Keep Government Out Of Your Home

People are free to use their homes for anything they desire so long as what they are doing is legal. Once law enforcement is aware of illegal activities then it is obligated to act. However, people are free to do anything in their own homes.

People can host Tupperware parties, scout meetings, Thanksgiving dinner, football parties, pool parties, wakes, bachelor parties, wedding receptions, Amway sales meetings, Homeowner’s Association meetings, socials and birthday parties.

Apparently, one can do all these in his home and have no problem (unless the activity disturbs the peace) but one thing that cannot be done, at least in Gilbert Arizona, is for church groups to meet in a private home. In Gilbert, members of the local church host Bible Study meetings in their homes on a rotating basis.

Those meetings have been put on hold as the legal system works out the process of what authority the town has to decide what legal things people can do in their own homes.

Good luck with that. People can do whatever they want in their homes including worshiping, holding Bible studies, and dying Easter Eggs and there is not a thing the government can do about it.

It is amazing that people are told what they can and cannot do in their own homes, the homes they are buying and paying for, and yet we as a society can’t tell people living in public housing to mow their own grass.

It is also a sure bet that if a group of Muslims were having meetings at a home they would not be bothered and if they were CAIR would be screaming about discrimination. After all, they have the right to build bomb vests in their own home and no one has the right to deny them that religious practice.

The folks in Gilbert AZ need to stand up to this and tell government to back off. What goes on in the home is none of government’s business.

Government is out of control…

SOurce:
WND

Share on Facebook

AP Slips in ‘Poverty’ as Reason For Nigerian Massacres

-By Warner Todd Huston

True to its fealty to left-wing, western pop psychology, the Associated Press thinks it knows one of the principle reasons why roving gangs of Muslims are hacking Christians to death and burning their villages to the ground in Nigeria: It’s “poverty.”

Liberals that struggle to understand why man is often so cruel to his fellows seem always to have assumed that poverty is a key factor in violence and crime, but rarely it is the factor that liberals assume it to be. Poverty is no picnic, but it is not the cause of crime and violence. It is more likely a symptom itself rather than a catalyst.

It’s a chicken and egg question, of course. What came first, the poverty or the crime? But the simple fact of the matter is that poverty is seen in every corner of the Earth, yet crime rates vary wildly from area to area and era to era. So, if poverty is constant and is the catalyst for crime, why doesn’t crime hold at a fairly constant rate? It seems pretty obvious that crime is not directly caused by poverty.

Poverty is caused by a myriad of factors. A lack of education, racism, government oppression, social factors and the like all create poverty. But these same factors also mitigate crime in some parts of the world.

Typically, however, the AP has decided that “poverty” has caused the religious-based violence in Nigeria. While poverty most certainly is a problem in Nigeria, it has changed so little for generations that I find it hard to believe that it could be a cause of this newest wave of violence.

The real cause is both religious and cultural. That poverty abounds in the region is of little difference to the cause of the violence. The clash is between Muslims from the north and Christians in the south. It’s a fight for cultural supremacy. Poverty doesn’t figure into it very much, when all is said and done.

Yet here is the AP presenting “poverty” as a “cause” of the violence as if it is fact. The truth is that “poverty” being a catalyst for crime is a pop psychology trope, not a fact.

It is not fact.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

What is a ‘Religious Extremist’? This Lefty Weekly Sure Doesn’t Know

-By Warner Todd Huston

For the Independent Weekly of Durham, North Carolina, writer Sam Wardle proves that he hasn’t a clue how the phrase “religious extremist” is properly defined. But, I’d suggest that his confusion is endemic in the far left and proves to show why so many in the west don’t understand how to face and defeat the real religious extremism of radical Islam.

In a story about Representative Sue Myrick (R, NC) and her association with The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools as juxtaposed with her condemnation of radical Islam, Wardle sees no difference between a radical Islamist that might blow himself up with a suicide vest or cut off the head of a helpless captive and a Christian American that wants to use properly constituted law to have the Holy Bible used in the classroom.

Certainly you can disagree with having the Bible used as a text in the classroom, but to say that a person that does want the Bible in the classroom is no better than a terrorist is, well, just plain stupid. It is also intellectually vapid. Unfortunately, Mr. Wardle is all too representative of the vapidity of the left that so often comes to this intellectually dishonest conclusion.

Wardle reveals his hatred of all things Christian in his IndyWeek piece titled, “For Rep. Sue Myrick, Islamic moderates are extreme, Christian extremists are moderate,” wherein he equates Rep. Myrick to a religious extremist.

Wardle starts his piece straight on with an attack on Rep. Myrick:

Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) is one of North Carolina’s staunchest defenders from Islamic extremism. When it comes to Christian extremism, though, the record is more mixed.

Wardle says that Myrick’s “defense against Islamic extremism” itself borders on the extreme.

Those are pretty serious charges, of course. So what does Wardle show as his proof to bear out the finger wagging at Myrick? One of the first of Wardle’s accusations would take an Olympic gymnast’s back-bending performance to agree with. In short it is weak as heck.

However, Myrick’s concern over religious extremism seems relegated to practitioners of one religion. At the forum, she pointedly avoided applying the label of “terrorist” to Joseph Stack, the 53-year-old Texan who flew his airplane into an IRS building in Austin in February.

Whether Stack should have been termed a terrorist by Myrick or not is one question, but what it has to do with the subject of religion is anyone’s guess. Austin IRS building attacker Joe Stack had no connection to any religion whatever. He did not perpetrate his act of terror in the name of religion so Wardle’s usage of Stack as his religious foil for Myrick is insensible. But such is Wardle’s hatred for both Myrick and Christianity that any stretch is excused, apparently.

Then Wardle goes on the attack against The NCBCPS, a “right-wing evangelical group” in Wardle’s terminology. Wardle reports that the NCBCPS’ goal is to “bring a state certified (sic) Bible course (elective) into the public high schools nationwide.” He says that the group claims that it has gotten its curriculum in 532 schools in 38 states.

Wardle counters that success by revealing that this group’s school texts have been criticized as containing “shoddy research, factual errors and plagiarism.” Wardle also lays out all the other groups and Media outlets that have attacked the veracity of the NCBCPS’ offerings.

But one thing is completely missing from Wardle’s piece. Any actual “extremism.” Apparently just the fact that the NCBCPS wants to get its curriculum in a school is enough to be classified just as extreme as al Qaeda to one such as Wardle.

But implicit in the whole discussion (but only implied because Wardle does not say it) is the fact that if the NCBCPS did get its curriculum in schools in 38 states it must have done so through the legitimate process of appealing to school boards and having those schools agree to accept the program. In other words, the NCBCPS followed the same legal procedure that every other education advocate has followed.

Notice how the NCBCPS didn’t win over those schools by cutting off administrator’s heads, bombing public buildings, or killing students thereby using intimidation and violence to get its way. So, while this Christian group is certainly seriously active, to act as if they are somehow just as extreme as Islamic Radicals is idiotic.

But this is the empty logic that befalls the far left in this country. Any religion, all religion is classified as “extreme” to these people. No logic need apply.

(Originally posted at BigJournalism.com)

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

Planned Parenthood Pushes Sexualization of Ten-Year-Olds

One indication that moonbattery is not just misguided but evil is that progressives have an obsession with corrupting children. This is why, under our Hopey Changey regime of pure moonbattery, our federal “Safe Schools Czar” is a militant pervert associated with NAMBLA. It’s also the reason for this:

A new report by the International Planned Parenthood Federation is advocating that children as young as 10 be given extensive sex education, including an awareness of sex’s pleasures.

This latest push to sexualize 10-year-olds provides yet another opportunity for moonbats to open fire on Christianity, which they once again equate with Islam. Complains the federally funded abortion mill’s report (PDF):

Young people’s sexuality is still contentious for many religious institutions. Fundamentalist and other religious groups the — Catholic Church and madrasas (Islamic schools) for example — have imposed tremendous barriers that prevent young people, particularly, from obtaining information and services related to sex and reproduction. Currently, many religious teachings deny the pleasurable and positive aspects of sex and limited guidelines for sexual education often focus on abstinence before marriage…

Understandably, since abstinence does not produce costumers, Planned Parenthood disapproves of it — even among children.

According to PP, their 10-year-old potential customers are “sexual beings” in need of “comprehensive sexuality education.” Therefore sex ed should present sexuality as a “positive force for change and development, as a source of pleasure, an embodiment of human rights and an expression of self.”

Michelle Turner, president of the Maryland-based Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum, notes that once again progressives are trying to shove parents out of the picture, the better to impose their social engineering. Ed Mechmann, spokesman for New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, observes that PP is attempting to undermine traditional values — and that PP makes money selling contraception and abortion.

Remember when moonbats launched a jihad against Joe Camel for allegedly tempting children to become smokers? Maybe old Joe should be brought back to advance a cause liberals seem to believe in — indiscriminate premature sex. The sooner kids get started, the more abortions they can have — and that means more profit for Planned Parenthood.

On a tip from Mega. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

Islamic radicalism blamed on “conservatism”

The stupid definition of conservatism as “opposition to change” is still something of a reality-defying mantra among Leftists — despite conservatives often being major agents of change — from Benjamin Disraeli to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. And if George Bush’s movement of American power into two countries of the Middle East is not a major policy change, I would like to know what would be. It is Obama who hasn’t changed that, for all his talk of change.

The idea of conservatives being opponents of change is quite laughable, in fact. Every single conservative that I have ever met has got a HEAP of things he would like to see changed in the society about him. Conservatives are opponents of the brainless ideas of Leftism but that is far from being opponents of change — much though Leftists might like to think otherwise.

But, in terms of the stupid Leftist definition, it does make some slight sense to describe Islamic fundamentalists as “conservative” — though one could argue much more reasonably that Islamists are in fact reactionaries: Far from opposing change they want the major change of a sudden and violent return to 7th century ways.

However you look at it, the violent authoritarianism advocated by Islamists has NOTHING in common with the individual liberty orientation of American conservatives. So it is just Leftist propaganda to claim some basic similarity between American Christian conservatives and Islamists. But calling Christian conservatives “Taleban” is in fact a fairly common Leftist form of abuse — dare I call it “hate speech”?

This is all brought to mind by the following academic journal article:

Arch.europ.sociol., L, 2 (2009), pp. 201-230.

Why are there so many Engineers among Islamic Radicals?

By Diego Gambetta & Steffen Hertog

Abstract

This article demonstrates that among violent Islamists engineers with a degree, individuals with an engineering education are three to four times more frequent than we would expect given the share of engineers among university students in Islamic countries.We then test a number of hypotheses to account for this phenomenon. We argue that a combination of two factors – engineers’ relative deprivation in the Islamic world and mindset – is the most plausible explanation.

SOURCE

It turns out that the “mindset” they identify is religious conservatism. In a summary of the article we read: “Statistical analysis of poll data on US faculty shows that the odds of being both religious and conservative are seven times greater for engineers relative to the odds of a social scientist. Engineering as a degree might also be more attractive to individuals seeking cognitive “closure” and clear cut answers – a disposition that has been empirically linked to conservative political attitudes.”

So they explicitly conflate American conservatism with the mindset that drives Jihadists. They also incidentally accept the junk-science claim that conservatives have a rigid cognitive style.

I am not going to comment on any of that right now. I already have a large historically-based paper on what is central to Anglo-Saxon conservatism here and I have a large number of academic journal articles on the claim that conservatives are mentally rigid oversimplifiers here.

But what I have said so far is criticism and there is an old axiom that bad science is driven out only by better science. So I am going to propose what I think is a better explanation of the phenomenon in question. I think it is all “cognitive dissonance”

It seems to me that engineers get intimately involved in a world of great rationality and logic. You can’t afford to let ideology dictate your design of a bridge, for instance, or the bridge might fall down. Christians are used to living in both worlds: The secular world about them and their private religious beliefs. But Muslims are not. The engineer’s mental world is quite opposed to the intense religiosity and scant regard for rationality that permeates the Muslim world. So the Muslim engineer is put into a situation of great conflict. He is thrown into a mental world that runs counter to all his religious assumptions and ways of thought. And sometimes he relieves the pressure of that — in psychologist’s terms he “reduces his cognitive dissonance” — by reasserting his Muslim identity in an explosive or extremist way. The violence of his reaction is a testimony to how great has been the dissonance and mental conflict he has been subjected to in an engineering environment

Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post