The Reformed Pastor

Via Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage comes word that the trans insanity has spread to deep-red Kentucky:

A transgender teenager, who was born male but identifies as a female, can continue to use a women’s restroom and locker room at a Jefferson County Public School.

In a 5-to-1 vote, an appeal board upheld Atherton High School’s nondiscrimination policy Thursday, which states the school must accept the gender identity each student asserts and shouldn’t discriminate on the use of school space on the basis of gender identity nor gender expression.

The current JCPS policy allows individual schools to set their own policies on the use of facilities.

The appeals board is composed of three teachers appointed by the president of the Jefferson County Teachers Association, two parents appointed by the 15th District PTA and a school administrator appointed by the president of the Jefferson County Association of School Administrators.

Attorney Clint Elliott argued allowing transgender students to use the restroom of their choice violates other students’ right to privacy.

“So students get to choose the restroom or locker room they use without any apparent monitor or control measures in place under the policy and no control to assure safety or privacy,” Elliott said.

Atherton’s principal defended the school’s site-based decision making council’s resolution to add gender identity to its non-discrimination policy.

“Is the question really about privacy or is it about comfort? Just because someone does not feel comfortable, doesn’t mean their rights are being violated. Our policy recognizes gender identity as a real issue that deserves accommodation within a school system,” Atherton Principal Dr. Tom Aberli said.

There’s an easy answer to this question, Dr. Tom.

It’s about privacy, you moron!!!

Ask yourself this, Dr. Tom: if your 14-year-old daughter came home and told you that there was a 17-year-old boy who had a gym class at the same she did, and who was telling everyone he believed he was actually a female, and was insisting that he be able to take a shower at the same time as your daughter, would that be fine and dandy with you?

Here’s another question for you, Dr. Tom: If it’s all about being “uncomfortable,” and such concerns are really beneath your notice, why not have all the boys and all the girls shower together? As long as there’s no touching, what could it hurt? It might make some of them “uncomfortable,” but what difference does that make?

And yet another question, Dr. Tom: given the apparently infinite malleability of human sexuality, and the willingness of public school administrators to accommodate those of every possible permutation, what are you going to do with a high school junior who comes to you and says, “I was born in the wrong body, I identify as a female, and I’m also a lesbian”? Yeah, I know, that’s a joke a lot of people have made, but I mean it in all seriousness, Dr. Tom. Are you going to dispute that young man’s claims? Accommodate him? Turn him away? On what grounds?

Oh, and before I go, one more question, Dr. Tom: why do hate females? I mean, you seem to have no concern over exposing them to naked teenagers on a daily basis, whether they want to be so exposed or not. As we all know, there’s a “war on women” going on in this country, and you appear to be doing your part to traumatize teenage girls. A fair-minded person has to ask, “are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Republican Party?”

Most important word for every sane parent to remember: HOMESCHOOLING.

Old hotness: “get the government out of the bedroom.” New hotness: “the government needs to micro-manage your bedroom behavior.” From NRO:

The University of Michigan has released a list of relationship behaviors that it considers violent and abusive — including “withholding sex.”

“Discounting the partner’s feelings regarding sex,” “criticizing the partner sexually,” and “having sex with other people” are also examples of “sexual violence,” according to the list.

The school also offers definitions of domestic abuse. Under the section for “verbal or psychological abuse,” it states that not only is “insulting the partner” considered “abuse,” so is “ignoring the partner’s feelings.”

Brings a whole new meaning to the expression in loco parentis, doesn’t it?

That famous phrase of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan came to mind when I saw this item from the Daily Telegraph:

Laws banning incest between brothers and sisters in Germany could be scrapped after a government ethics committee said the they were an unacceptable intrusion into the right to sexual self-determination.

“Criminal law is not the appropriate means to preserve a social taboo,” the German Ethics Council said in a statement. “The fundamental right of adult siblings to sexual self-determination is to be weighed more heavily than the abstract idea of protection of the family.”

Their intervention follows a notorious case in which a brother and sister living as partners in Saxony had four children together. The couple had been raised separately and only met when the brother, identified only as Patrick S, was an adult, and his sister Susan K was 16.

The Council said it based its recommendation on extensive research, in which it found many incestuous couples are forced to live in secret.

In one case, it found a woman was being blackmailed by her father and ex-husband, who threatened to deprive her of access to her children unless she ended a new relationship with her half-brother.

“Sexual self-determination”–the most important right in all of human existence. It is the one right before which everything–including genetics, the good of children, the stability of families, common sense, and common decency–must bow, no matter where it leads.

I used to laugh at the comparison that some people drew between the decline of the Roman Empire and the modern West. I no longer do.

Every time I think the Molech cult has reached a new low, they find even greater depths of evil and idiocy to plumb. The latest instance is a Scottish “poet” named Leyla Josephine, whose self-justifying video is being promoted by the Huffington Post. LifeSiteNews has more:

In the video Josephine, decked out in military camouflage, justifies herself in part by saying that she would have been willing to serve as a sacrifice to abortion just as she offered her daughter to the idol of “choice.”

“I would’ve supported her right to choose – to choose a life for herself, a path for herself. I would’ve died for that right like she died for mine,” she said.

Well, she would’ve supported her right to choose, but unfortunately the little tyke had the temerity to be conceived at the wrong time. So no “right to choose” for her. As for Josephine’s declaration that she “would’ve died for that right,” that’s clearly a lie, since she wouldn’t even suffer the inconvenience of an untimely birth in order to insure that her kid had the right to choose….anything.

In the next rhyming line, she addresses her unborn daughter: “I’m sorry, but you came at the wrong time.”

And since you “came at the wrong time,” Josephine has every right to take away, not only your “right to choose,” but your right to make any and every decision you ever would have made–the choice of who to love, who to serve, what to believe, what kind of work to do, what kind of education to get, where to live, who to bless, whether to have children. Your timing was bad, Baby Josephine, so you had to die. But hey! If your timing had been better, your mother would have defended to the death your right to do to your child what she did to hers.

“I am not ashamed. I am not ashamed. I am not ashamed,” she continues – a phrase she repeats a total of six times. She repeats the phrase “This is my body” three times.

In other words, she’s horrendously ashamed, and knows she has killed another human being. Modern technology being what it is, she refuses to do the decent thing and grieve privately. Instead, she wants to tell the whole world what an self-centered, self-absorbed, nitwit she is, so her heinous sin can then be celebrated by one of the most read Web sites on the planet.

In the early part of the video, she describes her belief that her child was a girl and imagines a life where she had given birth to her daughter.

“I know she was a she,” she says. “I would have made sure that there was space on the walls to measure her height,” she adds. “I would have made sure I was a good mother.”

If the video is any indication, she’d have been a horrible mother–incapable of putting her child first, consistently subordinated the child’s best interests to her selfish desires, and demanding that her child bow down to her obscene god. But that’s just my guess.

LSN writer Ben Jonson hits just the right note when he says:

That intimation that her daughter died for “choice” – that she offered her baby as a living sacrifice on the altar of abortion – confirms the darkest rhetoric of the pro-life movement: That for some in the movement, abortion is sometimes regarded as an idol.

Rarely has the cult-like nature of the abortion movement been better illustrated.

(Embedding has been disabled. If you really want to see this, you can go here. Via Hot Air.)

Ever since Aleister Crowley gained the reputation for being the “wickedest man in the world,” there have been imitators, poseurs, and wannabes. Herbert Arthur Sloane, Anton LaVey, Ozzie Osbourne, Marilyn Manson–with a greater or lesser degree of seriousness, these and others have tried to make Satanism a thing. The latest pretender to the throne appears to be a guy from Oklahoma named Adam Daniels, who rented out the Oklahoma City Civic Center in an effort to get the world to pay attention to him:

Sunday’s upcoming Satanic black mass in the Oklahoma City Civic Center may be attracting national media attention, but it is not a publicity stunt, says Adam Daniels, the self-avowed devil worshipper who organized it.

“This is not a game. It’s very serious to us,” Daniels said in a phone conversation this week.

The “us” is him and his worms, if I don’t miss my guess.

“This will be held as a real black mass, altered to follow state laws,” he said.

In other words, it’s not a real black mass. Crowley would not be impressed.

He said when his Oklahoma City-based Satanic group — the Dakhma of Angra Mainyu Syndicate — conducts the black mass in private, it involves sex, urine and nudity.

The Civic Center ceremony Sunday will tone down those elements to comply with state law, he said, but in every other way, it will be a genuine Satanic ritual.

The purpose of the mass is to deprogram people from the influences of Catholicism and Christianity, he said.

How exactly that is supposed to happen when none of them will be present or paying any attention to him is left unexplained.

The 2½- to 3-hour mass will follow a ritual from the late Antoine LeVay, founder of the Church of Satan and author of “The Satanic Bible.”

It will begin with music by the band God in a Machine, followed by a lecture from Daniels on the purpose of the black mass, a ritual denouncing Jesus Christ and swearing allegiance to the devil, blasphemy against Christ, and stomping on and spitting on a wafer, representing the host, the element from the Christian communion, he said.

It will conclude with a reverse exorcism, casting the Holy Spirit out of the person, Daniels said.

Yes, I’m sure the Holy Spirit will obey whatever mumbo-jumbo Daniels throws at Him. Here’s a bit of irony for Daniels to ponder: if it is actually the Holy Spirit who resides in the person in question, He is omnipotent, making Daniels’ incantations meaningless. If another spiritual entity resides within the person, it’s demonic, in which case Daniels will be doing an actual exorcism, the opposite of his intention. Boogieboogieboogie!

Daniels said the group meets every Sunday in an Oklahoma City-area home, going through a cycle of rituals and activities that include teachings, working on journals and workbooks, and meals together.

Oh, it’s an Episcopal church. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

He said he and members of his group believe in and worship the literal devil, which they know by its Zoroastrian name, Angra Mainyu.

Asked if he considers Satan good, or if he believes he is worshiping an evil being, Daniels said Satan is a title that means adversarial king.

“My devil is an equal anti-cosmic spirit that is the antithesis to what most call God,” he said.

“If you call chaos, freedom and self-service evil, then I’m one wicked individual. … I’m no more evil than a lion who eats a gazelle.”

Whatever. As long as they don’t break any laws prohibiting the harming of people, animals, or property, they can play-act all they want. I suspect, however, that Daniels is probably not the kind of guy you’d want as a co-worker.

He said he was not upset about the outcry across the state and nation against what he is doing.

“We’re glad that we have this opportunity to expose these people’s self-righteous behavior,” he said.

He’s trying to “deprogram” Catholics and other Christians, but he going to “expose” other people’s “self-righteousness.” Clearly irony is not a Satanist strong point.

Many thousands of people have signed petitions opposing the black mass. One online petition had more than 100,000 signers by noon Friday.

Despite the protests, officials in Oklahoma City have stood firm in their decision to allow the black mass to be held, maintaining that under the Constitution, Satanists have the same right as any other group to rent city facilities.

Oklahoma City’s officials are correct, and Christians really do need to get used to this idea. Even faiths that we find repugnant have the right to believe and practice as they wish within the proper, First Amendment-respecting applicable laws. If Daniels and his buddies want to fork over to play Halloweenies in public, fine. God is not mocked, and He’s not threatened by such foolishness, either.

I do not by any means discount or downplay the reality of the demonic, nor do I doubt that there are deluded or evil people who are devoted to it. What I doubt is that stunts like this do anything more significant than make clear how ridiculous people like Daniels are.

It is common among the useful idiots of the West, especially in the mainline Christian churches, to claim that if it weren’t for the fact that Israel is an apartheid Nazi genocidal oppressor state, the Palestinians would love to just live together in harmony. They have nothing against Jews, we’re told, and nothing against Israelis as a people, they just goshed darned want their own country and to sing “Kum Ba Yah” together. Then we read something like this, and see the real face of Palestinian hate:

Last week, Palestinian and Israeli boys met in southern Israel for a football match organized by Israel’s Peres Center for Peace. The Palestinian Authority (PA) daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida reprinted an article from Agence France-Presse that described the match and the initiative in a positive light.

Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), however, exposed that the news of the joint sports activity with “the Zionist enemy” was not well received by the Fatah-controlled PA and Fatah party leaders.

In reaction to the friendly game, Jibril Rajoub, Deputy Secretary of Fatah’s Central Committee and head of the Palestinian Supreme Council for Sport and Youth Affairs, stated: “Any activity of normalization in sports with the Zionist enemy is a crime against humanity.”

In a Facebook post, Rajoub stated that “for awhile now the Palestinian sports leadership and community – the Supreme Council for Sport and Youth Affairs, the Palestinian Olympic Committee and the Palestinian Football Association – have opposed such activities,” specifying that “normalization in sports with the Zionist occupation is a crime.” He demanded that “all individuals and institutions distance themselves from such activities, especially because their recurrence would arouse disgust and aversion towards all members of the [Palestinian] sports community.”

Others called for an investigation and for the prosecution of the Palestinian organizers who agreed to the game with the Israelis. Denouncing the match as “a crime and an unpatriotic and immoral act,” Palestinian Olympic Committee member Abd Al-Salam Haniyeh demanded that Rajoub “immediately interrogate the organizers of the match, settle the account with them and prosecute them on charges of serious treason against the blood of the Martyrs [who died in the Gaza war] and violation of the decisions made by the Palestinian sports community’s leadership,” independent Palestinian news agency Sama reported earlier this month.

The National Committee against Normalization in Palestine “condemned the participation of children from the West Bank in a football match between Palestinian and Israeli children” and “called on the heads of the Palestinian sports [community] and the Palestinian leadership to discover who is behind this ‘normalization match.’” The Committee’s secretary-general, Jihad Uweida, expressed “surprise” and “astonishment” that Palestinians would “do Israel a free service” by participating in such an event at a time when the National Committee against Normalization in Palestine “is conducting an international campaign for expelling Israeli sports from the international sports system, and after international sports organizations expressed their intention of boycotting this entity [Israel].”

This is not Hamas speaking, mind you. This is the Palestinian Authority, Fatah, the “moderates” whom the useful idiots in the West insist want nothing more than to live at peace with their neighbor, but who in fact are determined to oppose anything and everything that might actually humanize typical Israelis (even children!) in the eyes of their propaganda-soaked population. For years, Palestinian media and educational materials have spoon-fed vicious anti-Semitism to their people, and done everything they could to make peaceful co-existence with the “Zionist enemy” impossible. Meanwhile, you’ve got Churches for Middle East Peace (a National Council of Churches outfit), inviting other useful idiots to this gala event:

At the invitation of Churches for Middle East Peace, Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, will give his first public speech to a general American audience and deliver it for the first time in English, to students and faith leaders at The Cooper Union in New York City, NY.

In discussing his vision of a future Palestinian state and peace between Palestine and Israel, he is expected to cover the following topics:

•His views on how peace and inter-religious co-existence can flourish in Israel and Palestine with the help of the next generation.
•Why non-violent protest is the best method by which Palestinians should seek their rights.
•Why terrorism as practiced by Al Qaeda on 9/11 and ISIS is inconsistent with Islam.

Ever tried singing “Kum Ba Yah” to the tune of the “Horst Wessel Song”?

(Hat tip: Boring Bloke in comments at Stand Firm here.)

Here’s the headline from the Daily Beast:

A Christian Case for Abortion Rights?

Wendy Davis’ abortion revelations raise the question: Can abortion be the most compassionate choice? Some religious leaders say yes.

Wendy Davis is the Democratic candidate for Governor of Texas. She has just published a memoir, less than two months before the election, with the transparent purpose of trying to play on voters’ sympathies. In it, she claims to have had two abortions, one because of an ectopic pregnancy, one because of fatal birth defects to the baby. The odds of both of these highly unusual circumstances happening to the same women are very high, and Davis has a history of fudging her biography. None of it matters electorally, because she has as much chance of winning as I do of being the next Super Bowl MVP. Nonetheless, her “confession” has occasioned some supposedly deep thinking, Keli Goff’s column in the Daily Beast included.

She begins:

When news broke that Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis had previously terminated two pregnancies for medical reasons, she received words of compassion from a surprising source. A spokesperson for Texas Right to Life called “the value of life precious” but nevertheless also stated, “Our heart goes out for the decision she had to make.” Part of what has struck a chord about Davis’ story is that it serves as a potent reminder that the factors that go into the decision of whether to have an abortion are rarely as black and white as public political debates pretend they are.

If Goff knew any real, live right-to-life people, she would know that there is nothing surprising about her source. Right-to-lifers by and large are people who understand sin and redemption, understand the need to treat sinners with kindness though not approval of their actions, and who have done more to help post-abortion women than NARAL or NOW would dare (since admitting that abortion is typically not a rainbows-and-unicorns experience undermines The Narrative). As for Davis’ abortions demonstrating that things “are rarely as black and white as public political debates pretend they are,” the fact that she claims to have had abortions under two very rare circumstances actually does nothing to change the fact that in 97% of abortions, it is black and white. Abortion is wrong. Period.

Davis makes it clear this was a pregnancy that was greeted with joy, and that the aftermath caused great sorrow. But she expressed no regrets mainly because of her concerns about how much her fetus suffered before termination. Her candid confession gets at the heart of the debate for many over the issue of abortion, particularly people of faith: Can abortion sometimes be the most compassionate choice? More pointedly, can supporting abortion rights be compatible with Christianity?

No. Next question.

Leave aside the claims that Davis makes about the condition of the deformed baby. Here’s the reason why Goff’s question gets such a curt answer: while relieving suffering is a Christian virtue, it is not the highest virtue. The fact that a person is suffering or may suffer in the future is never a reason to kill that person. For one thing, Christianity contends that suffering may have a redemptive purpose that cannot be dismissed given that the redemptive suffering of Christ is at the heart of our faith. Countless Christians through the centuries have counted it an honor to suffer as our Lord suffered, and in the process seen their own life or that of people around them transformed. For another, claiming that killing is a proper response to suffering makes the mistake of allowing suffering to define the entirety of life, which is the first step down the road of claiming that there is life that is unworthy of living. For a third, this is a classic “ends justify the means” argument–ending suffering is a noble end, so it makes righteous the use of killing to end it. Christianity unequivocally rejects such an perversion of moral reasoning, no matter how pervasive it is in American culture.

Since the Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion nationally, efforts to criminalize it have been led in large part by high-profile religious leaders, religious groups, and activists whose politics are defined in large part by their religious identity. In the 41 years since Roe, the Religious Right, (sometimes called the Christian Right), has become a major force in national politics, with each Republican president since Ronald Reagan owing his election to its key players, among them Pat Robertson, the late Jerry Falwell, and others. Their influence in politics and ubiquity in the media created the impression that being religious, particularly identifying as a Christian, means opposing abortion.

But interviews with various clergy members and religious scholars indicate that there is far from a consensus that “Christian” = “opposed to abortion.”

You can imagine where this goes from here. Goff offers the opinions of a variety of liberal Christians, none of whom bother to make a theological or ethical argument for supporting abortion rights. For example:

Rev. Jacqui Lewis, who holds a PhD in psychology and religion, wrote in an email, “I am a practicing Christian and I am pro-choice. Those are compatible.” She elaborated, “I am a Christian, a pastor, a counselor and I know from counseling that when women make this decision, it is a painful one, often a heart breaking one. But personally, I believe it is their right to decide, in conversation with their partner or spouse, their family, their spiritual leader and their God.”

All that demonstrates is that there are Christians who support abortion rights. No news there. As to why they do, that’s a mystery. Tom Davis, a former chaplain and associate professor of religion at Skidmore College, takes a crack at it:

In a phone interview Davis said there are texts for some religions that address abortion specifically, such as in ancient Babylonia, but this is not the case in Christianity: “There is no law against abortion in the Bible. There is no law about birth control in the Bible. So when you don’t have a specific guidance on something, you look at what is the most human thing to do in a situation, what is most helpful and sometimes abortion is indicated.”

Ignore the line about birth control, which is pure red herring. It is debatable whether the Bible does or does not specifically condemn abortion. What is indisputable is that the Christian Church, from its earliest days, condemned abortion (widely practiced in the Roman Empire at the time) in the strongest terms. (The author of the Didache writes, “You shall not murder…you shall not abort a child or commit infanticide” [2.2], while the author of the Epistle of Barnabaswrites, “You shall not abort a child nor, again, commit infanticide” [19.5]. Both are from the early second century.) Claiming that there is any ambiguity about historic Christian teaching because the New Testament doesn’t mention it is like claiming that Jesus was OK with homosexual behavior because He isn’t recorded as condemning it. As for Davis basing his ethical decisions on “what is the most human thing to do in a situation,” I suppose it is possible to conceive of a flabbier excuse for ethical thinking, but I can’t come up with anything just at the moment.

Not having an argument, Davis tries an example:

Asked for an example of abortion being a more humane choice he recalled a situation from his days as a counselor when a woman came to him crushed because her husband had been killed. Though they had planned her third pregnancy, she was now barely able to support the two children they had before his death. Blaming sexism for much of the organized opposition to abortion among religious leaders, he said, “There are many reasons why a woman needs an abortion. Sometimes rape, sometimes because she says ‘I can’t be responsible for this child and can’t bring a child into this world I can’t care for.’”

Yeah, religious leaders oppose abortion because they hate women. Personally, I’d be more likely to think that given the consequences of abortion–significantly increased rates of depression, substance abuse, mental illness, and suicide–recommending abortion would be much more a sign that one was a sexist than not. And Davis’ case is a perfect example of how these consequences comes about. A woman in a terrible situation like the one he describes who resorts to killing a child because of difficult circumstances is bound at some point to be burdened with crushing guilt for having deprived one of her children of the gift of life because he or she couldn’t do what was necessary to provide for it. Is it really better for the child to kill it than to give it up for adoption? Is that really the position Davis wants to claim is Christian?

Goff mentions two other individuals in her attempt to discover a “Christian case for abortion rights.” One is Jon O’Brien, head of Catholics for Choice, a political front group that is no more Catholic than People for the American Way. The other is Gloria Feldt, the former president of Planned Parenthood (!), who relates a story about a Catholic priest who rejected Christian morality and so became an Episcopal priest. Feldt, who I suspect knows as much about “faith” as she knows about particle physics, says women clergy will change minds:

Feldt, who now runs Take the Lead, a group devoted to increasing gender parity in leadership positions, predicted women’s leadership may ultimately play a defining role in where faith and reproductive rights intersect in the future. “If you think about the underlying misogyny in the history of most major religions, it’s not surprising we’ve been dealing with these issues [reproductive rights] in those terms,” she said. “I do believe that the ascent of more women in the clergy, at least in the mainstream religions at this point, is going to make a huge difference. They simply see the world through a different lens.”

There is some truth to what she is saying. Lots of women clergy, particularly in the mainline denominations, see the world through the lens of feminist politics rather than Christian theology and ethics, and so have bent their churches in directions that are more suggestive of apostasy than faith. But there are also women clergy in denominations like mine (the Evangelical Presbyterian Church) as well as Pentecostal and independent churches that don’t fit Feldt’s stereotyping and reject the model of the abortion-loving woman.

If that’s the best Goss could do to find “Christians” who would tell her that there is a “Christian case for abortion rights” even as they fail to offer one, I’d say it’s a certainty that the pro-abortion case will continue to be made by Molech-worshipers of a decidedly secular mind. The “Christian case for abortion rights” is a mirage, and always has been.

Got an email this morning from the Office of Public Witness of the Presbyterian Church (USA) that let me know they are foursquare behind suppressing free speech. I have to wonder how many PCUSAers are aware that their denomination is in favor of Harry Reid’s cockamamie re-writing of the First Amendment to give control over political speech to Congress:

Next week – on September 8 – the United States Senate will vote on a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and return the power of political voice to the people. As of right now, 50 out of 100 Senators are on board. With just one more, the balance will at last tilt away from Citizens United, back toward democracy.

You’ve got to love this. Here are these people advocating changing the Constitution, and they don’t even know what’s in it! Anyone who was awake during social studies in public school (I assume) will know that it takes 67 votes in the Senate to pass a constitutional amendment, not 51. That’s so that idiocy like this can’t pass on a bare majority founded on political expediency.

And the form of “democracy”  they are advocating for is, to put it politely, bizarre. Apparently having Congress restrict free speech (by preventing individuals and groups from spending the money that it necessarily takes to get a message out these days) is “democratic.” Allowing people to use their resources to get that message out is “undemocratic.” Instead, the instruments of free speech should be in the hands of the state and its politicians. Then again, when you learn your political science from cereal boxes, bumper stickers, and Marxist textbooks, I guess that’s what you come up with.

Call on Monday, September 8th, call (866) 937-7983 to reach the Capitol Switchboard and express support for the Democracy for All Amendment. This amendment will ensure that all Americans, regardless of their wealth, can have their voices heard in our elections and our government. The amendment will give the power back to Congress to regulate special interest spending in elections.

What kind of mind writes this pap? How exactly will restricting or prohibiting the expenditure of funds in support of a preferred message or candidate “ensure that all Americans…can have their voices heard”? What they really mean is that under such a regime, the only voices that will be heard are 1) those approved by the politicians, and 2) the mainstream media, which offers virtually nothing but a message vetted and approved by liberals. (Citizens United, you may remember, is a conservative advocacy organization that had to sue for its right to show a movie critical of Hillary Clinton. That’s the kind of voice that will be shut down by this amendment.)

I also suspect that the writer of this email hasn’t actually read the amendment in question. It doesn’t just return to the post-Watergate campaign finance regime.

•First, it expands authority to regulate campaign and issue spending to the states, as well as Congress, meaning that every election or referendum in the country will have limits on speech, rather than just federal elections. (The amendment uses the word “elections,” but that is usually taken to mean anything that is put to public ballot, not just to fill public office.)

•Second, It doesn’t just permit regulation, but prohibition, of speech. (The proposed Article 2 says, “Congress and the States shall have power to implement and enforce this article by appropriate legislation, and may distinguish between natural persons and corporations or other artificial entities created by law, including by prohibiting such entities from spending money to influence elections.” [Emphasis added.]

•Third, because it has been advertised as being a repeal of the Citizens United decision, I have to assume that the writers mean to bring back the ability of politicians to prohibit criticism of their job performance within 30 days of an election–in other words, when voters are most tuned into what’s happening.

•Fourth, it will allow regulators to pick and choose between favored entities, for instance, by prohibiting corporate contributions and allowing union contributions. The relevant word in Article 2 is “or,” which clearly indicates that regulators–politicians–can pick and choose between “entities” such as corporations, unions, or groups that come together for the purpose of achieving a shared goal such as electing a candidate or advocating a policy.

•Fifth, it will mean that “speech” will be institutionalized as a function of the mainstream media, as if it speaks for the citizenry. Article 3 says, “Nothing in this article shall be construed to grant Congress or the States the power to abridge the freedom of the press.” So the corporations that run ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc. will retain their full freedom to influence elections in any way they want, while many others will not be able to spend money to speak for themselves. In other words, liberal propagandists journalists will have their place as the primary molders of political opinion encased in amber, while large swaths of the American people, acting in concert or as individuals, will be frozen out.

To sum up: if this amendment were to pass–the chances of which are absolutely zero, the Senate debate being nothing more than kabuki theater to give Democrats a chance to bash the Koch Brothers–the winners would be incumbent politicians and mainstream media. The losers would be freedom of speech and anyone who dissents from liberal orthodoxy who doesn’t have tens of millions available to start another conservative media company.

An email like this wouldn’t be complete without a set of talking points:

As a person of faith, I believe that democracy belongs in the hands of the people because we are each a special creation of God.

THEOCRATS! They are obviously trying to write their religious beliefs into the Constitution.

I therefore urge you to support S.J.Res. 19, a constitutional amendment to establish that Congress and the states have the power to regulate and limit election spending.

Speech, folks. This is about speech.

Each person has the right to raise his or her voice in public discourse, but our system today is broken and dominated by big money special interests, whose spending drowns out people’s voices and floods the media with ideological propaganda.

You know what’s amusing? They aren’t talking about the mainstream media such as the corporations mentioned above. They are talking about the private expenditures of private citizens and businesses offering a viewpoint never heard in the coastal newspapers or on the alphabet networks. The latter are apparently pure as the driven snow.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, now bolstered by the recentMcCutcheon decision, has unleashed a flood of spending on our elections that threatens the very foundation of our democracy.

Apparently talking points are to be fact-free, logic-free, argument-free, and dominated by TEOTWAWKI.

We know that corruption can take many forms, not just the quid pro quo of bribery.

Politicians turning the First Amendment into an incumbent-protection racket, for instance.

Our country faces great and serious challenges – from putting people back to work to averting catastrophic climate change to building a culture for peace and shalom around the world. But we will fall short unless we repair our democracy.

Translation: The progressive agenda will never triumph as long as dissenters are allowed to speak their minds.

Via the Huffington Post, we have a splendid example of what’s going on in American higher education these days. It comes in the form of an email written by one Dr. Charles Negy, a professor of psychology at the University of Central Florida. He wrote to the students in his course on “Cross-Cultural Psychology” on the subject of “religious bigotry,” a subject with which he clearly has some personal experience.

He starts off by telling his students some pedestrian things about the purpose of a university, developing critical thinking, yada yada, and then got where he really wanted to go:

Critical thinking is a skill that develops over time. Independent thinking does not occur overnight. Critical thinkers are open to having their cherished beliefs challenged, and must learn how to “defend” their views based on evidence or logic, rather than simply “pounding their chest” and merely proclaiming that their views are “valid.” One characteristic of the critical, independent thinker is being able to recognize fantasy versus reality; to recognize the difference between personal beliefs which are nothing more than personal beliefs, versus views that are grounded in evidence, or which have no evidence.

Those would include some of the most cherished beliefs of certain schools of psychology (some aspects of Jungian thought, for instance, are simply made up out of whole cloth, and even resembles some forms of religious mysticism), but that’s not what concerns him:

Last class meeting and for 15 minutes today, we addressed “religious bigotry.” Several points are worth contemplating:…

Students in my class who openly proclaimed that Christianity is the most valid religion, as some of you did last class, portrayed precisely what religious bigotry is. Bigots—racial bigot or religious bigots—never question their prejudices and bigotry. They are convinced their beliefs are correct. For the Christians in my class who argued the validity of Christianity last week, I suppose I should thank you for demonstrating to the rest of the class what religious arrogance and bigotry looks like.

Not being in the class, I can’t say what kinds of arguments his students might have used. The typical 20-year-old hasn’t had much practice with apologetics, after all. Sometimes they are simply reduced to sputtering, “but it’s the truth!” Not the most effective way to proclaim the gospel.

But I suspect that there might have been at least a few students who were able to actually marshall some evidence and some reasoned arguments. They might not have been the best, or the most convincing. But I think it’s evident that for their professor, it would not have mattered. What seems to have him exercised is simply that some of his students had the temerity to argue “that Christianity is the most valid religion.” Doing so, he says, is “religious arrogance and bigotry.”

Negy, of course, represents the religion of secular liberalism. In that faith, it is taken for granted (and rarely argued with evidence or logic, as Negy doesn’t bother to do here) that all religions are equally “valid,” which is to say that they perform some socially or psychologically useful function for their believers, though they have nothing to do with truth, and are impervious to either evidence or logic. As such, to argue that any particular religion more greatly conforms to the reality of the world, or to an objective standard of truth, is the highest form of heresy. And in the religion of secular liberalism, heresy is better known as “bigotry.”

It seems to have not even occurred to you (I’m directing this comment to those students who manifested such bigotry), as I tried to point out in class tonight, how such bigotry is perceived and experienced by the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists, the non-believers, and so on, in class, to have to sit and endure the tyranny of the masses (the dominant group, that is, which in this case, are Christians).

I laughed out loud when I got to this part. Negy apparently does not know any real, live Muslims. If he did, he would know that among the Islamic faithful, the belief that Islam is the final, unquestionable, superior, and ultimate truth is universal. Judaism is called a “gutter religion” practiced by the offspring of monkeys and apes, while Christianity is similarly denigrated. Even among those who don’t stoop to inane insults of other religions (as I suspect none of the students to whom Negy wrote did), it is taken as a given that Islam is divinely revealed truth, and that doubting it is a slap in the face of Allah. Muslim student group on college campuses all over America act on that belief, and in many instances seek to limit or shut down debate that might call it into question. For Negy to label Christian students who argue for the superior “validity” of their faith “bigots,” and then hold Muslims up as people who would be justified to be offended by the claim, is the height of secular liberal arrogance and bigotry.

Moreover, this “let’s just put our fingers in our ears so we will not hear what we disagree with” is appallingly childish and exemplifies “anti-intellectualism.” The purpose of a university is to engage in dialogue, debate, and exchange ideas in order to try and come to some meaningful conclusion about an issue at hand. Not to shut ourselves off from ideas we find threatening.

Fine. So apparently a child is teaching this class. See, what Negy is doing is denigrating the belief–the idea–of some of his students that Christianity is the most “valid” of all religions. Moreover, he uses the ultimate secular liberal insult (“bigot!”) as a way of shaming those students into abandoning that belief, or at the very least not expressing it in class. So who is it really that is being “appallingly childish” and “exemplifying ‘anti-intellectualism’”? The students who wish to take a position of which the professor disapproves, or the professor who calls names when someone takes such a position?

Universities hold a special place in society where scholarly-minded folks can come together and discuss controversial, polemic, and often uncomfortable topics. Universities, including UCF, have special policies in place to protect our (both professors’ and students’) freedom to express ourselves. Neither students nor professors have a right to censor speech that makes us uncomfortable.

Except that at UCF, in Charles Negy’s psychology classes, the professor has the right to stick odious labels on beliefs that he does not share, and browbeat students into repudiating long-held and cherished beliefs. Nice indoctrination center you’ve got there, Doc.