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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; morality</title>
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		<title>Why America Is in Jeopardy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dennis-prager/why-america-is-in-jeopardy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-america-is-in-jeopardy</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dennis-prager/why-america-is-in-jeopardy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 11 Jul 2014 04:00:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[christianity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[judaism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[morality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Religion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[secular]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=236041</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Secularization and its consequences. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/pic_giant_121713_SM_No-Ones-Watching-Prison-Rape-in-America.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236046" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/pic_giant_121713_SM_No-Ones-Watching-Prison-Rape-in-America-450x262.jpg" alt="pic_giant_121713_SM_No-Ones-Watching-Prison-Rape-in-America" width="258" height="150" /></a>On page 563 of his latest biography, &#8220;John Quincy Adams: American Visionary,&#8221; author Fred Kaplan (biographer of Abraham Lincoln, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and Gore Vidal among others) cites this insight of the sixth president:</p>
<p>&#8220;Christianity had, all in all, he believed, been a civilizing force, &#8216;checking and controlling the anti-social passions of man.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
<p>That insight is pretty much all an American needs to know in order to understand why the American Founders considered religion — specifically ethical monotheism rooted in the Hebrew Bible — indispensable to the American experiment, and why the America we have known since 1776 is in jeopardy.</p>
<p>It is easy to respect secular Americans who hold fast to the Constitution and to American values generally. And any one of us who believes in God can understand why some people, given all the unjust suffering in the world, just cannot believe that there is a Providential Being.</p>
<p>But one cannot respect the view that America can survive without the religious beliefs and values that shaped it. The argument that there are moral secularists and moral atheists is a non-sequitur. Of course there are moral Americans devoid of religion. So what? There were moral people who believed in Zeus. But an America governed by Roman religion would not be the America that has been the beacon of freedom and the greatest force for good in the world.</p>
<p>In order to understand why, one only need understand John Quincy Adams&#8217;s insight: How will we go about &#8220;checking and controlling the anti-social passions of man&#8221; without traditional American religious beliefs?</p>
<p>There are two possible responses:</p>
<p>One is that most Americans (or people generally, but we are talking about America here) do not have anti-social passions.</p>
<p>The other is that most Americans (again, like all other human beings) do have anti-social passions, but the vast majority of us can do a fine job checking and controlling them without religion as it has been practiced throughout American history.</p>
<p>These are the views with which virtually every American who attends secular high school or university is explicitly and implicitly indoctrinated.</p>
<p>Both are wrong. And not just wrong, but foolish — and lethal to the American experiment.</p>
<p>To deny that human beings are filled with anti-social passions betrays a denial of reality and a lack of self-awareness.</p>
<p>One has to be taught nonsense for a great many formative years to believe it.</p>
<p>If we weren&#8217;t born with anti-social passions — narcissism, envy, lust, meanness, greed, hunger for power, just to name the more obvious — why the need for so many laws, whether religious or secular, that govern behavior?</p>
<p>The second objection is that even if we do have anti-social passions, we don&#8217;t need a God or religion in order to control them. Only moral primitives, the argument goes, need either a judging God or a religious set of rules. The Enlightened can do fine without them and need only to consult their faculty of reason and conscience to know how to behave.</p>
<p>Our prisons are filled with people whose consciences are quite at peace with their criminal behavior. As for reason, they used it well — to figure out how to get away with everything from murder to white-collar crime.</p>
<p>But our prisons are not filled with religious Jewish and Christian murderers. On the contrary, if all Americans attended church weekly, we would need far fewer prisons, and the ones we needed would have very few murderers in them.</p>
<p>Meanwhile the record of the godless and Christianity-less crowd is awful. I am not simply referring to the godless and secular Communist regimes of the 20th century that committed virtually every genocide of that century. I am referring to those Americans (and Europeans) who use reason to argue, among other foolish things: that good and evil are subjective societal or individual opinions; that gender is purely a social construct and therefore the male and female distinction is of no importance; that marriage isn&#8217;t important — it is just a piece of paper and it was invented by the religious to keep women down; that a human fetus, even when it has a beating heart, a formed human body, and a conscious brain, has less right to life than a cat; and that men, let alone fathers, aren&#8217;t necessary (see, for example, The Atlantic Are Fathers Necessary? and the New York Times Men, Who Needs Them?). And that is a short list.</p>
<p>For proof of the moral and intellectual consequences of the secularization of America, look at what has happened to the least religious institution in America, the university.</p>
<p>Is that the future we want for the whole country?</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<item>
		<title>Spending and Morality</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/spending-and-morality/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=spending-and-morality</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/spending-and-morality/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Jul 2014 04:15:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[charity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Congress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[general welfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[morality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235828</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The curious practice of government theft for the "common good." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Government-Money.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235829" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Government-Money-426x350.jpg" alt="Government-Money" width="286" height="235" /></a>During last year&#8217;s budget negotiation meetings, President Barack Obama told House Speaker John Boehner, &#8220;We don&#8217;t have a spending problem.&#8221; When Boehner responded with &#8220;But, Mr. President, we have a very serious spending problem,&#8221; Obama replied, &#8220;I&#8217;m getting tired of hearing you say that.&#8221; In one sense, the president is right. What&#8217;s being called a spending problem is really a symptom of an unappreciated deep-seated national moral rot. Let&#8217;s examine it with a few questions.</p>
<p>Is it moral for Congress to forcibly use one person to serve the purposes of another? I believe that most Americans would pretend that to do so is offensive. Think about it this way. Suppose I saw a homeless, hungry elderly woman huddled on a heating grate in the dead of winter. To help the woman, I ask somebody for a $200 donation to help her out. If the person refuses, I then use intimidation, threats and coercion to take the person&#8217;s money. I then purchase food and shelter for the needy woman. My question to you: Have I committed a crime? I hope that most people would answer yes. It&#8217;s theft to take the property of one person to give to another.</p>
<p>Now comes the hard part. Would it be theft if I managed to get three people to agree that I should take the person&#8217;s money to help the woman? What if I got 100, 1 million or 300 million people to agree to take the person&#8217;s $200? Would it be theft then? What if instead of personally taking the person&#8217;s $200, I got together with other Americans and asked Congress to use Internal Revenue Service agents to take the person&#8217;s $200? The bottom-line question is: Does an act that&#8217;s clearly immoral when done privately become moral when it is done collectively and under the color of law? Put another way, does legality establish morality?</p>
<p>For most of our history, Congress did a far better job of limiting its activities to what was both moral and constitutional. As a result, federal spending was only 3 to 5 percent of the gross domestic product from our founding until the 1920s, in contrast with today&#8217;s 25 percent.</p>
<p>Close to three-quarters of today&#8217;s federal spending can be described as Congress taking the earnings of one American to give to another through thousands of handout programs, such as farm subsidies, business bailouts and welfare.</p>
<p>During earlier times, such spending was deemed unconstitutional and immoral. James Madison, the acknowledged father of our Constitution, said, &#8220;Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.&#8221; In 1794, when Congress appropriated $15,000 to assist some French refugees, Madison stood on the floor of the House of Representatives to object, saying, &#8220;I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.&#8221; Today&#8217;s Americans would crucify a politician expressing similar statements.</p>
<p>There may be nitwits out there who&#8217;d assert, &#8220;That James Madison guy forgot about the Constitution&#8217;s general welfare clause.&#8221; Madison had that covered, explaining in a letter, &#8220;If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the general welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one.&#8221; Thomas Jefferson agreed, writing: Members of Congress &#8220;are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare. &#8230; It would reduce the (Constitution) to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and, as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please.&#8221;</p>
<p>The bottom line is that spending is not our basic problem. We&#8217;ve become an immoral people demanding that Congress forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another. Deficits and runaway national debt are merely symptoms of that larger problem.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>A Young College Grad Calls My Show</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dennis-prager/a-young-college-grad-calls-my-show/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-young-college-grad-calls-my-show</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dennis-prager/a-young-college-grad-calls-my-show/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 30 May 2014 04:01:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[caller]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[college student]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[good vs. evil]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[morality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Syria]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Young]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=226433</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A look into the morally confused universe of the youth. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/1275923315_96962728_1-online-radio-host-required-multan-1275923315.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-226434 alignleft" alt="1275923315_96962728_1-online-radio-host-required-multan-1275923315" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/1275923315_96962728_1-online-radio-host-required-multan-1275923315.jpg" width="318" height="269" /></a>Last week, on my radio talk show, I received a call from Jeff, a 21-year-old in North Carolina. I have abridged it and edited it stylistically.</p>
<p>JEFF: I wanted to respond to your question about America being feared in the world. You brought up Syria. I think it&#8217;s a little naive, and maybe that&#8217;s not even the right word, to boil down such complex international issues into just good and bad. Like to say that America, for you, represents good. And to just boil down the Syria situation into good and bad is to underestimate the complexity of the situation. Because if the United States were to get involved there, you know, there might be consequences for us in that region that I think would be definitely more bad than good.</p>
<p>DP: Like what?</p>
<p>JEFF: If we were to depose Assad, there could be a power vacuum and that could create more problems than we intended.</p>
<p>DP: There are two separate questions here. One is: Should the United States be feared by bad regimes? The other is: What should the United States do? They&#8217;re not identical. So let&#8217;s deal with the first: Would you acknowledge that it would be good if countries like Putin&#8217;s Russia, Iran or North Korea &#8212; though I don&#8217;t compare Putin to North Korea &#8212; feared us? And do you think they do?</p>
<p>JEFF: I think that&#8217;s a really good question. If I had the answer to that I think I&#8217;d be secretary of state.</p>
<p>DP: It&#8217;s not that tough a question. What we should do is a tough question. But whether America should be feared by bad regimes is not a tough question.</p>
<p>Let me just throw in a tangential comment that I think is important: I presume you went to college.</p>
<p>JEFF: Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>DP: The reason I presume that you went to college is that you were taught &#8212; and this is no knock on you whatsoever since anyone who takes liberal arts courses, in political science in particular, is taught &#8212; what you just told me: You can&#8217;t divide between good and bad, because it&#8217;s too complex.</p>
<p>But that&#8217;s not accurate. There is a good and bad. Yes, sometimes there is bad and worse &#8212; in Syria today, for example. But between Syria and the United States the difference is between bad and good. Would you agree that it&#8217;s between bad and good between Syria and the United States?</p>
<p>JEFF: As an American, absolutely.</p>
<p>DP: Wait a minute. That&#8217;s a terrible answer. I don&#8217;t want you to answer me as an American. I want you to answer me as a moral human.</p>
<p>JEFF: I can only answer you as an American. I can&#8217;t answer you as anyone else.</p>
<p>DP: That&#8217;s not true. If I asked you how much two and two is, you wouldn&#8217;t answer me as an American.</p>
<p>JEFF: Here&#8217;s my only comment, I would just, you know, hesitate to boil down international issues of such complexity, with multiple variables, to, &#8220;It&#8217;s simply good or bad.&#8221; And that&#8217;s my only comment.</p>
<p>DP: Thank you for calling.</p>
<p>What Jeff said is what I was taught at college. It is heartbreaking to hear how effective left-wing college indoctrination continues to be, with its morally obfuscating concepts such as &#8220;too complex.&#8221;</p>
<p>The morally obvious fact is that the United States is overwhelmingly a force for good both in the world and within its borders, and Syria is overwhelmingly a force for evil both in the world and within its borders. Yet, colleges have taught for at least two generations that such judgments are illegitimate.</p>
<p>If you want to judge whether Sweden or Denmark is better, that&#8217;s complex. Or whether Iran or Syria is more evil. That, too, is complex. But between Denmark and Syria, there is no moral complexity.</p>
<p>The other revealing comment my caller made was that he could only say &#8220;as an American&#8221; that America was a better country than Syria.</p>
<p>This, too, reflects a fundamental left-wing doctrine taught at colleges &#8212; that there are no moral truths, and we can only subjectively observe the world as members of a group. There are, therefore, black truths, white truths, rich truths, poor truths, male truths, female truths. Accordingly, for example, since men do not get pregnant, they cannot morally judge abortion.</p>
<p>To Jeff&#8217;s credit, he listens to a radio show that so differs from what he was taught in college. There is therefore some hope that he will eventually realize how much nonsense he was taught at college. Dangerous nonsense.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>Illiberal &#8216;Liberalism&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/illiberal-liberalism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=illiberal-liberalism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/illiberal-liberalism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 01 May 2014 04:50:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democratic Party]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Fred Siegel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[middle class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[morality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressive]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Revolt Against the Masses]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224511</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Fred Siegel's new book exposes the history of the Left's hatred of ordinary Americans -- and its commitment to tyranny. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/41eaIef4eCL.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-224513" alt="41eaIef4eCL" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/41eaIef4eCL-233x350.jpg" width="186" height="280" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/175281">Hoover Institution</a>. </em></p>
<p>During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama let slip his disdain for the middle-class when he explained his lack of traction among such voters. “It’s not surprising then,” Obama said, “that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” More recently, U.S. Senate candidate Bruce Braley mocked his opponent incumbent Chuck Grassley as “a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school.” The liberal disdain for ordinary Americans has been around for a long time. Beneath the populist rhetoric and concern for the middle class that lace the campaign speeches of most liberal politicians, there lurks a palpable disgust, and often contempt, for the denizens of “flyover country,” that land of God, guns, religion, and traditional beliefs.</p>
<p>In <em>Revolt Against the Masses</em>, the Manhattan Institute senior fellow and <em>New York Post </em>columnist Fred Siegel presents a clearly written and engaging historical narrative of how nearly a century ago this strain of illiberal liberalism began to take over the Democratic Party. Along the way he also provides an excellent political history of the period that illuminates the “ugly blend of sanctimony, self-interest, and social-connections” lying at the heart of liberalism today.</p>
<p>Siegel begins with a valuable survey of the “progenitors,” the early twentieth-century thinkers and writers whose ideas shaped the liberal ideology. Those who know English writer H. G. Wells only as an early pioneer of science-fiction novels may be surprised to find how popular and widely read in America his philosophical and political writings were in the first few decades of the century. Wells’s 1901 <em>Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought</em> laid out the argument for a quasi-aristocratic elite of technocrats free of traditional values such as “monogamy, faith in God &amp; respectability,” all of which Wells’s book “was designed to undermine and destroy,” as he frankly admitted. Applying Darwinism to social, political, and economic life, Wells envisioned, as Siegel explains, “scientist-poets and engineers” who would “seize the reins in the Darwinian struggle,” so that instead of “descending into savagery, we would follow their lead toward new and higher ground.” In Wells’s work we see the melding of attacks on traditional authority and middle-class morality, with the scientistic faith in technocratic elites that still characterizes modern liberalism.</p>
<p>Wells’s kindred American spirit was Progressive theorist Herbert Croly, whose 1901 <em>The Promise of American Life </em>Siegel calls the “first political manifesto of modern American liberalism.” Croly “rejected American tradition, with its faith in the Constitution and its politics of parties and courts, and argued for rebuilding America’s foundation on higher spiritual and political principles that would transcend traditional ideas of democracy and self-government.”</p>
<p>As much as Wells, or for that matter Mussolini and Lenin, Croly “wanted the collective power of society put ‘at the service of its ablest members,’ who would take the lead roles in the drama of social re-creation.” Similarly, leftist intellectual Randolph Bourne wondered “whether there aren’t advantages in having administration of the State taken care of by a scientific body of men with social sense.” Bourne seasoned his antidemocratic elitism with a romantic idealization of “Youth,” which was a time when the ideals “will be the highest…the insight the clearest, the ideas the most stimulating,” an early example of the worship of adolescents that exploded in the 1960s and is still felt in our culture today. And perhaps most famously, journalist H.L. Mencken serially displayed his contempt for the American people, whom he called a “rabble of ignorant peasants.”</p>
<p>In Siegel’s reading, modern liberalism was midwifed in the 1920s by the break with Progressivism over Woodrow Wilson’s decision to take the United States into World War I, and the “wartime conscription, the repression of civil liberties, Prohibition, and the overwrought fears of Bolshevism in America.” The scorn of patriotism and the American masses, brutally described by Mencken as a “timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob,” became the default sensibility of litterateurs, journalists, and intellectuals alike, who viewed “American society and democracy” as “agents of repression,” sentiments that “deepened during the 1920s and have been an ongoing current in liberalism ever since.” The influential literary manifestation of this prejudice remains Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 bestseller <em>Main Street</em>, which along with <em>Babbitt </em>two years later fixed the caricature of Middle America uncritically endorsed by liberals nearly a century later.</p>
<p>Siegel moves briskly through the subsequent events and developments that seemingly legitimized liberal bigotry against the middle class as objective history. The 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial, a “contrivance from the start,” as Siegel writes, and immortalized in the historically challenged 1955 Broadway hit <em>Inherit the Wind</em>, established the meme of the brave and noble man of “science” battling slack-jawed, oppressive Christian fundamentalists. This cliché predictably surfaces in liberal commentary on issues ranging from teaching Darwinian evolution, to the validity of global warming. In the 1930s idolizing the Soviet Union and communism, a reflex of liberal disdain for capitalism and its déclassé obsession with getting and spending, began its long march through American culture and education.</p>
<p>A corollary to this admiration has been the fervent liberal belief that America is to some degree “fascist,” and in imminent danger of becoming a fascist state, a preposterous notion made famous by Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel <em>It Can’t Happen Here</em>. This hoary received wisdom has managed to survive the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of its archives, which established beyond doubt that Communist subversion and infiltration of America’s institutions were in fact by far a greater threat to democracy than a fascist takeover. Despite that history, in 2004 Philip Roth published <em>The Plot Against America</em>, which indulged to high praise the same long-exploded fantasy.</p>
<p>Particularly valuable are Siegel’s brief portraits of once prominent liberal commentators and critics like Arthur Schlesinger, whose influence lives in the “aristocratic aping of professional liberals who expect, given their putative expertise, to be obeyed.” They refined and perpetuated the old caricature of Americanism “as the mass pursuit of prosperity by an energetic but crude, grasping people chasing their private ambitions without the benefit of a clerisy to guide them,” enslaved to “their futile quest for material well-being, and numbed by the popular entertainments that appealed to the lowest common denominator.” In the 1950s, the liberal critic Dwight Macdonald groused of a America blessed with “money, leisure and knowledge” that had merely given the average American “masscult” and “midcult,” the vulgar “American culture of the cheap newspaper, the movies, the popular song, the ubiquitous automobile,” fit fare for the “hordes of men and women without a spiritual country . . . without taste, without standards but those of the mob.”</p>
<p>Yet as Siegel points out, this same period saw an explosion in the numbers of average people studying and experiencing the artistic and literary masterpieces of Western civilization. Local symphony orchestras increased by 250 percent between 1940 and 1955, and in that same year “35 million paid to attend classical-music concerts. The New York Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday-afternoon radio broadcast drew a listenership of 15 million,” almost 10 percent of the population. Fifty million televisions viewers watched Laurence Olivier in <em>Richard III</em>, book-sales doubled, and paperback versions of highbrow novels like Saul Bellow’s <em>The Adventures of Augie March</em> or non-fiction works like anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s <em>Patterns of Culture</em> became bestsellers. Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins introduced the pricey Great Books series, which by 1951 was being purchased by 50,000 Americans a year, who met in 2,500 Great Books groups to talk about the classics of Western civilization. As Siegel mordantly observes, “<em>This</em>was the danger against which critics of mass culture, inflamed with indignation, arrayed themselves against.”</p>
<p>Siegel’s survey ends with the presidency of Barack Obama. As <em>The</em> <em>Revolt Against the Masses</em> comes to a close, the policies and philosophy of Obama’s administration––best represented by the Affordable Care Act–– will strike the reader as the inevitable culmination of the ideological development Siegel has skillfully traced. The liberal elite’s disdain for a middle America of businessmen and churchgoers, which has always been linked to an uncritical admiration for Europe, has with Obama’s reelection created a political order teetering on the edge of fiscal collapse: “[Liberalism’s] sustained assault on the private-sector middle class and the ideals of self-restraint and self-government have, particularly in the blue states, succeeded all too well in achieving the dream of the 1920s literary Bolsheviks: an increasingly Europeanized class structure for America.”</p>
<p>One might argue with Siegel’s assertion of the “sharp break” between Progressivism and liberalism. On foreign policy this disagreement is obvious, and the liberals’ endorsement of illiberal identity politics in the 1960s would have horrified old-school Progressives, who were Darwinian eugenicists anxious over being swamped by the inferior races. The Progressives, even more than the liberals, disdained the masses, viewing them as an abstract collectivist “people,” Woodrow Wilson’s ideal “single community, co-operative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive.” This conception of the “people” ignored the great variety of regional, sectional, and religious identities, Madisonian factions, and clashing interests comprising flesh-and-blood Americans.</p>
<p>Progressives, moreover, like liberals homogenized and nationalized those various interests and aims as these were defined and chosen by techno-political elites. One hears H. G. Wells’s and Randolph Bourne’s impatience with democratic self-rule and preference for a managerial elite in Wilson’s call to “open for the public a bureau of skilled, economical administration,” comprising the “hundreds who are wise” empowered to guide the “thousands” who are “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.” What liberalism shares with the Progressives––the “living” Constitution, big government, regulation of the economy, and the redistribution of property to achieve “social justice”––far outweighs their differences.</p>
<p><em>The Revolt Against the Masses</em> is an important book, a first-rate intellectual history that clearly and crisply explains much of the political and cultural dysfunctions roiling the United States today. Siegel’s well-researched analysis of the liberal abandonment of self-government and individual freedom–– a betrayal of the Constitutional order justified in the main by social prejudice, class snobbery, and bad Continental philosophy––is a brilliant exposition of a century of bad ideas that have led to today’s bloated Leviathan state, these days on track to bankrupt the treasury and diminish our freedom.</p>
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		<title>The New York Times: America Sucks</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dennis-prager/the-new-york-times-america-sucks/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-new-york-times-america-sucks</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 16 Oct 2013 04:02:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[genocide]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Japan]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=207571</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Rwanda, Nazi Germany, America: what's the difference? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ny-times-building.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-207572" alt="ny-times-building" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ny-times-building-450x299.jpg" width="270" height="179" /></a>This past Saturday, the New York Times published an article, &#8220;Behind Flurry of Killing, Potency of Hate,&#8221; on the roots of monstrous evil. The article largely concerned a former paramilitary member of the Irish Republican Army, and as such was informative.</p>
<p>But when it ventured into a larger discussion of evil, the moral confusion and contempt for America that characterize leftism were on display.</p>
<p>The article contains a breathtaking paragraph that exemplifies both qualities. After noting that atrocities against groups of people are often the result of the dehumanization of the victimized group, the writer gives four such examples:</p>
<p>&#8220;The Hutus in Rwanda called the Tutsis cockroaches, the Nazis depicted the Jews as rats. Japanese invaders referred to their Chinese victims during the Nanjing massacre as &#8216;chancorro,&#8217; or &#8216;subhuman.&#8217; American soldiers fought barbarian &#8216;Huns&#8217; in World War I and godless &#8216;gooks&#8217; in Vietnam.&#8221;</p>
<p>This paragraph is noteworthy for its use of false moral equivalence to justify its anti-Americanism.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s begin with the moral equivalence — equating how the Hutus viewed and treated the Tutsis, how the Nazis viewed and treated the Jews, and how the Japanese viewed and treated the Chinese with the Americans&#8217; views and treatment of the Germans in World War I and Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.</p>
<p>In 1994, over the course of about 100 days, Hutus slaughtered between half a million and a million Tutsis. This was not a war between armies, but against a civilian population marked for extinction.</p>
<p>The Nazis murdered about six million Jews, all of whom were civilians. Indeed more than a million were children. The Nazis had targeted the Jews for extinction.</p>
<p>The Japanese likewise slaughtered Chinese civilians en masse and regarded the Chinese as so subhuman as to be worthy of being systematically experimented upon in ghoulish medical experiments that paralleled those of the Nazis.</p>
<p>What do any of those examples have to do with Americans fighting in World War I or in Vietnam?</p>
<p>Nothing.</p>
<p>Absolutely nothing about these other three examples applied to America in World War I or in Vietnam.</p>
<p>Nicknames — even derogatory ones — for enemies have probably been used in every war by every nation&#8217;s soldiers. That is not at all the same as a serious view of another racial or national group as unworthy of life, as subhuman.</p>
<p>Unlike any of the other examples, Americans did not have a term that — by definition — meant that Germans or Vietnamese were not members of the human race, as are &#8220;cockroaches,&#8221; &#8220;rats&#8221; and &#8220;subhumans.&#8221;</p>
<p>Unlike any of the other examples, the killing by Americans in World War I and Vietnam was confined to war. No war, no killing. The Nazi and Hutu examples had nothing to do with waging war. The Tutsis and Jews were targeted for annihilation, period. And the Japanese committing of hundreds of thousands rapes, tortures, and medical experiments on Chinese civilians — such as cutting them open without anesthetic or freezing people&#8217;s limbs and then cutting them off, also without an anesthetic — had nothing to do with war aims.</p>
<p>Moreover, what does &#8220;godless&#8221; have to do with subhuman categories? Again, nothing. Why, then, was it included in this article — &#8220;godless &#8216;gooks&#8217;&#8221;? Because the Times writer wanted to render the term &#8220;godless&#8221; as offensive as the term &#8220;subhuman.&#8221; Being largely godless itself, and aiming for a godless West, the left detested the right&#8217;s calling Communism &#8220;godless&#8221; — even though Communists were vocal and proud of their godlessness.</p>
<p>Lumping America&#8217;s actions in those two wars with the other three examples is typical of the left&#8217;s defamation of America and of its facile use of false moral equivalence.</p>
<p>But that is how a generation of Americans who have attended college — including most likely the Times author herself — have been taught to think. And that is what is taught to your child today at the left&#8217;s seminaries, our universities:</p>
<p>Nazis, Hutu murderers, Japanese rapists, Americans at war: All pretty much the same.</p>
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		<title>A Response to Richard Dawkins</title>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 01 Oct 2013 04:12:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The truth about morality that the famed atheist will not admit. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/richard_dawkins_2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-205867" alt="Description=Richard Dawkins Photograph: Jeremy Young 05-12-2006" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/richard_dawkins_2-444x350.jpg" width="311" height="245" /></a>This past Friday CNN conducted an interview with Richard Dawkins, the British biologist most widely known for his polemics against religion and on behalf of atheism.</p>
<p>Asked &#8220;whether an absence of religion would leave us without a moral compass,&#8221; Dawkins responded: &#8220;The very idea that we get a moral compass from religion is horrible.&#8221;</p>
<p>This is the crux of the issue for Dawkins and other anti-religion activists — that not only do we not need religion or God for morality, but we would have a considerably more moral world without them.</p>
<p>This argument is so wrong — both rationally and empirically &#8211; that its appeal can only be explained by a) a desire to believe it and b) an ignorance of history.</p>
<p>First, the rational argument.</p>
<p>If there is no God, the labels &#8220;good&#8221; and &#8220;evil&#8221; are merely opinions. They are substitutes for &#8220;I like it&#8221; and &#8220;I don&#8217;t like it.&#8221; They are not objective realities.</p>
<p>Every atheist philosopher I have debated has acknowledged this. For example, at Oxford University I debated Professor Jonathan Glover, the British philosopher and ethicist, who said: &#8220;Dennis started by saying that I hadn&#8217;t denied his central contention that if there isn&#8217;t a God, there is only subjective morality. And that&#8217;s absolutely true.&#8221;</p>
<p>And the eminent Princeton philosopher Richard Rorty admitted that for secular liberals such as himself, &#8220;there is no answer to the question, &#8216;Why not be cruel?&#8217;&#8221;</p>
<p>Atheists like Dawkins who refuse to acknowledge that without God there are only opinions about good and evil are not being intellectually honest.</p>
<p>None of this means that only believers in God can be good or that atheists cannot be good. There are bad believers and there are good atheists. But this fact is irrelevant to whether good and evil are real.</p>
<p>To put this as clearly as possible: If there is no God who says, &#8220;Do not murder,&#8221; murder is not wrong. Many people or societies may agree that it is wrong. But so what? Morality does not derive from the opinion of the masses. If it did, then apartheid was right; murdering Jews in Nazi Germany was right; the history of slavery throughout the world was right; and clitoridectomies and honor killings are right in various Muslims societies.</p>
<p>So, then, without God, why is murder wrong?</p>
<p>Is it, as Dawkins argues, because reason says so?</p>
<p>My reason says murder is wrong, just as Dawkins&#8217;s reason does. But, again, so what? The pre-Christian Germanic tribes of Europe regarded the Church&#8217;s teaching that murder was wrong as preposterous. They reasoned that killing innocent people was acceptable and normal because the strong should do whatever they wanted.</p>
<p>In addition, reason alone without God is pretty weak in leading to moral behavior.</p>
<p>When self-interest and reason collide, reason usually loses. That&#8217;s why we have the word &#8220;rationalize&#8221; — to use reason to argue for what is wrong.</p>
<p>What would reason argue to a non-Jew asked by Jews to hide them when the penalty for hiding a Jew was death? It would argue not to hide those Jews.</p>
<p>In that regard, let&#8217;s go to the empirical argument.</p>
<p>Years ago, I interviewed Pearl and Sam Oliner, two professors of sociology at California State University at Humboldt and the authors of one of the most highly-regarded works on altruism, The Altruistic Personality. The book was the product of the Oliners&#8217; lifetime of study of non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust.</p>
<p>The Oliners, it should be noted, are secular, not religious, Jews; they had no religious agenda.</p>
<p>I asked Samuel Oliner, &#8220;Knowing all you now know about who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, if you had to return as a Jew to Poland and you could knock on the door of only one person in the hope that they would rescue you, would you knock on the door of a Polish lawyer, a Polish doctor, a Polish artist or a Polish priest?&#8221;</p>
<p>Without hesitation, he said, &#8220;a Polish priest.&#8221; And his wife immediately added, &#8220;I would prefer a Polish nun.&#8221;</p>
<p>That alone should be enough to negate the pernicious nonsense that God is not only unnecessary for a moral world, but is detrimental to one.</p>
<p>But if that isn&#8217;t enough, how about the record of the godless 20th century, the cruelest, bloodiest, most murderous century on record? Every genocide of the last century — except for the Turkish mass murder of the Armenians and the Pakistani mass murder of Hindus in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) was committed by a secular anti-Jewish and anti-Christian regime. And as the two exceptions were Muslim, they are not relevant to my argument. I am arguing for the God and Bible of Judeo-Christian religions.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most powerful proof of the moral decay that follows the death of God is the Western university and its secular intellectuals. Their moral record has been loathsome. Nowhere were Stalin and Mao as venerated as they were at the most anti-religious and secular institutions in Western society, the universities. Nowhere in the West today is anti-Americanism and Israel-hatred as widespread as it is at universities. And Princeton University awarded its first tenured professorship in bioethics to Peter Singer, an atheist who has argued, among other things, that that &#8220;the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog or a chimpanzee&#8221; and that bestiality is not immoral.</p>
<p>Dawkins and his supporters have a right to their atheism. They do not have a right to intellectual dishonesty about atheism.</p>
<p>I have debated the best known atheists, including the late Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Lawrence Krauss (&#8220;A Universe from Nothing&#8221;) and Daniel Dennett. Only Richard Dawkins has refused to come on my radio show.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Richard Dawkins’ Amateur Philosopher Syndrome</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jack-kerwick/richard-dawkins-amateur-philosophy-syndrome/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=richard-dawkins-amateur-philosophy-syndrome</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Mar 2013 04:20:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Abortion]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Richard Dawkins]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=182497</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A look at the self-delusion of scientists who appoint themselves authorities on religion and morality.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jack-kerwick/richard-dawkins-amateur-philosophy-syndrome/descriptionrichard-dawkins-photograph-jeremy-young-05-12-2006/" rel="attachment wp-att-182619"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-182619" title="Description=Richard Dawkins Photograph: Jeremy Young 05-12-2006" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/richard_dawkins_2-450x333.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="200" /></a>Richard Dawkins is a scientist who is apparently either extraordinarily bored with his discipline, or hopelessly oblivious to its limits.</p>
<p>From his tireless defenses of atheism to his recent tweet on abortion, Dawkins, you see, spends very little time, it seems, sticking to what he knows.  Instead, he is busy away treating his background in science as the supreme credential for making pronouncements on all matters religious and moral.</p>
<p>Dawkins’ is a textbook case of Amateur Philosopher Syndrome (APS)—the delusion that because one is an expert on the physical, one is an expert on the <em>meta</em>physical—the stuff that scientists have traditionally left to the philosophers and theologians to study.</p>
<p>Just this past weekend, he got people talking about him after he fired off a tweet regarding abortion in which he said that “any fetus is less human than an adult pig.”</p>
<p>When a biologist, as a biologist, uses the term “human,” we expect for it to refer to that which is, well, biologically human.  A human fetus, then, is obviously more human than a pig, for the latter isn’t human at all.  Dawkins, however, uses “human” here in a moral sense, for he is interested in showing that abortion is permissible. “‘Human’ features relevant to the morality of abortion,” he tweets, “include [the] ability to feel pain, fear etc &amp; to be mourned by others.”</p>
<p>To be clear, there is nothing in the least bit scientific or descriptive about Dawkins’ comments on this score.  His training in science no more qualifies him to speak to the moral standing of abortion than does a person’s experience as a janitor or a dishwasher endow him with any special authority to do the same.</p>
<p>And his handling of the abortion issue shows this in spades.</p>
<p>Dawkins reasons here as if what he’s said hasn’t been said thousands of times over by abortion apologists.  Worse, he proceeds as if he was utterly ignorant of the fact that even those philosophers who have used his argument have conceded that it is fraught with pitfalls.  This ignorance, though, is a common symptom of APS.</p>
<p>If Dawkins is correct and an entity is human only if it is sentient (able “to feel pain, fear etc.) and “be mourned by others,” then our duties to pigs, rats, bats, and all sorts of other animals are no different than those that we owe to one another, for all of these are sentient and, in the right contexts, capable of being enjoyed and mourned by others. Furthermore, those members of the human race who are less sensitive to pain than others must thereby be deemed less human than others, and those humans whose sufferings or death fail to elicit the sympathies of their fellows must then be relegated to the ranks of the non-human.</p>
<p>This is where Dawkins’ logic leads.  But afflicted as he is with APS, Dawkins apparently hasn’t thought it through.</p>
<p>Dawkins’ position on abortion is just as amateurish as his stance on the question of theism, belief in God’s existence.  Not unlike most people, Dawkins thinks that science has it within itself the ability to undermine belief in God’s existence. This is probably the one big blunder of which both theist and atheist alike are guilty. The reality is that science can no more disprove <em>or prove </em>God’s existence than can a painting of the ocean establish the number of gallons that the ocean contains.</p>
<p>In short, in <em>theory </em>science has no bearing on religion, for each speaks to a world separate from the other.</p>
<p>The world of the scientist is an abstraction.  It consists of causes and effects, bodies, structures, processes, material forces, objects and categories of various sorts—e.g. genera and species, etc.  By definition, this is a “natural”—a purely natural—world, a universe that doesn’t allow for <em>any </em>intelligence or mind that isn’t ultimately reducible to matter in motion.  The methods of science ensure this.</p>
<p>In contrast, the world of religion (and morality) is comprised of, not causes, but reasons; not matter, but mind; not objects, but subjects; not forces and processes, but intentions and purposes.  It is a world of believers and unbelievers, moral agents and moral patients, virtues, vices, duties, rights, good and evil.</p>
<p>In conflating these two worlds into one, Dawkins destroys them both.  In bringing morality and religion before the tribunal of science, Dawkins betrays an astonishing ignorance of the characters of morality, religion, and science.</p>
<p>This, though, is exactly what we should expect from one ravaged by Amateur Philosopher Syndrome.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Immoral Beyond Redemption</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/walter-williams/immoral-beyond-redemption/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=immoral-beyond-redemption</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/walter-williams/immoral-beyond-redemption/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 06 Jun 2012 04:00:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[charity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[force]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Money]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[morality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=133961</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Is forcibly taking the property of one person to give to another ever ethical? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/state-income-tax-1.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-134013" title="state-income-tax-1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/state-income-tax-1.gif" alt="" width="375" height="241" /></a>Benjamin Franklin, statesman and signer of our Declaration of Independence, said: &#8220;Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.&#8221; John Adams, another signer, echoed a similar statement: &#8220;Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.&#8221; Are today&#8217;s Americans virtuous and moral, or have we become corrupt and vicious? Let&#8217;s think it through with a few questions.</p>
<p>Suppose I saw an elderly woman painfully huddled on a heating grate in the dead of winter. She&#8217;s hungry and in need of shelter and medical attention. To help the woman, I walk up to you using intimidation and threats and demand that you give me $200. Having taken your money, I then purchase food, shelter and medical assistance for the woman. Would I be guilty of a crime? A moral person would answer in the affirmative. I&#8217;ve committed theft by taking the property of one person to give to another.</p>
<p>Most Americans would agree that it would be theft regardless of what I did with the money. Now comes the hard part. Would it still be theft if I were able to get three people to agree that I should take your money? What if I got 100 people to agree — 100,000 or 200 million people? What if instead of personally taking your money to assist the woman, I got together with other Americans and asked Congress to use Internal Revenue Service agents to take your money? In other words, does an act that&#8217;s clearly immoral and illegal when done privately become moral when it is done legally and collectively? Put another way, does legality establish morality? Before you answer, keep in mind that slavery was legal; apartheid was legal; the Nazi&#8217;s Nuremberg Laws were legal; and the Stalinist and Maoist purges were legal. Legality alone cannot be the guide for moral people.</p>
<p>The moral question is whether it&#8217;s right to take what belongs to one person to give to another to whom it does not belong.</p>
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		<title>Should We Obey All Laws?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/walter-williams/should-we-obey-all-laws/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=should-we-obey-all-laws</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/walter-williams/should-we-obey-all-laws/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 15 May 2012 04:01:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Constitutional]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[morality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Supreme Court]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=132059</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What to do if ObamaCare is upheld by the Supreme Court.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/law-books2.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-132060" title="law-books2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/law-books2.gif" alt="" width="375" height="256" /></a>Let&#8217;s think about whether all acts of Congress deserve our respect and obedience. Suppose Congress enacted a law — and the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional — requiring American families to attend church services at least three times a month. Should we obey such a law? Suppose Congress, acting under the Constitution&#8217;s commerce clause, enacted a law requiring motorists to get eight hours of sleep before driving on interstate highways. Its justification might be that drowsy motorists risk highway accidents and accidents affect interstate commerce. Suppose you were a jury member during the 1850s and a free person were on trial for assisting a runaway slave, in clear violation of the Fugitive Slave Act. Would you vote to convict and punish?</p>
<p>A moral person would find each one of those laws either morally repugnant or to be a clear violation of our Constitution. You say, &#8220;Williams, you&#8217;re wrong this time. In 1859, in Ableman v. Booth, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 constitutional.&#8221; That court decision, as well as some others in our past, makes my case. Moral people can&#8217;t rely solely on the courts to establish what&#8217;s right or wrong. Slavery is immoral; therefore, any laws that support slavery are also immoral. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, &#8220;to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions (is) a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.&#8221;</p>
<p>Soon, the Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of Obamacare, euphemistically titled the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. There is absolutely no constitutional authority for Congress to force any American to enter into a contract to buy any good or service. But if the court rules that Obamacare is constitutional, what should we do?</p>
<p>State governors and legislators ought to summon up the courage of our Founding Fathers in response to the 5th Congress&#8217; Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798.</p>
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		<title>Are Evangelicals or University Professors More Irrational?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/dennis-prager/are-evangelicals-or-university-professors-more-irrational/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=are-evangelicals-or-university-professors-more-irrational</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/dennis-prager/are-evangelicals-or-university-professors-more-irrational/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Oct 2011 04:14:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Afternoon Edition]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[evangelical christians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Global Warming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[homosexuality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[morality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York Times]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=110079</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Society pays a greater price for tolerating the Left's moral bankruptcy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/religion_politics-sign1.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-110080" title="religion_politics-sign1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/religion_politics-sign1.gif" alt="" width="375" height="249" /></a></p>
<p>Last week, The New York Times published an opinion piece by Karl W. Giberson and Randall J. Stephens, a physics professor and history professor at Eastern Nazarene College, respectively. The authors take evangelicals to task for being anti-intellectual, anti-reason and anti-science. Their evidence:</p>
<p>— Evangelicals doubt man-made global warming,</p>
<p>— Evangelicals believe that gays can &#8220;pray away&#8221; their homosexuality.</p>
<p>— Evangelicals believe Earth is only thousands of years old and that men lived alongside dinosaurs.</p>
<p>— Evangelicals oppose same-sex marriage.</p>
<p>Given how often they are made, it&#8217;s worth analyzing these charges.</p>
<p>With regard to man-made global warming, the accusation that all skeptics are anti-science is despicable and, indeed, anti-science. The list of prominent scientists who dissent — including the scientist widely considered the dean of climate science in America, Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — is so long that there are entire websites that feature their names and credentials: There&#8217;s a Wikipedia page titled &#8220;List of Scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming&#8221; and a website called PetitionProject.org.</p>
<p>The authors of the Times op-ed piece, like virtually all other left-wing intellectuals who comment on the subject, dismiss all skepticism regarding the Al Gore hypothesis that humanity is headed toward a worldwide apocalypse due to heat resulting from man-made carbon emissions. This is a reflection on these intellectuals&#8217; politics, not on their commitment to science.</p>
<p>With regard to &#8220;praying away&#8221; homosexuality — if it is indeed the normative evangelical position that all gays, with the right faith, can cease being sexually attracted to the same sex — that position is wrong. But to the best of my knowledge, that is not the normative evangelical position; evangelicals believe that no more than they believe that prayer alone will end any undesired physical condition.</p>
<p>At the same time, the opposite position — the position of nearly all the liberal intellectual world — that everyone&#8217;s sexual orientation is fixed is a position also driven by ideology rather than by science. Society has a huge influence on how people act out their sexuality, including the gender of person with whom they choose to be sexual. Human sexuality — especially female — is far more elastic than the intellectual community admits. And the widespread liberal belief that, all things being equal, it makes no difference whether a child is raised by a mother and father or by two fathers or two mothers is hardly rational. On the issue of homosexuality, the intellectual left is just as driven by ideology as evangelicals.</p>
<p>With regard to those evangelicals — and for that matter, those ultra-orthodox Jews — who believe that Earth is less than 10,000 years old and that there either were no dinosaurs or that they lived alongside human beings, my reaction has always been: So what? I believe that Earth is many millions of years old, that &#8220;six days&#8221; is meant as six periods of time (the sun wasn&#8217;t even created until the third day, so how could there have been any days before then?) and that dinosaurs preexisted man by millions of years.</p>
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		<title>Tolerance for Terror</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/tolerance-for-terror/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=tolerance-for-terror</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/tolerance-for-terror/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 27 Jan 2010 05:08:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[appropriate response]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[cultural relativism]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[due recognition]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[howard rotberg]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47754</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the Obama administration resists the appropriate response to the threats to our freedoms and lives.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47758" title="Obama 2008" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/obaman1.jpg" alt="Obama 2008" width="450" height="335" /></p>
<p>Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Howard Rotberg, an author of several books who has just released his latest book, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tolerism-Ideology-Revealed-Howard-Rotberg/dp/0973406526">Tolerism: The Ideology Revealed</a></em> (Mantua Books). He blogs at <a href="http://secondgenerationradical.blogmatrix.com/" target="_blank">secondgenerationradical.blogmatrix.com</a>. He has previously been interviewed by Frontpage (<a href="http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=30923" target="_blank">Fatwa on a Book</a>) about the fate of his 2003 novel about a Jewish professor’s worry about Iran developing nuclear weapons and the professor’s problems with political correctness.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Howard Rotberg, welcome to Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p><strong>Rotberg:</strong> Thank you for having me</p>
<p>What inspired you to write this book?</p>
<p><strong>Rotberg:</strong> Basically, I began to understand that, in a world that was treating Islamist terrorism with tolerance and submission, as opposed to a due recognition of the war declared upon us, much of our “intelligentsia” was prisoner of a certain ideology that inhibited an appropriate response to the threats to our freedoms and lives.</p>
<p>As a result of my novel, <em>The Second Catastrophe,</em> being, essentially, banned in Canada because of the objections of some 18 year old Islamists, I was becoming aware that the very people who proclaimed their tolerance were in fact the least tolerant of all when it came to listening to, and debating, contrary opinions. In other words, political correctness, moral and cultural relativism and moral equivalency were combining to create a certain ideology in the West. I decided it was high time to write about the values and ideologies that have handcuffed much of our media and academic elites from critiquing the fascistic aspects of Radical Islam, and elevating the alleged “right’ not to be offended over the human rights of all victims of Islamist rage, including their own people.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Tell us a bit about your background that has influenced you in your thoughts and outlooks.</p>
<p><strong>Rotberg:</strong> My paternal grandparents and aunt were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and my father barely survived as a slave laborer there. As a member of the “Second Generation,” I was becoming alarmed at how “tolerance” was being called the most important value in the West. My background as a lawyer and as an observant Jew taught me that the most important value is justice, not tolerance. I knew that had the West “tolerated” Hitler, I would not be here. And I wondered why the West was so intent on tolerating Radical Islam and submitting to values inimical to liberal freedoms, feminism, separation of church and state, human rights and all the other great values that so many Americans and Canadians had struggled so hard to attain. As I looked out on political culture in the age of Obama, I sensed a very serious ideological problem.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What is the difference between tolerance and Tolerism?</p>
<p><strong>Rotberg:</strong> Over the years, such philosophers as Karl Popper and John Rawls had struggled with the idea of toleration and what limits must be placed on the tolerance of the <em>intolerant</em>, who, without such limitations could destroy the tolerant and the ways of tolerance. As the Second World War becomes a distant memory, we have noticed an alarming development: Instead of warnings about appeasement of Evil, we are told by the post-religious that there is no good and evil, only “competing narratives” which in a world of cultural relativism, means that western distinguished historians are given no more respect than mere polemicists, and that liberalism in Israel is given no higher respect than the totalitarian propaganda machines of its neighbours. The causes of Tolerism, then, are political correctness, cultural and moral relativism and moral equivalency.</p>
<p>Tolerism, the ideology, involves not just a tolerance of what should be <em>intolerable</em>, and the failure to set reasonable limits on tolerance, but an <em>in</em>tolerance of opposing viewpoints within liberal democracies, and an element of self-hatred, cultural masochism, and delusions about the difference between social tolerance and political tolerance. Those who seek justice are mocked with the allegation that we are seeking “vengeance,” as Spielberg did with his dastardly re-writing of history in the movie <em>Munich</em><em> </em>to show that Israel, and, impliedly, the Bush administration, were all about retribution and vengeance instead of the supposedly enlightened trait of tolerance. Tolerism, then, is the ideology of those who have attempted to cast off the Judeo-Christian ethics of justice and morality, and the sanctity of human life and fundamental liberties, and instead seek to undermine the great liberal democracies by their unwillingness to accept that tolerance has limits and that justice is far more important.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>How do Tolerists view the United   States and its place in the world?  Is Obama a Tolerist?</p>
<p><strong>Rotberg:</strong> Obama gave the highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, to the horrible Mary Robinson, who presided over the U.N. Durban conference where the illiberals brought into the mainstream the absurd view that the Israelis are the new Nazis and the Palestinians are the new Jews. Obama’s equivalency of American tolerance and justice with that of Muslim countries in his first major foreign policy speech at Cairo was so absurd that it showed that he is not just “tolerant” but a proponent of the new ideology of “Tolerism” – which implies not just a sympathy for opposing views but an “indulgence,” that is a treatment of those views with <em>excessive</em> <em>leniency</em>. The idea that America is comparable to Saudi Arabia is surely laughable, except that if the American President believes that, the Founding Fathers must be turning over in their graves. And therefore one can see the relevance of Obama’s past associations with Reverend Wright, William Ayers, <a title="Bernadine Dohrn" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernadine_Dohrn" target="_blank">Bernadine Dohrn</a>, and Rashid Khalidi.</p>
<p>There is no better proof that Obama is a Tolerist than examining his responses to the Fort Hood Massacre. By continuously referring to the Islamist Major Hasan (whose emails, statements and entire life-view was that of a terrorist Islamist) as an “extremist,” Obama creates a vile moral equivalency. For example, I might be regarded by some an “extremist” because some of my views are extreme relative to the mainstream, but I would not care to share that terminological status with the likes of Hasan. America must wake up; its soldiers must carry guns, and its President must understand who is the enemy, before America descends into a British-like fantasy world of submission and tolerance of a parallel Sharia universe, where universities actively promote radicalization of Muslim students.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>What is the connection between Tolerism and anti-Semitism?</p>
<p><strong>Rotberg:</strong> There are several: Firstly, to the extent that Tolerism contains a large dose of self-hatred, or the hatred of America and Israel standing for all that is good – liberal freedoms and human rights- a large number of Tolerists (think Naomi Klein here) begin to hate America and the Jewish state equally. These haters of all that is good relate well to Radical Islam which is the repository of unbridled hate for all things Jewish and American. While historically, up until the 1940s, Islam accepted Jews as dhimmis, Radical Islam has never accepted Jews in the Middle  East, which is, according to them, Dar-Al-Islam, once and forever Muslim territory, notwithstanding the continual presence of Jews for 3500 years.</p>
<p>Secondly, Tolerism posits a type of moral and cultural relativism that resents states like America and Israel striving for the morality and justice advocated in the Bible. As well, if Islamic totalitarian theocracies or Palestinian death cults are as morally valid as any other position, then the Jewish narrative must by its nature be extremist and hence suspect.  This is why there is such little regard paid in the topic of “refugees” for the nearly one million Jews who were expelled from Arab countries in the 1940s, and were taken in and resettled by Israel. The United Nations then can create a separate organization for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) and be utterly silent about the Jewish refugees from Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Lebanon.</p>
<p>Thirdly, I referred to Spielberg’s travesty of a movie, Munich, which portrays the Jew-nation of Israel as vengeful and intent on retribution, compared to the supposed Christian virtues of tolerance and mercy. This is a theme that is best explored in Shakespeare’s <em>The Merchant of Venice</em>, where a proper reading of this classic shows a man so marginalized and abused by society that he ends up, <em>as a result of this marginalization,</em> vengefully obsessed with retributive justice, which of course is denied to him, because the very Court proceeding has been corrupted by Portia impersonating the Judge.  An improper reading, such as was done by the Englishman Michael Radford in the most recent movie version of <em>The Merchant of Venice</em>, makes the Jew Shylock the archetype for the supposedly vengeful Jews and Americans exacting a negative form of Justice against the poor, oppressed terrorists or the Iraqi terror state. The fact that the worst terrorists have university educations and come from above average income families is irrelevant to the anti-Semitic fantasy that the intolerant Americans and Israelis are the new Nazis and supposedly deserve the terrorism inflicted on them. It is all anti-Semitic in nature.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>How do we find the limits of tolerance?</p>
<p><strong>Rotberg: </strong>Starting with the great philosophers of Toleration, we would have to accept, like Karl Popper that “if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed and tolerance with them … We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.”</p>
<p>But just as important, we have to begin to discuss how Tolerism and its associated ideologies are behind many of the delusions about the nature of the war that has begun against us, and the nature of the enemy.  We must learn that Terrorism is successful precisely because it creates what I call a “Cultural Stockholm Syndrome” or a cultural response similar to the “Patty Hearst Syndrome” where we begin to indentify with our terrorist oppressors and begin to accept small benefits from them as part of a submission to their will and values.  The idea that the West can defeat terrorism by more tolerance of the evil perpetrators of murder directed at civilians, is, quite frankly, preposterous.</p>
<p>In the book, I explore a variety of ways to find a suitable limitation for tolerance, and I refer to writings of such heroic writers as David Solway, David Horowitz, Charles Krauthammer, Daniel Greenfield, Vijay Kumar, and even moderate Muslims like Tarek Fatah (who has called for a clear statement by Islamic theologians that Jihad must henceforth be only construed as an individual inner struggle for spirituality rather than be construed as an outer-directed violent struggle against Jews, Christians and Hindus). I hope that my book induces further discussion of what are the limits of tolerance.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Howard Rotberg, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p>To order Howard Rotberg’s new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tolerism-Ideology-Revealed-Howard-Rotberg/dp/0973406526">click here</a>.</p>
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		<title>The Marijuana and Conservatism Debate &#8211; by FrontPagemag.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/frontpagemag-com/the-marijuana-and-conservatism-debate-by-frontpagemag-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-marijuana-and-conservatism-debate-by-frontpagemag-com</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 24 Dec 2009 05:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[Professor Mary Grabar and NewsReal's David Swindle go toe-to-toe on the right response to the war on drugs.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-43122" title="marijuana flag" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/marijuana-flag.jpg" alt="marijuana flag" width="350" height="344" /></p>
<p><strong>Professor and writer Mary Grabar had a recent piece at Pajamas Media responding to the death of a man who choked on a baggie of marijuana. Grabar wrote a critique of libertarians&#8217; advocacy for legalized marijuana in response. FrontPage&#8217;s Associate Editor, David Swindle, engaged Grabar in debate at NewsReal Blog. Grabar was gracious enough to respond at NewsReal. FrontPage presents this dialogue thus far. </strong></p>
<p><strong>David Swindle:</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/libertarians-need-to-rethink-support-for-drug-legalization/" target="_blank">At Pajamas Media today Mary Grabar</a>, a thoughtful writer and an acquaintance, has an effective piece in response to a recent tragic death which has reopened an important issue that’s not discussed nearly enough:</p>
<blockquote><p>A truly sad story about a 23-year-old Panama City man dying while being subdued by Bay County sheriff’s deputies has reawakened the debate about the legalization of marijuana. On December 11, 2009, Andrew Grande choked on a plastic bag full of marijuana as police attempted to arrest him on a violence charge. A video shows police valiantly trying to <a href="http://www.newsherald.com/news/want-79863-nobody-beach.html"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">save his life</span></a> once it became apparent that he was having difficulty breathing.</p>
<p>Two talk show hosts in Panama City have been discussing the case in the early morning hours — and revealing a divide on the right. <a href="http://burniethompson.com/"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Burnie Thompson</span></a> of WYOO, the libertarian, has called Grande “<a href="http://www.talkradio101.com/archives/AM/AM-Tue-12-15-hour__01.mp3"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">a casualty of the war on drugs</span></a>” and contended that because marijuana is illegal, Grande felt “compelled” to swallow a bag of it to avoid punishment.</p></blockquote>
<p>Mary then presents a number of pro-drug war arguments and rebuttals to common libertarian, pro-legalization points. She highlights the traditional role of alcohol and the countercultural nature of marijuana. She points out that marijuana use  hampers,</p>
<blockquote><p>the work ethic, emotional engagement, sexual inhibition, and the ability to reason.</p></blockquote>
<p>She notices that her stoner students who advocate for drug legalization do so in an incoherent fashion. She invokes conservative icon Barry Goldwater. (However she fails to mention that <a href="http://reason.com/archives/1997/02/01/prescription-drugs">Goldwater supported medicinal marijuana</a> in his later years.)</p>
<p>I’m sorry Mary but I remain thoroughly unpersuaded.</p>
<p>The arguments for drug legalization are numerous, and so as to avoid being dismissed as one of Prof. Grabar’s Jeff Spicoli students I’ll focus on one. (If Mary would like to engage the issue further then perhaps I’ll offer more.)</p>
<p>A single question for which all self-described “conservatives” should have a fairly similar answer: what is the purpose of the government as the founders intended?</p>
<p>The federal government does not exist to make the world better. It’s not here to eliminate poverty. (Look at inner city ghettos to see how effective the Left’s efforts have been.) It’s not supposed to try and make sure that more people can buy homes. (Look at the economic crash of 2008.) The founders never intended a government which would <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=180&amp;type=issue" target="_blank">require all citizens to buy health insurance</a>. (Look into a crystal ball of how the next few years will turn out.) When government is shifted toward bringing about some form of utopia it <em>fails</em>.</p>
<p>The purpose of government is to protect a free society. It’s to allow for a country in which the individual is sovereign, in which every man and woman can pursue his own destiny as they see fit. If they want to create jobs and raise families they can. If they want to destroy themselves then that’s their freedom.</p>
<p>So how does throwing people into jail for growing and consuming a plant fit into this understanding of government?</p>
<p>It does not.</p>
<p>Thus it makes sense that Goldwater was hardly the only important conservative whose opinion of marijuana softened over the years. William F. Buckley, Jr. went even further, advocating full-blown legalization in 2004. Perhaps it’s best <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley200406291207.asp" target="_blank">we close with some of his words</a> on the subject:</p>
<blockquote><p>And although there is a perfectly respectable case against using marijuana, the penalties imposed on those who reject that case, or who give way to weakness of resolution, are very difficult to defend. If all our laws were paradigmatic, imagine what we would do to anyone caught lighting a cigarette, or drinking a beer. Or — exulting in life in the paradigm — committing adultery. Send them all to Guantanamo?</p>
<p>Legal practices should be informed by realities. These are enlightening, in the matter of marijuana. There are approximately 700,000 marijuana-related arrests made very year. Most of these — 87 percent — involve nothing more than mere possession of small amounts of marijuana. This exercise in scrupulosity costs us $10-15 billion per year in direct expenditures alone. Most transgressors caught using marijuana aren’t packed away to jail, but some are, and in Alabama, if you are convicted three times of marijuana possession, they’ll lock you up for 15 years to life. Professor Ethan Nadelmann, of the Drug Policy Alliance, writing in <em>National Review</em>, estimates at 100,000 the number of Americans currently behind bars for one or another marijuana offense.</p>
<p>…</p>
<p>Such reforms would hugely increase the use of the drug? Why? It is de facto legal in the Netherlands, and the percentage of users there is the same as here. The Dutch do odd things, but here they teach us a lesson.</p></blockquote>
<p><strong>Mary Grabar:</strong></p>
<p>I will respond to your post, David, because it, like many of the posts in response to my column points to a very important divide in the <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=156&amp;type=issue" target="_blank">conservative</a>/libertarian  movement.  Thank you for the opportunity.</p>
<p>Your post also points to a war of ideas, a war that conservative strategists have ignored to their peril.  We lost the last election because we lost the culture war.  I make that claim based on my experience of teaching college for almost twenty years.  I have been in the middle of the culture wars, have seen its impact on young people and seen it played out on the political field.  Make no mistake about it: The Left strategized for the long term and outlined their plans in 1962 in the <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6723" target="_blank">Port Huron Statement</a>.</p>
<p>Conservatives  have been playing defense ever since.  My tenured Leftist colleagues  declare victory publicly and loudly.</p>
<p>Many,  including those on our side, have simply forgotten the traditions and  values that inform the fight. <img title="More..." src="http://newsrealblog.com/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/wordpress/img/trans.gif" alt="" /></p>
<p>Many of the young have been brought up on the liberalism now reigning in our culture.  It is a culture that says that all values are relative, that all matters of morality are a function of personal choice.  This also seems to be the tack of a certain strain of libertarianism.</p>
<p>These libertarians rightly want to be left alone to live their lives.  They want to be free to make their own decisions about health care and how they spend their money.  They want to be free to protect themselves with firearms.  I agree with all these goals.</p>
<p>But I often see something very reactionary in the responses that are made whenever laws affecting such social issues as drug use or prostitution come into play.  An apt display is radio talk show host Burnie Thompson’s reference to Andrew Grande [who swallowed the bag of marijuana] as “a casualty of the war on drugs.”  The statement, of course, ignores a central tenet of libertarianism, which is personal responsibility.</p>
<p>I think it also points to a certain absolutist world view, which goes something like “if we put any restrictions on marijuana all our freedoms are at peril.”  But this absolutist worldview is based on an either/or fallacy.  It promotes anarchy more than libertarianism.  It assumes that we are a society of atomistic individuals; it can exist only in a cultural vacuum.  The fact that I am accused of advocating “collectivism” because I favor keeping marijuana illegal I think is indicative.</p>
<p>It  is displayed, I think, by your proclamation,</p>
<blockquote><p>“The federal government does not exist to make the world better.  It’s not here to eliminate poverty. . . . It’s not supposed to try and make sure people can buy homes. . . . The founders never intended a government which would require all citizens to buy health insurance. . . . When government is shifted toward bringing about some form of utopia it fails.”</p></blockquote>
<p>I agree on all these points, but fail to see how they are connected to the legalization of marijuana.  Certainly, our government regulates substances it deems dangerous, doesn’t it?  It regulates certain drugs by prescription and outlaws others that are deadly.  That government regulation of a substance considered harmful will necessarily lead to infringements on all our freedoms seems to be a slippery slope argument.</p>
<p>Like many of my detractors, you point to the harmlessness of the drug.  But people are not thrown “in jail” for “growing and consuming a plant.”  Surely, you would have to agree that marijuana is not just a “plant” that you would grow in your garden, like spinach.  In fact, a better analogy might the one of growing poppies to produce opium.</p>
<p>Part of the absolutism is the refusal to acknowledge any of the dangers associated with marijuana or the concessions I made about the dangers of alcohol.  In my column I compared smoking marijuana to drinking alcohol, which I think is apt, depending on the strain of marijuana.  Both are used socially, both are relaxants, and both can be addictive.  The debate centers on legality.</p>
<p>Although marijuana is illegal, the punishment for its possession (alone) usually is very light. What legalization proponents (including William F. Buckley) don’t say is that many of those perpetrators serving prison sentences supposedly for “drug possession” have pled their cases down or are repeat offenders with long histories of other crimes, including violent crime.  So in effect they are not serving sentences for smoking a joint in their living rooms as many imply.</p>
<p>Those who do smoke in their homes (without any punishment I might add) say, “Look, I smoke every day and pull in six figures and pay my taxes, don’t beat my wife or kids, etc., etc.” That may be true.  It is also true for functioning alcoholics.</p>
<p>Again, the similarities between the two substances, and I revert back to an argument based on tradition and specifically our Judeo-Christian heritage.  I openly—and non-relativistically—assert that it is a heritage that is superior to all others.  I base my arguments on this premise.</p>
<p>The fact that I am accused of being a theocrat for simply invoking our cultural heritage and advocating for its values again points to an absolutism on the part of these libertarians, and I think, implicitly a rejection of the Judeo-Christian foundations of our culture.  Many of my detractors are absolutely hostile to the mere mention of the Bible or of why we should pay attention to it.</p>
<p>Such an attitude I think springs from an ignorance of history and a lack of appreciation for the roots of our culture, the very culture that supported the founding of this republic.  Like T.S. Eliot in “The Idea of a Christian Society,” I make the argument on a broad philosophical basis.  You can be an atheist and still appreciate the virtues of our Christian heritage.  If you are philosophically honest, you will see that, as a worldview, Christianity was the first that admitted that “all men are created equal.”  I came upon this fact, not in reading some religious tract, but an article by Francis Fukuyama in the liberal magazine the Atlantic.</p>
<p>In order to invoke the founding fathers, one needs to understand the cultural tradition they drew from.  They read deeply and drew upon the rich traditions of Western thought.  They agree with George Washington as he says in his Farewell Address, “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. . . .  Who that is a sincere friend [to our form of government] can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?”  I believe I was pointing beyond the isolated use of marijuana to the foundations.</p>
<p>Barry  Goldwater in <em>The Conscience of a Majority</em> bemoaned the decay of morality, of the acceptance of the once “unthinkable” that “eventually could bring about the destruction of our free society”:  “The ‘unthinkable’ says automatically that because of ‘changing times’ we not only must alter our old methods of living, but we also must change all of our previously held attitudes.  Thus, you find a vicious and growing attack directed at every tradition, every standard and belief—no matter how fundamental it might be to an ordered society of freedom and justice. . .”  I think we see this now with libertarian arguments that argue along lines divorced from tradition, standard, and belief.  The “unthinkable” also concerns those behaviors that on their face have no harmful effects.  One of these might be public nudity.  I can imagine an “unthinkable” scene, of nude citizens in the public square smoking joints.  It’s funny, but logically consistent with the arguments of those who would legalize marijuana and all other non-harmful behaviors. Our culture since Goldwater’s writing has accepted many, many other once “unthinkable” acts, usually to the detriment of our society.</p>
<p>For  arguments based on practical reasons, I encourage readers to look up  the comments of my friend Tina Trent who <a href="http://crimevictimsmediareport.com/" target="_blank">blogs  on crime</a>.  She gives many good reasons why legalization won’t lower crime rates.  In my column, I also linked an article that indicated that the legalization of marijuana in certain states has given young people the idea that it is safe.  It is not safe.  It has serious health effects.  It is addictive.  I personally know people who smoke it every day.  They started young.  One started after being in a motorcycle accident and used it for pain.  These are people who are supporting themselves, true.  But they are people who are operating way below capacity, who have lost the ability to think logically or to care enough to argue logically.  Their emotional relationships are shallow.  They have lost initiative and that fighting spirit that defends the idea of liberty.</p>
<p>Why  now put the imprimatur of legality on a substance that does this?</p>
<p>One of the things that sets our culture above others is that we are a nation of laws—reasonable laws.  And laws for possession of small amounts of marijuana need to remain at the misdemeanor level.  This does not take away our freedom to use drugs in a legitimate manner, nor detract from our other freedoms.</p>
<p>The culture warriors of the 1960s used a multi-pronged approach to effecting a change in “consciousness.”  One of those was to present the “unthinkable” in libertarian terms.  Nudity, sex out in the open, orgies, destruction of public places, desecration of art—why not?  The acceptance of all kinds of behavior, including some extremely self-destructive behavior, by my students worries me.  They cannot articulate reasons why some behaviors—even those that seemingly affect only individuals—should be condemned.  They cannot articulate reasons why our culture is superior to others.</p>
<p>Conservatives need to focus on educating young people who have been kept in ignorance about how our culture and country have provided them the freedoms they now enjoy. As Goldwater said in 1964, there is no freedom without law and order. The debate about drug laws entails larger questions about cultural values.  To argue in an arid, absolutist manner is to indicate a certain disregard for our heritage.</p>
<p>As I see it, this debate really is about more than whether or not you smoke a joint in your living room—which for all practical purposes neither I nor the cop on the street much cares about.  What I do care about is this one more capitulation in the Culture Wars.</p>
<p><strong>David Swindle:</strong></p>
<p>Mary Grabar&#8217;s response in our debate about drug criminalization has clarified her opposition to marijuana legalization in an important way. She concluded her essay with these words:</p>
<blockquote><p>As I see it, this debate really is about more than whether or not you smoke a joint in your living room—which for all practical purposes neither I nor the cop on the street much cares about.  What I do care about is this one more capitulation in the Culture Wars.</p></blockquote>
<p>Mary is certainly intelligent and reasonable enough to acknowledge what is plainly obvious: marijuana is not functionally different in its effects than alcohol or tobacco and we should not be too concerned with adults using it responsibly in their own homes.</p>
<p>So why keep it banned? Why all the numerous arguments highlighting marijuana&#8217;s negative qualities? Simple: because in Mary&#8217;s estimation to allow legalization would be to grant a victory to the counterculture. And, well, we as conservatives can&#8217;t have that. Or can we?<img title="More..." src="http://newsrealblog.com/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/wordpress/img/trans.gif" alt="" /></p>
<p>Here&#8217;s an argument that might be rather counter-intuitive: conservatism and counterculture are in no way mutually exclusive. I&#8217;ve blogged about this before here in <a href="http://newsrealblog.com/2009/07/23/comedy-central-douglas-rushkoff-talks-corporations-with-stephen-colbert-draft/" target="_blank">talking about author Douglas Rushkoff&#8217;s brand of Robert Anton Wilson-influenced libertarian counterculture</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Wait a second,&#8221; some people must be thinking. &#8220;Isn&#8217;t the counterculture the same as the Left?&#8221;</p>
<p>Sort of. Not really. No. The Left as defined by <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/">Discover the Networks</a> and the <a href="http://www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org/">Freedom Center</a> is a political movement. The &#8220;counterculture&#8221; is a cultural movement. The two frequently overlap (they certainly did in the &#8217;60s when both had their heyday), and countercultural thinkers and leftist thinkers are often friendly. (Hence, Rushkoff frequently recruits feminist author <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Wolf">Naomi Wolf</a> to write blurbs for his books.) Counterculturalists are more about shifting the culture, not the political system. They promote their art, music, film, drugs, sexuality, spirituality, and philosophical ideas while often passing on the political sphere.</p>
<p>A good example of the difference is in the person of David Horowitz. In the &#8217;60s he was a leftist, not a counterculturalist. He argued for a Marxist political system while basically adopting the cultural norms (nuclear family, no dope smoking) of American society.</p></blockquote>
<p>Is the Conservative Movement a political movement or a cultural movement? Is it about conserving the political ideas of the founders or the Judeo-Christian, &#8220;traditional&#8221; culture of the founders? (This is hardly an either/or decision.) And if it is about preserving a traditional culture, is it going to use the tyrannical power of government to do it? (And spend billions of taxpayer dollars?)</p>
<p>My answers to these questions should be obvious. I&#8217;m concerned about defeating the Left&#8217;s political machinations. And that should be the primary concern of conservatives. It&#8217;s not pot-smoking counterculturalists that are sending Guantanamo detainees to Illinois. The push for socialized medicine comes from leftists. (<a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2282" target="_blank">Harry Reid</a> and <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1313" target="_blank">Howard Dean</a> are in no way &#8220;counterculture.&#8221;) And the political fight against these problems can only be won by a functioning coalition comprised of many peoples with many cultures who are united by a common <em>political</em> understanding of the role of government &#8212; the one I articulated in my previous post.</p>
<p>Mary wrote in her rebuttal that,</p>
<blockquote><p>We lost the last election because  we lost the culture war.</p></blockquote>
<p>No we didn&#8217;t. John McCain lost to <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1511" target="_blank">Barack Obama</a> because of politics, not culture. Obama was a more exciting candidate who ran a much more effective campaign. It&#8217;s that simple.</p>
<p>A conservatism that can win is one which understands itself and defines itself as a <em>political</em> movement, not a cultural one. To do otherwise is to begin to destroy a functioning coalition that has been vital to defending America since Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley Jr., and Ronald Reagan brought it together in the 20th century. Conservatism must take the same approach to culture as the Constitution does &#8212; neutrality. Such an attitude worked for the document which has guided and protected our country for centuries and it will work for the Movement who has the same objective.</p>
<p><strong>Mary Grabar is invited to respond further if she so chooses.</strong></p>
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