Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Gaywalkers, Gaytards, and the Gaystapo

Blog and Mablog

Posted on Monday, April 7, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

Let us begin, shall we, with some basic distinctions.

The first has to do with the basic sin issue, with politics not involved. When I was in the Navy, and had evangelistic discussions with whoring drunks, sin was always the issue. I was presenting the gospel to them, and the necessary response to the gospel message is “repent and believe.” I would talk with men who were ashamed of their sin, and also to men who were belligerent about it. I would confront them with their tomcatting ways, and they would confront me for being such a Jesus freak. But, to everyone’s credit, after we would have what the diplomats call a frank exchange of views, nobody ran off to tattle.

Those who are tempted with same sex attractions — both those who are ashamed of it and try to resist it and those who are given over to it — are gaywalkers. God built the road, and it is straight road, and he told us to cross at the intersection. Refusing to do so, or wavering on the point, is a sin issue, not a political issue. Let’s talk about it. As we address this kind of thing, the faithful Christian is dealing with the homosexual on exactly the terms as he deals with adulterers, gamblers, liars, drunks, and so on. Sin is sin, and Jesus is the only way out of that death trap. So let’s talk about it.

But then there are the gaytards. These are the people — homosexual, straight, and whatever Justin Bieber is — who are the ideal receptacle for the cultural propaganda served up by our duly appointed thought managers. They believe in “gay rights” for the same reason that they believe in climate change.
The cool kids have decreed what is “in,” and the wannabe cool kids will enforce it on the unconvinced with a ferocity that can scarcely be credited. They do this in the hope that the cool kids will notice them, and promote them to better things. These people amuse themselves by taunting people ten times shrewder than they are as “low information voters.” Low information voters are those who believe that you can’t spend money you don’t have, that climate that doesn’t change isn’t climate change, and that men should marry women.

But then we come to those who are the driving force behind all this. They are in the grip of the libido dominandi, the lust for power, and they have combined it with their lust for flesh just like their own. They are the pink mafia. They are the gaystapo, as one observer put it. They want to establish their sodomite sharia law, starting in Portland, say, and working its way out.

Unless you take their tolerance tattoo, either on your right hand or on your forehead, you will not be able to buy or sell (Rev. 13:16-17). Why should such an enemy of humanity be able to buy or sell? But the problem with taking that tolerance tattoo is that the space is reserved. Everyone who serves the living and true God is called to reserve that space on the hand or forehead for the law of God (Deut. 6:8). And the law of God says to confuse male and female is a root confusion. Someone that confused might wind up having sex with someone just exactly like himself, and then calling it “diversity.”

But the collision here is not over whether or not the anus is a sex organ — that is reserved for the first category above. Our controversy here has to do with who defines love and hate for the public square, and what those definitions are. If they hear you witnessing to an apolitical homosexual in the first category above, and they declare you to be guilty of “hate speech,” what are we to say about this and why?

Behind these efforts of the gaystapo is a false view of history. They are marching, or so they think, from Seneca Falls to Selma, and from Selma to Stonewall. They want this battle to be exactly parallel to that which overthrew Jim Crow, in which the “old white guys” go down in ignominious defeat once again.
But — quite apart from my age and color, which some might consider irrelevant in discussions of morality — there is a stark difference between the two scenarios. The ardent defenders of principled segregation were defending sin. The ardent defenders of biblical marriage are opposing sin. “Sin? Sin? What is this babbler trying to say?”

Compare these passages. The first two address the segregationists, and the last one addresses the sodomites.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).

“And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation; And hast made us unto our God kings and priests: and we shall reign on the earth” (Rev. 5:9–10)

“For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment; And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly; And turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha into ashes condemned them with an overthrow, making them an ensample unto those that after should live ungodly; And delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked: (For that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds;) The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished: But chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government. Presumptuous are they, selfwilled, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignities. Whereas angels, which are greater in power and might, bring not railing accusation against them before the Lord” (2 Pet. 2:4–11).

What this means, in brief, is that in the civil rights movement, the liberals were trying to accomplish a good thing by a false means. Statist coercion cannot create racial harmony, but racial harmony is at least a good thing. The goal was noble, even though their confidence in the saving power of their compulsions was radically misplaced. And those who opposed them had, in the same moment, the task of opposing the murmurings of their own conscience.

In this instance, the liberals are trying to accomplish an evil thing. And when they start cracking heads in order to compel the corruption, they have fully earned their right to the name of gaystapo, and anyone with a Bible and a willingness to read it submissively can tell what they are up to. Their opponents in this one have a clean conscience, which makes all the difference in the world.

Letter From America (About Felonies)

Commit any felonies lately?

A. Barton Hinkle bhinkle@timesdispatch.com

Posted: Wednesday, July 3, 2013 12:00 am
Updated: 12:13 am, Wed Jul 3, 2013.

Elizabeth Daly went to jail over a case of bottled water.

According to the Charlottesville Daily Progress, shortly after 10 p.m. April 11, the University of Virginia student bought ice cream, cookie dough and a carton of LaCroix sparkling water from the Harris Teeter grocery store at the popular Barracks Road Shopping Center. In the parking lot, a half-dozen men and a woman approached her car, flashing some kind of badges. One jumped on the hood. Another drew a gun. Others started trying to break the windows.

Daly understandably panicked. With her roommate in the passenger seat yelling “Go, go, go!” Daly drove off, hoping to reach the nearest police station. The women dialed 911. Then a vehicle with lights and sirens pulled them over, and the situation clarified: The people who had swarmed Daly’s vehicle were plainclothes agents of the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. The agents had thought the sparkling water was a 12-pack of beer.

Did the ABC’s enforcers apologize? Not in the slightest.
They charged Daly with three felonies: two for assaulting an officer (her vehicle had grazed two agents; neither was hurt) and one for eluding the police. Last week, the commonwealth’s attorney dropped the charges.

The agents’ excessive display of force is outrageously disproportionate to the offense they mistakenly thought they witnessed: an underage purchase of alcohol. But in a sense, Daly got off easy. A couple of weeks after her ordeal, a 61-year-old man in Tennessee was killed when the police executed a drug raid on the wrong house. A few weeks later, in another wrong-house raid, police officers killed a dog belonging to an Army veteran. These are not isolated incidents; for more information, visit the interactive map at www.cato.org/raidmap.

They are, however, part and parcel of two broader phenomena. One is the militarization of domestic law enforcement. In recent years, police departments have widely adopted military tactics, military equipment (armored personnel carriers, flash-bang grenades) — and, sometimes, the mindset of military conquerors rather than domestic peacekeepers.

The other phenomenon is the increasing degree to which civilians are subject to criminal prosecution for noncriminal acts, including exercising the constitutionally protected right to free speech.

Last week, A.J. Marin was arrested in Harrisburg, Pa., for writing in chalk on the sidewalk. Marin was participating in a health care demonstration outside Gov. Tom Corbett’s residence when he wrote, “Governor Corbett has health insurance, we should too.” Authorities charged Marin with writing “a derogatory remark about the governor on the sidewalk.” The horror.

This follows the case of Jeff Olson, who chalked messages such as “Stop big banks” outside branches of Bank of America last year. Law professor Jonathan Turley reports that prosecutors brought 13 vandalism charges against him. Moreover, the judge in the case recently prohibited Olson’s attorney from “mentioning the First Amendment, free speech,” or anything like them during the trial.

In May, a Texas woman was arrested for asking to see a warrant for the arrest of her 11-year-old son. “She spent the night in jail while her son was left at home,” reports Fox34 News. The son never was arrested.  Also in Texas, Justin Carter has spent months in jail — and faces eight years more — for making an admittedly atrocious joke about shooting up a school in an online chat. Though he was plainly kidding, authorities charged him with making a terrorist threat.

Federal prosecutors also recently used an anti-terrorism measure to seize almost $70,000 from the owners of a Maryland dairy. Randy and Karen Sowers had made several bank deposits of just under $10,000 to avoid the headache of filing federal reports required for sums over that amount. The feds charged them with unlawful “structuring.” Last week, they settled the case. Authorities kept half their money to teach them a lesson.

“I broke the law yesterday,” writes George Mason economics professor Alex Tabarrok, “and I probably will break the law tomorrow. Don’t mistake me, I have done nothing wrong. I don’t even know what laws I have broken. … It’s hard for anyone to live today without breaking the law. Doubt me? Have you ever thrown out some junk mail that … was addressed to someone else? That’s a violation of federal law punishable by up to five years in prison.” Tabarrok notes that lawyer Harvey Silverglate thinks the typical American commits “Three Felonies a Day” — the title of Silverglate’s book on the subject.

As The Wall Street Journal has reported, lawmakers in Washington have greatly eroded the notion of mens rea — the principle that you need criminal intent in order to commit a crime. Thanks to a proliferating number of obscure offenses, Americans now resemble the condemned souls in Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” — spared from perdition only by the temporary forbearance of those who sit in judgment.

“What once might have been considered simply a mistake,” The Journal explains, is now “punishable by jail time.” And as 20-year-old Elizabeth Daly has now learned, you can go to jail even when the person making the mistake wasn’t you.

bhinkle@timesdispatch.com

Letter From the UK (About US Citizen Surveillance)

The “War on Terror” is Proving to be a War on Citizens

In wartime it is common for civil liberties to erode.  The exigencies of war mean that extraordinary and emergency measures are required to prosecute the conflict.  Often civil liberties are attenuated.  At the very least, the resistance to the state exerting emergency powers over its citizens becomes muted.

Hopefully (and hope is the operative word) at the end of the conflict the greater powers of the state prove to have truly been emergency powers and temporary only.  They are revoked, and civil liberties are restored.  But what happens when the state moves to a permanent state-of-war footing?  George Orwell’s dystopian 1984 shows us one consequence: an alleged state of perpetual war was used as a pretext for totalitarian controls over all citizens (in the name of freedom and liberty, naturally).

The United States has been at war now for decades. 
  It is as close to being in a state of perpetual war that we have seen in the modern period.   The War on Terror is the latest morph.  This gets the United States pretty much into a state of perpetual war for the country.  Terrorists need to be fought, both abroad and at home.  During war, it is the risk of enemy spies in the land which normally provides the justification for greater controls and restrictions of citizens, on the one hand, and of much greater powers of state surveillance, on the other.  Because terrorism is a tactic, not a defined enemy nation against whom Congress has declared war, the possibilities of domestic terrorism and of “combatants” being one’s next door neighbour increase exponentially.  Enemy operatives could be anywhere.  Naturally, the drive to attenuate and remove civil liberties ratchets up considerably.  Naturally, the state surveils its citizens far more comprehensively.

In this regard, The Guardian ran the following piece on US government surveillance of its own citizens.  What was fantastical and unthinkable ten years ago is now normal.  Welcome to the wonderful world of perpetual war.  The US is proving to be an exceptional nation after all.  Well outside the common understanding of what constitutes a free society. 

Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?

A former FBI counterterrorism agent claims on CNN that this is the case

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 4 May 2013

The real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.

Over the past couple days, cable news tabloid shows such as CNN’s Out Front with Erin Burnett have been excitingly focused on the possible involvement in the Boston Marathon attack of Katherine Russell, the 24-year-old American widow of the deceased suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. As part of their relentless stream of leaks uncritically disseminated by our Adversarial Press Corps, anonymous government officials are claiming that they are now focused on telephone calls between Russell and Tsarnaev that took place both before and after the attack to determine if she had prior knowledge of the plot or participated in any way.

On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?
CLEMENTE: “No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.
BURNETT: “So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.
CLEMENTE: “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”

“All of that stuff” – meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on US soil, with or without a search warrant – “is being captured as we speak”.

On Thursday night, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that “all digital communications in the past” are recorded and stored. 

Let’s repeat that last part: “no digital communication is secure”, by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications – meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like – are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.

There have been some previous indications that this is true. Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein revealed that AT&T and other telecoms had built a special network that allowed the National Security Agency full and unfettered access to data about the telephone calls and the content of email communications for all of their customers. Specifically, Klein explained “that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T” and that “contrary to the government’s depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists . . . much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic.” But his amazing revelations were mostly ignored and, when Congress retroactively immunized the nation’s telecom giants for their participation in the illegal Bush spying programs, Klein’s claims (by design) were prevented from being adjudicated in court.

That every single telephone call is recorded and stored would also explain this extraordinary revelation by the Washington Post in 2010:

Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.

It would also help explain the revelations of former NSA official William Binney, who resigned from the agency in protest over its systemic spying on the domestic communications of US citizens, that the US government has “assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about US citizens with other US citizens” (which counts only communications transactions and not financial and other transactions), and that “the data that’s being assembled is about everybody. And from that data, then they can target anyone they want.”

Despite the extreme secrecy behind which these surveillance programs operate, there have been periodic reports of serious abuse. Two Democratic Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have been warning for years that Americans would be “stunned” to learn what the US government is doing in terms of secret surveillance.
Strangely, back in 2002 – when hysteria over the 9/11 attacks (and thus acquiescence to government power) was at its peak – the Pentagon’s attempt to implement what it called the “Total Information Awareness” program (TIA) sparked so much public controversy that it had to be official scrapped. But it has been incrementally re-instituted – without the creepy (though honest) name and all-seeing-eye logo – with little controversy or even notice.

Back in 2010, worldwide controversy erupted when the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates banned the use of Blackberries because some communications were inaccessible to government intelligence agencies, and that could not be tolerated. The Obama administration condemned this move on the ground that it threatened core freedoms, only to turn around six weeks later and demand that all forms of digital communications allow the US government backdoor access to intercept them. Put another way, the US government embraced exactly the same rationale invoked by the UAE and Saudi agencies: that no communications can be off limits. Indeed, the UAE, when responding to condemnations from the Obama administration, noted that it was simply doing exactly that which the US government does:

“‘In fact, the UAE is exercising its sovereign right and is asking for exactly the same regulatory compliance – and with the same principles of judicial and regulatory oversight – that Blackberry grants the US and other governments and nothing more,’ [UAE Ambassador to the US Yousef Al] Otaiba said. ‘Importantly, the UAE requires the same compliance as the US for the very same reasons: to protect national security and to assist in law enforcement.'”

That no human communications can be allowed to take place without the scrutinizing eye of the US government is indeed the animating principle of the US Surveillance State. Still, this revelation, made in passing on CNN, that every single telephone call made by and among Americans is recorded and stored is something which most people undoubtedly do not know, even if the small group of people who focus on surveillance issues believed it to be true (clearly, both Burnett and Costello were shocked to hear this).

Some new polling suggests that Americans, even after the Boston attack, are growing increasingly concerned about erosions of civil liberties in the name of Terrorism. Even those people who claim it does not matter instinctively understand the value of personal privacy: they put locks on their bedroom doors and vigilantly safeguard their email passwords. That’s why the US government so desperately maintains a wall of secrecy around their surveillance capabilities: because they fear that people will find their behavior unacceptably intrusive and threatening, as they did even back in 2002 when John Poindexter’s TIA was unveiled.

Mass surveillance is the hallmark of a tyrannical political culture. But whatever one’s views on that, the more that is known about what the US government and its surveillance agencies are doing, the better. This admission by this former FBI agent on CNN gives a very good sense for just how limitless these activities are.

Treaty of Waitangi Fables, Part III

Tribalism Makes Some Animals More Equal Than Most

This is the third piece recently seeing the light of day in the NZ Herald confronting the historical revisionism being foisted upon the Treaty of Waitangi and its signing.   Dr Elizabeth Rata takes up the issue of Maori tribalism and argues that it is incompatible with a democratic form of government.

Elizabeth Rata: Tribalism, democracy incompatible

5:30 AM Tuesday Jan 29, 2013

Tribalism is based on principles of inequality. Democracy is based on equality. So unity is only way forward.

The post-1987 idea of a Treaty ‘partnership’ is not true to the original Treaty. Photo / Alexander Turnbull Library

The recent Herald commentary by Ewen McQueen takes us further into a thoughtful consideration of the Treaty of Waitangi and the constitution. Using Sir Joseph Ward’s metaphor that “there can only be one sun in the sky”, McQueen showed why the post-1987 idea of a Treaty “partnership” is not true to the original Treaty. He concluded by noting that most chiefs agreed to give absolutely to the Queen the complete government over their land in return for guaranteed protection of chieftainship.

According to McQueen the constitutional review may help us find new ways for chieftainship to be expressed. I agree, the issue of chieftainship is crucial to the current national discussion convened by the Government’s Constitutional Advisory Panel. So what is the chieftainship issue?

If chieftainship still exists to be “expressed” then so too must the tribal political system of 1840 also exist. After all, to exercise chieftainship one must be a chief of something. This does appear to be the case. Who can ignore the existence of iwi today? The revived tribes go from strength to strength. It seems self-evident that the tribal kinship system that framed traditional Maori society is alive and well, albeit in a modernised form.

A lot rides on this point. Present-day iwi insist that they are the inheritors of the past. Their claims for greater political power, even constitutionally recognised power, and for vast economic resources follow from this premise of tribal revival. The vital importance of the Treaty is as the document of iwi inheritance, hence iwi leaders insistence that the Treaty be included in the nation’s constitution.

Yet how can a traditional tribal system be revived when it was destroyed by democracy? Tribalism and democracy are incompatible – they cannot exist together as political systems in the one nation. As the late New Zealand historian Professor Peter Munz noted, the condition for democracy is everywhere the end of tribalism with its birth-ascribed inequality and exclusive kin membership.

The incompatibility goes deep into the very structure of politics. Tribalism is based on principles of inequality. Democracy is based on equality. Kin status is what matters in the tribe; citizenship is the democratic status. Tribalism is exclusive. To belong you must have ancestors who were themselves born into the system. Democracy by contrast includes people from all backgrounds. The matter of who is included and who is excluded touches all areas of New Zealand life. Many New Zealand families have members who are Maori and members who are non-Maori. What would it mean for New Zealand if this division were to become a political division throughout every level of our institutions?

Those wanting to place the Treaty into New Zealand’s Constitution must address the implications of the fundamental incompatibility between democracy and tribalism if the constitutional review is to have any real purpose. The equality versus inequality, inclusion versus exclusion incompatibility goes deep into the very nature of the political system. Democracy has three elements: the nation, the state, and the citizen. The nation is the overall framework and idea we have of ourselves as the nation New Zealand. The state is parliament and all the institutions and systems of government. Citizens are the subjects of the nation-state and have rights that flow from along with responsibilities to the system.

The principle of universalism is the base upon which these three elements rest. Indeed, democracy could only become a political system once this principle was widely accepted. Universalism justifies the equal status of the citizen. It justifies our human rights, including the right to have a cultural or religious identity. Democratic universalism doesn’t rule out various forms of cultural identity within the one nation. Tribalism does. Democracy separates political status from cultural/racial identity. Tribalism is unable to do so.

The place of religion in New Zealand is a good example of the division between political status and identity. Many New Zealanders have a religion but their religious identity is not part of the political arrangements, although the right to exercise their religion is. Race and culture are like religion – an identity but not a political status. We meet in the political sphere as equal citizens not as members of a religion, a race, or a tribe.

For this reason race or cultural identity cannot be included as a political status in a constitution. What a constitution can include, and New Zealand’s constitution already does, is the right that each individual has to exercise his or her cultural identity. It is a right enshrined in legislation which protects the ongoing identification people may have with their racial heritage. It is a right that can exist only because of our equal status as citizens, a status that comes from the universalist principle that we are all equal as human beings. The right of people to belong to and practise their iwitangi in society at large but outside the political sphere is guaranteed by democracy’s principle of human rights.

This takes me back to the question of chieftainship. Can chieftainship be exercised in a democracy? The comparison with religion holds the answer. Just as bishops and priests lost their considerable political power to democracy’s system of accountable leadership, so too must today’s iwi leaders accept the same limitations. Their influence on the political system should be that of any other social organisation or business corporation. Just as one sun is the sky is true for the nation’s sovereignty so it is true for our institutions.

Democracy can only exist in one unified nation with a constituted government accountable to its equal citizens. Its three elements must stand united upon the foundation of the universal human being.

Dr Elizabeth Rata is an associate professor in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Auckland and a member of the Independent Constitutional Review Panel.

 
 

Secular Rationalizing No Foundation for Rights

The Christian Foundation of Human Rights

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  This is the kind of thinking I would like to recommend.

We don’t know the nature of Jefferson’s religious beliefs or doubts, or disbeliefs  He seems to have been as original in this respect as in many others. But we do know he had recourse to the language and assumptions of Judeo-Christianity to articulate a vision of human nature.  Each person is divinely created and given rights as a gift from God.  And since these rights are given to him by God, he can never be deprived of them without defying some divine intent. Jefferson has used Scripture to assert a particular form of human exceptionalism, one that anchors our nature, that is to say our dignity, in a reality outside the world of circumstance.  . . .

What would a secular paraphrase of this sentence look like?
  In what nonreligious terms is human equality self-evident?  As animals, some of us are smarter or stronger than others, as Jefferson was certainly in a position to know.  What would be the nonreligious equivalent for the assertion that individual rights are sacrosanct in every case?  Every civilization, including this one, has always been able to reason its way to ignoring or denying the most minimal claims to justice in any form that deserves the name.  The temptation is always present and powerful because the rationalizations are always ready to hand.  One group is congenitally inferior, another is alien or shiftless, or they are enemies of the people or of the state.  Yet others are carriers of intellectual or spiritual contagion.

Jefferson makes the human person sacred, once by creation and again by endowment, and thereby sets individual rights outside the reach of rationalization.  [Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), p. 162f.]

Protesting Too Much

Weakness of Idols on Display

Auckland has seen another violent protest by the same old faces.  This time it is protesting against free trade agreements.  The NZ Police took the brunt of the assault.  This from the NZ Herald: 

Police have condemned “violent” protesters who attacked two police officers and set fire to cardboard boxes as they tried to force their way into free trade negotiations.  A handful of police and SkyCity security staff were overwhelmed by more than 150 protesters, forcing the on-the-ground commander to call in reinforcements from around Auckland.

“Police staff moved in to prevent escalation and two officers were separated, attacked and kicked numerous times. Fire appliances were called to the scene to help,” police said in a statement. “Two arrests were made. One of these arrests was a female that stomped on a constables head.”

The usual suspects attended: John Minto (perpetual, serial, promiscuous protestor), Jane Kelsey (lecturer, Auckland University), Cathy Casey (Auckland City Councillor), Catherine Delahunty (Green MP) along with the mob.

Now in a rule-of-law democracy the only lawful way to propound convictions and arguments is by those means which respect the persons and property of your opponents.  The only successful way is to persuade a majority of voters to embrace your point of view.  When people resort to violence and seek to force, not persuade, people at least two things are happening.

The first is that the proponents of violence and lawbreaking believe the cause they represent is such a clear and present danger that normal rules do not apply.  Violence is legitimate and destruction of other peoples’ property is acceptable.  Such provocateurs are madmen.  They are revolutionaries.  Even if they were correct they are not the one’s charged with taking that decision and binding us all to its consequences. 

The second thing going on is that the violent, unlawful protest brigade are not really sure of their arguments nor the strength of their case nor their ability to succeed.  One facile way to cover this deficiency is to deflect attention away from the actual issues to the passion and zeal and commitment of the protesters as a means to make the issues appear momentous and, thereby, legitimate. 

This may have some traction amongst some for a time, but not now.  The tactic of unlawful violence is a double edged sword.  The same tired old names keep cropping up, protesting violently and publicly against so many causes that the public see little more than artifice in the passion and anger.  Now their passion serves only to undermine credibility.

We Christians are used to protest.  We protest against so much that secular humanism imposes upon us, employing its soft-despotism to crush out opponents and those who disagree.  But we are constrained in all we do by the law of God: respect for fellow-men and their property is at the heart of the law of the Covenant.  We are also protected from thinking that desperate times call for lawbreaking, since Christians have an eschatology of ultimate victory.  The Lord of lords does reign over all the kings and all the peoples of the earth. Ultimate triumph is assured.  

How the John Mintos of this world act betrays the impotence and weakness of the idols they serve.  It demonstrates that in their hearts they know it to be so.  Therefore, they believe it appropriate to give their idols a helping hand by a bit of force and violence. 

For our part, we trust that the prosecution against those who assaulted police officers and anyone else over the weekend at the protest against free trade will proceed apace and with the full force of the law. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

The Chocolate Milk Test 

Culture and Politics – Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, 11 September 2012

In talking about gay rights, we have to distinguish between different kinds of rights. If someone tries to ramp up the stakes by saying that he is talking about human rights, then we have go on to distinguish between different kinds of human rights.

The first kind of right is a liberty right — the right to be left alone in certain specified areas. These are rights we have over against an officious government or a meddling neighbor. I have, for example, the right to keep and bear arms. This right was given to me by God, not James Madison. I also have a right to free speech. I have a right to free assembly together with others exercising the same right. I have the right to worship God as He requires in His Word.

Now in this sense, I absolutely believe in gay rights. Homosexuals are people and habeus corpus applies to them as much as to anybody else.
They have a right to a fair and speedy trial. They have a right to not be convicted of a crime on the basis of stupid rumors. In fact, I cannot think of a single genuine right that I have that homosexuals do not have together with me, and for the same reasons.

At this point in the proceedings, someone clears his throat and says, “Umm, marriage? You have a right to marry, and they do not.” But “marry” is not an unspecific verb with no direct object. I have the right to marry a woman, and so do they. A man and a woman together is what marriage is. The fact that they don’t want to marry a woman is their look out. I have a right to own a gun and so does your spinster Quaker aunt. The fact that she doesn’t want to own a gun is perfectly acceptable. But what she is not free to do is redefine everything, and say that gun ownership is very important to her, but that for her, gun ownership means owning a quilting rack.

Marriage was defined by God in the garden, and He wove it right into our identity as having been created in the image of God (Gen. 1:27). Not only did He weave this definition in, He did it with a thread count that we cannot begin to count or comprehend. Redefining marriage is therefore not a project of weaving something else; it is the destructive project of tearing up what was already woven.

But there is more. Liberty rights mean that other entities (like the government or your meddlesome neighbor) have a corresponding duty to respect that right. They respect it by leaving you alone. You buy a gun, and they do not attempt to take that gun away from you. They respect your rights by doing nothing. All they have to be is “not a busybody.” In this sense, such rights are negative rights.

This leads us to the other conception of rights, which are not rights at all. They are “positive” rights, in the sense that something must be given to you. These would be things like the right to “affordable housing,” or a “living wage.” With the gun, you buy the gun and other people leave you be. With the affordable housing, you provide the lack of a house, and somebody else has to buy the house. You provide the need for a job, and somebody else has to pay the wage. Your “rights” understood in this way amount to an obligation on the part of someone else to provide it.

You have a right, and they have a corresponding duty, not to respect what you bought, but rather to buy you something. Your right is purchased with corresponding duties from them. The more freedom you have under this definition, the less somebody else has. So not everybody leaps to do their duties in this regard — enter the government in order that we have somebody to make them do their duty. The government takes money from them in order to pay for the “right” to an affordable house, a living wage, or a hot lunch.

This notion of positive rights is therefore the intellectual framework of slavers. The former, the idea of liberty rights, is the theological framework for a free society. With liberty rights, you pay for your own gun, and other people leave you alone. With the positive rights, under that definition, say that you had the right to gun ownership. This would means somebody else would have to buy you a gun . . . with a gun pointed at them in case they didn’t want to.

So what does this have to do with gay rights? All we have to is ask whether or not anybody is going to have to be coerced in outlandish ways order to establish, say, the right of homosexuals to marry. With negative rights, when a right is recognized and acknowledged, the experience of liberty grows, and it grows for everyone. With positive rights, when such a “right” is established,” real liberty — in all sorts of areas — shrinks.

Go back to gun ownership. A man has a right to own a gun, and the owner of a restaurant has the right to require all guns to be checked at the door. It is his restaurant. Of course, he should also have the right to go the other way too. This is Idaho, at least where I am, and we have one restaurant in town that gives you a discount for “open carry.” It’s kind of endearing.

So say that homosexuals are given the right to marry, as has occurred in a number of states. Do Christian photographers have the right to turn down the job of shooting the wedding? Do Christians caterers get to say “No, thank you. We don’t do gay weddings.”? Do the Christian owners of a bed and breakfast have the right to decline being the scene of the honeymoon? No? Well, then, there’s your answer. Those driving this particular agenda are no friends of liberty.

I sometimes describe the mentality of soft despotism that surrounds us on every hand as the “free chocolate milk for everybody” mindset. So let this be your litmus test. Do I have a right to buy chocolate milk if I want? Or is someone else being obligated to buy me a chocolate milk whenever I want?

Homosexual Marriage

Not a Human Right

Oh, dear.  This is going to be a bit of a set back to the Commentariat in the UK and here.  The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has ruled that homosexual marriage is not a human right.  Now, of course, this is a bit of a joke, because secular humanists only have gigantic sky hooks on which to hang their “human rights”.  In secular humanist Western democracies human rights are whatever the majority of people want anyway.  Human rights in a secular state are nothing more than a wax nose to be twisted to the shape-shifting of the day.

But for what its worth, the European Court has ruled against homosexual marriage.  Regardless of the tenuous nature of the ruling, we are glad with the outcome.  This from the Daily Mail:

Same-sex marriages are not a human right, European judges have ruled.  Their decision shreds the claim by ministers that gay marriage is a universal human right and that same-sex couples have a right to marry because their mutual commitment is just as strong as that of husbands and wives. 


The ruling was made by judges of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg following a case involving a lesbian couple in a civil partnership who complained the French courts would not allow them to adopt a child as a couple. 

There is a sting in the tail of the ruling.  The august judges reckon that if homosexual marriage were declared a human right, anti-discrimination laws would require Christian churches to marry homosexuals.

The ruling also says that if gay couples are allowed to marry, any church that offers weddings will be guilty of discrimination if it declines to marry same-sex couples.  It means that if MPs legislate for same-sex marriage, the Coalition’s promise that churches will not be compelled to conduct the weddings will be worthless.

The UK government had been running the argument that if they legalised homosexual marriage, churches and conscientious objectors would not be required to perform homosexual marriages.  The European Court exploded that argument to pieces.

Neil Addison, a specialist in discrimination law, said: ‘Once same-sex marriage has been legalised then the partners to such a marriage are entitled to exactly the same rights as partners in a heterosexual marriage.  This means that if same-sex marriage is legalised in the UK it will be illegal for the Government to prevent such marriages happening in religious premises.’  


The Government’s consultation paper also said that no church would have to conduct gay weddings. It said there would be different legal categories of civil and religious marriage and same-sex couples would not be allowed religious marriages.

Hat Tip: Maria at NZ Conservative.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Honest As White Paint

Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, January 27, 2012

I have said kind things about Ron Paul in the past, and I will continue say them in the future. He continues to be one of the people I could vote for when Ringling Bros. finally brings the gaudy parade to my state. But he whiffed it last night in the debate when asked how his faith would affect his behavior in office. He said that it wouldn’t. Not only did he whiff it, but Santorum jacked it out of the park.

Santorum said, quite rightly, that the Constitution is the how of America, and the Declaration is the why. He said that government doesn’t give us our rights — God does that — and he said that the government’s role is to protect God-given rights. This was a dead-on bull’s eye.

Ron Paul’s formal position is therefore secularist. Now, of course, like all secularists, he is unable to actually keep these “disparate” elements of his worldview in separate compartments. The thing is impossible. But when you think you can do it, the result is generally a lot of confusion. Now I also believe that Ron Paul is as honest as white paint, and that he has told us plainly his actual thoughts on this. But this just means that he is honestly schizophrenic on this topic. That doesn’t make him lonely, it just makes him wrong. The secularist experiment is a fraud, and is lying around on the floor in a shambolic ruin.

In a breakfast discussion this morning, a friend astutely observed that this is why we probably ought to back away from our talk of constitutional rights. The Constitution was assigned to protect them; the Constitution was not given to us so that it might assign them. The Constitution was made for the rights, not the rights for the Constitution. Let’s speak of God-given rights.

I really appreciated the clarity in Santorum’s remarks. I appreciated the lack of confusion. God honors it when He is confessed.

Mis-Applied Civil Rights

Panty Waist Liberals and Criminal Gangs

The case of the Turangi child rapist has sickened the nation.  There has been a plethora of reports in the media about how the 16 year old, who has plead guilty, is an ordinary fellow.  His friends expressed puzzlement, disbelief, and confusion over his actions.  His community network spoke of his family being fine, upstanding people.  We were all left wondering, What on earth has gone on here?

Now, more sinister matters are coming to light.  This from Stuff:

The teenager who raped a five-year-old girl in a Turangi holiday park has gang connections.

The Sunday Star-Times has been told the 16-year-old, who has pleaded guilty to the attack, was motivated by the possibility of securing entry into a gang.  Because of the suppression orders around the case, the gang cannot be named.

The Star-Times understands the teen’s father had been associated with the gang, but not since the attack, which shocked New Zealand in the lead-up to Christmas. The boy’s father cannot be named for legal reasons. The claims were made by several sources close to the investigation.”The family and the boy are connected to a gang,” one said. “The family is gang-associated. It’s not just the father.”

Another source said: “The family are well-recognised as being what they are … rotten apples. Where are you heading in society when you have this underbelly?”

A couple of cautions.  Firstly, the Sunday Star-Times is hardly a fish-wrap of record and reports such as this should be treated with a dose of salt until reliably corroborated elsewhere.  Secondly, we note the report refers to “sources close to the investigation” and “another source”.  None are named.  This hardly deserves credence until people are named and go on the record. 

We shall see.  In general, however, there is an aura of credibility about the story.  It is well known that gang recruitment most often requires a novitiate to commit a serious crime as part of his “entrance exam”.  Whether or not gangs were involved in this case–something which will no doubt be corroborated in due course–it reminds us that there are vast criminal enterprises in New Zealand whose primary reason for existence is to prey on others and benefit financially from their crimes.  And for many gang membership is an attractive career option.

It’s time to clean up.  We should never have allowed the civil right of  free association to be abused by liberals to the extent that it covers the right of criminal gangs to exist.  A serious respect for civil rights would lead a more enlightened society to conclude that if an organization were proven through due judicial process to exist for the purpose of committing crimes and preying upon other citizens, the organization needs to be outlawed and interdicted.  Just to belong, or be associated would then be a criminal offence. 

Oh, but then no doubt the UN would scold New Zealand as a pariah state. The shame and scorn would be just too much for our panty waist liberals who only see all of life through their insipid, one dimensional pinot-gris.