Category Archives: Freedom of Religion

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Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain An Anglican priest really, really doesn't want you to see Sound of Freedom

One thing is certain: the movie Sound of Freedom sure has the left tied up in knots! As we reported previously, the movie, which stars Jim Caviezel, who had played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, is about Tim Ballard, a former U.S. government agent who embarks on a mission to rescue children from sex traffickers in Colombia. It is produced by Eduardo Verástegui, who also plays a role in the film. The plot centers around Mr Ballard’s Operation Underground Railroad, an anti-sex trafficking organization. As we noted then, Kathleen Parker Cleveland[1]Though the columnist is married to Sherwood M. “Woody” Cleveland, she hasn’t shown him enough respect to have taken his name. While she may not have shown him such respect, The … Continue reading, of The Washington Post, knows that no decent person can support child sexual abuse and trafficking, but, gosh darn it, the movie Sound of Freedom just has too many supporters on the wrong side of the political divide. Mrs Cleveland thought it important enough to stress Mr Caviezel’s role as Jesus, just to let readers know that, why, he must be a Christianist kook, so maybe don’t take the movie too seriously!

Now comes this, from Canada’s The Globe and Mail. The author, Michael Coren, is an Anglican priest.

The far right’s fixation on pedophilia is dangerous

by Michael Coren | Friday, August 11, 2023

I’ve just experienced another attack on social media. The harassment on X, as Twitter now calls itself, usually lasts around 36 hours, and while most of the nasties are trolls and bots, I can’t pretend that the hundreds of comments don’t have an effect. I’m a priest, progressive, outspoken. No point in complaining. But a disturbing new aspect of these bombardments are the repeated and constant false accusations of pedophilia – not a libellous dribble, but a flood.

Normally, I prefer not to copy and paste the photographs which come with articles, but this one is important. Online, it falls right between the headline and byline, and the first paragraph of the Rev Coren’s article, and the caption, long for a photograph, makes certain that you know that Mr Caviezel is connected to QAnon:

Actor, Jim Caviezel who currently stars in the film Sound of Freedom speaks during a Catholics for Catholics anti-abortion ‘rosary rally’ on Aug. 6, 2023, in Norwood, Ohio. Caviezel frequently endorses a QAnon-based conspiracy theory where abducted children are seen to be victims of ‘adrenochroming’, a fictional practice of extracting adrenochrome from adrenal glands in a living human.

Mrs Cleveland did the same thing; are you turned off about the film now?

Then there’s the “anti-abortion ‘rosary rally'”, a reference to reference to an article by Daniel Panneton in The Atlantic, originally entitled “How the Rosary Became an Extremist Symbol“, about which I have previously written.

The Atlantic got plenty of pushback about it, and twice changed the article headline and subheading — the title “How Extremist Gun Culture Co-Opted the Rosary: The AR-15 is a sacred object among Christian nationalists. Now “radical-traditional” Catholics are bringing a sacrament of their own to the movement” isn’t shown in the screen captures tweeted by Taylor Marshall — imaged to the left, but the internet is forever.

My good friend — OK, OK, I’ve never actually met her, but people can become good friends over Twitter these days — Christine Flowers used to have in her Twitter biography, that she has an “open carry permit for (her) assault rosary.” 🙂

Back to the Rev Coren’s original:

It’s not really about me of course, and I’m in good company. Last month in Belleville, Ont., when Justin Trudeau was swarmed by a right-wing mob, one of the hysterical shouts clearly heard was that he was a child molester. It’s grotesque nonsense about the Prime Minister that swamps social media. In fact, there aren’t many politicians and activists on the left who haven’t been accused of this awful crime.

Well, it’s true enough that Mr Trudeau was mocked when he announced that his wife and he were separating, with some people speculating that both of them found new boyfriends. But the Rev Coren wrote that he was accused of pedophilia, though he didn’t state why the accusations were leveled; perhaps it’s just because he’s a priest.

And with a horribly convenient timing, a new movie, Sound of Freedom, is currently the talk of the far right. Jim Caviezel (who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ) stars as Tim Ballard, a former government agent who rescues children from sex traffickers. As the critic Sam Adams wrote perceptively for the online magazine Slate, it “arrived in theatres surrounded by a cloud of innuendo put forth by its star and its noisiest right-wing supporters – conspiratorial insinuations about who doesn’t want this story to be told and what real-world traffickers are really up to.”

Rescuing children is one thing, and entirely admirable, but this phenomenon goes much further than that. Mr. Caviezel himself has spoken of “the whole adrenochrome empire,” describing the substance as “an elite drug that they’ve used for many years” that is “10 times more potent than heroin” and “has some mystical qualities as far as making you look younger.”

Adrenochrome, zealots claim, can only be obtained from adrenal glands in a living human body, thus the need to abduct children. It’s obscene and dangerous quackery, but that doesn’t help convince the cult of the credulous. This rubbish has its origins in a QAnon belief that powerful, international figures intent on resetting the world, controlling people and destroying religious freedom are also kidnapping little boys and girls.

That was the lunacy behind Pizzagate in 2016, when thousands believed that a pedophilia ring led by those at the highest levels of the Democratic Party was operating out of a Washington pizza restaurant. More than a million messages were sent on Twitter supporting the fantasy, eventually leading to employees being harassed, followed by a shooting and then an arson.

Has the Rev Coren managed to turn you off of seeing the movie yet? Sure, he tells us that “Rescuing children is one thing, and entirely admirable,” but immediately continues to tell readers what a kook the actor is.

There’s always been a strong dose of homophobia involved, through the venomous old canard of gay men being groomers, in spite of all the facts and evidence. Facts and evidence, however, are the last things relevant in all this. The trans issue magnified the paranoia, and it’s been pushed into the mainstream by a new generation of right-wing politicians.

And here we go again! The left want so very much to tell us that homosexuality has nothing to do with “grooming” the young, saying that “all the facts and evidence” tell us otherwise.

But as an Anglican priest, one who, according to Wikipedia,

In an interview with the National Post on 1 May 2015, .  .  . cited the Catholic Church’s teachings on homosexuality and contraception as some of the reasons for his conversion to Anglicanism.

he has to know about the famous John Jay Report, concerning sexual abuse by Catholic priests and deacons, all of whom are male, which noted that rather than prepubescent children, abusers targeted older children:

The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female. Male victims tended to be older than female victims. Over 40% of all victims were males between the ages of 11 and 14.

Only willful, deliberate ignorance could contend that such numbers don’t indicate a problem with homosexuality among priests.

It isn’t just evil reich-wingers who are ignoring “facts and evidence”; the Rev Coren has just done so.

The Archdiocese of San Francisco is about to declare bankruptcy, as now we have this news:

Archbishop Cordileone: Chapter 11 bankruptcy for San Francisco ‘very likely’

by Daniel Payne | Washington, D.C. Newsroom | Saturday, August 5, 2023 | 12:22 PM EDT

San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone on Friday revealed that it was “very likely” that the archdiocese would be filing for bankruptcy in the near future due to the hundreds of clerical abuse lawsuits that have been filed against it.

The prelate revealed the news in an announcement on the archdiocesan website Aug. 4 in which he noted that, following a 2019 California law that lifted the statute of limitations on certain sexual abuse claims, the archdiocese was ultimately served with “more than 500 civil lawsuits” related to clerical sexual abuse.

The “vast majority of the alleged abuse occurred in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s and involved priests who are deceased or no longer in ministry,” Cordileone noted, while others involved “unnamed individuals or named individuals who are unknown to the archdiocese.” The archdiocese has been “investigating the best options for managing and resolving these cases,” Cordileone said.

“After much contemplation and prayer, I wish to inform you that a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization is very likely,” Cordileone said.

Don’t be fooled: the Archbishop is one of the good guys, who supported the Tridentine Mass, opposes homosexual ‘marriage’ and allowing Catholics in homosexual relationships to receive the Eucharist, and is strongly pro-life. But for decades and decades, our bishops swept accusations of sexual offenses by priests under the rug, paying off victims quietly and rather than reporting them to law enforcement just moved them around to other, unaware parishes. But in San Francisco, of all places, you know that the victims have mostly been boys.

We also recently noted that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia just settled, for $3.5 million, a sexual abuse case in which a now-deceased priest, who was shuffled from parish to parish to sweep his abuse under the rug, molested, you guessed it, a boy. And outside the Catholic Church, a Fayette County high school teacher, and “youth volunteer” at Faith Lutheran Church in Lexington, has just been charged with producing media of a 9-year-old boy in a sexual performance.

This was all in just the past week.

Scratch the surface of modern conspiracy theory and antisemitism often appears, but today the accused are usually singled out not by race but ideology, and that includes politicians and public figures considered to be left-of-centre, or even people who support vaccinations, abortion rights, LGBTQ equality, or climate justice policies. This might sound fanciful, but the evidence is sadly abundant.

Naturally, along with QAnon, the Rev Coren wants to link this concern about child trafficking to anti-Semitism, just another ploy to get people to not watch the movie. Heaven forfend, if you go to see it, you are literally Hitler!

It’s particularly tragic as children increasingly suffer under a culture of poverty, food insecurity and forced migration. Ironically, those roaring about pedophile rings tend to ignore all of this and are often downright opposed to legislation that may help children. As well, child abuse and human trafficking are genuine issues and have to be taken extremely seriously; baseless and hateful hyperbole only worsens the situation.

That’s nothing but a sop, to let you believe that yes, the Rev Coren really, really is worried about child trafficking, but he doesn’t want you to get too incensed about it, because what about other problems.

Even the National Institutes for Health, in 2021, under President Joe Biden, not the evil conservative Donald Trump, wrote:

Our meta-analysis results suggest that political conservatives are significantly more charitable than liberals at an overall level, but the relationship between political ideology and charitable giving varies under different scenarios.

Conservatives see private efforts to help the poor as preferable and are more opposed to government action to do so.

Don’t be fooled here. The Rev Coren, who has a wife and children of his own, so I assume that he is sexually normal, wants to defend homosexual males from accusations of “grooming”, to let people know that heterosexual males can be just as guilty. Jerry Sandusky, after all, was married to a woman, even though he liked 10-year-old boys’ butts. But the “facts and evidence,” to use the Anglican priest’s formulation, indicate an outsized number of boys being molested by adult men, when, if homosexuality were not a risk factor, we should see fewer than 5% of sexual abuse victims of adult males being boys.

I am not a psychologist, I am not a sociologist, I am not a behavioral expert of any kind. But what I do know and understand, and know and understand well, are numbers, and the numbers say that the last thing a priest, a priest of any Christian religion, should run his keyboard about is the notion that homosexuality has no relationship to child sexual abuse.
_______________________________________

That was the part I finished last night, but scheduled for publication at noon on Saturday. But the Rev Coren used Twitter to publicize his article, and soon got the negative responses you’d expect, and quickly started blocking people who questioned him . . . including me.

I am trying to figure out his thinking, and quite frankly failing at it. As a priest, even an Anglican one, he had to know that any article written by a priest which in any way tried to minimize the response to child sex trafficking and child sexual abuse would draw plenty of negative response. His Twitter handle reads “Reverend Michael Coren,” and not everyone who read his tweet clicked on the article — which is now paywalled, though perhaps not a first time Globe and Mail visitor — and saw that he is an Anglican priest, not a Catholic clergyman, and many mocked and dismissed his article as somehow justifying sexual abuse among Catholic priests. It doesn’t do that, and it does not somehow excuse child sex trafficking and sexual abuse, but it definitely shows that he sees those as lesser problems than children reared in poverty or opposition to the homosexual and transgender agendas.

Then there was this tweet by Frank Rizzo (@FrankRi68868220):

MAPs are a stigmatized community, thank you for taking a stand in support.

MAPs are “minor attracted persons”. Mr Rizzo — no, not the former Police Commissioner and later Mayor of Philadelphia, who has long since gone to his eternal reward — has no indication that he actually is a minor attracted person, and I assume that his tweet was meant sarcastically, but this is the kind of response that the Rev Coren should have expected.

There are some things about which a person should just keep his mouth, or keyboard in this case, closed, and the Rev Coren has just found his. You cannot defend, or even minimize, child sex trafficking as somehow not that serious, because no matter how nuanced your point, no matter how well you write, you will not truly make your point, and just draw criticism and scorn.

References

References
↑1 Though the columnist is married to Sherwood M. “Woody” Cleveland, she hasn’t shown him enough respect to have taken his name. While she may not have shown him such respect, The First Street Journal does not similarly show such disrespect.
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The Feds believe that conservative Catholics are an extremist threat FBI Director Christopher Wray flat out lied to Congress about Bureau's surveillance of Catholics

We reported, last February, on the story that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was targeting “Radical Traditionalist Catholics”, with a memo from the FBI office in Richmond, Virginia:

Kyle Seraphin, who was a special agent at the bureau for six years before he was indefinitely suspended without pay in June 2022, published the document, “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities,” on UncoverDC.com.

A priest elevates the Eucharist after consecrating it during a Latin Mass. Photo by Andrew Gardner/Creative Commons

“In making this assessment, FBI Richmond relied on the key assumption that [racially or ethnically motivated extremists] will continue to find [radical-traditionalist Catholic or RTC] ideology attractive and will continue to attempt to connect with RTC adherents, both virtually via social media and in-person at places of worship,” the document from January 23 states.It adds that “RTCs are typically categorized by the rejection of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) as a valid church council; disdain for most of the popes elected since Vatican II, particularly Pope Francis and Pope John Paul II; and frequent adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist ideology. Radical-traditionalist Catholics compose a small minority of overall Roman Catholic adherents and are separate and distinct from ‘traditionalist Catholics’ who prefer the Traditional Latin Mass and pre-Vatican II teachings and traditions, without the more extremist ideological beliefs and violent rhetoric.”

Once this was disclosed, the FBI quickly told us that this was the product of one field office, and was withdrawn because it didn’t meet the Bureau’s standards of quality. Director Christopher Wray said:

We do not conduct investigations based on religious affiliation or practices, full stop. We have also now ordered our inspection division to take a look at how this happened and try to figure out how we can make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.

Yeah, uh huh, right.

From The Wall Street Journal:

The FBI and ‘Radical’ Catholics

New evidence suggests the bureau probe was wider than director Christopher Wray said.

by The Editorial Board | Wednesday, August 9, 2023 | 12:02 PM EDT

Remember the tempest this year when the Federal Bureau of Investigation was found to be targeting some Catholics as “extremists?” The bureau cast it as the work of a single rogue field office. Well, it looks like the effort was more widespread than our G-men admitted to the public.

That’s the news from a less-redacted internal FBI document released Wednesday by the House Judiciary Committee. Chairman Jim Jordan wants more information from the FBI on how broad this investigation really was.

This story began in February when a whistleblower leaked a heavily redacted January report from the FBI’s Richmond office: “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities.”

The document defined “radical-traditionalist Catholics” as those who attend the Latin Mass and who frequently adhere to “anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist ideology.” The agents relied on half-baked “open-source” reporting from liberal outlets to justify more bureau investigation.

“Open source” reporting, huh? Brittany Bernstein noted that the FBI report was sourced from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left source which supports just about every #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading position out there, and calls the Moms4Liberty extremists because they don’t want the public schools pushing the homosexual and transgender agendas. A screen capture of the Catholic organizations that the SPLC considers to be “Radical Traditional Catholic Hate Groups” in the United States can be found here.[2]Full disclosure: Yes, I am Catholic, but have little opportunity to attend a Tridentine Mass. Due to my significant hearing loss, a Traditional Latin, or Tridentine, Mass, in which the priest … Continue reading

FBI headquarters quickly said the report didn’t meet its “exacting standards” and had been withdrawn. FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Judiciary Committee in July that the report was “a single product by a single field office.” He added that “as soon as I found out about it, I was aghast and ordered it withdrawn and removed from FBI systems,” and he said he began an internal probe.

On July 25 the FBI finally provided the committee with a less-redacted version of that Richmond document. The report says that its information on Catholics was “primarily derived” from an “FBI Richmond contact”; an “FBI Portland liaison contact” who informed on a subject who “gravitated to” traditionalist catholicism; and an “FBI Undercover Employee” who reported on a subject who attended a Catholic church in California.

It also says the FBI’s Los Angeles field office “initiated an investigation” into a subject, and that the Richmond office “[c]oordinated with” FBI Portland to prepare the field report. In other words, this was a widespread bureau effort. Why was this suspicion about religion so widespread at the FBI?

The Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal might not be able to answer that question, because the answer involves their own culture. The federal government, including the FBI, are dominated by the same Ivy League, northeastern elites as the Journal, and, to them, there’s a frightening issue. Remember the exchange between Center For American Progress fellow John Halpin and Hillary Clinton’s communications director Jennifer Palmieri, in the e-mails hacked by Wikileaks:

Mr Halpin: Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic (many converts) …they must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations.

Miss Palmieri: I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.

It’s all the same thing to them: Catholicism is ‘acceptable,’ as long as it is the go-along-to-get-along Catholicism of Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden, attending Mass on Sunday, but with political positions completely subservient to the Democratic Party. Actual Catholicism, with its prohibition on homosexuality, transgenderism, and abortion, scare the poop out of them, and must be not just conservate but actually threatening. That the ‘radical traditional Catholics’ are becoming a stronger, if nevertheless in the distance, voice in the Church worries them that, Heaven forfend!, they might just become politically stronger.

Also troubling is the FBI’s decision to redact the Portland and Los Angeles roles from the original version of the Richmond document it provided Congress in March. In a letter with the less-redacted version, acting assistant FBI director Christopher Dunham said the redactions had been necessary to protect “information specific to ongoing criminal investigations.”

What “ongoing criminal investigations”? What crimes were the FBI investigating that tied them in with Catholics who prefer the Tridentine Mass? Have any of those investigations resulted in charges against anybody?

Well, we may not know the answers to those questions, but we do know one thing: the Director of the FBI deliberately lied to Congress! What is going to be done about that?

Of course, we know the real reasons: while the Catholic Church is opposed to prenatal infanticide, those wicked ‘radical traditional Catholics’ tend to be more intensely devout, and more politically conservative, and we can’t have that, can we? President Biden is both a Democrat and a Catholic, but we have seen just how much he prioritizes the former over the latter.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.

By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑2 Full disclosure: Yes, I am Catholic, but have little opportunity to attend a Tridentine Mass. Due to my significant hearing loss, a Traditional Latin, or Tridentine, Mass, in which the priest celebrates the Eucharist ad orientem, with his back to the people, I would be completely lost.
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Chickenhawks in the Church

Pedophilia is defined as a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent children, while hebephilia is that attraction to children in the early stages of puberty, approximately ages 11 to 14, and ephebophilia is the attraction to teenagers in the later stages of puberty, approximately 15 to 19.

Archdiocese of Philadelphia agrees to $3.5 million settlement in priest sexual assault lawsuit

The lawsuit alleged that Pastor John Close raped a boy at St. Katherine’s of Siena in Wayne in 2006.

by Nick Vadala | Wednesday, August 9, 2023

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia will pay $3.5 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that one of its priests sexually assaulted a 14-year-old boy in Delaware County nearly two decades ago.

Filed in 2020, the lawsuit alleges that Pastor John Close raped the boy at St. Katherine’s of Siena in Wayne in 2006. The plaintiff, whose name was withheld in court filings, was attending a Confraternity of Christian Doctrine program there, and Close was the head of the parish.

During a class, the boy became upset, fearing eternal damnation. He was sent to Close’s office, the pastor took his confession, and then raped him, according to the lawsuit. Afterward, the lawsuit says, Close told the boy that he was absolved of his sins, but he would be eternally damned if he told anyone about the assault.

While the age of the victim at the time of the assault was not given, he is 31 years old today, and the rape was 17 years ago. That means the victim was 13-to-15 years old at the time. Was that hebephilia, or was it ephebophilia? You know what? It doesn’t really matter, because urban slang gives us a far better definition: a chickenhawk, older males who prefer younger boys as sex partners.

Close, who was ordained in 1969, worked at several parishes and Catholic schools in the region throughout his 42 years in the ministry, including Christ the King parish, Cardinal O’Hara High School, Archbishop Wood High School, and the Cathedral of Basilica Saints Peter and Paul. He was placed on administrative leave in 2011 in connection with the reinvestigation of another alleged case and retired the following year. He died in 2018. . . . .

Spokesperson Kenneth A. Gavin said in a statement that the archdiocese “acknowledges settlement in this matter and the resolution it brings.” He added that the organization had no knowledge of the allegations against Close until the plaintiff’s lawyers reported them in July 2019, after the pastor’s death.

“In accordance with policy, the archdiocese reported the allegation to law enforcement,” the archdiocese said.

Is that true? Not according to the plaintiff!

The lawsuit argued that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia was notified of a pattern of behavior from Close that put children in danger as early as 1976. That year, a pastor at Blessed John Neumann parish in Bryn Mawr (now known as St. John Neumann parish) reported that Close had teenage boys in his room at the rectory at odd hours, including overnight. As a result, Close was transferred to another parish, and “the archdiocese did not warn that next parish of this past behavior,” according to court documents.

Another alleged victim came forward several times starting in the late 1990s, reporting that Close had sexually abused him in 1969 when he was an altar boy at Christ the King parish in Philadelphia. The Archdiocesan Review Board investigated but could not substantiate the allegation, and it was dismissed, court documents say.

In 2011, following the release of a second scathing grand jury report that accused the church hierarchy of harboring more than two dozen priests suspected of abuse, a third alleged victim of Close came forward. That person said Close sexually assaulted him while he was a student at Archbishop Wood High School in Warminster in the early 1990s, when Close was the principal. The Archdiocesan Review Board again found the accusations could not be substantiated.

According to court documents, the archdiocese learned of at least two additional allegations. A woman in 2011 reported that a friend had told her that Close “messed around” with him at Cardinal O’Hara High School in Springfield in the 1970s. The review board found this to be unsubstantiated. And in 2014, a boy alleged that Close sexually abused him at Christ the King in the 1970s, but archdiocesan investigators were unable to make contact with the boy, court documents said.

We know of over $80 million in Church settlements, and there are other cases in which settlements were reached, but the amounts were not disclosed, and the vast majority of it is due to the Church sheltering chickenhawks.

Homosexuality has been a huge problem within the Catholic priesthood, and that problem has spilled out in the form of predator priests. while it is wholly politically incorrect to say, the sexual abuse of minors in the Church has been a problem of homosexuality: the vast majority of sexual abuse by Catholic priests has been against boys rather than girls. The John Jay Report noted that, of the abuse cases it studied, between 1950 and 2002, stated:

The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female. Male victims tended to be older than female victims. Over 40% of all victims were males between the ages of 11 and 14.

Despite attempts by the politically correct, you cannot explain that huge disparity by saying that boys were simply more available to priests years ago. This isn’t a matter of random selection, but of chickenhawk priests deliberately choosing which victims to groom and then assault.

How many parishioners have we lost over this? How many previously devout, Mass-attending Catholics have left the Church over the thoroughly disgusting cases of bishops — some of them predators as well — simply moving the abusers to another parish, without informing the new parish that the priest had ‘problems’? How many parishes have we had to close because there were no longer enough parishioners to keep them open? How many priests could have been moved into positions in which there was almost no contact with minors? And how many could and should have been referred to law enforcement, but were not?

This is what happens when you sweep things under the rug: as you keep doing that, the lump of material under the rug becomes more noticeable, and the debris under the rug became so large that the Church started tripping over it.

It isn’t just the Catholic Church, of course. We reported on Wednesday morning how a 49-year-old Henry Clay High School English teacher and Lutheran Church ‘youth volunteer’ was arrested for sexual offenses with children, and noted over a year ago how a Philadelphia high school teacher had groomed and started sexually abusing a teenaged girl, and others in the school knew about it and did nothing. But if it isn’t just the Catholic Church, the Church has definitely gained a negative reputation for having let it happen, and is often the first ‘suspect’ in people’s minds when they turn to the subject.

Pope Benedict XVI, in 2005, had the subject addressed, and the Congregation for Catholic Education released an instruction stating that homosexual men should not be admitted to seminaries to study for the priesthood. Naturally, the left went bonkers, with one former priest asking Why Isn’t Celibacy Enough? The answer, of course, is that celibacy would be enough if the chickenhawk priests actually remained celibate! The sexual abuse scandals which have rocked the Church occurred because too many priest could not remain faithful to their vows of celibacy.

What Pope Benedict recognized, that the oh-so-politically-correct left couldn’t stand, is that homosexuality among priests was, while not the sole contributor to the sexual abuse scandals, certainly the largest part. What about 81% of the victims were boys, and the two most abused age groups were, in order, 11-to-14-year-old boys, followed by 15-to-17-year-old boys can’t they understand?

Pope Benedict was right: admitting those with “homosexual tendencies” to the priesthood is a recipe for disaster, and had already been a disaster.

There is only one real solution, and that is to admit heterosexual married men to the priesthood. Not only will they not be preying on young boys, but they will have a sanctified outlet for their sexual drives, and can have a normal family life. We already have married priests, both in the Eastern-Rite Catholic Churches, but a few hundred married former Anglican priests who converted to Catholicism, and it hasn’t somehow been a disaster for the Church.

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Anti-Semitism is a serious problem, but restricting the Freedom of Speech and of the Press is not the way to fight it

We reported, on Thursday, how someone had distributed white supremacist flyers in Lexington’s Kenwick neighborhood, flyers contained in baggies, using rice to weigh them down enough not to be swept away by the wind. The Lexington Police Department was investigating, with Lt Dan Truex stating that the LPD were “very interested in identifying” “who possibly left those flyers,” yet, at the end of the Lexington Herald-Leader’s report, the Department spokesman was either unable or unwilling to specify just what actual crime had been committed or what charges the distributor of the flyers might face.

Now, thanks to a tweet from my good friend and occasional website pinch hitter, William Teach, I found this from WRAL News:

Hundreds of anti-semitic flyers distributed in at least 5 north Raleigh neighborhoods overnight

Hundreds of anti-semitic flyers appeared in at least five north Raleigh neighborhoods overnight.

Sunday, August 6, 2023 | 11:12 AM EDT | Updated 4:14 PM EDT

Anti-Semitic flyers distributed in Raleigh. Photo via WRAL News. Click to enlarge.

Hundreds of anti-semitic flyers appeared in at least five north Raleigh neighborhoods overnight.

Someone really needs to educate the WRAL intern that subtitles are supposed to be significantly different from the main headline! 🙂

The flyers link to a website to an organization called Goyim Defense League, which is currently tracked as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law.

While I have exactly zero support for the so-called Goyim Defense League, telling me that the hard-left Southern Poverty Law Center — the name of which WRAL got slightly wrong — classifies an organization as a “hate group” doesn’t impress me in the slightest. The SPLC has similarly trashed Moms 4 Liberty, a group trying to protect children from the far-left transgender agenda, even though the ‘transgender’ lobby are trying to impose control of people’s speech.

One woman, who wished to remain anonymous, discovered a multitude of fliers left on neighbors’ driveways while taking an evening walk in Fairfax Hills. Just three minutes away, another woman reported more hate flyers in her own neighborhood of Hickory Hills. Just a few more minutes away, another neighbor near North Hills reported finding one of the flyers.

North Ridge also woke up to anti-semitic flyers in their driveways. According to neighbors, there’s a notable Jewish population in North Ridge due to its walkable distance to the Orthodox Synagogue on Falls of Neuse Road. The synagogue appears to be very close to all of the neighborhoods targeted.

Unlike the Lexington situation, in which the white supremacist flyers were distributed in the heavily white, as in 89.9% white, Kenwick neighborhood, the Raleigh incident was somewhat close to a Jewish neighborhood. Nevertheless, unless an actual threat was communicated, it should be protected speech.

Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman said a person caught distributing these flyers could be charged with ethnic intimidation if the it contains a threat.

That’s a Class 1 misdemeanor, meaning someone convicted of that crime could face up to 120 days in jail.

Unlike the Lexington flyers, which, from the single image I could find of them, simply directed readers to a website, the Raleigh flyers shown in the WRAL report had a much larger variety of things printed. However, in the admittedly limited views shown, I could see no actual threat. Rather, the flyers made fanciful and stupid claims about Jews, including a reference to the long-debunked Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the creation of Russian anti-Semites around 1902-3, a time in which Tsar Nikolai II was still an absolute monarch. Laughably, the Raleigh flyers date the Protocols as 1897, before they were written. No one with any knowledge of this stuff who isn’t already anti-Semitic is going to swallow this junk.

Anti-Semitism is a serious problem, but the way to fight it is not to restrict the freedom of speech and of the press. If you find anti-Semitic, or in the Lexington case, white supremacist garbage, just pick it up and throw it in the trash.

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Remember you haters! Calling them ‘groomers’ and saying that ‘they’re coming after our kids’ is sexist, homophobic, transphobic and just plain false!

There are times I think that I’ve written on the subject of ‘transgenderism’ too frequently, but it keeps coming up in the news. I wouldn’t care if Jack wanted to call himself Jill, if the ‘transgendered’ weren’t trying to use the power of the state to force other people to go along with their delusions.

You will not find this story many places, and certainly not in the leftist part of the credentialed media. From the New York Post:

California school suspends 2 children for misgendering classmate

By Hannah Grossman , Fox News | Friday, July 7, 2023 | 3:31 PM EDT | Updated

A California school district suspended two children for five days after a misgendering incident took place, and then subjected them to a training called “restorative justice,” according to an email reviewed by Fox News Digital.

The email was sent by a recently departed principal of Herbert Hoover High School located in the Glendale Unified School District. It was first reported by GUSD Parents Voices.

The former principal, Jennifer Earl, described two students who misgendered a transgender student, and then ran away as the teacher attempted to correct them.

There’s some disagreement here. The Post story states that the students correctly referenced a student’s sex “misgendered a transgender student,” but the local Fox 11 report has the suspended student “misgendering” a teacher.

So, what is “restorative justice” in the Glendale United School District? The district has a handy graph of its system, as shown in a photo in the Post. It has “Control” on one axis, defined as “Pressure Limits (and?) Expectations”, which can only mean that the district believes that, in the case of “restorative justice”, high pressure is acceptable, as long as it is accompanied with high levels of “Support – Encouragement – Nurturing”.

Further down:

GUSD explained to Fox News Digital that they make determinations if a misgendering – generally defined as using the wrong pronouns – is considered bullying based on whether a student’s perceived intent.

“A student has never been punished, much less suspended, for accidentally using the wrong pronoun to refer to a peer or staff member. However, a student could be suspended if the action escalated to harassment or bullying,” a spokesperson said.

Translation: if we assume that the school district’s spokescritter is telling the truth, the district decided that the “action escalated to harassment or bullying”.

Now we get to the district’s definition of a re-education camp “restorative justice”

The district’s website explains restorative justice on its website.

Restorative justice is a re-education of students and gaining control over a situation based on the perceived wrongs they committed.

So, even the district uses the term “re-education”. Got it!

First the person making the restorative justice circle will ask “barrier breaking” questions, such as:

“What is the greatest value that guides your life?”

“What gives you the most security?”

“If you could smash one thing… what would you smash?”

If I could smash one thing, it would be the cockamamie idea that girls can be boys and boys can be girls.

“Describe the ideal family.”

Simple: a mother and father, married to each other, living with and rearing their minor children. Anything else, anything else, is less than ideal. This is the system which successful human societies have had for as far back into the past as we have any real knowledge of human sociological structures.

The district’s website continues, “When there is harm or conflict within the established community, restorative responses help to repair the damage. This is done through processes that bring harmed and harmers together to address root causes of the conflict, support accountability for those responsible, and promote healing for impacted individuals. As a result, community is once again restored bringing back a sense of belonging to all.”

So, “restorative justice” exists when the “harmed and harmers” are brought together, but note the rest: “to address root causes of the conflict, support accountability for those responsible, and promote healing for impacted individuals.” Simply put, “restorative justice” cannot be achieved unless the two students who correctly recognized the ‘transgender’ person’s sex who “misgendered” someone agree that the Special Snowflake™ person they correctly referenced “misgendered” is actually the sex the transgender individual claims to be rather than the sex they actually are, and say that they are oh-so-sorry.

Simply put, the Glendale Unified School District is teaching that transgenderism is real, that a person actually can change his ‘gender,’ and if you decline to go along with that notion, you will be punished.

Remember how we have been told that the government may not establish a religion? Well, the Catholic Church, the majority of Protestant Christian denominations, Judaism, and Islam all agree that transgenderism is not something with which their faiths agree, yet the Glendale Unified School District, apparently as required by law in California, are teaching something major which is against the religious faiths of most Americans.

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A great Mexican family

We are having to renovate the rectory at St Elizabeth’s Catholic Church, which was, to put it bluntly, somewhat neglected for almost twenty years; our previous pastor was an uncomplaining man, and even in very warm, humid Kentucky, never even wanted air conditioning, save for a single, 110-volt window unit.

Now, we are having to catch up, and our new priest, who is Mexican and very well-liked by the Hispanic communities in the surrounding counties — our county really has few Latinos — and a Mexican family who have their own construction and remodeling company volunteered, volunteered I stress, to help us do some major work. They are not even parishioners here, but at St Mark’s in Richmond, where our priest, Fr Enrico Montoya, has been saying the 1:00 PM Mass in Spanish One thing is certain: though I did a lot of work myself, two contractors in their forties can do more work than my 70-year-old body can do! 🙂

On Saturday, our project was to remove the old carpeting from the rectory. After twenty years of our previous pastor, a child of the Depression who hated spending money, things were just plain not clean.

The brothers, Casiano and Anesimo — I’m not going to use their last names here — showed up, with two sons, in their late teens or early twenties, and we started work. I will say one thing: these guys worked! We cut out the carpets, removed them, and removed the ancient padding under them, to expose the hardwood floors beneath them. Pulling the carpets wasn’t that bad; it was cleaning the floors underneath them! The old padding had stuck to the finish on the original floors, not in one piece, but in small pieces across the entire area. We — including me! — were on our hands and knees, scraping the floors, pulling up staples and the nailer strips that hold wall-to-wall carpets in place. I might have said darn or heck or even shoot a couple of times, had our priest not been there.

The doors of St Elizabeth’s Church, after I refinished them last Fall.

Around 11:30, the men’s wives and families showed up. They set up a long table on the covered front porch, and they had brought a ton of food, for everybody. This was real Mexican food, not what you get at Taco Bell or other Mexican restaurants in the United States, and it was great. I’d never pictured real Mexican food as being anything like this, and Anesimo — I wound up closer friends with him than any of the others — told me that they don’t really consider what we see served in Mexican restaurants around here to be Mexican; their families are from far south in Mexico, near the Guatemalan border, so the cuisine is probably different from closer to the United States.

The family are huge! Lots of kids and grandkids, and the older wives joined right in with their husbands in pulling staples from the floor. They all spoke English, though among themselves, Spanish. And my thoughts were simple: these are the kind of immigrants the United States needs!

I do not know, and certainly didn’t ask, if Anesimo and Casiano and their wives were here legally. Considering that they had built companies in Kentucky, the younger kids were almost certainly born in the United States, and are citizens.

But what we need is the kind of border security that allows families like this into our country, to become citizens, while keeping the riff-raff out. And if the family with which I worked Saturday are here illegally, why don’t we just keep them, and deport some lazy, good-for-nothing Americans sucking up welfare in their place?

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The ‘Wise Latina’ says the quiet part out loud.

At the annual Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Lecture at UC-Berkeley in 2001, Federal Judge Sonia Sotomayor said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Those words were fished out after President Barack Hussein Obama nominated her to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court. What can those words mean other than, as a jurist, Hudge Sotomayor would take her decisions, at least in part, based not on the law, but on her race, sex, and ethnicity.

She backed away from that statement in her confirmation hearings, “declaring it ‘a rhetorical flourish that fell flat’ and stating that ‘I do not believe that any ethnic, racial or gender group has an advantage in sound judgment,'” and she was ultimately confirmed, 68 to 31.

Well, today Associate Justice told us, once again, that it isn’t what is written in the law, or the Constitution, that is important, but people’s feelings! In her dissent in 303 Creative v Elenis, she wrote:

The meaning of our Constitution is not found in any law volume, but in the spirit of the people who live under it.[1]303 Creative v Elenis, , page 38 of dissent, page 70 of the .pdf file.

This is rather remarkable. The Justice, utterly horrified by the decision that a Colorado web designer could not be compelled to create a website for a same-sex ‘wedding,’ cited precedent after precedent telling us that the government could, and has, gotten away with both restricting and compelling various forms of commercial speech, along with dozens of citations of laws and court cases concerning equal access to commerce and commercial enterprises. Yet, after all of that long dissent, she broke down and told us that what was written in the law just flat didn’t matter. What mattered, according to our ‘wise Latina,’ is how the people who live in the United States feel about things.

This is a hugely dangerous position, but one which is hardly unexpected. Justice Sotomayor voted against religious freedom in the cases of Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley v. Sisolak and South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, but railed against the decision, this time supporting the freedom of religion and assembly in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v Cuomo. The cases were all about the same thing: the states forcing churches to close, due to the COVID-19 penicdemic, and Justice Sotomayor believed that the virus trumped the Constitution of the United States.

The good Justice also saw nothing wrong with restricting our Second Amendment rights in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen and McDonald v City of Chicago, or upholding equal protection under the law in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. The plain words of the Constitution meant nothing to Justice Sotomayor, or the other liberals on the Court, as they went through all sorts of contortions to say that somehow, some way, the rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution just didn’t matter when it came to liberal policies.

The liberals on the Court are hardly the only ones who want to massage the words of the Constitution to mean something other than what they say. The Editorial Board of The New York Times opined:

In striking down affirmative action in higher education on Thursday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority said it had to do so because the Constitution forbids any form of racial distinction. With a single opinion, the justices overturned decades of precedents that upheld race-conscious admissions policies as consistent with the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and ignored the reality of modern America, where prejudice and racism endure.

The Editorial Board spend many words telling us why Affirmative Action is so desperately needed, yet never manage to give us a reason as to how it fits under the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Thursday’s ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by all of the Republican-appointed justices, takes a long time to make a simple — and simplistic — point: There is no real difference between the centuries of racial discrimination against Black people and targeted race-conscious efforts to help Black people. Both are equally bad, in this view.

Left unaddressed was one of the Chief Justice’s points, that, in the context of university admissions, which are a zero-sum game, helping black applicants has another effect, hurting white and Asian applicants.

There is so much more that could be said, but, in the end, it boils down to this: the left have programs in mind which elevate the programs of the government over the rights of individuals, and today’s left are fine with that. And that is why sensible people must fight the left, fight for our rights, because the left won’t help us.

References

References
↑1 303 Creative v Elenis, , page 38 of dissent, page 70 of the .pdf file.
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Today’s #woke left sure do hate Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, and democracy . . . when those things go against leftist values

I will admit it up front: when I saw the article on the front page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website main page, and cited below, I expected one dripping with liberal bias, but it was actually mostly balanced reporting.

Why Moms for Liberty was designated an ‘extremist’ group by the Southern Poverty Law Center

Born out of opposition to COVID-19 mandates in schools, Moms of Liberty pivoted to targeting diversity education and how LGBTQ issues are handled by schools.

by Maddie Hanna | Wednesday, June 28, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

Moms for Liberty calls itself a parent empowerment group. But as the polarizing organization arrives in Philadelphia this week for its annual summit, it’s being identified as something else: an “antigovernment extremist group.”

That’s according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the veteran civil rights organization that tracks domestic extremism. This year, the group added a number of “parental rights” groups — the Southern Poverty Law Center refers to them as “anti-student-inclusion” — to its tally of hate and antigovernment extremist groups.

Robert Stacy McCain has done a lot of reporting on the Southern Poverty Law Center, SPLC, and pointed out, in an article asking “What counts as hate?“, writing:

by continually expanding the definition of “hate” and “extremism,” and by encouraging censorship and suppression of anyone who dissents from their liberal agenda, the SPLC compels people with more or less mainstream beliefs to engage in the kind of activism practiced by Moms for Liberty. Furthermore  (and, again, I think SPLC staff are too stupid to grasp this), by denoting mainstream groups as proponents of “hate,” the SPLC undermines its own credibility and causes people who are not remotely “extremist” to question the whole rationale of this type of “hate”-hunting enterprise. Like, why should we even care if someone is prejudiced against gay people or black people or Jews or whatever? So long as they are not engaged in any actual criminal behavior, or advocating violence against others, people are free to form their own opinions. This whole business of “exposing” people as holding allegedly dangerous beliefs — which is to say, acting as Thought Police — is antithetical to liberty. And I think more Americans are beginning to reject the type of Thought Police agenda that SPLC pursues.

Of course, in heavily Democratic Philadelphia, where so many seem to despise freedom of speech for the people they oppose, the staff at the American Revolution Museum in Philadelphia, a revolution against the British government spread by freedom of speech and of the press, don’t support allowing the Moms being allowed to speak.

Back to the Inquirer:

Moms for Liberty has accused the Southern Poverty Law Center of espousing “hate” toward its members. Here’s why the organization says Moms for Liberty warrants the designation:

What makes Moms for Liberty an antigovernment group?

Founded in Florida in 2021, Moms for Liberty was born out of opposition to COVID-19 mandates in schools and now claims 285 chapters across 45 states. It pivoted to targeting diversity education and how LGBTQ issues are handled by schools, as part of a broader conservative movement that has accused schools of indoctrinating students around race, gender, and sexuality.

Heaven forfend! Some parents are opposed to the public schools, which have, due to the compulsory education laws in every state, what is, in effect, a captive audience, been teaching, been indoctrinating, beliefs which are opposed to some people’s religious beliefs, and opposed to simple, common sense. It wasn’t so very long ago that girls who like rough-and-tumble, who would go out and get dirty and sweaty playing ball with the boys were called, sometimes admiringly and sometimes not, tomboys, but everyone knew that they were still girls. There was a time in which boys who liked to play with dolls or do somewhat ‘girly’ things were called, never admiringly, sissies, but everyone knew that they were still boys. Now? Now, they’re not what they were born, but one of 1 × 10n new ‘genders,’ you’ve got to call them that, and it’s time to reach for the puberty blockers and surgical scalpel. No one would ever say that public school libraries should have materials showing girls fellating boys, but today’s left — which includes a lot of public school teachers and administrators — are aghast that some people are opposed to having materials in public school libraries which depict boys fellating boys. Many concerned parents do not want this kind of stuff normalized, but if you are a parent who doesn’t want that, the SPLC says that you are a hater and an anti-government extremist.

That messaging is what landed Moms for Liberty on the SPLC’s list, said Maya Henson Carey, a research analyst with SPLC’s Intelligence Project.

“It’s really looking at their overall narrative: that public educators and public schools are attempting to indoctrinate and sexualize children through this radical Marxist agenda,” Carey said.

The SPLC notes statements from Moms for Liberty leaders, including the group’s slogan that “we do not co-parent with the government,” comments referring to “government schools,” support for abolishing the federal Department of Education, and accusations that teachers unions are responsible for indoctrination.

In one example flagged by the SPLC, Moms for Liberty said last year that “the K-12 cartel — also known as the national teachers union (NEA) — met and drafted a proposal to replace the word ‘mother’ with ‘birthing person.’” Describing the proposal as “insane,” Moms for Liberty said that “as the teachers union pushes an agenda focused on everything but educating our children, American parents are rising up, taking back our school districts and putting the focus back on educating our children.”

We have previously reported how The Washington Post kowtowed to the #woke by headlining an article with “pregnant people” in both the title and body, and a site search of the Inquirer’s website returned 2,905 references to “pregnant people,” 1,062 references to “pregnant person,” 1,643 references to “birthing person,” and 4,669 references to “birthing people.” Is that what the Inky’s stylebook now requires? Is it surprising that sensible people would note these assaults on language and attempts to normalize transgenderism and the notion that men can get pregnant and have babies?

Well, perhaps the SPLC were not surprised at that, but Maya Henson Carey said that the SPLC cited such objections as part of the reason Moms for Liberty was declared to be an “anti-government extremist” group.

After several paragraphs in which Dr Carey claimed that the Moms must be raaaaacist, comparing their objections to critical race theory, the education of which has a strong political component, she went on:

Moms for Liberty has also opposed policies accommodating transgender students and has referred to gender dysphoria as being “normalized by predators.” And while Moms for Liberty has said it’s focused on removing inappropriate sexual content, efforts to ban books from libraries have disproportionately targeted stories about LGBTQ people or people of color, Carey said.

It’s certainly true that the Moms are fighting the normalization of homosexuality and transgenderism in the public schools, but that’s what they should be doing. It’s an obvious question: why on earth would the public schools be pushing normalization of homosexuality and transgenderism in the first place? Why would the public schools be pushing something which is opposed by many religions, why would they be pushing something that is directly contrary to the religious faiths of many parents?

Is not the state pushing a particular issue which violates a lot of people’s religious faith in itself a state establishment of religion?

Carey said the education groups represent a trend of “a shift to public spaces” by extremist groups, that “comes with them showing up for school board meetings and running for public office. A lot of these antigovernment and hate groups are really infiltrating the lives of everyday Americans.”

And there you have it: an SPLC spokeswoman is complaining that conservatives are exercising their freedom of speech, and, in what must surely be a horrific attack on democracy, are doing something really radical like running for office in democratic elections!

 

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Karma! The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend In a time when the left are all for 'diversity,' they have exactly zero diversity of thought or understanding.

How many times have conservatives noted that the Muslims, primarily the Palestinian Arabs, the liberals and homosexual lobbies supported because they opposed Israel, were not really their friends? Quietly and desperately they tried to ignore the fact that homosexuals were executed by hanging in Iran, and by being thrown off tall buildings by Da’ish. But this happened in the good, old United States!

‘A sense of betrayal’: liberal dismay as Muslim-led US city bans Pride flags

Many liberals celebrated when Hamtramck, Michigan, elected a Muslim-majority council in 2015 but a vote to exclude LGBTQ+ flags from city property has soured relations

by Tom Perkins in Hamtramck, Michigan | Saturday, 17 June 2023 | 6:00 AM EDT

In 2015, many liberal residents in Hamtramck, Michigan, celebrated as their city attracted international attention for becoming the first in the United States to elect a Muslim-majority city council.

They viewed the power shift and diversity as a symbolic but meaningful rebuke of the Islamophobic rhetoric that was a central theme of then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign.

This week many of those same residents watched in dismay as a now fully Muslim and socially conservative city council passed legislation banning Pride flags from being flown on city property that had – like many others being flown around the country – been intended to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community.

Muslim residents packing city hall erupted in cheers after the council’s unanimous vote, and on Hamtramck’s social media pages, the taunting has been relentless: “Fagless City”, read one post, emphasized with emojis of a bicep flexing.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” as the ancient saying goes. But, as our friend, the Soviet Union, helped the West finish off our enemy, the Third Reich, the Soviets quickly proved that, without that common enemy, they were not our friends. For the liberals in Hamtramck, the Muslims were their friends; for the Muslims in Hamtramck, the liberals were their useful idiots.

Homosexual activity has been widely condemned under Islam, and even a pro-homosexuality site notes the problems. Some try to argue that the Quran is at least somewhat ambiguous on the subject, but it is clear that the Islamic nations of the world interpret their faith as being strenuously opposed to homosexuality, and homosexual activity is a criminal offense across much of the Islamic and African nations.

In a tense monologue before the vote, Councilmember Mohammed Hassan shouted his justification at LGBTQ+ supporters: “I’m working for the people, what the majority of the people like.”

While Hamtramck is still viewed as a bastion of multiculturalism, the difficulties of local governance and living among neighbors with different cultural values quickly set in following the 2015 election. Some leaders and residents are now bitter political enemies engaged in a series of often vicious battles over the city’s direction, and the Pride flag controversy represents a crescendo in tension.

“There’s a sense of betrayal,” said the former Hamtramck mayor Karen Majewski, who is Polish American. “We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.”

Could none of the non-Muslim liberals in that town read? Did none of them even wonder if the hostility to homosexuality in the Islamic world might be part of the culture of the Muslims in Hamtramck?

But it’s not only the left in Hamtramck who have deluded themselves. From The Victory Girls:

Feminism: Why The West Is Silent On Iran

by Lisa Carr | Sunday, June 18, 2023

We will attempt, once again today, to illustrate how feminism in the West has lost its way. Today, we look back on this very day in 1983, where 10 women from the ages of 17 to 57 years old were hung in an Iranian prison.

Why were they given such a horrific death sentence? Because these women were members of The Bahai Faith. They were told to renounce their religion or die. The Washington Examiner‘s Joseph D’Souza, provided an interesting commentary on the silence this past weekend:

Iranian women face daily threats of violence. More than 50 girls schools across Iran have suffered from apparent poisonings. Just last week, Iran put on trial the brave female reporters who visited Mahsa Amini in prison and told the whole world what the regime had done to her.

Women in the West have rightly asserted their own dignity and rights for decades. Can those same women not raise their voices louder in support of Iranian women and their quest for the same rights and dignity?

They must forcefully call on their governments not only to speak up but to take action on behalf of Iranian women. Tweets are not enough. They don’t create justice, tolerance, harmony, and human rights.”-Joseph D’Souza, The Washington Examiner

Women are still protesting in Iran. The violence is still happening. According to this from PBS, The Iranian government has detained over 20,000 protesters and killed more than 500, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a group that has been tracking the movement. Since November, a string of suspected poisonings has taken place at more than 50 girls’ schools across the country. Iran has also since banned women who refuse to wear the hijab from health and education services.

But in our “educated” country, our Land of Opportunity, our brand of “feminism” looks different. The plight of Iranian women and women in other, oppressive cultures is largely ignored. Why? Because Western feminists are a bunch of narcissistic twits who can’t be bothered to face the inconvenient truths of what is happening in the world around them.

“(N)arcissistic twits,”? Perhaps, but I believe that ignorant twits, twits who cannot see outside of their Western civilization mindset, who simply cannot wrap their heads around the concept that not everybody in the world thinks as Westerners in general, and Americans specifically, think. Because the American and western European left have swallowed the concern for the plight of the Palestinian Arabs not just hook, line, and sinker, but the fishing rod as well, all the way down to the reel, because they are so wholly anti-Israel — though don’t you dare call them anti-Semitic! — they must support the Arabs, and the Muslims, even though a Western woman walking down the streets of Tehran or Riyadh in typical Western women’s garb would be snatched up by the police and hauled off to jail, to treatment which would be less gentle than an American jail. A Western woman outspoken about the freedom to be lesbian in those countries might well find herself facing decades in prison.

There’s a lot more at Lisa Carr’s original, and there’s no paywall on The Victory Girls, so you can check out the whole thing for free. But it just helps to illustrate that inward thinking of the left, how they just can’t understand how anyone could think or believe differently from them. In a time when the left are all for ‘diversity,’ they have exactly zero diversity of thought or understanding.