If there was a group of people whose suicide rate was 10 times that of the population in general, what would you do about it? Well, if you’re on the Left these days, you’d encourage more people to join that group.
That’s what happening in the transgender community.
This is a tragedy that has been going on for years, and not just in the US but worldwide. The Left and their parrots in the media generally try to blame this on rejection by society, parents, and peers. But there a few problems with limiting blame to just those causes, or by assuming that those are even the major causes.
We’ve been told various things about human sexuality in the 21st century, and it’s what those activists who have been trying to get laws changed and policies made have said was the absolute truth. They’ve presented it, however, without much evidence at all, if any. But now, an examination of over 200 peer-reviewed studies in the biological, psychological, and social sciences, done by two of the nation’s leading scholars on mental health and sexuality, have determined that these claims are just not backed up by the science.
We need more information, but in the meantime, we’re making public policy based on very incomplete data.
In June of 2013, the Supreme Court’s liberals declared that the Defense of Marriage Act, which was passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton, was unconstitutional, because, as they said, the power of the individual state in defining marriage is “of central relevance”, and the decision to grant same-sex couples the right to marry is “of immense import.” Basically, it’s the state, and not the federal government, which should determine what marriage is and license accordingly.
Two years to the day later, those same liberals overrode those immensely important marriage laws in 14 states and proclaimed same-sex marriage from the federal bench.
If you celebrate these rulings, and if you’ve ever been a proponent of power to the people, or you’ve ever put forth the idea that every vote should count, you either have not been paying attention, or have no idea at all what those phrases even mean.
This is the Consider This podcast, which recently passed its third anniversary, bringing you conservative commentary, and your feedback, in 10-minute-or-less chunks, since June 14th of 2012. I’ve left the terrible twos and am entering the thrilling threes! And just like the 1st and 2nd anniversaries, the time limit might just take a holiday for this episode.
I’ve got kind of a general topic for this anniversary. I’m going to explain, not why I’m conservative, but why I’m not a liberal. The launching point for this will be what seems to me the Liberal Utopia society would be, and why it doesn’t really work or why I believe that some features are really problems.
In this episode, I talk about how the money spent on (literally) nothing will soon outpace defense spending, and not much later, non-defense spending as well. And no, it’s not some right-wing think tank making that prediction.
Also, is it possible to have a moral disagreement with someone, and yet not hate them? The Left seems to think that impossible, and Dana Bash questioned Mike Huckabee about it specifically. He schools her in the art of disagreeing without being disagreeable.
(OK, normally I don’t like it when someone says, “Hey, X really schooled Y!” when all X did is say something the speaker agrees with. Usually there’s not actual educating going on. But this time, there certainly is.)
If you think it sounds like this episode is going to delve more into religion that it has up until this point, you have a discerning ear. But when I started this podcast, I promised you a take on these issues that you might not have heard elsewhere. So, depending on the circles you run in, this could very well fit the bill; a Protestant defending Catholic doctrine using Jewish texts.
I posted an article to my social media audience from CNS News headlined, “No Unambiguity: Homosexual Acts Sinful and Disordered”. It’s an opinion piece that explains the Catholic Church’s position on homosexuality. I received a comment on the Google+ posting of it, with common misunderstandings that I thought I’d cover in the podcast. But 10 minutes or less is only enough to point you in the right direction, and so the links in the show notes will be very helpful.
The state of the conflict between Hamas and Israel was well-described over half a century ago, and it still rings true. Rather than being simplistic descriptions of what might be a complex problem, I think that it’s tough to deny the truth of those sayings. It’s worth considering.
The US now has the best calculation of how many people in its borders are gay, and the number might surprise you. What the result of this may be on leglation and funding is anybody’s guess, but perhaps it bears reconsideration.
It’s been two years since I launched my own podcast, and once again I’m giving the 10 minute time limit the day off. I’m not going that much over, but hey, I did this for my 1st anniversary, so there’s precedent.
This time out, I’m focusing mostly on social conservatism. The idea of tradition, history and experience being a good reference for what we should do now works just as well for fiscal and political policy as it does for social policy. The idea is sound, regardless of where it’s applied. And that’s why I’ve been doing this show for 2 years; to get the word out that this idea of conservatism works. It isn’t always practiced as well as I would like by the guys I vote for, but at least I’m not ceding more ground.
Another problem we’ll see is that the folk least likely to give you your freedom are not conservatives, in spite of how conservatives generally get portrayed. While not a social issue per se, it does show the underlying intolerance of those who seek to remove all dissent, rather than have a healthy debate.
Back in episode 73, I mentioned the case of Brendan Eich, the new CEO of a technology company, who was drummed out of his job because he had the audacity to give money to a cause he believed in. It wasn’t politically correct, however, and he paid for it with his job.
This time out, I have yet another example of folks who would describe themselves as “tolerant” unwilling to tolerate dissenting opinions, even, as with Eich, those opinions have nothing at all to do with the job at hand. But they lost their job because of the oxymoronic “Tolerance Police”.
And a commenter on my Google+ page has an interesting point to make on this subject. Can you be against an agenda without being against the people pushing that agenda?
Did you know that the Boy Scouts recently allowed alcoholic boys to join? After all, there is a genetic component to alcoholism, and certainly you can’t discriminate against someone like that if they were born that way, right?
No, just kidding, but only a little. Turns out that it was homosexuality is the allegedly genetic behavior that the Scouts were discriminating against. All of a sudden, it turns the whole story upside down. Hmm, why is that?
In order to avail yourself of ObamaCare(tm), it will require you to use an ID card. Is that racist? If not, why is a voter ID racist?
