Tag Archives: Topic: Culture

USA Today: “In the wake of historic victories for gay-rights supporters in last month’s elections, a pair of USA TODAY/Gallup Polls find growing acceptance among Americans toward gay men and lesbians — and soaring optimism among gay Americans that issues involving homosexuality will one day no longer divide the nation.”

Rasmussen: A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 46% of Likely U.S. Voters feel that if providing such coverage violates the deeply held beliefs of a church, religious organization or business owner, they should be allowed to opt out of providing coverage for contraceptives.

Tom Goldstein at SCOTUS Blog: The upshot is that the parties and lawyers driving the gay-marriage cases have cornered the Justices. They brought and won cases striking down a federal law, a California initiative, and an Arizona statute.

The Smoking Gun: The Wisconsin man, who has fathered nine children with six women, was ordered yesterday to cease procreating until he can support his numerous offspring.

CBS: Verizon has filed a patent for targeting ads that collect information from infrared cameras and microphones that can detect the amount of people and types of conversations happening in customers’ living rooms.

Helen Alvare at Public Discourse: Contraception isn’t the only way to plan a family, and it certainly isn’t cost-free: contraception leads to sexual disillusionment and weakens the marriage culture at the expense of the least well-off women. The second in a three-part series.

Daily Caller: The poll found Hispanics in the conservative camp on social issues in particular. Fifty-one percent said they opposed legalizing gay marriage, compared to just 40 percent who favored legalization. Fifty-six percent called themselves pro-life, while just 33 percent said they were pro-choice.

Paul. A. Rahe at Ricochet: The heart of the matter is this. As a people — thanks in part to our astonishing prosperity, thanks in part to technological change, and thanks in part to the ordinary human propensity for self-indulgence — we have abandoned the notion that impulse-control is a thing both good and necessary, and we have abandoned it in a sphere that is fundamental. We are creatures of habit. In the absence of sexual self-control, there is apt to be very little self-control of any kind.

AP: Atheists could be allowed into Britain’s boy and girl scouts after more than a century.

George Will at Human Events: In 2007, Keith John Sampson, a middle-aged student working his way through Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis as a janitor, was declared guilty of racial harassment. Without granting Sampson a hearing, the university administration — acting as prosecutor, judge and jury — convicted him of “openly reading [a] book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject.” “Openly.” “Related to.” Good grief.

Gary Bauer at Human Events: The fact is that Republicans have been pummeled in two straight presidential elections, and both those elections were decided on economic issues. In fact, every time in the last 20 years cutting Social Security and Medicare were major issues, the GOP has lost.

Ross Douthat at NY Times: IN the eternally recurring debates about whether some rival great power will knock the United States off its global perch, there has always been one excellent reason to bet on a second American century: We have more babies than the competition.

Washington Examiner: By a wide margin, 68 percent to 23 percent, Americans prefer stores with signs that say “Merry Christmas” during the Christmas holidays than the more generic and secular “Happy Holidays,” according to a new Rasmussen Reports survey.

ABC: Fulton was one of the first women to attend West Point more than three decades ago, and she was a key player in the fight to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Last July, President Barack Obama appointed her to West Point’s Board of Visitors, making her the first openly gay or lesbian person to serve on it.

Derek Bekebred at Public Discourse: Students across the country have been pushing back against liberal dominance, but we cannot solve the problem on our own. We need the full support of our party and conservative allies . . . Instead of abandoning fundamental portions of the Republican platform, it’s time for the party to embrace a new one: outreach to America’s universities on social issues.

Christian Concern: Most Britons feel that the decline of marriage is a key cause of social breakdown, according to a new survey. In a poll of over 1,700 adults commissioned by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), 55 per cent say at least one of their local communities is plagued by broken families, crime and poor schools.

Kathleen Hunker at the Bell Towers: The Republican Party will not solve its election woes by retreating from the defense of the unborn. The American public has grown increasingly pro-life, and Republicans are unified in their objection to abortion on demand . . . The pro-life position is more marketable to American voters today than it has been in decades. Republicans just need to learn how to stand up and follow through on the sale.

Lee Habeeb & Mike Leven at National Review: Conservatives need to support their arguments with creative storytelling.”>National Review: But if there is one thing conservatives can agree on post-election, it’s this: The dominance of the Left in the storytelling arena is making a difference at the polls. It’s impossible to measure, but anyone who doesn’t think it skews outcomes is living in an alternative universe.

Guardian: Archbishops’ Council calls on bishops to bring revised plans before General Synod in July after ‘sadness and shock’ of defeat.

LifeSiteNews: So parents like those in Nova Scotia are right to decry any unnecessary incursions into their proper area of authority. We need to ask: If parents are responsible to the government for what they teach their children, then what’s to stop the government from telling parents what to teach them?

ACLU: The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the city of Philadelphia’s appeal from a jury verdict that it was “unreasonable” for the city to require the Boy Scouts of America’s Cradle of Liberty affiliate to certify that it would not discriminate against gay scout members and leaders as a condition of continuing its rent-free use of city property for its headquarters building at 21st and Spring Streets.

Steven H. Aden at American Thinker: Ultrasounds have long been a thorn in the side of abortion sellers. This is because the images of hearts beating inside the womb, and of children sucking their thumbs or reacting to outside stimuli, have gone a long way in undercutting the “mass of cells” or “bundle of DNA” theories abortionists pawn to ease the consciences of prospective clients.

Alan Sears at Townhall: This was seen over the weekend as hundreds of thousands of people rallied in France to support marriage in the face of a pending redefinition of it. They were also standing up for keeping the best environment for a child the number one priority for adoption, rather than change adoption laws to place children with same-sex couples for purely political reasons.

The Hill: In their period of post-election soul-searching, Republicans are enmeshed in a debate about abortion — and whether to debate the subject at all.

Christian Post: Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren has said that being tolerant of homosexuals does not mean one approves of their choices, while appearing on “CBS This Morning” Tuesday to promote the re-release of his book, The Purpose Driven Life, on the 10th anniversary of its publication.

Mercury News: There is no way to measure their true numbers, but gay activists say that in many cases, these “unicorns” were Republicans before they were gay — driven by conservative upbringings, economic issues and libertarian principles. They often did not acknowledge their sexual orientation, even to themselves, until middle age.

LifeNews: New York Times magazine noticed the fertility gap with an article that shows women with families and women with larger families are more likely to vote Republican.

Warning: Article contains a nude image William Saletan at Slate: The speakers don’t say whether they’re straight or gay. What they share is a sense of decorum. A former art student says that while he loves nude beaches, what’s going …

Christian Institute: Morrisons and Asda have called for an increase in Sunday trading hours at Christmas – but Tesco is resisting such a move saying the day is still “special” for many.

First Things: The movement toward same-sex “marriage” has every appearance of being an irresistible force, with recent elections indicating the inexorability of its spread across the Western world. Those who stand against it will be bowled over by it. The outcome is all but inevitable.
So say its proponents, at any rate. Sherif Girgis, Ryan Anderson, and Robert George beg to differ.

Star Paker at Townhall: The claim that somehow it is a sign of a healthy, free society that by way of the vote we can re-write our language, our dictionary, our oldest, time-tested traditions is a sign of how lost we are. Same sex marriage advocates argue that their efforts will save the embattled institution of marriage. But this takes a symptom of the disease and calls it a cure.

Ralph Reed at Wall Street Journal (access via Google): Republicans have now lost four of the six presidential elections since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. A season of soul-searching will be healthy, and it is needed to retool and rebrand the party.Yet despite the stinging defeat and a post-electoral narrative that suggests otherwise, Republicans need not abandon their principles. They must resist the temptation to form a circular firing squad, especially one with evangelicals and their social-conservative allies in the middle. The media trope that the Grand Old Party resembles a Star Wars bar scene of theocrats and religious zealots has by now become a cliché . . .

Luis Tellez at Public Discourse: Many friends have said that same-sex marriage is inevitable. It is not. I have confidence that fence-sitters will enter the fray in support of traditional marriage. As we continue to debate this issue, three important forces can shift the outcome in favor of marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Consider first, public opinion; second, the methods and the message of LGBT activists; and third, reality.

Garnett, Nicole Stelle, Are Charters Enough Choice? School Choice and the Future of Catholic Schools (January 19, 2012). Notre Dame Law Review, 2012; Notre Dame Legal Studies Paper No. 12-50. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1988467

This contribution to a Notre Dame Law Review symposium on “Law and Educational Innovation” critiques the oft-repeated assertion that private-school-choice programs, such as tuition vouchers or tax credits, are unnecessary because charter schools provide sufficient educational choices. Arguing that policy makers have failed to come to terms with the profound, unfortunate consequences of Catholic schools’ rapid disappearance from urban neighborhoods, the essay builds a case for a shift in education policy that embraces both charter schools and private-school-choice mechanisms.

William Becker, Jr. at American Thinker: When Tuesday (11/19/2012), United States District Court Judge Audrey B Collins delivered a 28-page ruling denying my client the right to continue a 59-year-old tradition of exhibiting Nativity scenes along Ocean Boulevard in the City of Santa Monica this Christmas season, another dagger plunged into the heart of America’s twilight customs and traditions. The sneered-at “war on Christmas” was effectively lost for good.

For all these reasons, conservatives would be ill-advised to abandon support for conjugal marriage even if it hadn’t won more support than Mitt Romney in every state where marriage was on the ballot. They certainly shouldn’t be duped into surrender by the circular argument that they’ve already lost. The ash-heap of history is filled with “inevitabilities.” Conservatives—triumphant against once-unstoppable social tides like Marxism—should know this best. “History” has no mind. The future isn’t fixed. It’s chosen. The Supreme Court should let the people choose; and we should choose marriage, conjugal marriage.

The Republic (Scripps Howard News Service): If the American public is truly changing its mind on marriage, then author George Weigel believes it is time for Catholics to draw a bright red line between the state’s secular ceremonies and the church’s rites of Holy Matrimony. — At least, that’s an option that Catholics, and by implication other religious traditionalists, must be willing to consider, according to the Ethics and Public Policy Center scholar, who is best known as the official biographer of the late Pope John Paul II.

The Atlantic: For Gay Catholics, an Alternative to the Collection Plate Still, the reality is this: Every time Catholics tithe at a local parish, they are not only helping to keep the lights on for Mass and to make sure …

Chad Griffin and Lynn Schusterman at the Washington Post: And yet, too often we turn a blind eye on faith communities that are neglecting these values. The dissonance is acutely felt among our lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) friends, family members and colleagues, who are overwhelmingly less engaged in their faith communities than their heterosexual counterparts because they are unsure of where they are welcome. It is in our power and our interest to work together to change this norm. LGBT equality is the major civil rights issue of our time.

Church of England: The General Synod of the Church of England has voted to reject the draft legislation to allow women to become bishops.

Glenn Stanton at National Review Online: And only a few decades ago in certain developed Western nations did it become an identity — something someone was. And this was only after the American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying same-sex attraction as a mental disorder in 1973. Don’t think for a moment that this was done as a result of the careful scientific deliberation of the association. It is commonly known they acquiesced to the rambunctious and constant protest of gay activists. And this brings us to where we are today with the issue: People are just born that way, so accept it. Mark Steyn explains the implications of this social evolution: One can object to and even criminalize an act; one is obligated to be sympathetic toward a condition; but once it’s a fully fledged 24/7 identity, like being Hispanic or Inuit, anything less than wholehearted acceptance gets you marked down as a bigot.

Boston Globe: A Catholic advocacy group was delivering more than 5,000 petition signatures to the Knights of Columbus that ask the Catholic fraternal organization to stop funding divisive political issues, such as opposing same-sex marriage. Catholics United Education Fund planned to protest Tuesday outside the Knights’ New Haven headquarters.

Ruth Institute: Within the GOP there is a concerted frontal attack against those who oppose genderless marriage. The aim is to stifle real debate before it can take place. The strategy: marginalize opponents by finding high profile “conservatives” who can help fund and manufacture an illusory cascade of public opinion away from the definition of marriage as one man and one woman.

Lawrence Journal World: He said births to unmarried women nationwide have increased from around 30 percent in 1993 to 40 percent now. The poverty rate for children in female-headed households is 41 percent, while it is about 9 percent for married couples, he said.

LifeNews: Catholic Fordham University is coming under fire from pro-life advocates for rejecting a pro-life speaker but then deciding it is okay to bring pro-infanticide speaker Peter Singer to campus. Fordham University’s president Fr. Joseph McShane, S.J. determined conservative and pro-life author Ann Coulter was too “hateful and needlessly provocative” to speak on campus.

John B. Londegran at Public Discourse: A common trope in social policy debates is to claim that the public’s changing opinion on the policy at stake, rather than the policy’s moral or substantive justifications, merits changing the platform of one’s preferred political party. This notion seems recently to have taken root on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, and several commentators have reacted.

AP: A majority of the church’s governing General Synod is ready to say yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s all wrapped up. The vote needs a two-thirds majority in order to be approved, and an unlikely coalition of advocates and opponents of female bishops may have enough strength to derail the motion. Some voices on both sides argue that the church’s compromise asks them to concede too much.

Crisis Magazine: The success that the gay community has achieved in shedding the “deviant” label has relied upon convincing the heterosexual world that homosexual behavior is perfectly normal. The recent uproar over a social work course titled “Deviant Behavior” at Franciscan University of Steubenville—which lists homosexuality as a form of deviant behavior—demonstrates just how vigilant the gay community remains in confronting anyone who might suggest that homosexual behavior could be anything but normal. It also shows how difficult it is for faithful Catholic institutions to teach students what the Church says about the nature of homosexual acts.

WorldNetDaily: He noted he and a handful of other conservative leaders, including Tony Perkins of Family Research Council, Gary Bauer and Gen. William Boykin, had met with the GOP candidate to encourage him to address social issues important to Christians across the nation. “We begged him to deal with eight issues. We listed first the sanctity of life, marriage, religious life, ‘Don’t Ask,’ ENDA, on it went,” Dobson said. “We said we really are not here to jump on you, but evangelicals are not excited about your candidacy, not energized. … You could connect if you’ll even mention these things. “He nodded and he smiled and he was gracious as he always is, and he went out and was silent,” Dobson said.

NY Times: Limbaugh echoed a Republican theme that was voiced before and after the election: Barack Obama has unleashed a coalition of Americans “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it — that that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them” — as Mitt Romney put it in his notorious commentary on the 47 percent. You can find this message almost everywhere on the right side of the spectrum . . . In fact, the 2011 Pew Research Center poll Bennett cites demonstrates that in many respects conservatives are right to be worried:

Jill Stanek at LifeSiteNews: The GOP is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy on the life issue, squandering an American pro-life majority as if it didn’t/doesn’t exist.

Sacramento Bee: The newly elected, 113th Congress includes the first Buddhist to serve in the Senate, the first Hindu to serve in either chamber and the first member of Congress to describe her religion as “none,” according to a new analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life of congressional data compiled primarily by CQ Roll Call.

Washington Post: Strong majorities of adults under age 30 support gay marriage and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and a majority supports legalizing small amounts of marijuana according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. The fact that younger Americans are consistently more supportive of these measures than the oldest generation may signal change in the years to come. For those under age 30, about two thirds support gay marriage and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

NY Times: Mr. Obama’s more than three-to-one edge in exit polls among the 5 percent of voters who identified themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual was more than enough to give him the ultimate advantage, according to the study, by Gary J. Gates of the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, in conjunction with Gallup

Catholic Culture: “The mother did say that Bishop Michael Hoeppner of the Diocese of Crookston informed her that if Lennon stood before the church and denounced his support of same-sex marriage claims, he could be confirmed,” the Fargo Forum added.

AP: An Oregon woman will be the first openly lesbian lawmaker to lead a state legislative chamber in the U.S.

Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Jordan Lorence will be available for media interviews following his oral argument Monday in favor of a ruling that would allow churches and other faith groups to continue meeting for worship services in New York City public school buildings on weekends.

Mark J. Rozell and Clyde Wilcox at the Washington Post: The Democratic triumph of this year could certainly be followed by disaster for the party in 2014 or 2016. What the Christian Right learns from this election and how it reconstitutes itself going forward will have a big impact on its future and those of the major political parties. Indeed, it will not surprise us if observers declaring the death of the Christian Right today are marveling at its big comeback in two or four years.

Emily Newburger at Harvard Law School:  Michael Klarman’s scholarship has focused on the effect that court rulings have on social reform movements. He argues that when courts get ahead of public opinion, political backlash often follows. That’s what he found in an earlier book he wrote on race and the U.S. Supreme Court, and it is a phenomenon he has also observed in cases involving the death penalty and abortion. In his new book, “From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage” (Oxford), the HLS professor explores whether the same effect has taken place when it comes to same-sex marriage litigation.

Ralph Z. Hallow at the Washington Times: Evangelicals are “fighting an uphill battle of demographics” on issues such as gay marriage, Focus on the Family President Jim Daly told the Los Angeles Times after the election.

Amy Ziettlow at Family Scholars: More than a century and a half ago Alexis de Tocqueville made the striking observation that an individualistic society depends on a communitarian institution like the family for its continued existence. The family cannot be constituted like the liberal state, nor can it be governed entirely by that state’s principles. Yet the family serves as the seedbed for the virtues required by a liberal state. The family is responsible for teaching lessons of independence, self-restraint, responsibility, and right conduct, which are essential to a free, democratic society. If the family fails in these tasks, then the entire experiment in democratic self-rule is jeopardized.

WorldNetDaily: he HRC ranks U.S. companies according to their support and non-support for “gay,” lesbian, bisexual and transgender causes. The scale is from zero to 100, with those closest to zero being firms that are not supportive of homosexual policies, and those nearest 100 being very “gay”-friendly . . . Here is the latest list of companies scoring 100 percent on the index . . .”

Baltimore Sun: Lori said he hopes the bishops can take better advantage of “the most persuasive argument of all” — the living example of “strong families with loving fathers, mothers and children” — and some of his colleagues suggested finding more positive terminology for their position, as they had in debates over abortion.

The Atlantic: “The United States is, perhaps other than India, maybe, the most religiously diverse country in the world,” said Rassbach. “It’s a recipe for societal strife to force people to try to conform to a particular ideal.” Despite Americans’ evolving views on marriage and the increasing legal recognition of marriage equality, the strife around the definition of marriage isn’t going anywhere. “Do you really think that we’re going to be quiet and go away?” Brown said. “Just because the state says it’s so, we’re never going to accept it.”

Paul Coleman at the Bell Towers: “A secular society is not an anti-religious one. Rather, it is one where fundamental beliefs that we disagree about – beliefs that provide strong motivation to some but mean little or nothing to those who do not hold them – are left aside in public debate about communal decisions.” So says the European Humanist Federation. Such a statement is no doubt intended to comfort the religiously minded that often hold the sneaking suspicion that the secular vision for society is, a contrario, anti-religion. But do the secularists really practice what they preach, and is secularism really neutral in matters of religion and belief, as it is claimed.

DailyCaller.com: By 6:00 a.m. EST Wednesday, more than 675,000 digital signatures appeared on 69 separate secession petitions covering all 50 states, according to a Daily Caller analysis of requests lodged with the White House’s “We the People” online petition system.

Alan Sears at the Alliance Defending Freedom: The occupant of the White House isn’t the only thing that hasn’t changed in the last two weeks. Many friends of Alliance Defending Freedom have expressed grave concern about how our work will continue, in the wake of President Barak Obama’s re-election. Although this ministry is committed to being apolitical, there is no denying that this administration has been the most openly and aggressively hostile in American history to religious freedom, to preserving marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and to the protection of life in the womb.

Mark Regnerus at National Review: This month yielded yet another published study — which received positive media attention — based on the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study. The NLLFS is about to enter its third decade of following the same 78 respondents, who were “planned” and born to lesbian mothers employing artificial reproductive technology; in nearly all the families studied, the children were being raised by their biological mother and her partner. While any sociologist worth his or her degree can appreciate the laborious task of keeping track of and reinterviewing the same group of people over many years, this particular data-collection effort probably ought to be retired. And yet it continues to appear in peer-reviewed journal articles in the health and social sciences. What exactly is the NLLFS and why do I say it should be retired?

Baptist Press: The survey by the Polling Company shows that 60 percent of voters in this year’s election agreed that “marriage is between one man and one woman.” Fifty-one percent agreed strongly. All total, 34 percent disagreed with the statement.

Cass Sunstein at Bloomberg: When politicians defer to “universal feeling,” they are often self-interested. Knowing that their electoral lives are on the line, they choose to live. Other politicians defer out of humility. Lacking confidence in their own views, they follow the judgments of their constituents. But in this context, Lincoln was being neither self-interested nor humble. Instead he was emphasizing democratic constraints on the achievement of clear moral imperatives. As he went on to say: “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.”

The Hill: On Friday morning, Louisiana Rep. John Fleming (R) issued a statement urging Boehner to “talk with House Republicans before making pledges on the national news.”

The Hill: Limbaugh played “Feliz Navidad” on his show Friday and argued Hispanics are moving to Democrats not because of immigration but because of the party’s positions on taxes and welfare. Allowing those in the United States illegally to stay wouldn’t help the party, he argued.

Charles Pope at the Archdiocese of Washington: It is rare that a respected segment of American life would become vilified and hated overnight. The usual transformation from respect to vilification goes in stages which grow in intensity. And hereby the Church, once a respected aspect of American life, along with the Protestant denominations has become increasingly marginalized and hated by many. It may help us to review these stages of persecution since it would seem that things are going to get more difficult for the Church in the years ahead. Generally there are distinguished five basic stages of persecution.

NY Times: Christian conservatives, for more than two decades a pivotal force in American politics, are grappling with Election Day results that repudiated their influence and suggested that the cultural tide — especially on gay issues — has shifted against them.

Ken Klukowski at Breitbart: It’s enough to make your head spin with the implications. What would a “divorce” look like? Can you divorce one partner but not others? What about child custody? For that matter, how many of the adults in the marriage have parental rights over the children? So we’re in a brave new world when it comes to the very definition of what we call a family. It will be interesting to see if all of these other proposed family units make Americans rethink whether we want to redefine the institution of marriage at all.