Sorry, Gays, Equality Is a Different Thing

The TV news channel Russia Today's CrossTalk programme for once had a debate (in the above video) I am glad to report on.

"Unimarriage?", on the subject of gay marriage, was a discussion among the UK's prominent gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, UK Independence Party's Member of the European Parliament Godfrey Bloom and Thomas Peters of the USA's National Organization for Marriage who works in Washington DC.

It was introduced thus:

Should same-sex marriages be accepted? What's driving the change in the institution of marriage? Are equal marriage rights democratic? Why aren't civil unions enough for gay couples? And if marriage is about love and the emotional needs of adults, then what about their children?

The programme was also exceptional in that the supposedly "moderator" Peter Lavelle did not intervene with opinions of his own.

One of the recurring claims of the conversation was Peter Tatchell's insistence that the right to marry is one of the human rights recognized by the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to deny it to homosexuals violates a principle of equality for all individuals.

But is it true that opposing gay marriage means discriminating and denying equal rights to homosexuals?

Tatchell confuses equal rights with equal treatment. Equality for individuals who are different results in different treatment.

Peter Singer, a moral and political philosopher much respected by the Left and certainly one of the thinkers of our time who will be included in future history of philosophy books, begins his classic work Animal Liberation with a comparison between the objections usually raised against the case for moral equality of animals to humans and the derisive attacks that greeted the publication of early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in the late 18th-century.

One of the most frequent of those criticisms was to highlight the factual differences between men and women (analogous to the possible use of the differences between human and nonhuman animals to counter Singer's argument).

Singer responds to both in the same way: equal consideration of interests (the utilitarian Singer does not use the terminology of "rights") does not require equal treatment. The treatment for different sentient beings, the moral objects, will be different if their interests are given equal consideration (if they have equal rights).

The Australian philosopher says that equality does not entail that dogs have the right to vote because humans do and men have the right to abortion on demand if women do.

The incongruity of the idea that equality requires non-differential treatment in all cases can be seen if we think of, for instance, children not being allowed to drive a car or vote, even if they wanted to: developing the logic of Tatchell's argument to its full consequences would require giving children all the rights that adults have, including, for instance, driving and voting.

In the specific case of marriage, children, close blood relatives, threesomes are not allowed to marry, even if they so wished: are all those persons discriminated against? Most reasonable people would not think so.

This is probably why the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Thatchell invokes in his support does not include sexual orientation among the characteristics that should not limit the right to marry. It says:

Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.

Virtually nothing of what Peter Tatchell said throughout the debate had a leg to stand on.

His assertion that polls show that a majority favours same-sex marriage was dismantled with ease by Thomas Peters of the National Organization for Marriage. He explained that in 30 out of the 34 times when people were given the possibility to vote on this they voted against gay marriage. Polls on this subject are not reliable because people tend to say they are favourable to it even when they are not, since they think it makes them look good.

In these Orwellian times when accusation of "homophobia" are thrown so liberally (pun half-intended) it seems a highly plausible explanation.

In addition, "polls claiming a majority support redefining marriage offer those they poll a false binary choice between redefining marriage and no legal recognition whatsoever".

In the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron has been accused by the polling company ComRes to misrepresent its polling data in order to claim popular support for redefining marriage:

Andrew Hawkins, Chairman of the polling company, wrote to David Cameron to “put the record straight” about the number of people who are in favour of the Government’s plans to redefine marriage.

The Prime Minister had responded to a letter from MP Cheryl Gillan, in which she criticised the proposals. He said that more Tory-leaning voters were in favour of same-sex marriage than were put off by it.

Support

But Andrew Hawkins said his polling showed that redefining marriage was unlikely to win back support from disillusioned voters.

He also said it was “simply not the case” that all the published polls show more voters are in favour of same-sex marriage, something the Prime Minister asserted as fact in his letter.

Mr Hawkins said the level of agreement that marriage should stay as it is, varies between 55% and over 70%.

Ignore

He said that taking the polling as a whole, it is hard for David Cameron to ignore the fact there is less support for gay marriage than he makes out.

He said “the policy is likely to make it harder to retrieve many former Conservative supporters” and the issue is having a “detrimental effect on local Associations.”

Andrew Hawkins referred to a recent ComRes poll which showed that six out of ten Conservative Party chairmen believed the policy would lose the party more votes than it would gain.

Election

Earlier this week, Chancellor George Osborne said that gay marriage would win the party the next election, a claim quickly refuted by the Coalition for Marriage.

C4M Director Colin Hart said: “Yet again the Government’s spin doctors are trying to claim that redefining marriage is a vote winner. Quite the opposite is true.”

More than 610,000 people have signed the Coalition for Marriage petition to keep marriage as it is.

Tatchell's presentation of his battle for gay rights as a lonely one could have been realistic a few decades ago, but these days everybody knows that it cannot be delivered with a straight face. Peters pointed out that the three main associations for same-sex marriage in Washington receive many times the money his small organization gets, not to mention Obama's support and the Decmocratic Party's inclusion of legalization of gay marriage in its manifesto. Peters also said he receives death threats.

UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom argued that the gay claims, with which he used to agree, have now gone too far, and threaten other people's liberty, as in the case of Peter and Hazelmary Bull, the Christian husband and wife B&B owners who were successfully sued by a gay couple for offering them two rooms rather than one.

Peters summed up some of the reasons to keep marriage between a man and a woman:

There's an awful lot of civil society -- churches, communities, government -- that is all built to support marriage because marriage isn't easy. It's not easy to get men and women to commit to raising the children they make with their bodies. But that's what civil society has been doing and a healthy society does that. It is difficult and gay marriage makes it difficult for all of civil society to enshrine that value that children deserve a mom and a dad, and that men and women should stick around and love and raise the children they make with their bodies, and the distraction of gay marriage has made it impossible for things like the Catholic Church, for things like political/civil government to give that message and so when you say "gay marriage won't hurt anyone" it already has because now when I try to say "a child deserves both mom and a dad" you jump in and say "that's against equality!" and so you can actually see already that the more gay marriage becomes accepted and enshrined in law the more difficult it will become for the rest of us to communicate this life-saving propagating message for the next generation.

We must also not forget how the redefinition of marriage could pave the way to allowing for Islamic polygamy to become acceptable:

Muslim polygamy has been a much more easily accepted practice, with authorities and police in Western countries turning a blind eye to it, than it would have been the case in the past, when people knew what the word 'family' meant, before the time of constant redefinitions of the term to include homosexuals, threesomes, incestuous couples and all the ever-expanding circle of relationships that the concepts of marriage and family must now apply to.

Post-Election Obama Administration's Iran and Israel Policies

Moshe Phillips, member of the executive committee of the Philadelphia Chapter of Americans for a Safe Israel / AFSI, writing for Voice of the Copts says that Democratic Senator John Kerry as the next Secretary of State is a much bigger problem for Israel than Republican former Senator Chuck Hagel as the next Secretary of Defense, despite the American Jewish establishment's vehement protesting the latter but not the former.

The role of the Secretary of State, much more than the Secretary of Defense, is "a position to effect policy as it impacts Israel, set an overall tone for US in the Middle East and be a key player in future negotations".

Kerry thinks that the settlements are the main problem, adopted the Arab view that Jerusalem is one of “the big three issues" and believes that Israel and the Palestinian Arabs equally share blame for the continuation of a decades old conflict.

Kerry’s words show that he will be hostile to the very existence of Israeli towns in the suburbs of Jerusalem. Democrats consider these “settlements” to be part of the “Occupied West Bank”and he will label them as such.

John Kerry’s leadership at State will be the beginning of a new effort by the Obama Administration to pressure Israel to surrender territory to the Palestinian Authority, deny Israel’s sovereignty in Jerusalem, negotiate with Hamas and accept a hostile Palestinian State along its vulnerable borders.

Israel and its American supporters are in for a very tough time with Kerry and they seem to have no idea.

Hagel is not spared either. In another article in Voice of the Copts by Heritage Foundation senior fellow and former deputy assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Brookes, Hagel is criticized for his soft stance on Iran ("Hagel has pushed for direct talks, while pushing against economic sanctions and force"), his comments in favour of cutting the Defense budget, and his underestimation of North Korea. Brookes concludes:

The concern, of course, is that Hagel — like Kerry — will push US foreign and defense policy violently Left, more in line with Obama’s real sentiments.

I end with a quotation from a third article from the same high-quality publication, about Obama's policy of appeasement towards Iran, poorly camouflaged as Iranian Nuclear Containment. The article is by Mark Langfan, who has created an original educational 3d Topographic Map System of Israel to facilitate clear understanding of the dangers facing Israel and its water supply, which has been studied by US lawmakers:

And just like a nuclear-armed Hitler and/ or Togo would have found a "rational" use of a nuclear bomb in World War II, had he owned one, the Iranians will figure out a "rational" use of a nuclear bomb which will destroy the United States in the coming World War III.

Whether it is an Iranian EMP attack on Saudi Arabia, thereby gaining Iran sole control of 60 percent of the world's oil supply, or an Iranian untraceable nuclear suicide terror attack against Manhattan, it doesn't matter. The Iranian Islamic Regime is a talented, resourceful, and driven cabal of very rational people who are determined to rule the world, and impose their Shia Islam on every human on the planet.

The only person who is not "rational" in this drama is US President Obama, and neither is his merry band of sycophantic echo-chamber yes-men, who irrationally believe Israeli settlements are a greater threat to world peace than Iranian nuclear weapons.

Yes, elections have consequences, sometimes, irreparably catastrophic consequences. And, the horrific irreparable consequence of a 51 percent to 49 percent 2012 US Election is that the United States elected a President who has been, who is, and who will continue to be an Appeaser-in-Chief of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Had the world allowed Hitler or Togo's Japan to gain a nuclear bomb before World War II, there wouldn't be a free-world today. Unfortunately, Obama's containment policy will enable Iran to gain a nuclear weapons' arsenal which will bring the entire world into a dark ages from which the free-world will never return.

What Happens in the USA? Houston Resident: "I felt in a War Zone"

Residents of Miami, Florida, and Houston, Texas, were terrified by the sight of military helicopters in their skies and the sound of military gun fire. A Houston resident said: "I felt I was in a war zone". It turns out it was just a multi-agency training a drill.

Similar urban military exercises took place in Los Angeles and, since April 2012, in St. Louis, MO; Minneapolis, MN.; Long Branch, NJ; Laredo, TX; Boston, MA; and Chicago, IL, and Atlas Shrugs says in Harrisburg, Pennslyvania.

Atlas Shrugs also says:

What kind of military exercise requires black hawk helicopters and machine gun fire in a city? What is Obama expecting to happen?

Why such drills in civilian areas? These usually take place out of public view. Why weren't local police and fire/rescue alerted prior? There is certainly an intimidation factor at work here.

And The Examiner (h/t Augusto Pozuelos):

Of course, a little over a week ago, renowned author and humanitarian Dr. Jim Garrow made the shocking claim that President Obama will only keep military leaders who "will fire on U.S. citizens."

Read this columnist's report on the shocking claim...

It should be noted that the Obama administration has yet to deny the allegation.

On January 20, the Washington Free Beacon reported the head of Central Command, Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis is being dismissed by Obama and will leave his post in March.

Since 2010, Commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal (USA), Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. David Petraeus (USA) and Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright (USMC) have all been forced into retirement.

In light of the Obama administration's push for gun-grabbing legislation (being sponsored by Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA)), a flurry of "multi-agency training drills" and the dismissal of several well-respected military leaders...one need not be a conspiracy theorist to be genuinely concerned about the imminent threat to our freedoms.

As the ancient Chinese curse portends...these are truly "interesting times."

Italian Priest Offers Reward for Weddings

In the small village of Volania, in Northern Italy, home to about 300 families and 1,000 people, the local priest Father Giancarlo Pirini has decided to offer a "bounty" of 500 euros, in cash, of his own money to every couple who will get married.

The Father is worried about the crisis of marriage.

"Some time ago, leafing through the marriage register of the parish - says Fr Pirini - I noticed that it was still at the first volume, which began in 1955." Scanning it, the parish priest ended in despair: in 1960 only 17 weddings were celebrated, in 2006 and 2012 none.

Europeans, if the current rates of marriage and reproduction continue, are going to die out.

New Facebook Page: Save the West

I have started just 3 days ago a new Page on Facebook, called Save the West.

Save the West from what threatens to destroy it from without, Islam, and from within, cultural Marxism, what we kindly call "political correctness".

Come and have a look and, if you like it, Like it.

The Marxist-Leninist Roots of the European Union. Interview with Vladimir Bukovsky

Below is my translation of an interview I found very interesting with former Soviet dissident and political prisoner Vladimir Bukovsky by Alessandra Nucci, published in the December 2012 issue of the Italian periodical Radici Cristiane. What he says provides a very useful background to understand what lies behind the European Union project and its similarities with the Soviet Union, a subject on which Bukovsky has written a book.

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Vladimir Bukovsky, 70, is one of the most famous ex-political prisoners of the former Soviet Union. In total he spent twelve years of internment, including prisons, labour camps and psychiatric hospitals, before being ejected and swapped for the Chilean prisoner Luis Corvalan in 1976. Since then he has lived in Cambridge and took British citizenship.

In 2007 he co-authored with Pavel Stroilov EUSSR: The Soviet Roots of European Integration in which he reconstructs, on the basis of documents copied from the Soviet archives in 1992, plans to transform the European Union into a Union of Socialist Republics in all identical to the former Soviet Union.

Radici Cristiane has asked his opinion on current developments.

Mr. Bukovsky, at least since 2000 you have been saying that the European Union is the exact copy of the Soviet Union. Aspects in common you highlighted include the new Europe’s structure itself: a union of republics with a socialist structure, run by a handful of unelected people who make typically Bolshevik promises - equality, fairness and justice - and do not recognize nations but only citizens of a new people, with "European" instead of "Soviet". In common, in addition, the two unions have the typical corruption of a socialist republic, a corruption organized from the top, aggressiveness towards the outside and even gulags inside. Many years later, are the events proving you right?

You forgot the similarity in the way they started. How was the USSR created? Of course, by military force, but also by forcing the republics to join with the financial threat, making them economically fearful. So there we are.

But we are still at the beginning, at the first stage. The ultimate goal of all unions that have been built so far does not end with the submission to the control of Brussels, but it goes further. The target is the building of a single state, under one world government, with a single law, a single pension....

The financial crises serve to push in this direction.

The general impoverishment would then be wanted?

It is the very concept of "union" that removes flexibility from the economy. A single economy makes the constant adjustments necessary to facilitate trade impossible.

Don’t let's forget that the Soviet Union went bankrupt. Of course, we were far ahead on the road to integration towards a single state: not just a single currency, but also one people. And the Soviet Union, in contrast to Europe, had enormous resources, so, every time it was on the verge of bankruptcy, it would discover new resources: oil, diamonds, gold... That's what made ​​them carry on. Otherwise they would not have failed in the eighties but by the end of the thirties.

You said that the crisis was the first stage. What about the second?

Over time there is a development of distrust that can lead to hostility. That is the next stage. Examples abound, just think of Yugoslavia, the USSR… Countries forced to live under the same roof. I myself grew up under a federal flag. But it is a pressure cooker that sooner or later blows up.

Is this why they are gradually unifying the military?

It still has to do with the construction of a single state. One government, one president, one policy. The economic difficulties help to reduce the sovereignty, because people are more willing to accept and obey. In Italy not coincidentally you have an unelected Prime Minister.

Are they using the economy to crush the nation state? It seems to me that they use it to crush people. They manipulate people to prevent them from opposing the new policy, which must, on the contrary, appear to them as the only hope.

Are they therefore all socialists in Brussels?

The project is socialist. I do not know these people personally, but most of them are on the Left, more or less extreme. That means that they favour statist solutions and the regulation of everything. And they all talk like in Lenin's book The State and Revolution, which explains how the nation state will die. His words are that it will "fade until it disappears."

For their part, the Conservatives hold the curious idea that the project can change from within. The EPP does not resist, and trying to influence it from within becomes a good excuse for doing nothing.

Is then in Lenin the matrix of what we are experiencing?

The dream of socialists, the Maximum Programme, has always been to eliminate the private property, the family and the nation state. With the private property they have not succeeded, but they continue on the path of destruction of the family and the nation.

The plan that failed in the East has been transferred to the West; Europeans and Moscow have worked together to implement the "convergence" of the "Common European Home". Prior to 1985, the Left was opposed to the European Community because it was saying that it helped the owners, industrialists, capitalists, and let down the workers. Then they made a U-turn.

“Socialist” for us is a term very different from “communist”. You seem to apply it to the Soviet paradigm as a synonym for “communist”.

No, socialism is the gradual and less violent form of communism, and socialist is the project of the European Union, which was born in Maastricht in 1992. The intent was to save socialism in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the predictable bankruptcy of the welfare state in the West as well. Welfare costs were growing and there was no way to counter them or stop them.

You can give benefits to people but cannot take them away without alienating a huge part of the population, because you do not get re-elected. So when leftist leaders realized that they were going into the red and that their socialist innovations in Europe would go belly up, they decided to create this administration of unelected people, who could not be sent home.

An administration that however already existed!

Before Maastricht there was no European Union. There was a common market, created to facilitate trade, movement of capital. That's why no one has had anything to object for so long. But in the mid-eighties, rather than an economic community they decided to set up a state. Before Maastricht they never said “union”, they were saying “community”. And they were not talking about it publicly.

Among your predictions for the EU-USSR there was also the gulag. Do you confirm it?

Unfortunately, yes. The EU is creating them slowly. The politically correct is imposed not by persuasion but by repression. In Britain just last month they jailed for hate speech a nineteen-year-old who had written something offensive on Twitter about a football player with black skin. He was sentenced to a month and a half in prison.

As nobody protests, they will gradually widen the net and eventually we will get the gulag. And remember that the European police force is granted immunity, something that was not granted even to the KGB!

Is Barack Obama not part of all this?

For now, Americans do not perceive the European Union, do not see where it is going. But America has a parallel special project, the American Union.

If the process includes the United States of America, what hope is there to stop this global government? It will fail, because it is too big to handle. It is impossible to govern such a huge entity. And notice that the most common resistance is not open, but passive: sabotage.

On the other side is Putin. I know that you have an entirely negative opinion of him, but times change and its strong ties with the Orthodox Church have meant that a few weeks ago Russia joined the majority of other nations in opposition to the United States and the countries of Western Europe on the subject of abortion. Thus Russia is, and has been for a while, a reference point for the Orthodox churches and also for the Catholic Church.

For that matter the same applies to Muslims, who on these issues make a common front at the UN with the Church, but in obedience to their own religion. This does not make them "good", because outside of this topic they are opposed to us as their enemies. It is one of the paradoxes of this world.

Minority German Children Bullied by Muslims in Their Own Schools

Just published on YouTube is a shocking video of discrimination against German and Christian children in German schools. They are severely bullied by Muslim kids in a school where immigrant children are an astonishing 96 percent. Hardly anybody speaks to them, they become introvert. They are outcasts, not integrated into the schools of their own land.

The reporter investigating this shameful situation interviews a boy who tells her how he was chased and attacked for saying that he does not believe in God, and a girl who says she is regularly insulted for being a Christian and called "You shit Christian".

The problem is not addressed by the school staff or the education authorities. The teachers even refuse to talk to the journalist in the video.

Indigenous and Christian children then become fearful even of reporting that they have been bullied to the teachers, not knowing how they will react (maybe they'll be called "racist"?).

The school councillor interviewed in the video admits that this causes real problems in children, like academic failure and refusal to return to school, and yet teachers are afraid to discuss it openly and reproach the Muslim bullies, lest they come "under immediate general suspicion of being against foreigners": and that's obviously anathema to them.

Cultural Marxists and liberals prefer to let their children grow up shy and socially inept than to risk fomenting "xenophobia" by openly discussing this scandal. They seem to be prepared to throw even their kids under the bus.

Some families move away closer to a different school. Do native Europeans have to leave their homes and cities to make way for Muslim immigrants? Many British people choose to go and live abroad and not just for the climate. Is this the future of Europe, or lack thereof?

The last kid interviewed in the video describes his plans for the future thus: "Move away from here to where there are Germans living and where one is left in peace".

Germany's Family Minister Kristina Schröder aknowledged the existence of this issue of children being bullied in schools just for being German as part of "a growing tendency to violence stemming from a 'macho culture' among young Muslim men".

The problem was highlighted in 2010 in the city of Essen by the German TV channel Das Erste:

"They're not threatened with a knife every day. but the children of immigration background clearly have their way here," says the school principal. The female teachers have to deal with students saying "don't speak to her, she's just a German slut."

"When it's Ramadan, there's a state of emergency. The last time it went so far, that they spit in our food," says the home-economics teacher. "People always say that foreigners are discriminated, but here it's precisely the other way around." A Lebanese Arabic teacher says that the German way of living is very clearly being rejected by his students, the attitude is almost chic.

The German children respond with aggression or by over-adapting their behavior. In the playground you find them in the corners. Sebastian, an ethnic German 16 year old, feels bullied by the Muslim students, and is often involved in fights. Juli is a friend of the devout Saleh from Palestine. She calls herself a Muslims, which means: no parties, no alcohol, no sex.

The teachers try to respond t the situation with clarity and by upholding German laws and regulations, but also by mother-tongue classes and understanding for the Lebanese.