Seems it’s Happy Friday at diva Ann Althouse’s blog.  She led off this morning at 8:20 AM related Robert Louis Stevenson’s thoughts about the underrated duty of being happy, then 19 minutes later quoted La Rochefoucauld’s quip about happy people rarely correcting their faults (guess that means Bill Maher is one happy fella. Dan, he said, “rarely,” not “never.” –Ed.).

Just six minutes after that, she asked, if there were a “happiness mantra or motto that you’ve found very helpful” and answered with a link of her own.  Later, she referenced a happiness bank before quoting my friend David Boaz to answer the question whether Rick Santorum hates freedom and happiness.  Her next piece led with the quotation, ”I think he showed me a cover of a magazine that said ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun.’”  She then proceeded to contrast, “Romney’s Religion of Happiness” to “Gingrich’s Religion of Grievance.”

And soon would lament ”The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.”  As compensation perhaps, she cited a Gallup poll finding “that by almost any measure, people get happier as they get older…”  “Happiness,” she offered in a subsequent post, “is more like knowledge than like belief.”  And listed, “5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy (But Won’t).”

She would soon furnish a clever quip, ”I have told myself a hundred times that I would be happy if I were as stupid as my neighbor, and yet I would want no part of that kind of happiness.”  Finally, she found “the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you’ve got to do.”

It was most serendipitous that I would linger on Ann’s blog today.  Perhaps the happiness drew me in.   You see, I’ve been re-reading the Odyssey and today revisited Odysseus’s misery on the island of Ogygia, by conventional wisdom a straight man’s paradise, beautiful beaches, distant from the outside world, his wife far away, an eternally youthful and nubile nymph eager to bed him.  And yet when first we see the hero, he suffers terribly amidst all these sensual pleasures, “his sweet life flowing away/with the tears he wept for his foiled journey home”. (more…)

In his Preface to the 1982 edition the C.S. Lewis Anthology, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature, Walter Hooper contrasts the featured essayist with “literary critics” who

. . . were encouraging readers to find in literature almost everything, life’s monotony, social injustice, sympathy with the downtrodden poor, drudgery, cynicism, and distaste: everything except enjoyment.

Everything except enjoyment.  This idea came to mind as I watched excerpts from the Oscars — a few hours after the telecast — and delighted in the success of Hugo and The Artist, the latter winning the lion’s share of the big prizes, including not only Best Picture, but also best actor for Jean Dujardin and best director for Michel Hazanavicius.

The film may offer no great insight into human nature, save to show that we enjoy a happy ending, celebrating instead the joy of making movies — and of telling stories.  Unlike other critically acclaimed films of recent days, it did not stint on enjoyment.

Indeed, it seemed that, as he paid homage to silent film, Hazanavicius kept his focus on crafting an enjoyable film — and entertaining his anticipated audience.  You leave this film with a smile on your face.

Let us hope that the idea of a movies which telling such a simple, sweet story and delights an audience regains the traction it once enjoyed in Hollywood.

Earlier today, I finished Walter Isaacson’s most excellent biography of Steve Jobs.  And highly recommend it, despite some glaring flaws.  At time, the book seems slapdash (which makes sense given how quickly the book was published after the death of the entrepreneur).  And he seems to treat Jobs’s wife with kid gloves — as if she were some kind of saint (which makes sense given how cooperative she was in Isaacson’s research–and that she’s still alive and grieving).

There is much to say about jobs, his prickly personality, his luck in finding peers and mentors who could help him find his way professionally and personally.  His ability to achieve his great success without federal funding or government encouragement.  His appreciation of design and attention to detail.  His charisma. His supportive stepfather.

When I was still reading the book a friend asked me what one thing stood out about the book (and by extension the man), I replied his persistence, his determination, his belief that he could achieve a certain project even when others told him it was impossible.  How he grappled with what one of his colleagues called the “reality distortion field.”

Toward the end of the book, Isaacson compares Jobs to such pioneers as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. I see his point, but don’t buy his argument.  As I was reading the biography, I kept thinking of another pioneer of the last century, Walt Disney.  Soon after finishing Isaacson’s book, I picked up — and started reading — Neal Gabler’s biography of the cartoon tycoon.

As a bibliophile, I fear the coming demise of an institution and product I love, the bookstore and the physical book.  With technology, we became able first to order books online, then to buy electronic editions, both actions facilitated by one particular company.

The virtual bookstore, however, could not replace several aspects of the brick-and-mortar variety.   The old-fashioned institution is an actual locale; a place of respite for your home or place of business.  Not just that, you could could discover treasures just by browsing — or by chancing upon one title while browsing for another.  Or while randomly wandering through a bookstore alone — or with a friend.

This happened to me on Sunday evening when, after dinner with a new friend in Glendale, we ended up in an adjacent Barnes & Noble.  There, in the essays section, I alighted on a book about a man, Lionel Trilling, who crafted an expression that helped me define my sometime predicament in life (“the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet”).  I might not have discovered the book through an amazon search.  Trilling doesn’t always come to mind.

Yet, for nearly two full days after first seeing the book, this book kept coming to mind.  I have this crazy theory (well, maybe it’s not so crazy) that if you see a book in a bookstore and you keep thinking about it (without outside prompting), it’s a sign that you’re supposed to buy the book.

So, today, rather than return to Glendale to buy the book, I ordered it.  On amazon.

On this the 192nd anniversary of the birth of the greatest English novelist, let me offer, in slightly modified form, the tribute I have offered in years past.  It is also the 115th anniversary of the birth of my late, beloved Aunt Ruth.  In her life, that great lady embodied the qualities of a heroine of an Eliot novels.

A few years back in anticipation of Eliot’s birthday, I watched the BBC version of Silas Marner, perhaps her most accessible novel.  The story got to me as the book always does.  It’s odd I who love books so much and am moved cry so little when I read (yet tear up frequently when watching movies).  Wwhenever I hear the story of the lonely weaver of Raveloe, however, whether in print, via the spoken word (i.e., book on tape/CD) or on screen, I am always touched, always lose it, so to speak it.

Ben Kingsley’s Silas plea to keep an apparently orphaned child who had strayed into his home, “It’s a lone thing; I’m a lone thing. . . . It’s come to me,” is the plea of every human being who has ever felt cut off from his fellows.  Indeed, that line in quintessetially George Eliot who so understood human loneliness and recognized our need for the companionship of our fellows.

And how meaningful that companionship can we find it.  Or how powerful the presence of someone who listens to our concerns and manifests sympathy for our plight.

George Eliot so delighted in the effect of a child on an adult with an open heart:

She [that child] was perfectly quiet now, but not asleep–only soothed by sweet porridge and warmth into that wide-gazing calm which makes us older human beings, with our inward turmoil, feel a certain awe in the presence of a little child, such as we feel before some quiet majesty or beauty in the earth or sky–before a steady glowing planet, or a full-flowered eglantine, or the bending trees over a silent pathway.

I rediscovered those words when I re-read Silas Marner a few years ago. When I opened the book I had just purchased containing the novel and some of Eliot’s short fiction, I did not quite arrive at the short story I had just begun.  I plunged instead right back into the novel, starting this time in medias res, reading well over two chapters before sleep overtook me.

Such is the power of George Eliot’s prose, the images she invokes, the ideas she presents, the emotions she expresses. She helps us find words for our deepest thoughts and shows compassion for our everyday weaknesses. She seems to see into the troubles of all our lives and finds the balm in tender relations with our fellows.

And that was how I introduced my George Eliot birthday post: (more…)

Over the weekend, Glenn quoted a comment from Matt Welch which helps explain why I stay with the GOP despite a number of concerns with the Republican Party, notably its imperfect record on gays and its often inadequate commitment to Ronald Reagan’s small government ideals:

MATT WELCH COMPLICATES WILL WILKINSON’S NARRATIVE: “But here’s the thing that non-Republican, gay-marrying, pro-immigration, pro-choice, anti-empire potheads like me (and Will) need to grapple with if we insist on talking about the relationship between ourselves and various large political blocs: The GOP has been more receptive to libertarian ideas these past couple of years.” And the Democrats, not so much, despite all the “liberaltarian” hype.

He’s right. At least the GOP has been more receptive to libertarian ideas in recent years.  Heck, even the establishment candidate is starting to sound like a Tea Partier, proposing major cuts in federal spending.

In his post (which is well worth your time), Welch adds:

honesty compels the observation that among the governing classes, if you find an economic libertarian he/she is more likely to be a social con than a RINO (or DINO). The Gary Johnson crossover dream is still just that. Which makes me no more likely to join Team Red, but it does suggest that certain libertarianish traditions within the broader right have staying power, at a time when the libertianish tendencies on the broader left seem to be receiving little or no expression in the governance by Team Blue. That I wished things were different doesn’t change the basic facts.

I have noticed the same thing among a good number of social conservatives; they hold libertarian views on a great many issues.  It’s why some gay people are willing to work with these folks in common purpose — reducing the size of the federal government. (more…)

Yesterday, I started Thomas Sowell’s Economic Facts and Fallacies, underlining many passages, including this one:

. . . the zero-sum fallacy had kept millions of very poor people needlessly mired in poverty for generations before such notions were abandoned.  That is an enormously high price to pay for an unsubstantiated assumption.  Fallacies can have huge impacts.

Emphasis added.  In the margin, I wrote, “Obama’s ‘stimulus’: was there evidence it would work — where have similar programs tried & succeeded?”  Yes, we read economists explaining how the president’s plan was supposed to work, but they derived their explanations from Keynesian theory and not marketplace experience.  They reached their conclusions on unsubstantiated assumptions.  And we’re paying an enormously high price for that.

It does seem that Democrats and left-of-center pundits, not to mention intellectuals, make their cases on faith, er, theory rather than experience.  A few hours after reading Sowell, I caught something  on Instapundit which helped confirm that hypothesis:

JIM TYNEN: “Here’s what interests me: why do the journalists and professors so fervently believe in things they cannot possibly verify on their own? . . . Journalists who are not scientists, or professors who are not climate scientists, identify with the Knowledge Class.”

Tynen adds that “journalists and others on the low rungs of the Knowledge class defend the dogma. And of course this also goes for the dogma of Keynes, and multiculturalism, and much else.”  Emphasis added.

Last Thursday, a blogger at Ace of Spades quoted White House flack Josh Earnest’s contention that the president’s American Jobs Act is “the only plan before Congress that independent analysts confirm would create jobs right away“. And just who are those independent analysts, Josh? And did they show how the president’s plan was similar to other government programs which led to job creation or did they base their conclusions on economic theory?

It seems sometimes that so much of liberal theory is just that, theory, based not on how the world works, but on how some very smart people believe it works.

As I drive to Colorado to celebrate my father’s upcoming birthday, I have been listening to Ron Chernow’s wonderful biography of George Washington.  Last night, when crossing Nevada in the dead of night, but with the temperature fluctuating from the mid-90s to low 100s, I learned of the trials that great man faced when first taking charge of the Continental Army, then little more than a ragtag collection of  state militias, in 1775.

Among other things, the then-green Commander-in-Chief was concerned about the spiritual welfare of his men.  From his “General Orders” of July 4, 1775 (one year before that day would become the most significant one on an American’s calendar):

The General . . . requires and expects, of all Officers, and Soldiers, not engaged on actual duty, a punctual attendance on divine Service, to implore the blessings of heaven upon the means used for our safety and defence.

Wonder how the ACLU would have reacted had it been around at the time.

Contrast the father of our country with the the current Mayor of New York City:  ”New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will not reconsider his decision to exclude clergy from the ceremony marking 10 years since the Sept. 11 attacks, a spokesman said Friday.“

I put this post in our “Random Thoughts” category because I put it out there, as kind an observation with a question mark, wondering if the “test” really works.

As many of our blog readers know, I am a huge fan of the English novelist George Eliot.  Along with J.R.R. Tolkien and Albert Camus, she ranks as my favorite prose author, with Homer, Wordluf (AKA the Beowulf-poet) and Wordsworth ranking as my favorite poets.

I have often believed that if you really want to date someone, you would show an interest in their passions.  For example, before I came out, a German woman was obsessed with me, yet entirely indifferent to the things I loved, refusing to understand why I would prefer to sit at home reading than to go to a crowded club with loud music playing.  It seemed she was attracted to the surface and remarkably uncurious about what lay beneath.

Over a decade ago, I met a nice intelligent, attractive, libertarian man in a relationship and we struck up a friendship.  When I met him at his office for lunch, I caught sight of a brand new volume of Wordsworth’s poetry.  He had bought it because of my love for the great English Romantic.  I was flattered.  I also recognized that all was not well with his (then-)relationship.  In retrospect, I wondered if I should have done something more, given this obvious interest.  He would later break up with the boyfriend, but foolishly perhaps, I never pursued the matter.

Only later, much later, did I appreciate how significant his act was, going out of his way to buy a book of poems because I loved the poet.

I doubt I had that experience in mind when I bought Silas Marner, Eliot’s shortest, sweetest and most accessible novel for a close friend (but it may have been lurking in my subconscious).  When we first met, we started dating, but realized there wasn’t a romantic spark, so enjoying each other’s company, remained friends.  As to the book, he couldn’t, he claimed, get past its first few pages. (more…)

Citing Leonard Read, the Gipper, on one of his index cards quoted in The Notes: Ronald Reagan’s Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom, appears to be offering advice to some who comment to this blog:

No bad idea is ever overcome by attacking the persons who believe it.

Here’s another piece of wisdom the Gipper recorded on one of his many note cards, included in the wonderful recent release, The Notes: Ronald Reagan’s Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom:

One way to distinguish truth from all its counterfeits is by its modesty:  truth demands only to be heard among others while its counterfeiters demand that others be silenced.

He attributes this bit of wisdom to Sydney Harris.

The great wickedness of Liberalism, I saw, was that those who devise the ever new State Utopias, whether crooks or fools, set out to bankrupt and restrict not themselves, but others.

–David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture

Just after midnight last night, I pre-ordered the next volume in George R.R. Martin‘s .A Song of Ice and Fire, A Dance with Dragons. And while my criticism of the works has increased since I first blogged about this fantasy cycle, my enjoyment has not lessened. That said, these books differ from the other great fantasy cycles I’ve read in their absence of defining relationships. To be sure, there are relationships, but each seems limited to a particular volume, sometimes limited even to a series of chapters.

One character falls in love with another, either to see his feelings consummated or remain unrequited, yet certain to see the beloved perish shortly after the love was declared or otherwise acknowledged.  We see a growing sympathy develop between two seemingly opposed characters, only to have them part company, likely never to see each other again, even as each has helped transform the other.

It seems that in good fiction (and yes, this is good fiction, far more readable and offering more insight into human nature that much literary fiction) as in great movies, there is always a defining relationship, oftentimes several. In Star Wars, we see the mentor-mentee relationship between Obi-Wan and Luke Skywalker as as well as his fraternal relationships with Princess Leia and Han Solo, the latter bond which causes the space smuggler to come back and help our hero destroy the Death Star. (Indeed, one friend believes it the absence of just such a character (Solo) which accounts for the weakness of the prequels; I believe that it’s also the absence of the hero’s relationship to a character like Han that makes Anakin Skywalker far less compelling than his son.)

Indeed, once director Francis Ford Coppola has established the character of Don Corleone character in The Godfather, the movie only really gets going when he notices the absence of his son Michael as the family poses for the requisite wedding picture. “Where’s Michael?” he asks, “we’re not taking the picture without Michael.” Later, when, through the blinds, he sees his son arrive at the reception, we know there is something significant about this relationship.  And it is that relationship which will define Michael’s journey in the film. (more…)

I am finally getting around to reading Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction classic, The Left Hand of Darkness, a book that over the years, numerous friends and acquaintances have encouraged me to read, largely because she explores a topic that has long fascinated me — sexual difference.*

About half-way through the book, I find it at once the most brilliant work of science fiction I have ever read  – and among the most frustrating.  Brilliant because of Le Guin’s insights into how human sexual difference has defined our culture — the book is set on a planet where the humanoids are hermaphroditic.  Frustrating because, at times, it seems less a story than a reflection on sexual difference via conversations with and character sketches of some leading figures on the Planet Gethen (also called Winter), the setting for this novel.

What really got me thinking (and there is much in this book to get one thinking) was this paragraph in the chapter on “The Question of Sex”:

Consider: There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive.   In fact, the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter.

Perhaps, it is serendipitous that at the moment I read this book I am watching some lectures of Joseph Campbell on DVD.  That great scholar of myth is constantly talking about the images of difference which recur in mythological narratives and artwork (i.e,. the ying and the yang).  Carl Jung, one of Campbell’s mentors once wrote, “there is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites“.  Without sex difference, Gethenian culture would necessarily lack such tension. (more…)

In the past few years, I have been reading pretty regularly about certain great historical figures who have long fascinated me, notably Julius Cæsar, Charlemagne, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. Earlier today, I started John Lukacs‘s The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler, having previously enjoyed the author’s Five Days in London: May 1940 about how that great Briton came to become Prime Minister in the early days of World War II.

In the second chapter where the historian contrasts the “decisive turning point” in the life of the Nazi leader to a similar transformation in that of Charles de Gaulle — how each man found the resolve to lead his nation, Lukacs notes:

In de Gaulle’s prose there is the essence of a bitter love of his nation, a love that was stronger than his hate of his enemies.  With Hitler the opposite was true.  No one can gainsay Hitler’s love for Germany; but that love was only implicit, subordinated as it was to his hatreds of what he saw as his enemies, external and internal ones.

In the margin, I wrote, “sounds a lot like Al Qaeda.”  Instead of harkening back to the great days of Islamic civilization, Baghdad at the turn of the second millennium of the Common Era, its leaders dwell on their hatred of Western civilization in general and the United States in particular.  No wonder they devote themselves to destruction and cheer at the murder of civilians.

This is my first posting via my new iPad. Just so you don’t think I’m a rich millionaire like Obama, I cashed in years of AMEX miles points to get it.

I’ve had it less than 24 hours and already love it. It is the most user friendly computer device I’ve used since I first loaded the game “Lawn” into the cassette player attached to the 60lb PC.

There is a lot of functionality that I hope will allow me to do more frequent blogging on the go. Always remember that if you REALLY need your daily GayPatriot fix … I’m a minor celebrity on Twitter! (@GayPatriot.

The other thing I’m hooked on with the iPad is the quick way to get information. There are a lot of multimedia sources available (think: the “come to life” newspapers in Harry Potter’s world)

And books!!! My Kindle subscriptions can be read in full color and it LOOKS LIKE A BOOK!! By the way, I’m currently reading “Rawhide Down” — the in-depth story of what happened behind the scenes on March 31, 1981.

For now, so long. I’ll be back soon….as long as there’s a free WiFi!!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Sarah Palin may seek out the limelight, as some of her critics contend, but unlike most in this town (Hollywood) who see such attention, this much (and usually falsely) maligned Republican woman gets it.  AP tasks 11 Reporters to “fact check” her book.  The DNC churns out press releases at a rapid clip.  He books remains at #1 on numerous bestseller lists, far ahead of the latest tome of a man who gets fawning attention from the MSM (in contrast to the patronizing, negative coverage she receives).

And now that woman is helping an Obama supporter cash in on her popularity, giving Oprah her biggest audience in two years:

Oprah Winfrey’s interview with former vp candidate Sarah Palin scored the talk show host her highest rating in two years.

Monday’s episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” drew a 8.7 household rating and 13 share — the best since Winfrey had the entire Osmond family on the show in 2007.

That means Palin also topped Winfrey’s heavily viewed interviews with Whitney Houston at the start of the season.

Hey, aren’t the Osmonds Mormons?   Doesn’t the MSM treat Mormons like they do Palin, maligned them with great glee?

Hmmm. . . . .  Seems that sometimes when the media try to strike people down, they only make their adversaries far more popular than they had ever foreseen.

In his short biography on the greatest man of the century just concluded, British historian John Keegan writes:

It is now often thought that Churchill became prime minister because of the success of the German blitzkrieg, which produced the strategic catastrophe against which he had warned throughout the appeasement years.  It is ironic, in retrospect, to perceive that the appeasers were brought down by their mishandling of the comparatively insignificant sideshow in Norway, leaving Churchill to inherit the catastrophe he had argued so long to avert, during the first hours of its unrolling.

Emphasis added.

In May of 1940, Wintson Churchill inherited a crisis far worse than would Barack Obama nearly sixty-nine years later.  Not just that, repeatedly throughout the 1930s, that great man had warned of just such a catastrophe and had urged his colleagues in Parliament to take action to avert the crisis–on numerous occasions.

By contrast, while then-Senator Obama did write one letter expressing concern about the mortgage mess, he never proposed (or even signed onto) legislation designed to avert the financial meltdown.  Churchill thus had more reason to whine about the crisis he had “inherited,” but never did. Churchill warned repeatedly before the catastrophe.  Obama whines repeatedly after he was elected in large part because Americans had better confidence in  him to deal with the consequences of the catastrophe.

Maybe Obama should ask our friends across the pond to return the bust of Churchill he recently returned to he can ponder the last lion‘s lesson of leadership.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Newsweek ran a cover study asking, “Why Do they Hate Us?” as if the cause of animosity to the United States lay in the object not the subject.  They could use the very logic of that question to determine that gay-bashers are not to blame for attacking gay people because the fault lies not in their actions, but in our attitudes.

It seems hard for some on the left to grasp that hatred can often exist independently of the reviled object.  It can be a product of the mind of the hater–or the ideology to which he subscribes.  But, some wish to believe that the U.S. is responsible for all manner of ills around the world, including violence directed against our nations, its institutions and its citizens.

Writing 144 years before 9/11, the greatest English novelist of the Victorian Age, got what all too many leftists, blinded by their ideology, refuse to grasp.  In “Janet’s Repentance,” the third of three stories in her 1857 collection, Scenes of Clerical Life,  George Eliot offers this about an abusive husband:

Cruelty, like very other vice, requires no motive outside itself–it only requires opportunity.  You do not suppose Dempster had any motive for drinking beyond the craving for drink; the presence of brandy was the only necessary condition.  And an unloving, tyrannous, brutal man needs no motive to prompt his cruelty; he needs only the perpetual presence of a woman he can call his own.  A whole park full of tame or timid-eyed animals to torment at his will would not serve him so well to glut his lust of torture; they could not feel as one woman does; they could not throw out the keen retort which whets the age of hatred.

Emphasis added.

Just as the cruel husband needed no motive to abuse his wife, so do terrorists need no motive to commit atrocities against civilians.  Those who wish to blame America for the terrorist attacks against us are akin to those who would blame a battered wife for her husband’s abuse.

Mark Levin’s new book, Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, arrived just in time.  Last week, I wondered how “equality” had become the watchword for the gay movement and engaged in a spirited discussion in the comments section on the values on the founders’ notion of the concept.

I had always believed the founders’ focus was on liberty, freedom, with a concern for equal rights.  Their concern for equal rights was a response to the privileges of class, then inherent in the British system.  Levin understands how today’s left has twisted the notion of equality to serve their statist ends.  And given the political make-up of the gay groups, it’s pretty clear they have borrowed that idea of equality.

In short, Levin gets it:

The primary principle around which the Statist organizes can be summed up in a single word–equality.

Equality, as understood by the Founders, is the natural right of every individual to live freely under self-government, to acquire and retain the property he creates through his own labor, and to be treated impartially before a just law.  Moreover, equality should not be confused with perfection, for man is also imperfect, making his application of equality, even in the most just society, imperfect.  Otherwise, inequality is the natural state of man in the sense that each individual is born unique in all his human characteristics.  Therefore, equality and inequality, properly comprehended, are both engines of liberty.

The Statist, however, misuses equality to pursue uniform economic and social outcomes.  He must continuously enhance his power at the expense of self-government and violate the individual’s property rights at the expense of individual liberty, for he believes that through persuasion, deception, and coercion he can tame man’s natural state and man’s perfection can, therefore, be achieved in Utopia.  The Statist must claim the power to make that which is unequal equal an that which is imperfect perfect.  That is the hope the Statist offers, if only the individual surrenders himself to the all-powerful state.  Only then can the impossible be made possible.

Levin helps summarize why I fear then notion of “equality” when on the lips of gay activists.  Most of them have a background in left-wing political movements and show a commitment to the Democratic party and its leftist ideology.  They readily turn to the state to seek solutions to problems, real and imagined, which confront our community.

I’ve only read 18 pages, barely 10% of Levin’s book and I’m already hungry for more.  this new book may well be a manifesto for the coming conservative resurgence.