (more…)

Taking note of David Boaz’s comment that Rick Santorum is “frighteningly anti-libertarian“, Jennifer Rubin interviewed the Cato Institute Executive Vice President to get the lowdown on the former Senator:

Being philosophically minded, what scares me most about Rick Santorum is not his specific policy mistakes but his fundamental objection to the American idea of freedom. He criticizes the pursuit of happiness! He says, “This is the mantra of the left: I have a right to do what I want to do” and “We have a whole culture that is focused on immediate gratification and the pursuit of happiness . . . and it is harming America.” And then he says that what the Founders meant by happiness was “to do the morally right thing.” He really doesn’t like the idea of America as a free society, where adults make their own decisions and sometimes make choices that Santorum disapproves. In practice, I worry that he would continue and intensify Bush’s big-government conservatism, a federal government committed to reshaping individuals according to a religious-conservative blueprint.

Read the whole thing.  David adds hat Republican electoral victories occur in those years when “Democrats have overreached on their big-government agenda and Republicans campaign on lower taxes and limited government.”

Indeed, even Santorm’s economic policies more closely resemble Obama’s crony capitalism than they do Ronald Reagan’s free market ideals.  As Kevin Hassett and Glenn Hubbard put it in this morning’s Wall Street Journal:

And by proposing special tax breaks for manufacturing, Mr. Santorum follows Mr. Obama’s incorrect lead and introduces a significant economic distortion. (more…)

Rick Santorum can’t spin his showing in Washington State as he did his narrow loss in Michigan. Mitt Romney has no roots in the Evergreen State. His father never served as governor there.

That Santorum ran third behind Ron Paul does not bode well for the former Pennsylvania Senator. As Santorum supporter Ed Morrissey reports, “campaigned in Washington this week, and the finish will create even more doubt in Super Tuesday states about his continued viability.”  The 2010 CPAC blogger of the year also notes that turnout ticked up from “2008, when only 12,400 voters attended.  Nearly four times that number caucused yesterday, which means that Romney can rebut the charge that he only wins contests with depressed turnouts.”

What is telling is both the margin of Romney’s victory, far above what most polls indicated — and Paul’s strong showing.  The libertarian message does seem to be resonating with a growing number of Americans — and those people seem particularly engaged in the political process this year.

Let us hope that their small-government message continues to gain sway among Republican politicians.

Most criticism of the Koch Brothers comes from hyperventilating leftists or hyperpartisan Democrats.  Now, we hear some from principled libertarians, concerned that they want to change the focus of one of the nation’s premiere think tanks:

Now, billionaires Charles and David Koch, who are among the institute’s four equal shareholders, are trying to gain full control and remove [Cato President Ed] Crane, for reasons they have not spelled out publicly.

Crane says their goal is to turn it into “yet another political arm of their vast empire.” If so, they will be turning gold into straw. Cato’s value is precisely that it’s not a political entity but an idea factory, where the goal is sound research and intelligent advocacy on important issues. It’s hard for me to imagine that getting rid of Crane, who has steadfastly upheld its mission, will be for the good.

Emphasis added.  Cato is a first-rate idea factory, an institution which owes its strength in large part to its independence from the political “wars” of the nation’s capital.  Its experts offer sound and principled analysis of public policy, showing how statist solutions tend not to solve social and economic problems, but exaggerate them.

There are a number of free-market advocacy organizations out there, a good number which have grown with the emergence of the Tea Party.  Let Cato be Cato.  And let other organizations to do the advocacy work that this successful think tank shuns.

More here.

Looking at liberal blogger Ezra Klein’s “laundry list of Republican Party flip-flops”, the Washington Examiner’s Conn Carroll finds a pattern:

In every policy area mentioned above, the Republican party has become more libertarian. Some Republicans used to like Keynesian stimulus, now they don’t. Libertarians never did. Some Republicans used to like individual mandates, now they don’t. Libertarians never did. Some Republicans used to like cap and trade, now they don’t. Libertarians never did. You get the idea. There is a reason Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., has been speaking so highly of Ron Paul.

This shift, Carroll contends, corresponds with polling data showing that “Americas are just becoming more libertarian“, with “Republican leaders” merely “responding to those changing beliefs.”  The growing distrust of government solutions (to social and economic problems) has become particularly pronounced since Obama took office.

In a piece on former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty’s speech this past weekend to the California Republican Party Convention, Reason magazine’s Tim Cavanaugh contends the the Golden State GOP has floundered largely because its leaders have failed to embrace libertarian ideals:

The party is marginal and becoming more so, but the leadership is deathly afraid of the one proven source of Republican energy and enthusiasm – because that source is considered too marginal. If the California Republicans continue distancing themselves from the libertarian movement, they will continue to suffer, and so will everybody else who has to live in a state where one party has absolute power and the other refuses to compete.

He’s onto something.  Talk to small businessmen and -women here in Southern California, even to Democratic City Council candidates in West Hollywood, and you’ll hear these entrepreneurs grumbling about the amount of bureaucratic hoops they have to jump through before they can open up a new enterprise.  People across the political spectrum fault the state’s overspending and its overgenerous benefits to public employee unions.

In short, people here would welcome a government which scales back its intrusion into the marketplace — and reduces its expenditures.

To that end, we in California might more readily embrace a more libertarian Republican Party.   As would the nation as a whole.

A libertarian shift within the GOP, like those recent votes in Congress, would show Republican leaders embracing the emerging American consensus on the size of government.

NB:  Tweaked the post after its initial publication to make my point clearer.

Perhaps the greatest irony today about modern American liberals is that while they attack Republicans for wanting to limit their choices, they support policies which limit our choices.

They’ll lecture us about women’s health and the benefits of contraception, saying that individual women should be free to decided questions of sexual health (as well they should).  But, then they praise the federal government for dictating to an individual business owner what kind of health insurance he should provide — even if that provision violates the tenets of his faith.

The same government that call dictate to a Catholic business owner the policies he must adopt can also dictate to a lesbian physician the policies she should adopt in her clinic.

Should a lesbian physician concerned about the inadequacy of health care facilities tending to the particular concerns of women like herself be able to open up a clinic staffed only by women catering exclusively to lesbian, bisexual and transgender women?  Could the government, in the interest of “equality,” require that this clinic serve men?

Perhaps, under current law, it could.  And if it could, we should take away its power to deprive that woman of her freedom to establish such a clinic–and strip women of the freedom to seek care at a woman-only facility.

Just as this (hypothetical) lesbian physician should be free to establish an institution providing “woman-centered” health care so should a Catholic humanitarian be able to decide the conditions covered in the health insurance policy his institution offers its employees.

Blog reader and corespondent sonicfrog e-mailed me this story which helps elucidate what it means to be free.  Blogress diva Ann Althouse had linked a report that a gay hair stylist had droped New Mexico governor as client because she opposes same-sex marriage”:

Martinez was recently dropped by her hair stylist, Antonio Darden, who is gay.

Darden told a local news station that he cut the governor’s hair three times, but won’t do it again as long as she continues to oppose gay marriage.

“The governor’s aides called not too long ago, wanting another appointment to come in,” he told KOB-TV. “Because of her stances and her views on this, I told her aides no. They called the next day, asking if I’d changed my mind about taking the governor in and I said no.”

This man has every right to select his own clientele. Too bad he is depriving himself of the opportunity to engage the good governor in a conversation about marriage. Perhaps, while he cut her hair, he could persuade of the merits of state recognition of same-sex unions.

It’s his salon.  They are his services.  He may lose a buck or two.  But that’s his choice.

Unlike some of his competitors, at least Ron Paul is keeping the focus in the right place:

Some of our friends on the left seem bound and determined to turn the hullabaloo over the contraception mandate into a Republican War On Women.  But, there are quite a few pundits on the right (would it that there were more such politicians) who understand what’s really at stake.

The problem with the contraceptive mandate, writes the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner

is not the contraceptive part — it’s the mandate. The new health-care law requires every employer with 50 or more employees to provide their workers with health insurance. It also requires every American who doesn’t receive health insurance through work or a government program to buy insurance themselves or face a fine.

But simply providing or buying insurance is not enough to fulfill the mandate. The insurance must satisfy the government’s definition of what qualifies as proper insurance, including a long list of benefits that the government thinks you should have.

Read the whole thing.  The focus of this debate should be the simple question:  do we want the federal government to make our health care decisions for us — and to determine what kinds of health care plans we must own.

What if someone just wanted a plan to cover emergencies?  Well, under Obamacare, that’s just not possible.

Perhaps, if one of the Republican candidates laid the out in terms so clear, without getting distracted by a discussion on the merits (or demerits) of contraception, he would not only command the assent of his party, but turn the debate into a clear winner for conservatives.  And not just on this particular mandate.

In Mark Steyn’s column cited in the previous post, that astute commentator reminds that contraception is not at the crux of the current controversy, but choice:

Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, distills the current hysteria thus: “It’s as if we passed a law requiring mosques to sell bacon and then, when people objected, responded by saying ‘What’s wrong with bacon? You’re trying to ban bacon!!!!’”

. . . .

People are free to buy bacon, and free to buy condoms. But the state has no compelling interest to force either down your throat.

Emphasis added.  It’s not just conservatives who get it.  As John McCormack reports in the Weekly Standard, even moderates are on board:

Scott Brown, the moderate Massachusetts Republican senator who is up for reelection this fall, went on the offensive against the mandate in a series of interviews last week. He framed the issue as an assault on religious freedom that was a result of the national takeover of the health care system.

“This latest mandate under government-controlled health care is one reason why I campaigned and voted against Obamacare in the first place,” Brown wrote in an op-ed for the Boston Herald. “It operates by broad dictation from Washington, showing no respect for the judgment, needs, or rights of individual Americans and the states. And it opens the door to endless abuses of power such as this latest mandate.” (more…)

To find the text of the First Amendment, we simple go to google, type “First Amendment Text” without quotations marks into the little box and click “google search.”  Clicking on the first link, we get the Wikipedia entry, then clicking on the word, “text“, we get

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Emphasis added.  Please note that the authors of this amendment made clear to include the word, “exercise,” and not “worship.”  Which brings us to the editors of the New York Times.  Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto linked this editorial in the old gray lady on the president’s contraception compromise:

Nonetheless, it was dismaying to see the president lend any credence to the misbegotten notion that providing access to contraceptives violated the freedom of any religious institution. Churches are given complete freedom by the Constitution to preach that birth control is immoral, but they have not been given the right to laws that would deprive their followers or employees of the right to disagree with that teaching.

Note the word missing from this paragraph — and indeed from the entire editorial.  Yup, that’s right, it’s “exercise.”  As law professor Richard A. Epstein explains, “A direct legislative order to engage in conduct antithetical to their religious convictions would be in flat violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of the ‘free exercise of religion,’ which is far broader and more comprehensive than the religious right to ‘worship,’ to which the president grudgingly acquiesces.”  (Epstein via Instapundit.)

In not paying for their contraception, the churches are freely exercising* their religion — which opposes contraception.  I happen to think that’s a a silly belief, but then they might think it’s silly not to eat pork or shellfish.  The Times editors simply ignore the “free exercise” clause in their editorial.

Not just that.  Even if Catholic organizations don’t offer contraception, they’re not depriving their followers the right to disagree with their teaching, as the Times editors suggest.  (Do they really believe that if their employer doesn’t offer employees a benefit, they can’t get it on their own?) (more…)