Monday, April 25, 2005

Pop singer acknowledges kids aren't born "gay".

Recently, pop singer Moby had this to say about homosexuality: "As a matter of fact, I was talking to my friend Laura, who sings on [my latest] record, and we're both getting to the point where we want to start families. We're convinced that if we have children, we're going to do everything in our power to make them gay."

How refreshing to hear this sort of thing from someone so far to the left. Finally, someone on the left is acknowledging that homosexuality isn't completely inherent.

But one has to question Moby's parental credentials. Why on Earth would any loving parent encourage a male child to be gay? That's nearly a death sentence what with the AIDS virus ravaging the homosexual community. Maybe I'm nuts, but I think children should be encouraged to engage in activities that won't kill them at age forty. Like--I dunno--monogamous heterosexuality.

Moby may be a good singer but people who encourage children to be homosexuals should not be parents. Period.

Monday, April 18, 2005

What's in a name?

I'm fascinated by names. Years before my wife and I had our first child, we'd already heavily discussed possible names. It was important to both of us to name our children after relatives. But we didn't want to use outdated or old-fashioned names just for the sake of naming our chilren after a relative. We wanted good, solid traditional names for our kids. But we wanted to avoid trendy names even if they were traditional, too. So the challenge was to find a family member whom we liked and who also had a traditional name as long as the name was currently not trendy.

So we named our first kid Robert after my grandfather.

But the middle name was important, too. My father-in-law's first name is LeRoy so we decided to give my son the middle name Roy. However, I wanted more. With a common last name like White, my wife and deceided that my son should have two middle names. So I gave my son my middle name as a second middle name.

When we had our second child, a girl, we decided to name her Mary after my wife's grandmother. For Mary's middle name, we decided on Kathryn which is both my sister's name and my great-grandmother's name.

I think it's important to name children after family members who have been important and beloved figures in your life. It's a way to pass on a family legacy and pay homage to your past. I think it isn't done enough, frankly, and I think more people should name their children after family members.

But my brother has a different view. He, like me, thinks middle names should be for family members but first names should be unique to that family. I guess it's all where your coming from: I'm named after a relative, he isn't.

The Portrayal of McCarthyism in Comic Books.

In a recent storyline in the comic book JSA (Justice Society of America) by DC Comics, the modern-day JSA traveled back in time to save the JSA of the early 1950s. It seems a time-traveling villain by the name of Degaton has it out for the JSA and he has traveled to the 1950s to destroy the team of that era so that the modern team will never exist. And what is Degaton's mode of destruction? Is it a bomb? Or will he murder the team members one-by-one? Nope. Degaton will be using Senator Joe McCarthy to permanently dismantle the JSA in the name of protecting America from communism.

Other than being an extremely predictable storyline by using McCarthy as the villian, the view of McCarthy as a threat to democracy is absurd. McCarthy is an easy target for anyone writing about the 1950s but nearly everything written about Senator McCarthy is libelous. Joe McCarthy was a patriot who was defending America from a very real threat: Communism. While McCarthy came into the game too late to really be of any use (we now know communist agents had already done irreperable damage to America before McCarthy got involved), his crusade to root out those who would sell our secrets to the Soviet Union was admirable.

Yet McCarthy is painted as a man who cared little about the truth and was going around falsely accusing people of being communists and trying to unjustly detain or imprison those same communists. Contrary to nutty claims by the left (who were sympathetic to the commies), no one was detained or imprisoned without due process. McCarthy was correct in that dozens of government employees were communists or communist sympathisers. The same lefties who had a tizzy fit about Joe McCarthy did not get worked up over New York Times columnist Walter Duranty covering up the crimes of Joe Stalin.

I like the writer of JSA (Geoff Johns) but his facts are in question. Especially when he tries to tie McCarthy in with the House Un-American Activities Commitee (HUAC). McCarthy had nothing to do with HUAC. Here's a little tidbit leftist "historians" gloss over: Senator McCarthy was (duh) in the Senate! The 'H' in HUAC stands for House as in the House of Representatives!

Where is the disdain for John F. Kennedy? Kennedy, who was a U.S. representitive and a U.S senator in the 1950s, was so anti-communist (yeah!), he made Joe McCarthy look like Alger Hiss. Kennedy was enthusiastically along for the ride in any attempt to root out communists in our midst. But Kennedy was a Democrat so I guess he gets a pass.

Friday, April 15, 2005

Leftists do not care about the constitution.

If leftists truly cared about the constitution, they wouldn't misquote it so often. How many times do we here leftists ignorantly (or malevolently) spout off about "seperation of church and state" when that phrase appears nowhere in the founding documents of our nation? How many times do we hear leftists wanting to trash the second ammendment? If they truly cared about the constitution, why then do they say these things? The answer is, of course, they don't care about the constitution.

To be clear, I'm not talking about true liberals like Senator Joe Lieberman. I'm talking about the left. The nutty, bigoted, hate-filled left. You know of whom I speak. The folks who have been physically attacking conservative speakers like Pat Buchanan and David Horowitz on college campuses. The folks who defend Ward Churchill. The folks who buy "Kill Bush" t-shirts. The folks who want to hold modern American Christians responsible for what European Christians did five-hundred years ago. Do you know how stupid that is? How bigoted and hateful that is? But this is the modern American left. The folks who think that those who view things as black and white are idiots yet they (the left) view Christianity as black, secularism as white.

Next time you think about bashing conservatives, think about this: Noam Chomsky, Ward Churchill and their ilk can say the most idiotic, hateful things yet they never, never worry about being attacked. They don't need to hire bodyguards. But conservative speakers get attacked often. And some are forced to hire protection. The left is totalitarian and they don't tolerate disagreement. That's why you never hear guests that hold opposing viewpoints on Air America. But you hear opposing voices all the time on conservative talk radio. Dennis Prager and Sean Hannity have guests who disagree with them on their respective shows several times a week. Michael Medved only has guests who disagree with him (with rare exceptions). Conservatives tolerate dissent. We welcome dissent. The left doesn't want to hear that. They won't hear it.

Monday, April 11, 2005

Our universities are no longer about a universe of ideas.

Recent letters-to-the-editor in my local paper have me shaking my head at what people choose to believe. In response to a column published last week in the Ogden Standard-Examiner, many readers are taking the author of the column to task for pointing out the obvious: Colleges have become "monoversities" preaching only one viewpoint--a leftist viewpoint--as acceptable. These nuts who are writing into the paper and proclaiming that universities are open to all viewpoints are fooling themselves and ignoring the vast body of evidence that shows colleges to be havens for extremist leftist professors.

Over the last forty years, colleges have become increasingly hostile and intolerant to conservative ideas. Speech codes have targetted conservative ideas as "hate speech" in an attempt to silence anyone who isn't a leftist nut. Look at what recently happened at Colorado University and Harvard. These two cases illustrate exactly what I'm talking about. At Colorado, Ward Churchill spews out all sorts of extreme leftist nonsense even referring to victims of 9/11 as Nazis. He even lied about his racial background to get the job in the first place. Yet few of his colleagues have condemned Churchill and not one has asked him to resign.

Meanwhile at Harvard, an official spoke off the record about how he thinks men and women just might be different (what a concept) and he's suddenly on the hotseat and being asked to resign by nearly every leftist in the nation. His colleagues are asking him to resign. What is even more absurd about this is that the Harvard official's comments were off-the-record while Ward Churchill's comments were during a very public speech!

Professors in the social sciences are continually teaching kids to hate America. I've had these professors and they outweigh the conservative pofessors I've had by a six-to-one margin. And I know for a fact that the few conservative social science professors I've had are harassed by their colleagues for daring to have an opposing viewpoint. And the university I attend is considered conservative! It makes me wonder what kind of crap is happening at liberal colleges!

Ninety percent of our colleges have speech codes which try to enforce leftist intolerance in the name of social diversity and cultural sensitivity. So when it comes to the only diversity that really matters--intellectual diversity--only the left is allowed to speak.

Those who are defending colleges as "open to all viewpoints" are intellectually dishonest and sadly out-of-touch.