Race, Sex, and Marriage

“If the negro is denied the right to marry a white person, the white person is equally denied the right to marry the negro. I see no discrimination against either in this aspect that does not apply to both.”

Sound familiar? Sometimes pro-marriage advocates use this same argument and logic in attempting to defend traditional marriage between one man and one woman.

But as you can see, it is a very weak argument, and I don’t use it. I highly suggest that no else does either. It more reflects semantics surrounding the term “discrimination” than critical thinking.

Here is the truth about the comparison between race and sex with regard to marriage:

A protein (melanin) is not the same as an organ (genitalia), which is made up of many proteins that form many tissues that form the organ. The function of the protein melanin is merely to change the color of human skin. The function of sexual organs is to create new life.

Skin color is arbitrary, irrelevant, and impotent. Sex is significant, relevant, and potent because it has fertility and procreative powers. Sex has natural implications for love, children, and family; skin color does not.

Race and sex are on two entirely different levels of significance and moral relevance. The true purpose of civil marriage drives and determines the significance and relevance of each category, race and sex.

Because the essential public purpose of marriage is for the sake of children, sex is naturally relevant because children naturally come from the union of the two different sexes. Skin color has no relevance when it comes to love, children, and family. Thus this comparison to race that the other side appeals to ad nauseam is simply invalid.

But naturally, those who believe that civil marriage has nothing to do with children, parenting, and/or family will see a parallel between banning interracial marriage and withholding legal recognition from same-sex sexual relationships. The anti-marriage side is merely drawing a logical conclusion from their flawed premise about marriage and children.

The anti-marriage side is often merely trying to use the emotional force of civil rights and racial language to advance their cause without addressing the key question at hand: is civil marriage about children or not? They wish to beg the question and assume what they should be attempting to prove. In fact, this is a tactic that merely serves to whip up their own side into a frenzy and to put the intellectually ill-equipped and unprepared on the defensive.

The conservative can point out their logical fallacy easily (begging the question), but it will likely do little to convince the liberal because, like I said, it’s the emotional appeal to a seemingly similar oppression narrative that’s attractive and enchanting to them.

(It is interesting as a sidenote that science, evolution, and eugenics, not Christianity, gave impetus to the notion that race had more significance than mere skin color, that race could signify or establish moral superiority or inferiority.)

Conservatives Donate Too Much to Think Tanks and Partisan Orgs

Conservatives will never actually halt and roll back the uninterrupted statist trend over the past century if conservative donors are not funding movement organizations that actually make American culture more conservative, get conservatives elected, and get conservative legislation passed. Think tanks and partisan organizations don’t do any of these things. The organizations that do accomplish these things focus on grassroots organizing, activism, legal action, media & communication, arts & entertainment, and training.

Think tanks don’t win policy battles. Throwing a policy paper at a politician and hoping he will change his mind is insane. Unless the politician is a true believer (and there are many more on the left than on the right) who is willing to lose an election to further an agenda, organized votes and money (or some really bad publicity) are the only thing that will change his mind.

Think tanks are most effective when conservatives are already in power. Then the policy analysis can be used and quoted by conservatives in power to lend an air of scientific accuracy and credibility to policies that common sense, reason, and basic principles already prove to be true. When conservatives are not in power, the policy papers and eggheads of the political right are ignored. These are the facts of history: the Heritage Foundation was riding high in being listened to during the Reagan years, the Gingrich years, and Republican dominance from 2002-2006. But when the Democrats gained power in 2006 and 2008, they couldn’t have cared less what the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, or American Enterprise Institute thought.

The very fact that the Heritage Foundation has now started Heritage Action, a 501(c)4 proves the limits of the think tank.

Partisan organizations are most effective when conservatives are already the Republican Party nominees. Why are conservatives giving so much money to partisan organs when there is no guarantee that the money will actually support conservative candidates (and when in fact the money has gone to RINOs in the past)? Conservatives should focus their money on primaries, and then the Republican hacks will have to follow.

Basically, 501(c)4s, legal foundations, and PACs of various sorts have the potential to make substantial contributions to the conservative movement because they organize votes, money, and/or legal action. 501(c)3s that focus on mass education do not have this potential and are largely useless, despite the media attention they may get or buy. But 501(c)3s that focus on youth culture, youth education, youth politics, and youth training do well. They sow deep and powerful seeds for the future.

But the budgets of think tanks and partisan organizations are much larger than those of the more effective organizations. Here are the annual budgets of various organizations:

Republican National Committee: $320 million (2008, revenue)

Think Tanks
Focus on the Family: $130.3 million (2009, revenue)
Heritage Foundation: $71.6 million (2009, revenue); $63.6 million (2008, revenue)
Hoover Institution: $36.7 million (2006-7, revenue; endowment worth $437 million)
Cato Institute: $20.4 million (FY 2010, revenue); $20.6 (FY 2009, revenue)
American Enterprise Institute: $20.2 million (2008, revenue)
Family Research Council: $12.1 million (2009, revenue)
Media Research Center: $11.3 million (2008, revenue)
Mercatus Center: $7.9 million (2009, revenue)
Acton Institute: $6.2 million (2008, revenue)
Competitive Enterprise Institute: $4.7 million (2009, revenue)
Claremont Institute: $3.3 million (2009, revenue)
Ludwig von Mises Institute: $2.7 million (2008, revenue)
Independent Institute: $1.9 million (2009, revenue)

Effective Organizations
Alliance Defense Fund: $30.1 million (2009, revenue)
Institute for Justice: $10.2 million (2009, revenue)
Federalist Society: $9.9 million (2009, revenue)
Americans for Prosperity: $7.5 million (2008, revenue)
Leadership Institute: $7.4 million (2009, revenue)
Institute for Humane Studies: $6.8 million (2009, revenue)
FreedomWorks: $4.2 million (2009, revenue)
National Organization for Marriage: $3 million (2009, revenue)
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education: $2.8 million (2009, revenue)
National Right to Life Committee: $2.6 million (2009, revenue)

And what do you think the left spends its money on? On organizations that mould young minds and that can get money and votes for liberal politicians. The left didn’t even start funding think tanks until recently. The left doesn’t need think tanks; it has colleges and universities! The left supplements the funding it gets from millionaires and billionaires with taxpayer money and union dues.

Here are the annual budgets of some top leftist organizations:

United Nations: $13.9 billion
National Education Association (NEA): $307 million
Service Employees International Union (SEIU): $300 million
Democratic National Committee: $260.1 million
AFL-CIO: $120 million
Planned Parenthood Federation of America: $106.4 million
ACLU: $73.1 million
Center for American Progress: $27 million ($2.5 million of which is devoted to Campus Progress, a youth outreach arm)
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN): $25 million
Center for Community Change: $17.7 million
Human Rights Campaign Foundation : $9.6 million
People for the American Way Foundation: $8.3 million
Greenpeace Fund: $7.6 million

There’s a ton of small, left-wing community organizing groups nationwide. They are decentralized, effective, and well funded.

Because the education system is largely monopolized by the state, taxpayers fund the left in our schools from kindergarten through college.

Because the arts & entertainment industry is a profitable enterprise, irresponsible parents and young adults are primarily funding the left in its artistic efforts against traditional moral values.

How do conservatives expect to win eventually when we are outspent and not even spending our own resources wisely?!

Sex Education: Educate for the Soul, Not Just the Body

Chastity education and formation (i.e. abstinence until marriage) is the only effective and moral way for children to learn about sex because it is based in truth. To teach children anything else (e.g. the misnamed “safe sex”) would be misleading (if not deceitful), harmful, and immoral.

But before I defend chastity education, I’d like to make two broader big-picture points that will surely get lost in this debate unless someone brings them to the forefront.

First, we wouldn’t be having this debate over sex education to begin with if leftists would actually support school choice and parental control. Under such a system, parents would have the choice of whether they want to send their children to a school that effectively teaches and promotes chastity or one that teaches libertinism and perversion. This controversy over sex ed would then vanish. Conservatives and libertarians find common ground here against the left.

But rather than empower parents and give them freedom of choice, leftists would rather have a public school monopoly where they can more easily indoctrinate kids with their sexual perversity against the wishes of most parents. They would rather impose a financial burden on parents who want to escape the “public option.” They have the arrogance to claim they know better than and should have more control over kids than their own parents! For instance, President Obama’s misnamed “safe school czar,” Kevin Jennings, founded the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), which promotes homosexuality, fisting, pederasty, prostitution, public masturbation, child porn, and many other abhorrent practices to school children.

Second, formal sex ed in school is not the sole or even the major determinant of whether a kid will have sex or not before marriage. Education, in the broadest sense of the concept, starts in the home and continues within a community. Do the parents value and teach chastity? What about the kid’s peers and their parents? What kinds of websites, TV, movies, video games, and books is the kid exposed to? What does his church teach?

For example, I went to parochial Catholic schools from kindergarten through high school, which taught chastity. Did every single one or even a majority of my classmates abstain from sex? While I can’t be certain, I find that notion very doubtful. Education at school is only one small piece of the puzzle. It is worthless without family and community support and reinforcement of that education.

Alright, now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about chastity, a word which has been purposely obscured and removed from American culture and substituted with “abstinence” in these modern times.

But before I do, a caveat: if you don’t believe that human beings have souls and are more than mere animals, then just stop reading now. I won’t get through to you. Love and morality have no meaning among mere animals.

Chastity should be taught because it undeniably works 100% of the time. No sex = no pregnancy + no STDs. That simple. It never fails. People fail. They fail to exercise discipline and self-control, which is why sex ed should take into account more than just physical well-being.

I think most people can agree that only people who love each other should have sex, which is itself a unique and intimate form of love. But what exactly do we mean by “love”? I think most people can agree that love cannot be divorced from all notions of morality. There is a moral dimension to love for another human being.

Love is a freely chosen commitment to the good of another person for its own sake. Thus sex, as a form of love, is good and should only occur within the context of commitment. It should not be engaged in casually for the sake of one’s own pleasure and ego. STDs and pregnancy aside, the sexual act and its emotional, psychological, and spiritual consequences are permanent and cannot be taken back. Thus permanent consequences demand not just any “committed relationship” but a prior permanent commitment, namely marriage, for the sake of both the man and woman.

Whether one intends it or not, sex is itself a profound promise of fidelity, of commitment, that one soul makes to another. And to make a promise and then break it is wrong; it’s a sin. It causes spiritual trauma and harm. And a serious act like sex is a serious sin outside the context of love, i.e. of marriage. The marriage promise sanctifies the sexual promise.

Women, the more relational sex, seem to understand this truth better than men. They should trust this instinctual need for commitment and demand their boyfriends say “I do” before having sex. Only then, ladies, will you truly know whether he loves you or is just using you to gratify himself, playing you for a fool, and disposing of you when you no longer satisfy him. Take it from someone who knows exactly how men of all kinds think and act when you’re not around. While chastity is crucially important for both sexes, women will benefit the most from a more chaste society. Women have been harmed the most by widespread sexual perversion and yet a lot of the power for virtuous change rests in their hands, as girlfriends, mothers, and teachers. Men are not born lovers.

These are the simple truths about sex that children should be taught at home, in school, and within their local community. Parents have a responsibility to make sure that happens. Government has a responsibility get out of the way, not to hinder parents in any way from informing and forming their children in the virtue of chastity.

Contraception (& Protestantism) Paved Way for Gay “Marriage”

No Children

Contraception literally divorces procreation from sexual intercourse in violation of Scriptural commands and of both Catholic and early Protestant traditions. It is immoral and its rotten cultural fruit, including the gay “marriage” craze, has been immensely harmful to American society.

Contraception also allows men and women to divorce procreation from marriage. Because of contraception, American society no longer views marriage as a children/family-centered institution but merely a relationship of mutual self-gratification and convenience that can be ended at whim. Children and their rights are no longer integral to the institution of marriage in the minds of many Americans, especially among the young.

Because marriage is viewed this way now, it is only natural that the notion of gay “marriage” has gained ground culturally. Popular debates surrounding the issue hardly ever even mention children and their positive rights (see here also). Marriage is treated as an institution whose purpose is primarily for the benefit of the two (or more, perhaps) people involved. Only when one forgets that only one man and one woman united together procreate children and that children develop better under the care of their biological parents do the notions of “marriage discrimination” and “marriage equality” begin to gain plausibility.  

Contraception is what started the cultural ball rolling in divorcing children and their positive rights from marriage.

And how exactly did contraception come to be accepted and widespread in American society? American Protestants caved in to liberal regressives in the early 20th century. Up until around 1930, all Christians (Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant) rejected contraception as immoral. It was only a matter of time before this cultural change would produce legal changes.

So I find it very ironic that many conservative Protestants are staunch defenders of marriage and yet condone the use of contraception, the very thing that paved the way for gay “marriage” in American culture and law.

Culture War as Stigma War

Tyranny in democratic republics does not proceed in the same way, however. It ignores the body and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says: You will think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do. You may keep your life, your property, and everything else. But from this day forth you shall be as a stranger among us. You will retain your civic privileges, but they will be of no use to you. For if you seek the votes of your fellow citizens, they will withhold them, and if you seek only their esteem, they will feign to refuse even that. You will remain among men, but you will forfeit your rights to humanity. When you approach your fellow creatures, they will shun you as one who is impure. And even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they, too, be shunned in turn. Go in peace, I will not take your life, but the life I leave you with is worse than death.
— Alexis de Tocqueville

A friend of mine drew my attention to a very important article written by Jeff Schafer at the Alliance Defense Fund. It’s entitled “Stigma and Dogma, Revisited.”

This article re-echoes something that De Tocqueville (quoted above) observed early on about the dangerous tendencies of democratic culture. Stigma and social pressure rule the day in a democracy.

Yet stigma and social pressure were what kept the U.S. conservative and free for so long, esp. with regard to our current social issues. In the early history of America, abortion and deviations from traditional marriage were so powerfully and thoroughly stigmatized that they were not political issues at all. Not so anymore.

Stigma is the expression of moral outrage. The article reminds me of one of the Leadership Institute’s Laws of the Public Policy Process: “Moral outrage is the most powerful motivating force in politics.”

If conservatives are to take the long-term view of changing the culture in order to win (as the left did over a century ago), we have to be willing to publicly engage in the Stigma War. Big govt., govt. coercion, govt. dependency, promiscuity, sexual perversity, infanticide, etc. must all become shameful, stigmatized things again. Conservatives have to be willing to publicly denounce these things as immoral and shameful.

Why do you think the left likes to engage in name-calling? Racist, sexist, homophobe, bigot, etc. All these epithets are intended to stigmatize conservative views, whether the labels rationally apply or not. And they’ve done a pretty good job of it.

When people evaluate candidates or policies, it is moral factors that determine their choices; it is the elements of shame and guilt that convince people to be politically active and to hold certain political views with intensity.

We need not lose hope completely that the world is doomed to irrationality though. Feelings of guilt, shame, and moral outrage do not spring up spontaneously or irrationally; they are rooted in certain rational, though often false, paradigms and faith systems. The problem with the left is not that they aren’t rational; they are, assuming their faith-based assumptions to be true. It’s the fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality, human nature, and justice that separate us from them. (And these false assumption are inculcated into Americans through the cultural institutions of primary schools, academia, arts & entertainment, churches, and the media.)

We need to bring the reasons for our political faith and assumptions to the surface in the most clear, concise, direct, impactful, and thought-provoking ways possible. And this is where the necessity of activism comes in. And good activism is based on good organizational preparation beforehand that gathers the people and resources to make activism effective.

Moreover, activism should be directed not merely at challenging current leftist stigmas and dogmas but toward recapturing the cultural institutions mentioned above that inculcate these false stigmas and dogmas into American youth (and older).

The “Right to Marry Whomever” vs. The Rights of Children

The whole debate over same-sex “marriage,” like most highly controversial political issues, has reached the level of imprecise, emotional sloganeering. It is hardly surprising but not conducive to good policy-making.

It is time to stop being bamboozled by the rhetoric of the homosexual agenda. Even many young people on the political right have fallen prey to it. As conservatives and libertarians, we of all people should be much more careful about “rights”-talk than the socialists and statists. For every right there must be a corresponding duty. If I have an unconditional right to health care, then the doctor has an unconditional responsibility to give it to me. So then what exactly does it mean to have a “right” to get married?

When one starts thinking precisely in this way, one realizes that it depends on what we mean by “marriage.”  By marriage, do we mean merely the social institution by which one person binds oneself to another person through certain vows? Or do we mean that exact same institution which is also publicly recognized and ratified by government? Every good debate must define its terms.

Clearly, in the first sense, everyone already has the “right to marry.” There are no laws preventing people with same-sex attraction from legally binding themselves to each other, making vows to each other, living together, having sexual relations with each other, sharing property,  expressing affection for each other, etc. etc. Nor am I advocating laws to prohibit such things. This is the emotional straw man that the left and many libertarians like to throw at conservatives.

Of course, it is certainly true that homosexual relationships are currently not recognized and ratified by the state. Rightly so, for why should they be? Why should the state be involved in such relationships? The burden of proof must always be on those who demand more government action. To address these crucial questions, it helps to ask ourselves why life-long, binding heterosexual relationships, i.e. marriages, have been recognized and ratified by the state since the beginning of the institution.

Also, following the wisdom of Aristotle, it is injustice to treat unequal things equally. For example, there is no legal equality between children and adults in America for good and obvious reasons relating to intellectual maturity. It would be injustice for children and adults to be of equal legal standing. Likewise, if we can find reasons that the state recognizes and ratifies heterosexual relationships which do not similarly apply to homosexual relationships, then we have found relevant inequality between heterosexual and homosexual relationships.

So why has the state legally recognized marriage between one man and one woman? Because it is that sexual relationship that brings children into existence, and it is that marital relationship that fundamentally affects the psychological and emotional well being of children. The state recognizes marriage because of children and children’s rights upon their parents and their parents’ relationship.

Homosexual couples are naturally infertile and scarce. So there is no equality between heterosexual and homosexual unions in this regard. They do not bring children into existence and cannot provide a mother and father to children, as heterosexual unions do. They therefore do not deserve recognition by the state. It is as simple as that.

Should the state recognize the relationship between golf partners? Dance partners? Pen pals? Would such people be “oppressed” without such recognition? Of course not! These relationships serve no public good.

Moreover, while many people want the state to recognize “gay marriage” merely for the sake of combating discrimination against homosexuals in other spheres of social life, it seems quite clear that, like affirmative action, this agenda has only increased hostility toward homosexuals. Indeed, giving homosexual relationships public recognition that they do not deserve is just like giving an unqualified minority applicant a job or higher education they do not deserve.

Ultimately, transfers of property, who can visit someone in the hospital, and other common examples are not what marriage is all about and can be remedied through other currently available legal means (e.g. power of attorney, contracts, wills, etc.). They are not essential to the issue of marriage. If currently available legal instruments need some reform to allow greater individual liberty, then we can pursue that.

With all this in mind, it should be clear by now that most same-sex “marriage” advocates are merely trying to use the government to promote and legitimize homosexual behaviors, behaviors which have no public significance or relevance.

Moreover, what is lost in all this self-righteous chest-pounding for recognition are the rights of children. They have a right to care, love, and protection from their mother and father, the two people who gave them the gift of existence, insofar as it is possible. The state has a responsibility to govern and legislate in such a way that encourages parents to fulfill their obligations, that promotes family life without oppressing it.

All people have the right to “marry” whomever (or whatever) they choose. But only heterosexual unions, these unique relationships among human beings, have a true right to the attention and recognition of the state.

Now, who wants to tell me which verses of the Bible I quoted above?… Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Why Youth Politics Matters More than the Next Election

Conservatives of all ages tend to be very short-sighted and ineffective when it comes to political warfare. They put all their energy into electoral and legislative battles but largely ignore the crucial Culture War that CampusReform.org fights daily.

When things get bad politically, conservatives volunteer and work for campaigns, for political parties, and for already elected officials. And when they win an election or legislative battle, they rejoice and go back to their normal lives…until the other side starts winning the elections and policy battles again.

But a battle here or there in itself is meaningless. Who is winning the war? The left is.

Why? Because despite the Reagan Revolution and the consequent short-lived ascendance of the Republican Party, the overall trend in public policy has been toward more government control of the economy and more government-pushed erosion of traditional moral values.

How did this happen? Conservatives have allowed the left to largely dominate the key cultural institutions that shape and determine political outcomes: schools, arts & entertainment industry, churches, and the media.

Create a leftist electorate and leftists will get elected. Simple as that.

While conservatives thought they were turning the tide in the 80s, 90s, and first half of the 00s, leftists had a better long-term strategy, steadily increasing their control over American culture, especially youth culture. All of a sudden, young people helped Barack Obama get elected, not just with their votes but also with the favorable image and winning psychology they provided him.

But which cultural institutions should be a priority for conservatives? The leftist monopoly on the media has been broken. FOX News, talk radio, and the internet have seen to that. Conservatives still do better than leftists among the church-going crowd because of the pro-life and pro-marriage factions of the conservative movement that Reagan and George W. Bush brought on board. But the left has made some gains over time, deceiving many Christians into believing that government can be compassionate and charitable.

But neither the churches nor the media has as great an influence on young Americans as do our schools and the arts & entertainment industry. Teachers unions, liberal professors, Hollywood airheads, musical blowhards, and misguided entertainers promote Big Government and immoral lifestyles among the young.

We shouldn’t have to wait and hope for sincerely misguided young liberals to grow up to become conservatives. If we take these institutions seriously and meet the challenge of reclaiming them, there will be more cradle-to-grave conservatives and more effective, intense conservative activists generation after generation.

Why are young people crucial to long-term political success?

• It will take generations to undo what the left has inflicted on us over several generations.
• They are future candidates, campaign staffers, campaign donors, activists, teachers, professors, artists, actors, musicians, priests, pastors, pundits, and journalists.
• They can recruit and persuade their peers to join and be active in the conservative movement.
• The young today become the electorate that decides tomorrow’s elections.
• They will have children who eventually join the Culture War and the electorate that decides future elections.

Therefore, the most important policy endeavors conservatives can undertake lie in the realm of education, at both the primary and college level.

The left has understood this and is patient, fighting the daily battles always with the long-term cultural objective in mind. If conservatives want their principles to win, they will follow suit, giving priority of time and resources to supporting student activists!

Here’s what you can do to join the ranks in the broader war for the hearts and minds of American youth:

1. Support the mission of CampusReform.org by getting active in or creating a conservative student group on your campus!
2. Support CampusReform.org financially! Help fund political training for young conservatives!
3. Tell all your like-minded friends about CampusReform.org! Spread the word about the crucial importance of youth politics!
4. Make school choice for parents a top legislative priority in your state!

Scienceolatry: Science as a Religion and Idol

Our student newspaper, the Battalion, seems to worship the All-Powerful, Almighty Science, who saves all from death and conservatism (secular sin), especially one staff writer in particular, Mr. Tiruvadi:

“[M]any Americans are just getting sick of sectarian bickering and dogma, turning away from organized religion and instead toward an optimistic humanism that accurately reflects 21st century hopes…. As time went on and pesky scientists were dealt with, the inevitable transition of atheism from the dark arts to an acceptable religious identity accelerated. What we’re seeing now is the natural extension of the spirit that started the science ball rolling centuries ago…. Religion is often associated with vehement opposition to stem cell research, classroom science lessons, individuals exercising their rights and sexual scandals while those that don’t believe are seen as intellectual elitists.”

The irony is that there would be no modern science without the Judeo-Christian tradition. Virtually all other religious traditions, those of the gentiles and pagans, thought of the physical world as permanently divine and thus irrational (for their gods were capricious). Only with the coming of Yahweh, the Creator of the natural world, did humanity powerfully come to see order and reason to the universe, an order which by human reason could be measured, studied, recorded, even manipulated. The story of Galileo has grown into an atheist/agnostic myth over time. There is no real conflict between science/reason and Christianity.  Humanism, divorced from divinely sanctioned morality, must degrade into horrific, totalitarian power-worship over time.

Tiruvadi also writes, “As our excellence in science, arts and business increases we will see a shift in public misconceptions of A&M, fortified by our increasingly knowledgeable faculty and research focus…. In the coming decades we’ll find ourselves deeper into the vanguard of science, a place where our definition of tradition will really be tested and we’ll be confronted with controversial opportunities. For example, will A&M’s participation in stem cell research be an affront to its tradition? If you define A&M’s tradition as wholly steeped in conservatism then yes, we’ll have to forsake our brain just to be a big heart. Will we let misconceptions of the theory of evolution get in the way of how we teach biology? Luckily the integrity of science is still strong at A&M, but growing reactionary views can bring even science dangerously close to conservatism’s guillotine.”

Ironically, the guillotine was the instrument of the “progressive” French Revolution, which also idolized rationality and science and attempted to destroy all signs and symbols of organized religion. How appropriate that those who worshipped rationality would execute their heretics by chopping off the seat of such rationality! “Conservatism’s guillotine” is an oxymoron.

Media Credit: Jordan Bryan

Obama seems to have become Tiruvadi’s Scientist in Chief: “This may very well be the closest we get to a scientific-messiah-president, and that’s good news for every American…. America is still at the vanguard of scientific innovation, with brilliant minds paving the way…. The promise of stem cells as a viable cure in any disease is still up in the air, but as science always says, you don’t know until you know. And now, with a President that doesn’t resort to religion-laden stem cell rhetoric, we might finally know.” Thanks Yogi! Brilliant!

Science says touch your toes…. Touch your head. No, you’re out, I didn’t say “Science says“!

And they call us religious nuts? Who says science can’t be perverted into a religion (scientism) with their own messiah and dogma to go with it?

I could argue with Mr. Tiruvadi ad nauseam. But nothing I could say would be as powerful as three movies: The Island, Gattaca, and Brave New World. As I’m sure he would agree, seeing is believing, no? These are three must-see movies for everyone.

Science has methods and nothing more. It has no ethical standards in and of itself. Ethical standards must be applied to science from without. Science is knowledge and thus power. Power has no ethical standards in and of itself. Power-worship merely takes different forms throughout history. The golden calf, the hammer and sickle, and the swastika have all seemingly been replaced by the glass test tube.

Yet this is precisely what Mr. Tiruvadi and others like him seem to claim: science can do no wrong. They are not willing to engage in a moral debate because science sets the terms of morality, or, even worse, has “determined” that morality is a biological-sociological phenomenon, a delusion of sorts. “There is no good and evil; there is only power and those too weak to seek it.” When does human life begin? Does innocent human life have dignity and thus deserve protection, no matter the stage of its growth and development? These questions are brushed aside as heresy, as challenges to scientismic dogma.

Ironically, science itself tells us when human life begins: conception. Humanity can be scientifically defined, more or less, by genetic material, 46 chromosomes. And life can be defined, more or less, by the presence of cells, especially those which grow and divide. Thus conception is the exact moment at which humanity and life become one and find coexistence. So tell me, which book of the Bible or religious dogma did I just cite? The left abandons reason rather than embracing it.

In contrast, scientism and its acolytes often wish to define human dignity on a sliding scale based on intelligence; the intelligent may thus oppress or even enslave the ungifted and untalented. The mentally disabled, the senile, the comatose, and even the child, within or outside the mother, are thus expendable according to this strict logic.

We have seen communism and fascism, leftist ideologies both, deny human dignity and use the power of the state to commit genocide and enslave human beings. Perhaps the worst is yet to come under neo-pagan scientism, for it promises a power over human beings that not even Hitler or Lenin could have imagined, a miserable totalitarian power that only fictional movies can capture and illustrate…for now.

Flawed Premises of the Homosexual Agenda

This past summer I had a discussion with a friend of mine, a fellow D.C. intern, on the topic of gay relationships. It was the most enlightening and surreal experience that I have had in quite a while. Bits and pieces of it have been replaying over and over again in my head, and I can’t help but write about it. Only now have I gotten around to publishing it.

Though I’ve heard or participated in quite a few debates on this topic, this discussion in particular seemed to crystallize in my mind the false premises that underlie the push for so-called “gay rights”:

1. Biological urges, feelings, and attractions dictate and/or are equivalent to morality.

This was the most important and disturbing tidbit that I learned (or re-learned). When talking with people of the opposing point of view, the conservative soon gets the impression that the opposition recognizes no morality whatsoever. Talk of “imposing morality” on people and how we can’t know “whose morality” is correct inevitably arises. And when this happens, conservatives can’t help but label liberals as moral relativists because moral relativism is exactly what they are espousing.

But this is actually mere posturing of an impossible neutrality. Liberals often pretend that life in a moral vaccuum, a moral neutrality, is possible and desirable. They do this for for a moment or two, or rather, for as long as it takes to stonewall and deny the Christian view of sexuality (or of morality in general) without examining and critiquing the view in itself.

But liberals cannot logically even begin to chastise conservatives for anything if they really believe that there is no morality or that even if there is that we can’t know it. If liberals think conservatives are wrong about something, they must be appealing to some code of morality, however perverse and incorrect, which they think they know with sufficient certainty.

So one has to dig down deeper, past the contradictory rhetoric, to understand what the liberal is really trying to say. “It is wrong to discriminate against someone for something they are born with, something they can’t help or change. No one chooses to be gay.” Here we go! Finally, the liberal firmly plants her feet and takes a moral stand. The moral relativism of just a few minutes ago magically vanishes from ear and memory. A real discussion can finally begin.

This is where I ask my friend, “Are sexual acts chosen?” It is crucial to establish that people freely choose to engage in sexual relations of any kind, that human beings are not mere animals that cannot control themselves. In this way, one makes a fundamental distinction between a person’s freely chosen behavior and a person’s urges, feelings, desires, and attractions.

The situation was all the more ironic to me because I am a man and my friend is a woman. Surely, a woman would not say that human beings are unable to control their sexual desires. To say such a thing is to give license to the rapist, the supreme violator of sexual morality (even the liberal does not condone rape). If the homosexual cannot control his or her own sexual urges, neither can the rapist or the pedophile. We must be fair and equal and consistent, right?  Thankfully, my friend embraced some notion of individual responsibility.

Now a radical liberal may deny that we have free will at all and thus once again undermine any notion of morality (to be a wrong act, it must be freely chosen); you are back to where you started and unlikely to make progress. Thankfully, my friend did not go down this path.

So if all sexual acts are freely chosen, then all homosexual behavior is freely chosen. At this point in the discussion, the conversation should have focused specifically on the nature of homosexual acts. But my friend temporarily would not retreat from talk of feelings and attraction. “It is not right to force someone to deny who they are, to deny they’re feelings for other people.” So I couldn’t help but ask point blank the fundamental question, “Do biological urges determine morality?”

She said yes, more or less. I was shocked. Did she realize what she was saying? So sexual acts are freely chosen AND sexual morality is determined by our urges? This was more radical than saying people can’t control themselves. Her logic had managed to vindicate the rapist and the pedophile anyway. According to her logic, it would be immoral not to act on one’s sexual urges when they arise.

2. Sex is a necessity.

“So you want homosexuals to just deny their urges and never have sex?!” my friend asks. Oh no! Never have anal or oral sex at all?! What a cruel, unfulfilling fate! I guess people who don’t have sex at all aren’t fully human in some way? If conservative Christian morality deprives homosexuals of this “necessity,” we are apparently uncompassionate. As if our morality were depriving them of food and water! But my friend insisted that sex is a necessity.

This second premise is actually a logical continuation or corollary of the first. Morality is a necessity, so if biological urges, especially sexual libido, determine morality, then sex is a necessity too. And strictly speaking then, it is a necessity every time one feels the urge!

I guess the left would argue, more or less explicitly, that anal and oral sex with someone of the same sex are necessary for “individual self-fulfillment,” for reasons of “authenticity.” But this kind of talk merely turns the individual ego into the arbiter of morality, thus destroying any notion of morality. For what is morality if not independent of individual egos and wills? It is nothing, nonexistent then.

3. There is no ideal family structure.

What exactly do we mean by “ideal”? Ideal for who? For adults? For children?

Family and its structure is most relevant and important for children. Adults have acquired knowledge and skills that naturally make them independent of their parents; adults start their own families by having their own children. Children on the other hand are weak, dependent, and immature both intellectually and biologically. Therefore, any discussion of family and its structure must primarily revolve around what is ideal for children, not the fulfillment of adults.

Empirically, there is no doubt that the family structure of two biological parents is ideal for children in comparison to all other conceivable variations. We do not need to rely merely on Scripture to tell us this ideal when social science (reasoned observation) can tell us this too.

C. S. Lewis on Diabolical Democracy, Socialism, and Public Education

Is democracy a trap?

The following quotes below are taken from his satirical Screwtape Proposes a Toast (1959). Screwtape, a demon, speaks at the graduation of other younger demons from Tempters’ Training College.

Hidden in the heart of this striving for Liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal freedom. That invaluable man Rousseau first revealed it. In his perfect democracy, you remember, only the state religion is permitted, slavery is restored, and the individual is told that he has really willed (though he didn’t know it) whatever the Government tells him to do. From that starting point, via Hegel (another indispensable propagandist on our side) we easily contrived both the Nazi and the Communist state….

Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose…. [T]hey should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won’t. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether “democratic behaviour” means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.

You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal…. As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of human feelings. You can get him to practise, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided.

The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I’m as good as you….

No man who says I’m as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept.

And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes its annihilation. Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority…. “They’ve no business to be different. It’s undemocratic.”

Now, this useful phenomenon is in itself by no means new. Under the name of Envy it has been known to humans for thousands of years. But hitherto they always regarded it as the most odious, and also the most comical, of vices. Those who were aware of feeling it felt it with shame; those who were not gave it no quarter in others. The delightful novelty of the present situation is that you can sanction it — make it respectable and even laudable — by the incantatory use of the word democratic.

Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every way inferior can labour more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to a full humanity, actually draw back from fear of being undemocratic…. They might (horror of horrors!) become individuals….

Meanwhile, as a delightful by-product, the few (fewer every day) who will not be made Normal or Regular and Like Folks and Integrated increasingly become in reality the prigs and cranks which the rabble would in any case have believed them to be. For suspicion often creates what it expects…. As a result we now have an intelligentsia which, though very small, is very useful to the cause of Hell.

But that is a mere by-product. What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence – moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how “democracy” (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods?…

Once you have grasped the tendency, you can easily predict its future developments; especially as we ourselves will play our part in the developing. The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be “undemocratic.” These differences between pupils – for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences – must be disguised. This can be done at various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing things that children used to do in their spare time…. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have – I believe the English already use the phrase – “parity of esteem”…. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma…by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career….

In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I’m as good as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway the teachers – or should I say, nurses? – will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men. The little vermin themselves will do it for us.

Of course, this would not follow unless all education became state education. But it will. That is part of the same movement. Penal taxes, designed for that purpose, are liquidating the Middle Class, the class who were prepared to save and spend and make sacrifices in order to have their children privately educated. The removal of this class, besides linking up with the abolition of education, is, fortunately, an inevitable effect of the spirit that says I’m as good as you. This was, after all, the social group which gave to the humans the overwhelming majority of their scientists, physicians, philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, composers, architects, jurists, and administrators. If ever there were a bunch of stalks that needed their tops knocked off, it was surely they. As an English politician remarked not long ago, “A democracy does not want great men.”

We, in Hell, would welcome the disappearance of democracy in the strict sense of that word, the political arrangement so called. Like all forms of government, it often works to our advantage, but on the whole less often than other forms. And what we must realize is that “democracy” in the diabolical sense (I’m as good as you, Being Like Folks, Togetherness) is the fittest instrument we could possibly have for extirpating political democracies from the face of the earth.

For “democracy” or the “democratic spirit” (diabolical sense) leads to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of subliterates, full of the cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and quick to snarl or whimper at the first sign of criticism. And that is what Hell wishes every democratic people to be. For when such a nation meets in conflict a nation where children have been made to work at school, where talent is placed in high posts, and where the ignorant mass are allowed no say at all in public affairs, only one result is possible….

It is our function to encourage the behaviour, the manners, the whole attitude of mind, which democracies naturally like and enjoy, because these are the very things which, if unchecked, will destroy democracy. You would almost wonder that even humans don’t see it themselves. Even if they don’t read Aristotle (that would be undemocratic) you would have thought the French Revolution would have taught them that the behaviour aristocrats naturally like is not the behaviour that preserves aristocracy. They might then have applied the same principle to all forms of government….

The overthrow of free peoples and the multiplication of slave states are for us a means (besides, of course, being fun); but the real end is the destruction of individuals. For only individuals can be saved or damned, can become sons of the Enemy or food for us. The ultimate value, for us, of any revolution, war, or famine lies in the individual anguish, treachery, hatred, rage, and despair which it may produce. I’m as good as you is a useful means for the destruction of democratic societies. But it has a far deeper value as an end in itself, as a state of mind which, necessarily excluding humility, charity, contentment, and all the pleasures of gratitude or admiration, turns a human being away from almost every road which might finally lead him to Heaven.