Content by PhoenixFire
Posted at 1:24pm on Nov. 15, 2007 Must Read Michael Yon Interview
By PhoenixFire
Here is the transcript of Michael Yon's interview with Hugh Hewitt which was full of details, very optimistic, and the clearest, most comprehensive analysis I've read recently regarding Iraq.
Some select quotes:
HH: Characterize Baghdad today compared with your first trip there, I guess two years ago now.
MY: It was unbelievable. I mean, there was a lot of steady stream of explosions, car bombs constantly. When I say constantly, I mean numerous per day. Even in 2005, and even earlier this year, actually, in January, February, March...I haven’t heard one in a good six weeks or so.
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Posted at 11:03am on Nov. 12, 2007 Romney's Unique Attribute
By PhoenixFire
Romney's Unique Attribute
Disclaimer: I am undecided at this point between Romney and Huckabee
I just read this article in the WSJ which highlights what is, in my mind, a major and distinct advantage Romney has over all the other candidates.
We all (at least everyone who doesn't rely on the MSM) know that Romney is a Harvard MBA and a successful businessman. But his best attribute is not his experience as an executive and a businessman (though that is important), rather it is his approach to decision-making that sets him apart.
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Posted at 9:23pm on Jul. 10, 2007 Young Gay Leader Becomes Straight: UPDATED
By PhoenixFire
Michael Glatze, founding editor of Young Gay America magazine, has written a column about leaving homosexuality.
At age 22, I became an editor of the first magazine aimed at a young, gay male audience...YGA Magazine sold out of its first issue in several North American cities. There was extreme support, by all sides, for YGA Magazine; schools, parent groups, libraries, governmental associations, everyone seemed to want it. It tapped right into the zeitgeist of "accepting and promoting" homosexuality, and I was considered a leader. I was asked to speak on the prestigious JFK Jr. Forum at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in 2005.
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Posted at 12:48pm on Mar. 28, 2007 How Britain is Turning Christianity into a Crime
By PhoenixFire
I just read a disturbing article by Melanie Phillips, How Britain is turning Christianity into a crime, that I suggest everyone read and consider in light of the culture war going on in the US.
Some quotes:
An evangelical Christian campaigner, Stephen Green, was arrested and charged last weekend with using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour...[for] Merely trying to hand out leaflets at a gay rally in Cardiff...[that] urged homosexuals to ‘turn from your sins and you will be saved’. But to the secular priests of the human rights culture, the only sin is to say that homosexuality is a sin...our society is now so upside-down that, by doing nothing more than upholding a fundamental tenet of Christianity, he was treated like a criminal. And yet at the same time, the police are still studiously refusing to act against Islamic zealots abusing British freedom to preach hatred and incitement against the West.
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Posted at 2:55pm on Jan. 25, 2007 Homosexuality and our Cultural Pond
By PhoenixFire
Here is a new article today highlighting the fact that the UK is forcing Catholic adoption agencies to give children to gay couples instead of just referring applications from gay couples to non-Catholic agencies (which is the current practice). The UK education secretary says that while the Catholic agencies ``do a wonderful job,'' allowing them an exemption would be ``just plain and simple discrimination.''
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Posted at 2:28pm on Jan. 14, 2007 Insurgents already leaving Baghdad; Iraqis support new plan
By PhoenixFire
My source is Here, which is the best Iraqi blog I have been able to find.
Some quotes:
Insurgents and terrorists are already abandoning some of their positions in Baghdad and moving to Diyala...This came after dozens of foreign Arab militants ran away from Baghdad to areas across Diyala in order to avoid raids by the Iraqi and American forces during the incoming security plan to secure Baghdad.
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Posted at 3:12pm on Nov. 25, 2006 Analysis of Pew Research on Political Views
By PhoenixFire
I spent some time analyzing the data from the site that offers the typology test (Here), and found it to be very interesting.
Some observations:
1. A clear majority of Americans are socially conservative and pro-government. Even among Republicans, a significant number are generally pro-govt. It seems that this is the path to winning a sustainable governing majority (though I don't really want to admit it)
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Posted at 4:51pm on Jun. 6, 2006 The Legacy of Gay Marriage, part 2
By PhoenixFire
In the first part of this post I drew from the research of a Harvard Ph.D. in Social Anthropology to show that the legalization of same-sex partnerships in several European countries caused a decrease in marriages among heterosexuals and an increase in the number of children born out of wedlock. This has resulted in more broken homes, more messed up children, and an increased role for the government in the raising of children.
This article does an even better job of showing a causal link between gay marriage and marital decline by looking at the Netherlands instead of Scandanavia. A response to critics of the analysis is Here.
Gay marriage had more effect on Norway and the Netherlands because there was "more marriage" left to undermine when gay marriage came around than in either Sweden or Denmark. There's no way Eskridge can even claim to refute me without looking at Norway and the Netherlands. Yet he spends all his time on the two countries where marriage had declined the furthest even before gay marriage was introduced (while pretending I don't understand that point)...By connecting the world's first same-sex partnerships with a radical equalization of heterosexual marriage and cohabitation in 1987, Sweden introduced same-sex unions as a new factor reinforcing an already existing pattern of marital decline. But if you want to see the causal force of same-sex partnerships disentangled from other factors, look to the Netherlands. In Holland, unlike Scandinavia, there was little or no pre-existing practice of parental cohabitation when same-sex partnerships were introduced. So the Dutch out-of-wedlock birthrate accelerated at double-speed under the impact of the change.
The left has cleverly positioned the issue of gay marriage so that conservatives have to 'prove' that gay partnerships will be harmful. But if some group (especially a minority) wants to make major changes to our economic (Kyoto) or social systems, then the burden of proof lies on them to show that the changes will not be harmful. That is especially true when there is strong evidence to show that their proposed changes are harmful, and when they go against the combined wisdom of thousands of years of human history.
But there are even more problems that will be caused by the legalization and acceptance of gay marriage/partnerships. Public schools will become an accomplice to the promotion of homosexuality as an acceptable alternative lifestyle. This is already happening in Massachusetts
and California. In the words of Mitt Romney
we are beginning to see the effects of the new legal logic in Massachusetts just two years into our state's social experiment...In our schools, children are being instructed that there is no difference between same-sex marriage and traditional marriage. Recently, parents of a second grader in one public school complained when they were not notified that their son's teacher would read a fairy tale about same-sex marriage to the class. In the story, a prince chooses to marry another prince, instead of a princess. The parents asked for the opportunity to opt their child out of hearing such stories. In response, the school superintendent insisted on "teaching children about the world they live in, and in Massachusetts same sex marriage is legal." Once a society establishes that it is legally indifferent between traditional marriage and same-sex marriage, how can one preserve any practice which favors the union of a man and a woman?
Legalization of same-sex marriage will also mean that adoption agencies will not be able to give preference to traditional couples over other types of equally
legal marriages. Polygamous and same-sex couples can't be 'discriminated' against even though it is completely clear that children do best in mom/dad homes.
social science research is almost never conclusive, yet in three decades of work as a social scientist, I know of few other bodies of data in which the weight of evidence is so decisively on one side of the issue...Children navigate developmental stages more easily, are more solid in their gender identity, perform better in academic tasks at school, have fewer emotional disorders and become better functioning adults when they are reared by dual-gender parents.
The above article also reviews some of the pro-gay research on gay parenting:
The claim has been made that homosexual parents raise children as effectively as married biological parents. A detailed analysis of the methodologies of the 49 studies, which are put forward to support this claim, shows that they suffer from severe methodological flaws. In addition to their methodological flaws, none of the studies deals adequately with the problem of affirming the null hypothesis, of adequate sample size, and of spurious non-correlation...Williams noted that the follow-up study found that children of lesbian parents were significantly more likely to have both considered and actually engaged in homosexual relationships. This finding did not seem particularly interesting to the researchers. Williams found that other omissions were made by researchers who conducted research in these areas as well. Huggins found a difference in the variability of self-esteem between children of homosexual and heterosexual parents. Huggins did not test for significance, but Williams reanalyzed the data and found the differences to be significant. Williams noted that Patterson found, and left unreported, similar differences. Likewise, Williams noted that Lewis found social and emotional difficulties in the lives of children of homosexual parents, but such data did not seem to find its way into her conclusions.
The adoption problem recently came up in MA when Catholic Charities of Boston announced that they were being forced to shut down their adoption services as they would not comply with the government's demand to place children for adoption with homosexual couples.
This leads into the next point which is that gay marriage is going to erode our religious liberty. A couple years ago a Swedish pastor was sentenced to prison for preaching a sermon against homosexuality. His conviction was eventually overturned, but given another 20 years of continued cultural acceptance or the change of a few judges it is very likely people WILL be thrown in prison for their religious views on homosexuality. Similar things are happening up North:
"In another case, a British Columbia court upheld the one-month suspension, without pay, of a high school teacher who wrote letters to a local paper arguing that homosexuality is not a fixed orientation but a condition that can and should be treated. The teacher, Chris Kempling, was not accused of discrimination, merely of expressing thoughts that the state defines as improper...In 1998, lesbian lawyer Barbara Finlay of British Columbia said 'the legal struggle for queer rights will one day be a struggle between freedom of religion versus sexual orientation.'"
This is well understood by most people, but is worth pointing out, that allowing legal arrangements between couples other than a man and woman opens the door to polygamy and any other kind of arrangement. There have already been lawsuits filed in Utah arguing that polygamy should be legal, and a push for polyamory has been made in Scandanavia.
The years 2004 and 2005 saw the growth, collapse, and apparent rebirth of a campaign to abolish Swedish marriage and replace it with a gender-neutral partnership system that allows for multi-partner relationships...Once again, Sweden is showing us a possible future. The idea that we can and should abolish marriage and recognize multi-partner unions has its advocates in America, though they may seem too few to be bothered with. We ought not, however, mistake their chances for long-term success. Those radical advocates recognize something that even the moderate proponents of gay marriage overlook or deny: gay marriage changes the way that young people see and understand their social world. The slope from gay marriage to polyamory and ultimately to no marriage is not slippery by accident, but by design.
Among conservatives, the main objection to the FMA is that it is a federalism issue. Shouldn't the states be able to decide for themselves how they want to deal with this? Disregarding the issue of judges, why should any law be made on the federal level instead of a state by state basis? Some things (currency, language, business laws) need to be done on a national scale to ensure a certain amount of compatibility between states. Other laws are enforced across states because we believe some things are wrong and shouldn't be allowed. We wouldn't allow any state to enslave a certain minority, deny women voting rights, deny freedom of religion, or commit genocide. Allowing gender-neutral multi-party partnerships on a state by state basis would cause all sorts of legal chaos when people move state to state. And assuming marriage is critical to the proper rearing of healthy children and thus a healthy society, then isn't it important enough to be enforced on the federal level?
I actually think Mitt Romney says it best in a recent letter to Congress:
Some argue that our principles of federalism and local control require us to leave the issue of same sex marriage to the states--which means, as a practical matter, to state courts. Such an argument denies the realities of modern life and would create a chaotic patchwork of inconsistent laws throughout the country. Marriage is not just an activity or practice which is confined to the border of any one state. It is a status that is carried from state to state. Because of this, and because Americans conduct their financial and legal lives in a united country bound by interstate institutions, a national definition of marriage is necessary.
Another common objection is that we shouldn't 'force our values on others'. Ironically, it is the liberals who usually make this argument even though they are the ones using judges to change the laws to reflect their minority values. Regardless, there is no such thing as a value-neutral law. Every law, or even the absence of a law, is a reflection of someone's idea of what is good and bad. We have laws against abusing children because we think it's wrong. The lack of laws against murder or stealing that would mean we don't place a high value on life or personal property. We have laws against speeding because we think it is 'good' to be able to limit how fast people can drive. In a democracy the majority has the power to make the law reflect their values, and more sweeping changes require larger majorities. Minorities are given 'rights' to protect them from possible abuse by the majority. Politics is all about whose values will be reflected in the law. There is nothing wrong with 70% of Americans making a law that reflects their values as long as they do so through the proper process and within the limitations of the Constitution.
Obviously, passing FMA won't ensure everyone is going to have a great marriage; more work still needs to be done to lower our divorce rate and help people to have better marriages. But the FMA will help to shape our cultural values and encourage a certain type of behavior while protecting children and helping to preserve religious liberty.
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Posted at 11:59am on Jun. 2, 2006 The Legacy of Gay Marriage, part 1
By PhoenixFire
The Senate will be voting on the Federal Marriage Amendment June 6th. This is a critical issue, and I am disheartened by the lack of attention this issue has received. If there is not more of an outcry, the amendment will not be passed as the senators are afraid of the media and a very vocal minority. If the amendment isn't enacted, we all know what will happen eventually. Regardless of the fact that many states have passed amendments on marriage, all it takes is for judges in a state to throw out the amendment (already happened in Nebraska) or for the Supreme Court to rule that gay marriages in one state have to be recognized everywhere. Putting another conservative on the court would help with that, but would only be a temporary solution until the liberals gain control of the court at some point in the future.
People often make the argument that gay marriage won't affect them. That may be true to some extent, but it is going to affect their
children and grandchildren. Redefining marriage is going to change how our whole culture views and values marriage and family. Instead of being a sacred institution for the proper raising of children, marriage will become just a legal convenience for adults. This will cause fewer people to marry, and co-habiting parents break up at 2-3 times the rate of married couples. This means more children grow up in broken homes and end up with multiple mommies and daddies and 8 grandparents and multiple half-siblings. The overwhelming amount of social research show that these broken homes are bad for kids. Children are more likely to be abused by 'parents' who they are not biologically related to, and the effects of fatherlessness on children (criminal behavior, drug use, etc.) are well-documented.
The legalization of same-sex partnerships (not even same-sex marriage) on Scandanavian families has been profound as this article from a Harvard Ph.D. in Social Anthropology details. Portions of the article are quoted below.
"In short, since the adoption of same-sex registered partnerships-and of full, formal same sex
marriage-marriage has declined substantially in both Scandinavia and the Netherlands. In
the districts of Scandinavia most accepting of same-sex marriage, marriage itself has almost
entirely disappeared. I have shown that same sex marriage contributed significantly to this
pattern of martial decline. Recall that the social harm in all this is the damage to children.
Children will suffer if the Scandinavian pattern takes hold, because the concomitant of the
Scandinavian pattern is a rising rate of family dissolution."
More than half of the children in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are now born out-of-wedlock. The number of out-of-wedlock births started to rise in the 70s, but really took off after the debate and legalization of same-sex partnerships in late 80s and early 90s. The socially conservative areas were affected also, although the effect
was delayed.
"At the beginning of the nineties, for example, traditionally religious and
socially conservative districts of Norway had relatively low out-of-wedlock birthrates. Now
those rates have risen substantially, for both first and second-and-above births. In socially liberal
districts of Norway, where it was already common to have the first child outside of marriage by
the early nineties, a majority of even second-and-above born children are now born out-ofwedlock."
The acceptance of alternative family arrangements has contibuted significantly to the disintegration of the concept
of the nuclear family in these countries. Sex, marriage, and children should all be connected in the cultural consiousness. When
they're not, the social fabric slowly tears apart. Americans no longer associate sex with marriage, but we do still associate children with marriage. In
the middle and upper classes especially, couples feel like they are supposed to marry when they conceive.
When the ideal of family dissipates, society becomes a collection or autonomous individuals seeking self-fulfillment. There's no obligation
to care for those who are biologically related to us, so the government has to take over that responsibility.
"In Scandinavia, a massive welfare state largely substitutes for the family. Most
Scandinavian children over one year of age, for example, spend much of the day in public day
care facilities. Should the Scandinavian cultural pattern take root in the United States, with its
accompanying effects on the underclass, we shall be forced to choose between significant social
disruption and a substantial increase in our own welfare state. The fate of marriage therefore
impacts the broadest questions of governance."
The legalization of gay marriage will effect us all by changing the way our entire culture views and values marriage and family, which will
change how we act. And the effects of those actions will be more noticeable and harder to reverse with each new generation. One only has to look at
the African-American sub-culture to see the problems caused by the dissolution of the family. Children have a right
to be raised in a proper family and shouldn't be lab rats for social experimentation.
So I urge you to pressure Congress and the Bush Administration to pass the FMA for the protection of our families and our country. And you can sign a petition Here
There are of course several other problems with gay marriage, and I will detail those in my next post.
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Posted at 12:46pm on Mar. 27, 2006 Abortion and the Threat to Democracy
By PhoenixFire
The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that to sustain a democracy like the kind we live in (or want to live in) requires:
A. a strict declaration that all 'persons' are of equal value and share in a basic set of rights.
B. a strict definition of what constitutes a person
C. a strict definition of what the basic rights are that each person has.
We have never really had B (a definition of a person) in this country, and if we did we might have avoided a lot of the turmoil we went through regarding slavery and civil rights.
Rights are all nice and good, but what use do they provide if it is not clear who they apply to? Do you really want to live in a society where you are protected by the law only until the majority decides on some new arbitrary definition of what a person is (or what a valuable person is) that excludes you?
History is peppered with examples of one group dehumanizing another as a precursor to extermination, torture, and exploitation. The most obvious recent examples are of course the Holocaust and the enslavement of blacks. Dehumanization numbs society's conscience and blocks any empathy that would otherwise be felt for the suffering of the oppressed. Mass genocide becomes no different than the routine extermination of a pesky colony of ants.
The only way to prevent these situations from occurring is to have a strict and unambiguous definition describing who qualifies for the rights we have has Americans.
So how should we define a person? The following criteria are often used, but are clearly invalid:
- Skin Color, Race - Form and appearance are not what makes someone human.
- Size - Obviously a fully grown adult is not more human, or more of a 'person' than a 10 year old.
- Level of Development - Rights are not dependent on skills and abilities. The strong and intelligent do not have more rights than anyone else.
- Environment - Location is trivial and has nothing to do with who we are.
- Dependency - All of us are dependent on others to some degree, and that is especially true of the very young and old.
Personhood is obviously dependent on the essence of the being and has nothing to do with external factors.
Objectively, the essence of a being is determined by its DNA. So the definition of a person, which ends up the same as that of a human, should be: A person is any life form (characterized by one or more cells and the ability to grow, respond to stimuli, metabolize, and reproduce) with human DNA.
This of course speaks directly to the issue of abortion as unborn babies are clearly human life forms. They are therefore entitled to the basic rights all Americans have, including the right to life as it is the basis for all other rights. This was clearly understood by the founding fathers: "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." The right to life is also clearly enumerated in the 5th and 14th amendments.
The right to life is preeminent among all other rights which is why a mother cannot choose to kill her nine year old son for causing her stress; his right to life supercedes any of her rights to pursue happiness. The exact same logic applies to unborn children whose right to life supercedes anyone else's right to happiness or 'privacy'.
No criteria can be used to exclude fetuses from personhood that would not also exclude some other group that the vast majority of Americans would agree deserves the protection of the law. The only possible criteria that would produce the outcome desired by the pro-abortionists is, "A person is someone outside a mother's womb." But location is completely trivial and has no bearing on the essence of a being. In no other circumstance would anyone argue someone is not human because of their location. Anyone with even a hint of honesty has to concede that there is no meaningful difference between a fully delivered baby and the same child one second earlier who is still partly in the mother's womb.
As previously stated, dependency is not a logical criteria either. Babies don't suddenly become independent as soon as they are born. Some have argued that being dependent solely on the mother somehow makes a baby not human. But does that mean that something becomes human as soon as it is viable outside the womb? Or do all fetuses suddenly become human and worthy of protection once doctors are able to grow them entirely in a test tube with no help from a woman?
So Americans are happy to hold logically inconsistent views and live in a world of square circles. We can think of ourselves as progressive and morally superior because we have overcome the small mindedness of past eras, but still have all the sex we want and not deal with the consequences.
Any attempt to create a status of 'personhood' separate from that of being human is logically flawed, and the motivation and eventual result of doing so can only be the exploitation and abuse of an individual or group.
Defining personhood is critical for the long-term health of our republic and must be enshrined in the Constitution. Doing so will resolve the abortion debate and a host of other bioethics issues (cloning, embryonic stem cells, etc.), and it will prevent any future renditions of the holocaust.
Otherwise, our grandchildren will be living in a society where they are protected by the law only until the majority decides on some new arbitrary definition of personhood that excludes them.