HOMOPHILIC OREGON

A legislative plan to "eliminate attitudes" opposing homosexuality is moving forward in Oregon, even though opponents claim it threatens churches and establishes pagan morality as a benchmark for their operations. Senate Bill 2, already endorsed by the state Senate and favored by Gov. Ted Kulongoski, a Democrat, now heads to the floor of the state House following a 5-1 committee endorsement. It is expected to be voted on within the next week.

In the House Rules Committee, an amendment was offered that would have provided an exemption for Christian churches and Christian groups in the proposal to grant broad new powers to the homosexual community by designating them as members of a protected minority class. However, the amendment was rejected in favor of a plan to continue to allow homosexuals to demand Christian churches hire them when there are job openings - among other issues.

"This is still an intrusion of the state into religious liberty, and makes [Christian organizations] subject to state control," David Crowe, of Restore America, told WND. "It favors the homosexual community and puts the church in a defensive posture, having to defend itself and its beliefs, policies, doctrines and employment," he said.

The Oregon Family Council had proposed an amendment derived from similar legislative plans in other states where homosexual community members have been granted special rights, but it was rejected. "This is very objectionable. It reveals that this is an agenda. They couldn't care less about what the people of Oregon think," said Crowe. His organization's petition to encourage legislators to oppose the plan already has 6,000 signatures and is growing at the rate of about 1,000 per day. "We're going to tell the world what is being dictated (to Christians and Christian churches) in Oregon," Crowe said.

He said the attitude on the part of lawmakers was typified by a comment from state Rep. Peter Buckley, from Ashland, who didn't want to provide "more exemptions," likening the situation to "past racist employment motives." It used to be signs that said "No Irish need apply," he suggested. "Only now it's like, 'No gays or lesbians need apply for jobs.'"

Buckley insists the church must employ homosexuals, said Crowe. "He has no regard, no understanding whatsoever of the religious community at all, and certainly no respect for the U.S. Constitution," Crowe explained. "He says he's going to summarily override anything in the Constitution. He believes we ought to be forced to hire homosexuals. They come to the door, we ought to hire them."

He said the homosexual-rights promoters are becoming self-righteous in their attitudes, saying, "We're against any kind of discrimination and certainly this kind as well." Churches, meanwhile, are being portrayed as impeding "what is really good." The entire issue, however, is built on false pretenses, Crowe said, because the need for such legislation can only be substantiated if there is a significant problem with discrimination against homosexuals. In Oregon, while about 170 cases have been reported since 2000, a state agency confirmed the validity of only a handful of cases. "The substance is not there," Crowe said.

He also said the legislators supporting the plan need to look at the document and ask some questions, including, what is the definition of sexual orientation and is that a state of mind; will pedophiles be protected under the legislation; and what sexual acts will become protected.

But the proposal leaves churches unprotected in their religious beliefs and actions that derive from those beliefs, he said. It states churches are exempted "only if the employment, housing or the use of facilities is closely connected with or related to the primary purposes of the church or institution. ." Then the issue is left to the state courts to determine any relationship to "the primary purposes of the church."

One letter to the editor apparently spoke for many Christians in Oregon. "Oregon Senate Bill 2 . elevates immoral behavior to acceptance and approval. Will polygamy be granted civil rights status next?" wrote Mike Knutz of McMinnville. "The bill restricts religious freedom. . It denies religious liberty to business owners. . And the bill goes even further to establish 'a program of public education calculated to eliminate attitudes upon which practices of discrimination because of sexual orientation are based,'" he wrote. "People who view homosexual conduct as wrong, sinful and or unhealthy will see their tax dollars at work against their own moral code."

Crowe said the results of the bill would be to "limit your free speech rights and rights of conscience; require public schools to teach that homosexual/lesbian/bisexual behavior is 'okay' and 'moral'; impact your rights as a business owner; and put judges in authority on certain church matters." "The law - and this is onerous - has a clause that talks about developing a program of education to change our attitudes," Crowe said. "To change our attitudes? Is it the government's business to change attitudes? But that's precisely what's in the bill."

Nearly 500 Christian pastors, including one leader representing the 30,000 people in his organization's many churches, have opposed the proposal but have been fighting an uphill battle in a legislature dominated by Democrats. Crowe called the plan "the most sweeping and culturally devastating law in Oregon history, establishing pagan morality under the guise of a 'civil right,' and imposing it upon all Oregonians under the cover of 'law.'"

Source



Media hypocrisy about black crime

It may seem like ancient history now, but it was only a year ago that we were first subjected to the media circus that was the so-called and now-dropped Duke Rape Case. For months thereafter, you couldn't pick up a newspaper or turn on the television or radio without learning some new tidbit about the accused lacrosse players, even as their accuser remained shrouded in mystery. Today we know there was no rape and now not even a case at all, but even in those early days it was apparent enough that there were glaring problems with the accuser's story (or, as it happened, stories). But not even those problems prevented the case from consuming the attention of the sages in our national media, whose foot soldiers decamped from New York and Los Angeles and such places to descend on Durham, North Carolina, as quickly as they could find it on the map.

The case was simply irresistible to our sophisticated betters in Manhattan and the tonier zip codes of southern California. The "victim" was black and a single mother, each in itself a shield against criticism, but taken together an impregnable defense against any judgment of her own behavior and motives. Furthermore, she claimed to have been attacked by a group of southern white elites, thus justifying the low opinion of such elites held by those who live within sight of the Pacific Ocean or the Hudson River. (Never mind that none of the accused were actually from the south.) Only when the evidence of the defendants' innocence and of the prosecutor's misconduct accumulated to an undeniable critical mass did the media slink off to await the next Big Story.

Compare the attention given the Duke case with that accorded a far more heinous crime, one whose victims have thus far failed to arouse the sympathies or even the notice of those who found so much enjoyment in their condemnation of the lacrosse players. Chances are, unless you live in Tennessee, you will not recognize the names Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom. Christian, 21, and Newsome, 23, both of Knoxville, were driving through that city together on the night of January 6 when they were kidnapped and murdered. Newsome's burned body was found along some railroad tracks on January 7. Christian remained missing for two more days until her body, stuffed in a trash can, was found in a home not far from where Newsome's was found. Police and prosecutors allege both victims were raped before being killed. Yes, both. Three men and a woman have been charged with the crimes in a 46-count grand jury indictment handed down in Knoxville on January 31....

Yet the murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsome are known to almost no one outside Tennessee. Why? It's simple: the four suspects accused of killing Christian and Newsome are blacks from the inner city of Knoxville.

Uh oh, we're not supposed to talk about such things, are we. We're careful to step ever so gingerly around issues of race and crime, except of course when there is an opportunity, as in the Duke case, to point to a group of privileged whites and say, "See? Look at how badly they've behaved! Look at how they treated that poor black single mother!" And in the Michigan case we can look down our noses at a prosperous suburban white family and say, "Look how screwed up they are!" A visitor from a foreign land might read the news and suspect America was plagued by rampaging hordes of collegiate lacrosse players and middle-aged suburbanites. And all the while the far more serious problem of violent crime among minorities in our inner cities is almost completely ignored.

To even broach the topic of inner city crime is almost a social taboo, rather like discussing the bride's old boyfriends at a wedding reception. But the figures, as they say, do not lie, and we do no one a service by trying to ignore them. Here in Los Angeles, for example, there were 481 murders investigated by the LAPD in 2006, but almost half of them occurred among the 18 percent of the city's population living in South and South-Central L.A. These areas are almost exclusively black and Latino.

Source



DAVID THOMPSON TAKES GIBBERISH FAR MORE SERIOUSLY THAN IT DESERVES

Excerpt below. Ms Guertin is what Australians would call a "ratbag". Her disordered speech is very suggestive of paranoid schizophrenia

Thanks to the blogging psychoanalyst, Shrinkwrapped, I came across a doctoral dissertation called, rather implausibly, Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics: the Archival Text, Digital Narrative and the Limits of Memory. The work in question, by "radical cyber-feminist" Carolyn G. Guertin, is apparently the basis of a forthcoming book of the same name. Faced with such an imposing title, one can practically hear the boundaries of human knowledge squealing as they expand. Naturally, I had to find out more.

On visiting Guertin's website, I discovered that the author is a Senior McLuhan Fellow in the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. As a "scholar of women's art and literature and new media arts," Dr Guertin also shapes young minds at the Universities of Athabasca and Guelph, Canada, and is a frequent guest speaker at conferences and events across Europe. Her works, I learned, have been published "in print, online and in real space."

Space crops up quite a bit in Guertin's dissertation, as do various mathematical, quantum mechanical and geometric terms, the bulk of which are misused in a series of strained and incoherent metaphors. In keeping with many purveyors of postmodern theorising, Guertin has been careful to appropriate fragments of scientific terminology that sound fashionable and exciting, and uses them with no apparent regard for their meaning or relevance. (Entanglement and Hilbert Space are mentioned casually, with no explanation, and for no discernible reason.) Consequently, it's difficult to fathom the author's supposed intention, or to determine exactly how far short of that objective her efforts have fallen. Instead, we're presented with what amounts to a collage of grandiose jargon, habitual non sequitur and unrelated subject matter - including feminism, web browsing and space-time curvature - bolted together by little more than chutzpah:

thin quantum mechanics, the science of the body in motion, the intricacies of the interiorities of mnemonic time - no longer an arrow - are being realized in the (traditionally) feminized shape of the body of the matrix."

And,

"Where women have usually been objects to be looked at, hypermedia systems replace the gaze with the empowered look of the embodied browser in motion in archival space. Always in flux, the shape of time's transformation is a M"bius strip unfolding time into the dynamic space of the postmodern text, into the `unfold.'"

And furthermore,

"As quantum interference, the unfold is a gesture that is a sensory interval. In this in-between space, the transformance of the nomadic browser takes place; she performs the embodied knowledge acquired in her navigation of the world of the text."

I hope that's clear to everyone. Guertin takes care to drop the obligatory menu of names - Baudrillard, Burroughs, Deleuze, Derrida, Gibson and Guattari among them - though the actual relevance of many citations is, again, far from clear. The more sceptical among us may even suspect a number of them have been included arbitrarily or for reasons of cultish connotation, rather than for any logical or evidential relevance.

I should, I think, mention that Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze have been debunked at length in Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's book, Intellectual Impostures, chiefly for producing "a handful of intelligible sentences - sometimes banal, sometimes erroneous," and for what the authors describe as "the most brilliant m,lange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered." Readers unfamiliar with Guattari's prose may benefit from a mercifully brief, and by no means unusual, example:

"We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously."

At this point, readers may detect a strange similarity of Guertin's chosen prose style with that of Guattari. It needn't be Guattari, of course. It might as well have been Baudrillard or Derrida, or half of the names in Guertin's annotations. One ream of postmodern gibberish is difficult to distinguish from any other, and this is not by accident. Buzzwords and citations are carefully chosen - along with gratuitous neologisms and misused terminology - generally to build sentences of such opacity and length that readers will be suitably intimidated..........

More here

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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