GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

Topless protestors to hound Islamists

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This article from Femen, the feminist protest group, just came across HotAir’s Headlines section:

For the past five years now, we here at the international women’s movement Femen have been waging an active campaign of resistance to the patriarchy in various corners of the world…

The most obvious illustration of the patriarchy is Islamic theocracy, a symbiosis of political and religious dictatorship…

At the heart of Islamism lies the enslavement of women based on control over their sexuality…

I hereby both promise and threaten to deploy an entire network of Femen activists in Arab countries. We will hound Islamic leaders across the globe, subjecting them to desolating criticism. We intend to hound spiritual leaders who are personally responsible for mistreating women…

Femen stands for “democracy, atheism, and sexuality” (per the article), and famously protested Vladimir Putin a couple of weeks ago (video here).

I do NOT endorse everything they believe or do[1], but what’s interesting here is the phenomenon of a left-wing protest group realizing that Islamism is a major threat to the freedom that they seek to live out, and declaring their intention to confront Islamism. We see that occasionally, but not often enough. Some other leftists go for safer targets (such as Christians who, in reality, pose no great threat to them).

These women may be in for some rough times, if they carry out their declaration. While not necessarily endorsing all that they do, let’s give them some credit for their new-found insight, and wish them health and safety! [Read more…]

Gay athletes in the 21st century

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I’m late in getting to this, but last week on NBC’s Today, Matt Lauer said:

It’s interesting that in 2013, with attitudes towards homosexuality changing so dramatically in this country, there isn’t a single major athlete in a major professional sport playing right now who has come out and said, ‘I’m gay.’ Why is that?…

I have a possible answer, and a new question.

My answer is: For much the same reason that straight athletes don’t come out and say “I’m straight.” It’s irrelevant. Not every activity or field is one where the customers (spectators) need any information about the producers’ (athletes’) personal lives.

Part of what we love about athletes is their focus on something wonderfully beyond themselves: which is the sport, the game, the discipline it takes to be a winning athlete. Call me crazy, but I find it distasteful when any athlete, gay or straight, insists on my knowing whom they ‘like’ or are dating. I only care about their dedication to (and success with) their sport.

Which brings me to my question: why, in 2013, would Lauer think this is important? This isn’t the 1980s, wherein gays had to battle sodomy laws, or the total absence of gay-straight alliances at schools, or certain professional bans. Today we even have States scrambling to support gay marriage. Lauer’s question itself assumes there are lots of gay pro athletes – so, no real job discrimination.

I must admit that I thought like Lauer did in, say, 1993. Some years later, I came into the 21st century. Join me, Matt!

(Hat tip: reader Peter H.)

More signs of the times

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Don’t worry, I’m probably not going to make these headline summaries a regular feature. Other bloggers do it better.

Still, I must again express my amazement at how, on any given day, a quick scan of the headlines reveals a world gone awry. Just from Ace and HotAir today:

I need to start looking for things that are going right. Of course Obamacare, which kills both jobs and worker benefits, isn’t one of them.

But maybe the fight for gun rights is. Like seeing Mark Matteoli (of Sandy Hook) or Manuel Martinez (formerly of Communist Cuba): two men who understand freedom, and speak out in its favor.

Falling birthrates

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Why do some nations’ birthrates fall? And can Big Government boost them?

[Germany] spends some €200 billion ($270 billion) on promoting children and families per year…But its birth rate, at 1.39 births per woman aged 15 to 49, remains among the lowest in Europe…

…The web of benefits is so complex that even experts don’t fully grasp it: There’s a “child supplement,” “parental benefit,” an “allowance for single parents,” a “married person’s supplement,” a “sibling bonus,” “orphan money” and “child education supplement,” not to forget the “child education supplementary supplement.”

The article suggests that the reason that German women don’t have kids is because the government isn’t funding enough daycare and preschools to make it easy for them.

I have a different theory. My guess is that birthrates fall:

  1. because living standards rise. (Kids stop being a help on the farm; start being expensive.)
  2. and because the Welfare State gives people the illusion that government will take care of them in old age.

My second point would mean that Big Government measures won’t, over time and on average, raise a nation’s birthrates. The more the State does – the more it hands out benefits and asserts its dominance in citizens’ lives – the less urgent its citizens will feel about procreating. Agree/disagree?

“Mean World” Syndrome

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I’ve forgotten where I stumbled across this term, Mean World Syndrome, although it was yesterday!

“Mean world syndrome” is a term coined by George Gerbner to describe a phenomenon whereby violence-related content of mass media makes viewers believe that the world is more dangerous than it actually is…”You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour,” [Gerbner] said. “It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it’s a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell.”…

…Individuals who watch television infrequently and adolescents who talk to their parents about reality are claimed to have a more accurate view of the real world than those who do not, and they may be able to more accurately assess their vulnerability to violence…

What do y’all think of this idea?

I have only a few scattered fragments of thought about it, so far. First, I’m suspicious of anything that smacks of Behaviorism. But I also notice that this idea isn’t the standard fare, that our violent media culture somehow programs us to do violent crime. It makes a different point: that our violent media culture (and I would count TV News shows, in that) has given us all a darker vision of the world, making most people a little more frightened and suspicious. True/untrue/?

Left Can’t Let Social Issues Go

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If you haven’t seen Jamie Farr cum Larry King wannabe Piers Morgan getting into it with Christine O’Donnell, here is that video:

(apologies for the adverts at the beginning of the clip…apparently going on a quasi-news interview show to whore for a new book is matched dearly by a ‘news’ network playing commercials before even online videos)

I have no beef with Morgan being a tough interviewer, and I never really followed O’Donnell’s run for the Senate from Delaware. I realize she’s a social conservative and had run as such.

That being said, Morgan’s insistence on discussing not the debt problem, not the out-of-control runaway spending, not the unconstitutional interference of the current ruling class that led to historic turnover on Capital Hill in last year’s midterm elections; but rather topics such as DADT and gay marriage is a perfect example of why the Left keeps losing elections.

While controversy and drama are good for ratings, there’s also a seriousness in Leftists in the media like Morgan and others insisting on painting the Tea Party with an intolerant brush.

It’s the Alinskyite drubbing and constant drone about Tea Partiers being anti-gay, racist knuckle-dragging Bible-thumping social conservatives that the Left and the media (pardon my redundancy) are hoping to use to discredit their opponents rather than engage in the real argument that they know they’d lose: Is our government too bloated, is it doing things it shouldn’t be doing, and is it impeding our recovery?; or is it not big enough, not spending enough, and not regulating sufficiently?

The Left knows it can’t win that argument in a center-right nation, so they will search for social conservatives within the Tea Party movement (which, unquestionably it can easily find), and then generalize such positions broadly to paint us all as intolerant neanderthals hoping to cast homosexuals into prison.

Can anybody relate an experience at a Tea Party rally or other such event that even addressed social issues? Were gay marriage and DADT even topics of conversation (other than the court’s overreaching in many big cases, and the lack of 10th Amendment appreciation by the ruling class, that is)? I search and search Rick Santelli’s original rant on CNBC but can’t find either of these topics (nor religion, abortion, or race issues) having anything to do with his anger.

I, for one, am completely tired of hearing about social issues. Totally and completely. I can’t believe that with $14,000,000,000,000+ in debt and a new credit line of another $2,000,000,000,000 recently added on, three wars, 9.1% unemployment, GDP growth rate out of a recession at only 1.5%, housing failing, hiring failing, a credit downgrade, that to some morons, the issue of gay marriage and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is actually pertinent.

As I had admonished them a couple weeks ago, the Social Left in America is ruining our Nation because they care more about their social issues than they do about the fiscal and economic strength of our country.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

The political & practical limits of ignoring social issues

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One of our critics and one of our staunchest defenders respectively got at the weakness in the argument GOProud and this blog have been making asking the GOP to sidestep social issues.

The critic, Tim, in a comment, contended that my “compromise of not discussing social issues” means that Congress will not move forward on DADT and DOMA repeal while “immigration reform for gays will languish. Somehow,” he adds, “the status quo doesn’t seem that great.”

In a blog post, styled as an open letter to GOProud, North Dallas Thirty looks at the status quo from a different angle and also finds it also not great:

But the key to dealing with social issues is not to ignore them completely. Indeed, by making them off-limits, you infuriate those whose support you need and leave yourself open for the Obama Party to exploit them against you. . . .

Take, for instance, abortion.

Regardless of how you feel about it, the simple fact is this: Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi rammed through a bill that not only requires you as a taxpayer to fund abortion, but for that money to be sent to organizations who are covering up statutory rape and refusing to notify parents — and then donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to that same Obama, Reid, and Pelosi.

Read the whole thing, not necessarily because I agree with it, but because I do believe he raises some valuable points.  He suggest that instead of avoiding social issues, we “grab” and “reframe them.”

NDXXX is spot on about abortion.  But, I see that not so much as a social issue, but more as a fiscal.  No government should pay for abortion.

And yes, I do acknowledge that social conservatives are part of the GOP coalition.  But, Republicans risk losing independent voters if they bend over backwards trying to appease these folks.  So, keep the focus on fiscal issues, but make clear they understand social conservatives’ concern.

The less government is involved in our lives, the greater influence private institutions will have.  The government should not mandate that social conservatives pay for a medical procedure they find abhorrent. [Read more…]