LGBTQ Archives - Bookworm Room

The Democrat party is hamstrung because it can’t tell the truth about itself

June 26, 2017 by Bookworm 12 Comments

Insiders and observers are giving good advice to the Democrat party, but it all avoids the obvious: Democrats cannot tell the truth about their goals.

Several articles in the news recently combine to highlight a salient point about today’s Democrat party. The first is from Dan Balz, at Wapo, the title of which succinctly states Balz’s points: “Beyond opposing Trump, the Democrats are still searching for a message.” Balz identifies what is slowly becoming obvious to Progressivs — after four special election losses, while opposing Trump is enough for them, it is not enough for everyone else, including people who voted for Trump in 2016. You’d think they would have been quicker to realize that constantly telling voters “I hate you and everything you stand for” is not persuasive. Still, it’s a sign that Progressives can learn that, as Balz notes, at least some are calling for an emphasis on the economy.

For those looking to make a sale to Trump voters and undecided voters, though, a Democrat party emphasis on the economy is going to be a hard sell. It’s only the base that’s honest enough to admit that, from the top down, the only economic goal the modern Democrat party has is full frontal socialism:

For progressives, the answer to this problem is clear: a boldly liberal message that attacks big corporations and Wall Street and calls for a significant increase in government’s role in reducing income and wealth inequality. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has been aggressive in promoting exactly that, as he did during the 2016 campaign, with calls for a big investment in infrastructure and free college tuition at public colleges and universities. He has said he intends to introduce legislation he calls “Medicare for All.”

The other article, which comes from The Hill, notes that some Dems, seemingly those not on the hard Left, are pushing their congresscritters to stop talking about Russia all of the time.

Taking these two articles in conjunction, there is little doubt that, subject to a small (and easily ignored) subset of semi-sane Democrats, Progressives (aka the Democrat Party) see talking about Russia as far more edifying than the economy. One can’t help but be fascinated by what the Democrat Party power brokers mean to do if they “turn towards the economy.” How does one push socialist ideas while denying their socialism, even as the base is screaming “We love you, Karl Marx”?

The hard reality that the Progressives face is that Obama pulled us hard Left, with higher taxes and a tsunami of regulations, and he did so with the Democrat Party’s enthusiastic support. At the end of the day, of course, nothing that the Dems did “created jobs.” Indeed, the Dems are currently hoping that nobody notices that, in just the first five months of his presidency, the Trump effect elevated black employment to heights not seen for the last 17 years. So what exactly would their turn to the economy be? [Read more…]

California travel ban: Blatant hypocrisy about LGBTQ (etc.) rights

June 24, 2017 by Bookworm 34 Comments

The California travel ban against US states for claimed anti-LGBTQ laws follows its attack on the travel stay for Islamic countries that routinely kill gays.

In January and then again in March 2017, President Trump issued a temporary travel ban aimed at six countries that the Obama administration identified as terror sponsors. These countries are Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.

In each of these six countries members of the LGBTQ etc. (hereafter “LGBTQer”) community are officially and/or unofficially physically abused, imprisoned, and murdered. Specifically:

In Iran, as in all other predominantly Muslim countries, LGBTQer conduct is punishable by death, with myriad lesser punishments (e.g., lashing and imprisonment) available.
In Libya, as in all other predominantly Muslim countries, LGBTQer conduct is illegal and is subject to stringent punishments such as limb amputation and flogging.
In Somalia, as in all other predominantly Muslim countries, LBGTQer conduct is punishable by imprisonment or death.
In Sudan, as in all other predominantly Muslim countries, LGBTQer conduct is illegal and, even if the government does not act, vigilante groups are known to attack or kill people accused of homosexuality.
In Syria, as in all other predominantly Muslim countries, LGBTQer activity is illegal and, depending upon the territory in which the LGBTQ etc. individual finds himself or herself, can be subject to violence or death, whether administered by state agencies or vigilante groups.
In Yemen, as in all other predominantly Muslim countries, LGBTQer activity is officially illegal, with punishments ranging from lashing, to imprisonment, to death.

The reason behind the universally violent, murderous hostility to LGBTQ identification or conduct in the above countries is sharia law, which is hardwired into Islam. After all, the Pulse nightclub terrorist attack did not happen in an ideological vacuum.

Also in January and, again, in March 2017, California officially and vociferously protested against the Trump administration’s temporary travel ban, a ban that affected terror-exporting Muslim countries that make LGBTQer conduct a capital crime, on the ground that the temporary ban was unconscionable, discriminatory, and ineffective: [Read more…]

Evil losers, entrenched bureaucrats, angry cities, and transgender’s uses

May 23, 2017 by Bookworm 17 Comments

Evil losers, bureaucrats facing job insecurity, the anger that drives some cities, and why the Left loves transgenderism — my friends and I cover it all.

Saffie Rose Roussos Evil Losers killed her

Saffie Rose Roussos, 8 years old, was one of 22 young people Islam’s latest evil losers killed.

The advantage of living in a blue bastion is that your conservative friends are burnished in a type of crucible. It takes an affirmative intellectual effort to maintain and defend ones conservativism and that, in turn, makes for people who have thought deeply about issues and have quite impressive insights.

Last night, I had a marvelous dinner with four conservative friends, one of whom is the brilliant Michael Phillips, who blogs (too infrequently) at Pro Commerce. As I’ve said about him before, I’ve seldom met a person with more joy in and lust for life. Hanging around Michael is like hanging around a blazing incandescent light bulb. My other dinner companions are the same.

Since I’m still on deadline this morning with a legal project (an interesting one, for a change), I’ll just summarize quickly the insights my friends offered, all of which I greatly appreciated:

Evil Losers. We were trying to figure out what specifically Trump said that unleashed those Americans who voted for him. We concluded, as many have before, that Trump abandoned decades of euphemism and lies and, instead, spoke in old-fashioned, unmediated terms about real concerns: illegal aliens pouring across an uncontrolled border, Muslim terrorists taking aim at the West, unequal trade agreements, a hostile government bureaucracy, etc.

“He tells the truth” we concluded.

And then of course, we had to laugh, because one of the Lefts’ major tropes is that Trump is a liar. The reality is that Trump is a liar but he’s a liar about fundamentally inconsequential things, such as a crowd size, or he’s a puffer about consequential things, such as the number of illegal aliens who routinely vote in elections. The former is a sign of his undoubted ego; the latter is a clever way to force political debate about matters important to Americans.

But where Trump never lies is about the things that truly matter. Regarding yesterday’s Muslim attack against teenage girls in Manchester, England, Trump eschewed all the usual pabulum about “cowardly” behavior and “Islam is a religion of peace,” and how we’re “mourning with Britain.” Instead, he spoke an important truth: [Read more…]

I’ve finally figured out why I dislike the gay rights’ movement — and it has nothing to do with my support for gay civil rights

February 17, 2014 by Bookworm 70 Comments

I’ve always thought of myself as someone who’s cool about gays. For many years, I could honestly say that many of my good friends, and some of my best friends, were gay. I didn’t appreciate their lifestyle excesses (especially because I lost a lot of friends to AIDS because of those lifestyle choices), but I appreciated the qualities that made them my friends. These were the same qualities I looked for in any friends, female (straight or gay) or male (straight or gay): humor, kindness, intelligence, loyalty, etc.

Lately, though, I find myself increasingly uncool about gays and I haven’t been happy about that feeling. I kept asking myself, “Am I a homophobe?” My answer was, “I don’t think so, because I wish all American citizens well, and I pray for the well-being of all victimized people at home and abroad. I don’t see where homophobia fits into that world view.”

It was Ben Shapiro’s article about the failed Sochi Olympics that made me realize what was bugging me. It’s not the gays that bother me; it’s the way the Democrat establishment, from the White House down, is hiding behind gay rights to avoid being called upon for the Obama administration’s myriad failings in every area of domestic and foreign policy.

Here (in no particular order) are just some of the headlines that should concern the President:

Venezuela is teetering on the brink of revolution.

America is completely reliant on China and India for prescription drugs — countries that frequently provide tainted or defective medicines

Syria peace talks have failed, leading to increased tension between Russia and the United States

Islamist rebels in Africa are attacking Christians at an accelerated pace

Obamacare is proving to be a costly, destructive train wreck (no link needed for that, right?)

America’s debt now stands at $17 trillion, and that number is growing at an exponential rate

Our jobless rate is artificially low, because many people have just given up

Obama is paving the way for a nuclear Iran

The routine persecution everyone (including gays) in Muslim countries.

America is running out of clowns

Those are some pretty damn significant issues, and all of them fall within the purview of a President who owns half of Congress and who, for two years, owned all of Congress. Moreover, this is a president who came into office with all the goodwill in the world to give him a head start on tackling big issues.

Obama and his friends, however, are not interested in big issues. Instead, here is what the administration and its spokespeople are talking about:

Climate change, despite the fact that there’s ever-increasing evidence that the earth’s temperature hasn’t risen in almost two decades, that any change is natural and cyclical, and that we’re losing the benefit of the lovely warming period that’s made the earth so fruitful for the last few centuries. In other word’s, climate change is a con.

Gay rights as the “unfinished business of the 21st century.”

Gay football players

Gays in Uganda (when the administration should be talking generally about the dysfunctional, corrupt Ugandan political scene)

Transgender bathrooms in California’s public schools

Gays at the Sochi Olympics

Persecution of gays in Christian countries (although persecution of gays in Muslim countries and societies continues to be the persecution that dares not speak its name)

And, of course, gay marriage, gay marriage, gay marriage

Just about the only thing lately that gets the Obama administration excited is a report of discrimination against gays anywhere in the world.

Let me be clear: It’s morally right to take a stand against discrimination against gays, whether in Russia or the NFL or Uganda or the entire Muslim world. No one should ever be imprisoned, murdered, beaten, fired, barred from employment, harassed, or otherwise accorded violent or oppressive treatment at the hands of the state or of fellow citizens simply because that person does not embrace heterosexuality.

My complaint, therefore, isn’t that the administration regularly takes a principled stand for gay civil rights. My complaint is that, in addition to Obamacare (a terrible, destructive failure), and anthropogenic climate change (a non-falsifiable theory that is almost certainly a con), LGBTQ rights are the only things that excite the administration and its base. In that context, gay rights are a shell game, meant to distract the American people from the fact that the administration is routinely failing in its responsibilities to ensure that all Americans, not just gay Americans, can thrive at home. It’s also failed to fulfill America’s traditional role (since WWII) of keeping the world a safer, more democratic place, something that benefits all people regardless of race, religion, gender identity, or sexual orientation.

The whole gay rights thing puts me off, not because I hate gay rights, but because the administration uses it as both shield and sword to ignore much more pressing matters, some of which, if they were addressed (such as rising Islamism or increasing Russian oppression), would benefit gays along with everyone else. I don’t hate gays or gay rights; I hate false flag operations that hide policy failures with real world consequences, not just for gays, but for everyone.

As long as the Democrat establishment cynically uses gay rights as a way of avoiding the real issues, I’m going to have a negative visceral reaction every time I see yet another Democrat talking head or media figure (but I repeat myself . . .) mouthing off about gay rights issues at home or abroad.

Andrew Breitbart was right about the culture

October 28, 2013 by Bookworm 17 Comments

My daughter went to our local library this weekend and brought home a bunch of the library’s recent acquisitions for teens. The inside jacket blurb describes them as fantasy or high school relationship books. My daughter said to me, “I don’t know why it is, Mom, but they all turn out to be about lesbians.” Since she’s neither L or G or B or T or Q, I’m not concerned that these books will “turn” her. Certainly, though, they’re creating an intellectual dynamic that tells teenage girls where to look for real romance.

I had that in mind when I looked at the New York Times’ movie review page today. I don’t read reviews anymore, and I never go to movies, and I seldom watch movies, but I occasionally glance at the review page to see what’s going on. I was much struck by the page’s content:

One gets the feeling that filmmakers and the New York Times are advancing an agenda.

Andrew Breitbart was right that, because of media’s far reach, culture and politics flow downhill from it, with downhill being the operative word.

What are the obligations educational institutions have to young people in the LGBTQ spectrum?

August 9, 2013 by Bookworm 6 Comments

Let’s start with that acronym — LGBTQ. It stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning. There are also adjectives that can precede LGBTQ, such as “Of color,” Black, African American, Asian, Hispanic, Disabled, etc., all of which create their own little sub groups within the LGBTQ group, which is itself composed of particulate matters.

All of you know that, being libertarian, I don’t care what relationships people form in their personal lives. Having said that, Robert Lopez makes a good argument that the obligations we have to our children transcend our personal search for happiness, including love and sexual fulfillment.

I don’t believe in gay marriage, but that’s only because I believe it will lead inevitably to the type of clash between church and state that we’re seeing in England. And no, I don’t see the First Amendment protecting religions from attacks by LGBTQ people who insist that a church must ignore its own doctrine and marry them. We’ve already seen from the ObamaCare mandate regarding contraception and abortifacients that Leftists couldn’t care less about the First when it comes to protecting actual religions (which was the Founders’ goal), rather than protecting Leftists from religion. I’m fine with civil unions, however, because I think the state can make whatever decisions it wants, even if they prove later to be stupid.

I’m also sympathetic to people whose external appearance is at odds with their self-identity. I believe that hormones and other brain chemicals play a strong part in sexual identity and desire, and we all know that nature makes mistakes. (Believe it or not, I was supposed to look like Heidi Klum. Nature really messed up there….)

Lastly, I’m fully aware that LGBTQ people have higher rates of bad things such as drug abuse, alcoholism, depression, suicide, and spousal abuse. I’m prepared to believe that some of these problems in childhood lead people to identify as LGBTQ; that some people are so terribly discriminated against because they are LGBTQ that they end up with self-destructive behaviors; and that there is something fundamentally unhealthy inthe urban LGBTQ lifestyle that leads people into self-destructive behaviors.

So we’ve established that I’m cool with people’s private desires, that I’m okay with civil unions, that I recognize that biology can treat people cruelly, and that I acknowledge a multiplicity of possible factors behind LGBTQ dysfunctions. None of those factors, however, lead me to believe that our educational institutions have some overriding duty to serve all the needs of the LGBTQ community, or all of its racial or differently-abled subsets. The LGBTQ community, though, does think that it’s owed this stuff and it believes further that our educational institutions, despite the university diversity staffs that can be bigger than the rest of school administrations put together, is failing to make the community feel good about itself:

Not only do queer youth of color deal with life-altering issues, says a new UCLA study, but schools and institutions are not adequately addressing their needs.

“GBTQ youth of color struggle with homelessness, poverty, family rejection and bullying,” says Ilan H. Meyer, the study’s principal investigator and Williams Institute Senior Scholar for Public Policy at UCLA, in a press release. “Yet, serious barriers exist to providing youth with culturally competent care.”

With a grant from Liberty Hill Foundation, Williams Institute researchers contacted L.A.-based education, medical, and social service providers, examining how the unique needs of queer youth of color are being met. What they found out wasn’t very good…

According to the study titled “Provider Perspectives on the Needs of Gay and Bisexual Male and Transgender Youth of Color,” various institutions are dropping the ball.

You can read the rest here.

I’m old-fashioned enough to have fairly limited expectations about educational institutions: They should educate in an environment that doesn’t actively discriminate against people. The facilities should be reasonably safe (no crumbling buildings, etc.), and the faculty should be good. With younger students, the faculty should be attuned to obvious signs of abuse. At the university level, it would be nice if the faculty was sensible enough to recognize troubling signs (drug use, extreme depression, anorexia, etc.), and kind enough to act on those observations, but I do not think that it should be a job requirement to have this awareness and decency, nor should the taxpayer have to fund administrations that function as social workers and psychiatrists.

Am I missing something? Am I a societal sociopath or are the special interest groups in America demanding so much bath water that they’re killing the baby? (And yes, that’s a fearsomely strained metaphor, but it takes me where I want to go.)

This is one type of institution the recession should harm

March 11, 2009 by Bookworm 5 Comments

I would love to see the recession cut America’s top universities, which have become intellectually polluted institutions that have nothing to do with education. Heather MacDonald — in a larger article about how Yale, even as it tightens its belt panders more deeply to the LGBT community — sums up perfectly the expensive grievance culture for which parents pay when they send their kids to the nation’s premier schools:

If you’re tempted to ask why students require administration backing in order to form a “community,” [of LGBTQ students,] you don’t understand the codependent relationship between self-engrossed students and the adults whose career consists of catering to that self-involvement. Students in today’s university regularly act out little psychodramas of oppression before an appreciative audience of deans and provosts. The essence of those psychodramas is to force the university to recognize a student’s narrowly defined “identity” through ever more elaborate bureaucratic mechanisms. Rather than laugh the student players off the stage, the deans, provosts, and sundry other administrators willingly participate in their drama, intently negotiating with them and conferring additional benefits wherever possible.

UPDATE: Thanks, Earl, for the spelling correction. You’d think I’d know how to spell recession by know, but sometimes my brain just creates spelling chimeras.