James Lewis, at American Thinker, speculates that Obama’s own childhood traumatic experience is responsible for his Bathroom Edict.
At age ten, the child Barry Soetoro was sent by his biological mother from Jakarta, Indonesia to Hawaii, where his grandparents apparently handed him over to the care of a person of known and questionable character, his “mentor,” Frank Marshall Davis. There is no known legal basis for this double transfer of parental responsibility. The mother and her husband remained in Indonesia so that legally, the child was abandoned by his legal parents. This is child neglect.
As far as is known, Frank Marshall Davis never legally adopted the ten-year-old child. Any family welfare worker would have raised serious questions about the legality and safety of Frank Marshall Davis becoming the sole adoptive parent. Davis was a hard-core Communist at the time, a party member. The Soviet Union, then under Nikita Khruschev and soon Leonid Brezhnev, posed a nuclear threat to the Western world. The Cold War was at its height. Davis was an obsessively enraged anti-white, anti-American individual, as shown in his newsletters and personal accounts. Davis wrote at least one pornographic pseudo-autobiography under the name Ben Green. He was an obsessive race-hater.
On the face of it, Barry’s mother, his grandparents, and Mr. Davis were guilty at least of child neglect. Psychologically, children who are passed around like this are often traumatically affected. Abandonment at a vulnerable age is said to inflict an emotional “wound” that may turn into narcissistic overcompensation. To make up for crushing feelings of personal rejection, a child may take refuge in grandiose and self-glorifying fantasies. Children who feel abandoned may seek sexualized relationships with adults to ensure that they will never be abandoned again.
Davis shows strong features of oppositional-defiant disorder, a compulsive need to break the boundaries of socially accepted behavior. For example, he allegedly took naked photos of Obama’s mother, dedicated his life to the Communist Party at a time when it was viewed as a threat to national survival, wrote passages involving pedophilia, and expressed his rage in racial terms. Davis mixed his obsessive racial anger with sexual provocation and revolutionary politics. He was not a fantasy revolutionary. He really hated those he considered enemies.
As an adult, Barack Obama shows many of the same psychological features. Other father figures in Obama’s life are also enraged, racially charged, and emotionally obsessive. Jeremiah Wright is an obvious example, but he is not the only one.
The important point is that the young Barry Soetoro lived with father figures who were consumed with racial hatred. When he briefly encountered his biological father in person and read his socialist writings, he was ready to idealize the image of Obama Sr. In fact, Obama Sr. joined the post-revolutionary regime of Jyomo Kenyatta, was soon expelled, apparently became alcoholic, and died under suspicious circumstances after two nearly identical car accidents.
All this should be irrelevant, but it is not – certainly not when the president of the United States issues decrees to our school systems that directly affect the psychological development of children.
The author doesn’t spell it out, but I expect he is referring slightly obliquely to the “Bathhouse Barry,” Obama-is-Gay theory, and blaming Obama’s covert sexual identity and partisan loyalty to LBGT causes on childhood molestation by the communist poet Frank Marshall Davis.
That whirring sounds you hear faintly in the background are Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, both Y’1920, the founders of Time Magazine, spinning in their graves as Nancy Gibbs, Y’1982, Time’s current managing editor, celebrates a very special “tipping point” by identifying Transgender-ism as a Civil Rights Movement now officially recognized by the national bien pensant establishment as a worthy cause entitled to receive public celebration and state-enforced privileges and immunities.
Sexual deviance and perversity were racking up lots of victories this week. The National Park Service announced that it was going to make places and people of significance to the history of lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual Americans part of the national narrative. (That bronze historic marker in the public lavatory where so-and-so was once arrested may look a little out of place, but there you are.)
The Spirit of Enlightenment leaped suddenly from California to Texas as Houston’s mayor and city council announced that that city’s bathrooms, showers, and dressing facilities will henceforward be unrestricted by gender.
The self-congratulatory smugfest was, however, unkindly interrupted by National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson’s “nasty” and “offensive” “takedown” of Time’s munificent gesture. Williamson deliberately spoiled all the fun by noting that Time’s latest covergirl Laverne Cox is not actually a woman, and even the consensus of the community of fashion aided by the all powers of modern science cannot really make him into one.
Regardless of the question of whether he has had his genitals amputated, Cox is not a woman, but an effigy of a woman. Sex is a biological reality, and it is not subordinate to subjective impressions, no matter how intense those impressions are, how sincerely they are held, or how painful they make facing the biological facts of life. No hormone injection or surgical mutilation is sufficient to change that.
Genital amputation and mutilation is the extreme expression of the phenomenon, but it is hardly outside the mainstream of contemporary medical practice. The trans self-conception, if the autobiographical literature is any guide, is partly a feeling that one should be living one’s life as a member of the opposite sex and partly a delusion that one is in fact a member of the opposite sex at some level of reality that transcends the biological facts in question. There are many possible therapeutic responses to that condition, but the offer to amputate healthy organs in the service of a delusional tendency is the moral equivalent of meeting a man who believes he is Jesus and inquiring as to whether his insurance plan covers crucifixion.
The most amusing response to this unanswerable argument came from Mediate’s Matt Wilstein.
Williamson is right. Cox is not a “woman†in the narrow, traditional sense that he is capable of comprehending. But nor is she a “man†in the way he insists on describing her throughout his intentionally offensive screed. Cox proudly identifies as transgender. …
This passage demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding about the difference between sex and gender. There is a reason the term “transexual†is no longer used while “transgender†has become the accepted descriptor. While someone’s sex may be defined by biological characteristics, gender is essentially a psychological identification.
Ah, yes! The difference between sex and gender. Sex is an unalterable physical reality. “Gender” is a social construct, invented by academic sophisters, which is optionally chosen and modifiable at will. In other words, gender is BS.
Rod Dreher learns that Free Speech at Stanford is pretty darn expensive.
[L]ast week… the student government at Stanford refused to commit funds for a one-day conference run by the Stanford Anscombe Society, an organization named for the prominent 20th century British philosopher. Why the stinginess? Because the Anscombe Society stands, in part, for defending traditional teachings about sexual morality and the family. Their conference will bring to campus Ryan T. Anderson, … a Princeton-trained political philosopher best known for making a natural law case for privileging traditional marriage. That cannot happen on the campus of Stanford University, it seems; one student said that the presence — the mere presence! — of Anderson would make her feel “unsafe.†Thus does one of the world’s great universities appear as the Palo Alto School For Tots. …
[A]s was pointed out, correctly, refusing to fund a conference isn’t the same thing as suppressing it.
The SAS found other sources of funding for its conference, and all was well. Until this week. From an SAS news release:
The Stanford Anscombe Society (SAS) is requesting that Stanford University remove a burdensome $5,600 security fee it imposed on the conference organizers following the Graduate Student Council’s revocation of funding for its April Communicating Values conference.
“This fee is a tax on free speech,†said Judy Romea, SAS co-president. …
The fee is intended to pay for the presence of ten event security personnel, including four police officers, at the single-day conference. Approximately, 120 participants are expected, making the ratio of participants to security personnel 12 to 1. The administration only insisted on the added security after a vocal group of LGBTQ activists announced their opposition to the event. …
[T]he Grad Student Council’s decision to revoke the previously-granted $600 of funding was because of this same pressure from LGBTQ activists. …
This is jaw-dropping. The only danger on campus is to the 120 participants in this conference, who will no doubt face heckling and possibly worse from gay activists and their allies, trying to disrupt the meeting. And the university — an actual American university! — is requiring them to pay nearly $6,000 to guarantee their right to lawfully assemble and practice free speech. On a campus. Of an American university.
Michael W. Hannon, in First Things, serves up some serious history demonstrating that Americans have recently been legislating privileges and remodeling the fundamental institutions of Society in favor of an imaginary category of beings.
Heterosexuals, like typewriters and urinals …, were an invention of the 1860s. Contrary to our cultural preconceptions and the lies of what has come to be called “orientation essentialism,†“straight†and “gay†are not ageless absolutes. Sexual orientation is a conceptual scheme with a history, and a dark one at that. It is a history that began far more recently than most people know, and it is one that will likely end much sooner than most people think.
Over the course of several centuries, the West had progressively abandoned Christianity’s marital architecture for human sexuality. Then, about one hundred and fifty years ago, it began to replace that longstanding teleological tradition with a brand new creation: the absolutist but absurd taxonomy of sexual orientations. Heterosexuality was made to serve as this fanciful framework’s regulating ideal, preserving the social prohibitions against sodomy and other sexual debaucheries without requiring recourse to the procreative nature of human sexuality.
On this novel account, same-sex sex acts were wrong not because they spurn the rational-animal purpose of sex—namely the family—but rather because the desire for these actions allegedly arises from a distasteful psychological disorder. As queer theorist Hanne Blank recounts, “This new concept [of heterosexuality], gussied up in a mangled mix of impressive-sounding dead languages, gave old orthodoxies a new and vibrant lease on life by suggesting, in authoritative tones, that science had effectively pronounced them natural, inevitable, and innate.â€
Sexual orientation has not provided the dependable underpinning for virtue that its inventors hoped it would, especially lately. Nevertheless, many conservative-minded Christians today feel that we should continue to enshrine the gay–straight divide and the heterosexual ideal in our popular catechesis, since that still seems to them the best way to make our moral maxims appear reasonable and attractive.
These Christian compatriots of mine are wrong to cling so tightly to sexual orientation, confusing our unprecedented and unsuccessful apologia for chastity with its eternal foundation. We do not need “heteronormativity†to defend against debauchery. On the contrary, it is just getting in our way.
Michel Foucault, an unexpected ally, details the pedigree of sexual orientation in his History of Sexuality. Whereas “sodomy†had long identified a class of actions, suddenly for the first time, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the term “homosexual†appeared alongside it. This European neologism was used in a way that would have struck previous generations as a plain category mistake, designating not actions, but people—and so also with its counterpart and foil “heterosexual.â€
Psychiatrists and legislators of the mid- to late-1800s, Foucault recounts, rejected the classical convention in which the “perpetrator†of sodomitical acts was “nothing more than the juridical subject of them.†With secular society rendering classical religious beliefs publicly illegitimate, pseudoscience stepped in and replaced religion as the moral foundation for venereal norms. To achieve secular sexual social stability, the medical experts crafted what Foucault describes as “a natural order of disorder.â€
“The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage,†“a type of life,†“a morphology,†Foucault writes. This perverted psychiatric identity, elevated to the status of a mutant “life form†in order to safeguard polite society against its disgusting depravities, swallowed up the entire character of the afflicted: “Nothing that went into [the homosexual’s] total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle.â€
The imprudent aristocrats encouraging these medical innovations changed the measure of public morality, substituting religiously colored human nature with the secularly safer option of individual passion. In doing so, they were forced also to trade the robust natural law tradition for the recently constructed standard of “psychiatric normality,†with “heterosexuality†serving as the new normal for human sexuality. Such a vague standard of normality, unsurprisingly, offered far flimsier support for sexual ethics than did the classical natural law tradition.
There is a similar piece, looking at homosexuality from an anthropological perspective by David Benkof at Daily Caller.
[B]efore the 19th century nobody was called “gay.†… While various societies had different ways of thinking about and expressing gender, love, and desire, homosexuality was generally something one could do, not something one could be.
Matt K. Lewis explains that the current (losing for conservatives) attempt to defend individual business’s right to decline to bake Gay wedding cakes or photograph Gay weddings is the next to last stop before the conflict between egalitarianism and religious freedom arrives inside the churches’ doors.
this is a tough issue that pits things we value as a society against things we value as a society.
We have reached a point in the gay rights debate where all the low-hanging fruit has been picked. We are now entering into the zero-sum game phase of the debate, where gay rights and religious liberty must collide. (In other words, the cake is only so big. If you take a piece, you are guaranteeing the other guy has less cake.)
So who’s right? My guess is one could guarantee public opinion is on either side of the issue, depending on how you frame the question. If, for example, you were to ask someone whether or not “businesses should be allowed to deny services to same-sex couples,†the answer would, of course, be “no.â€
On the other hand, ask Americans if “government should have the right to forcefully coerce Christians to violate their convictions,†and the answer would also be “no.†…
This is really a surrogate battle. A much bigger one is coming.
Opponents of these bills score points when they argue that florists and bakers aren’t exactly granting their imprimatur when they make a cake or put together a flower arrangement for a gay wedding. Additionally, they are correct in assuming that most Christians, whether they agree with same-sex marriage, or not, would still bake the cake. In fact, this could be seen as an example of Christian love.
But this is another example of how this schism cannot be easily brushed aside like so many wedding cake crumbs. In recent years, libertarian-leaning conservatives have largely sided with the gay rights argument. Proud members of the “leave us alone†coalition were apt to side with a group of people who just wanted to be left alone to love the person they love (and what happens in the bedroom is nobody’s business).
At some point, however, “leave us alone†became “bake us a cake. Or else!â€
And that’s a very different thing, altogether.
The reason conservative Christians are fighting this fight today is because it’s a firewall. The real danger, of course, is that Christian pastors and preachers will eventually be coerced into performing same-sex marriages. (Note: It is entirely possible for someone to believe gay marriage is fine, and to still oppose forcing people who hold strong religious convictions to participate — but I suspect that is where we are heading.)
Think of it this way. If you were a congregant in a church, wouldn’t you expect the pastor to marry you? Why should you be treated different?
Any pastor — if he or she wants to maintain the church’s tax status, that is — had better grapple with this now.
Whether the analogy is fair, or not, refusing to officiate a gay wedding can just as easily be called “denying service.†And it will predictably also be compared to the bad old days of Jim Crow — where racist Christians opposed interracial marriage (until the courts struck down state laws prohibiting biracial marriage).
Gay rights and religious liberty are on a collision course.
Eight major studies of identical twins in Australia, the U.S., and Scandinavia during the last two decades all arrive at the same conclusion: gays were not born that way.
“At best genetics is a minor factor,†says Dr. Neil Whitehead, PhD. Whitehead worked for the New Zealand government as a scientific researcher for 24 years, then spent four years working for the United Nations and International Atomic Energy Agency. Most recently, he serves as a consultant to Japanese universities about the effects of radiation exposure. His PhD is in biochemistry and statistics.
Baby, you were born this way.†As soon as Lady Gaga sang these words on her smash hit “Born This Way,” they became a rallying cry for gay people around the world, an anthem for sexual minorities facing discrimination. The shiny, catchy song carries an empowering (if simple) message: Don’t be ashamed about being gay, or bi, or trans, or anything—that’s just how you were born. Gaga later named her anti-bullying charity after the same truism, and two filmmakers borrowed it for their documentary exposing homophobia in Africa. A popular “Born This Way” blog encourages users to submit reflections on “their innate LGBTQ selves.†Need a quick, pithy riposte against anti-gay bigotry? Baby, we were born this way.
But were we? That’s the foundational question behind the gay rights movement—and its opponents. If gay people were truly born that way, the old canard of homosexuality as a “lifestyle choice†(or “sexual preferenceâ€) is immediately disproven. But if gay people weren’t born that way, if scientists were unable to find any biological basis for sexual orientation, then the Family Research Council crowd could claim vindication in its fight to label homosexuality unnatural, harmful, and against nature.
In recent years, scientists have proposed various speculative biological bases for homosexuality but never settled on an answer. As researchers draw closer to uncovering an explanation, however, a new question has arisen: What if in some cases sexuality is caused by an identifiable chemical process in the womb? What if, in other words, homosexuality can potentially be prevented? That is one implication of one of the most widely accepted hypotheses thus far proposed. And if it’s true, it could turn out to be a blow for the gay rights movement.
Some of the strongest current evidence that some people are born gay is based on a phenomenon called the fraternal birth order effect. Several peer-reviewed studies have shown that men with older biological brothers are likelier to be gay than men with older sisters or no older siblings. The likelihood of being gay increases by about 33 percent with each additional older brother.
Men who chose a transgressive and perverse lifestyle are not all onboard with the professionally-managed public relations campaign aimed at domesticizing and taking homosexuality mainstream. The novelist Brett Easton Ellis finds all this whitewashing and all the appeals to sentimentality “infantilizing and condescending.”
Was I the only gay man of a certain demo who experienced a flicker of annoyance in the way the media treated Jason Collins as some kind of baby panda who needed to be honored and praised and consoled and—yes—infantilized by his coming out on the cover of Sports Illustrated? Within the tyrannical homophobia of the sports world, that any man would come out as gay (let alone a black man) is not only an LGBT triumph but also a triumph for pranksters everywhere who thrilled to the idea that what should be considered just another neutral fact that is nobody’s business was instead a shock heard around the world, one that added another jolt of transparency to an increasingly transparent planet. It was an undeniable moment and also extremely cool. Jason Collins is the future. But the subsequent fawning over Collins simply stating he is gay still seemed to me, as another gay man, like a new kind of victimization. (George Stephanopoulos interviewed him so tenderly, it was as if he was talking to a six-year-old boy.) In another five years hopefully this won’t matter, but for now we’re trapped in the times we live in. The reign of The Gay Man as Magical Elf, who whenever he comes out appears before us as some kind of saintly E.T. whose sole purpose is to be put in the position of reminding us only about Tolerance and Our Own Prejudices and To Feel Good About Ourselves and to be a symbol instead of just being a gay dude, is—lamentably—still in media play.
The Gay Man as Magical Elf has been such a tricky part of gay self-patronization in the media that you would by now expect the chill members of the LGBT community to respond with cool indifference. The Sweet and Sexually Unthreatening and Super-Successful Gay is supposed to be destined to transform The Hets into noble gay-loving protectors—as long as the gay in question isn’t messy or sexual or difficult. The straight and gay sanctimoniousness that says everyone gay needs to be canonized when coming out still makes some of us who are already out feel like we’re on the sidelines. I’m all for coming out on one’s own terms, but heralding it as the most important news story of the week feels to me, as a gay man, well, kind of alienating. We are apart because of what we supposedly represent because of… our… boring… sexuality—oh man, do we have to go through this again? And it’s all about the upbeat press release, the kind of smiling mask assuring us everything is awesome. God help the gay man who comes out and doesn’t want to represent, who doesn’t want to teach, who doesn’t feel like part of the homogenized gay culture and rejects it. Where’s the gay dude who makes crude jokes about other gays in the media (as straight dudes do of each other constantly) or express their hopelessness in seeing Modern Family being rewarded for its depiction of gays, a show where a heterosexual plays the most simpering ka-ween on TV and Wins. Emmys. For. It? Why isn’t the gay dude I have always known and the gay dude I have always wanted to be not front and center in the media culture now? But being “real†and “human†(i.e. flawed) is not necessarily what The Gay Gatekeepers want straight culture to see.
A clause added to the Defense Authorization spending bill repealing Section 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice in order to decriminalize homosexual relations has provoked considerable controversy.
It turned out that Section 125 stated that any servicemember who “engages in unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same sex or opposite sex or with an animal is guilty of sodomy.” Offenders would face court-martial for any violations.
Legalizing homosexual relations thus seemed to imply that bestiality would have to be legalized as well, and organizations from the Family Research Council to the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals exploded in indignation.
The Pentagon tried assuring Congress that bestiality would remain unlawful because it is impossible to conceive of a circumstance in which such an act “would not be conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline or service-discrediting.” Though they obviously overlooked the fact that plenty of people would be happy to argue that homosexual acts are bound to be just as prejudicial to good order and discipline, and discrediting to the service in the eyes of many Americans.
The Republican-controlled House has yet to endorse the Senate bill, and negotiators are discussing the differences in each house’s version of the Defense bill.
