Limbaugh and the, um, Lady

By: Matt Barber

Saul Alinsky is alive and well in the political maneuverings of the secular left. The problem is; we all have the play book now.

As most know, Rush Limbaugh has been under fire of late for comments he made about 30 year-old “reproductive justice” radical Sandra Fluke. Ms. Fluke recently gained national attention while testifying before Congress. There, she demanded that Georgetown Law, a Jesuit University, underwrite her stated fornication practices by paying for her and other students’ birth control and, ostensibly, abortions. Fornication and abortion, of course, are considered “mortal sins” in Christianity. Catholic doctrine further bars the church from providing contraception.

Rush said of Fluke: “[T]hey’re talking about, like this left-wing sl-t, what’s her name? Sandra Fluke?”

Not really. Actually that bile came from the revolving pie-hole of MSNBC’s Ed Schultz in reference to conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham. Ms. Fluke recently went on Schultz’s program to criticize Limbaugh for indirectly suggesting that, in light of her admitted sexually immoral lifestyle, she was a “sl-t” (an offensive and inappropriate slang for which he has apologized).

During the interview Ms. Fluke somehow failed to mention Schultz’s identical insult of Ingraham. (An inadvertent oversight, I’m sure.)

And speaking of double standards: the media has made much fanfare about a staged phone call from President Obama to Ms. Fluke to “ask how she was holding up.” (No call yet to the similarly aggrieved Laura Ingraham.)

Additionally, Obama has refused to return – or even answer questions about – a one million-dollar donation from serial misogynist Bill Maher who, among other things, has called Sarah Palin a “tw-t” and a “c-nt.”

Mainstream media-types have no interest in this double standard because they share it. They’re duty-bound to ignore the palpable hypocrisy. To do otherwise would undermine the absurd “GOP-has-declared-war-on-women” narrative. (By ‘women,’ of course, they mean liberal women – outnumbered by Rush-supporting conservative gals two-to-one).

Indeed, Rush Limbaugh has become the left’s flashpoint in this twofold election year ploy to both sour women against the GOP and distract from Obama's impending debt bomb, skyrocketing gasoline prices and the threat of a nuclear Iran.

David Burge (@iowahawkblog) of the Iowa Hawk blog summed it up nicely in a tweet: “How can you monsters talk about a $15 trillion debt at a time like this, when a brave coed has hurt lady-feelings?”

Yes, how can we focus on trillions in Obama debt, $6.00 gasoline and Islamo-fascists with nukes while a Georgetown “coed” is being denied free medication from Christians for her “Saturday night fever”?

Well, I have it on good authority that today Rush is chewing a big fat Padron Toro and laughing himself silly. Every time McCarthyite liberals take a swing at El Rushbo, they get their hemp-clad heinies handed to them. It’s like watching Andre the Giant toss midgets.

On Wednesday, Rush announced on his show that the “progressive” machine’s latest effort to bring him down via a sponsorship boycott was failing fantastically. Following the DNC-manufactured Fluke dust-up, Rush revealed that he has suffered zero revenue loss (even making gains); that he has a wait list of new advertisers lining up, and that some of his former sponsors – who hastily bowed to leftist pressure and dropped him – are now “practically begging to come back.”

This comes as little surprise. One such sponsor, Carbonite, saw its stock plummet by twelve percent overnight after announcing it was pulling its spots. This is what happens when a company puts partisan politics over profit.

Limbaugh – rated number one in talk radio – has tens-of-millions of loyal, activist listeners who love to spend tons of cash on the products Rush plugs. (Wonder how long before Carbonite CEO and MoveOn.org supporter David Friend “steps down” to “spend more time with his family”?)

Still, liberal attempts to sidetrack aside, the cultural issues embedded within this Fluke flap are worthy of discussion. Only a dying culture lionizes a woman who publicly impugns – with pride – her own honor and virtue. Yet, to the left, she’s a hero.

It’s genuinely sad that, as a society, we are no longer appalled that a young, single woman – though very nice, I’m sure – would go on national television nonetheless, to proudly and publicly boast that, to her, while sex is cheap and casual, dealing with the potential consequences is so expensive that those of us who disagree must subsidize her bad behavior.

Can someone please explain to me how and why a woman's “right” to be promiscuous is my financial responsibility? If you refuse to buy your own “preventative medicine,” why not hit up the fellas? Last I heard it takes two to do the fornication Fandango.
This is by design. Secular-“progressives” have been working to deconstruct traditional sexual morality for generations. The goal is to impose – under penalty of law – their own moral relativist, sexual anarchist worldview. (Hence, the unconstitutional ObamaCare mandate requiring that Christian groups cast aside millennia-old church doctrine, and get with the postmodern program.)

But, beyond this assault on religious freedom and the moral implications surrounding the debate, Ms. Fluke has additionally set the true women's movement back decades. Her public groveling for free contraception and abortifacients reinforces the sexist stereotype that single women can’t survive without welfare. Women’s empowerment? More like patriarchal government dependency.

Still, like so much in its propagandist bag of tricks, the left’s entire “denied access to contraception” premise is built upon a lie. Liberals would have you believe that, for decades, women seeking birth control – already cheap and often free – have been systemically tackled in front of Walgreens by a bevy of white, Republican Catholic Priests.

Name one woman who has been “denied access” to birth control – ever. Show me one Republican politico who wants to “ban contraception.”

There are none.

Birth control at Walgreens? A few dollars. Taking personal responsibility for your own lifestyle choices and consequences? Priceless.

That’s all Rush was saying.

Penguins 'pray away the gay': Liberals admit that changing orientation is possible

By: Matt Barber

Those bent on justifying the homosexual lifestyle often claim that there are umpteen million – or somewhere thereabouts – species of "gay" animals in the world. This begs a few questions:

• What?

• Then how do they procreate? If these animals forgo natural mating behavior to, instead, spend nights hooking up in Yellowstone's public men's rooms, march in critter "gay pride" parades and decorate their nest in fabulous Art Deco pastels, then wouldn't their species cease to exist after just one generation? So much for Darwinian evolution.

• Even if such nonsense were true, so what? There are plenty of species in the world that eat their young, too. Animals are animals. Does this mean we should act like them? (Besides, show me one species of animal that engages in the same kind of depraved homosexual conduct that can come only from the mind of man, and I'll be impressed.)

Still, whenever some animal displays atypical nesting behavior or exhibits quirks that can be remotely called "gay" (We've all seen that dog), moral relativists – who desperately seek to justify objectively immoral behavior – will cry: "Look! Animals are gay, too. It must be natural!"

So, it's not surprising that liberals have their feathers in a ruffle – that they're egg-cited over recent news that another pair of same-sex penguins has flown the "gay" coop. (I wrote about a second pair in 2009).

Famous "gay" penguins Buddy and Pedro from the Toronto Zoo are the latest chirpy birds with happy feet to begin eyeballing chicks. They're now "ex-gay" penguins. (Read about Buddy and Pedro's "reparative therapy.")

I know. For most of us this elicits little more than a chuckle. Yet there are those who actually believe this twaddle.

Unfortunately, this is all part of liberals' desperate attempt to dredge up some natural, biological rationalization – of which science has found none – to validate demonstrably unnatural behavior.

That's why we see such visceral hatred on the left for the ex-gay community. From a political and legal standpoint, it's strategically critical that these same liberals undermine and marginalize the very real-life experiences of untold thousands of former homosexuals.

This mean-spiritedness represents a profound lack of respect for other people's "right to choose." Their favorite dig is: "You can't pray away the gay." Once you've self-identified as – or been labeled – "gay," you're stuck with it, you see.

Ironically, these same liberals will suggest with a straight face (no pun intended) that something that is innate – a person's biological sex – can change. If you're a man who, today, feels like a woman, why then, snippity-snip and voila! You're a woman.

Many men and women with unwanted same-sex attractions have exercised sexual self-determination and have chosen to leave the homosexual lifestyle. As we make continuing advances in the science of human sexuality, it has become clear that "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" are largely fluid, subjectively determined classifications. As to what may drive a person's "sexual orientation" and/or sexual appetites, the highly liberal American Psychological Association (APA) has concluded: "Many [scientists] think that nature and nurture both play complex roles."

The scientifically reinforced fluidity of "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" may help to explain why, as even the liberal APA has admitted, thousands (if not millions) of people have "altered their sexual orientation" with "varying degrees of satisfaction and varying perceptions of success."

It is no longer open for serious debate. Despite tremendous political pressure to find otherwise, even the left-leaning APA has been forced to acknowledge that for people with unwanted same-sex attractions, change is possible. It's not always easy, but change is undeniably and conclusively possible.

Recently, the most comprehensive study ever done on the ex-gay phenomenon was released in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy. In the study, researchers concluded that, for many who desire to leave the homosexual lifestyle, "change does indeed occur, although not for everyone."

Some of the study's conclusions:

• Success: Conversion: 23 percent of the sample reported substantial reductions in homosexual attraction and subsequent conversion to heterosexual attractions and functioning.

• Success: Chastity: 30 percent reported that homosexual attraction was still present, but only incidentally or in a way that did not seem to bring distress, allowing them to live contentedly without overt sexual activity.

• Continuing: 16 percent reported modest decreases in homosexual attraction, but were not satisfied with their degree of change and remained committed to the change process.

• Non-response: 7 percent reported no significant sexual orientation change; they had not given up on the change process, but some were confused or conflicted about which direction to turn next.

• Failure: Confused: 5 percent reported no significant sexual orientation change, and had given up on the change process, but without yet embracing a gay identity.

• Failure: Gay identity: 20 percent had given up on the change process and embraced a gay identity.

Most importantly, the study determined that, for those who struggle with same-sex attraction and wish to change, "some people can indeed move from homosexuality to heterosexuality, and that harm is unlikely to result from such efforts."

But that's people. Penguins? They're probably just "bisexual" to begin with.

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Matt Barber (@jmattbarber on Twitter) is an attorney concentrating in constitutional law. He serves as vice president of Liberty Counsel Action. (This information is provided for identification purposes only.)

Liberal Violence Rising: The prediction of increasing mayhem by secular-socialism followers

By: J. Matt Barber

While necessity is the mother of invention, sloth and envy beget mediocrity and upheaval – the twin siblings of secular-socialism.

It is in this vein that a rebellious and increasingly violent spirit of incoherent anarchy continues to fester in urban centers across the nation. This is most evident in the form of the envy-driven "Occupy wherever" nonsense embraced by the "progressive" establishment.

Still, this Obama-supported effort to supplant, through lawless imposition, our free-market constitutional republic with some misguided conception of an outcome-based equalitocracy is rooted in much more than just good old-fashioned class warfare.

Part and parcel of secular-socialism is secularism. It's fascinating in its predictability. Wherever you find an entitlement-minded Marxist, you're likely to find a "progressive," counter-biblical moral relativist.

Case in point: The "Occupy D.C." protesters, who have squatted – in more ways than one – at Washington's McPherson Square, have posted a list of rules by which "occupants" are expected to abide. Rule No. 10 requires that folks not "assume anyone's gender," but, instead, "go with gender-neutral pronouns" like "comrade." (Who knew that a so-called "99 percent" of Americans were gender-bending commies?)

Indeed, the opposite of order is disorder. While rebelling against the natural order – whether related to economic liberty or issues surrounding transcendent moral values – many of the less stable elements on the left are exhibiting an increased willingness to move beyond mere disorder to outright violence.

Examples of such violence continue to mount. But beyond the fiery "Occupy" riots in Oakland, and the shootings, murders, rapes and thousands of arrests occurring throughout the dozens of disease-riddled "Occupy" chaos camps around the country, a less publicized example of left-wing violence took place last month in Illinois.

The "Gay Liberation Network" – a militant homosexual activist group of self-described "Trotskyites" – announced that it would be protesting an award ceremony held at the Christian Liberty Academy, an Arlington Heights, Ill., church and school. In the past, when GLN has protested this particular event, Christian attendees have been spat upon and even physically threatened by protesters.

This time, things got worse. The night before the event someone threw two paver bricks through the church's plate glass doors with a dire warning: "This is just a sample of what we will do if you don't shut down Scott Lively and AFTAH. … [F---] Scott Lively. Quit the homophobic [s---]!"

The Christian organization, Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH), was giving an award to Pastor Scott Lively, a pro-family advocate who, in recent years, has been falsely maligned by leftist groups and media-types like Rachel Maddow, for supposedly supporting the death penalty for homosexual behavior – a patently false charge.

The assailants later posted an al-Qaida-like statement on the "progressive" website IndyMedia.org, taking credit for the attack and calling it a "consequence for hatred and homophobia in our community." They further threatened the church, warning that "if this event is not shut down … the Christian Liberty Academy will continue to be under constant attack." Unbelievably, the threat remains posted to this day.

Fortunately, no one has yet been hurt; however, according to the FBI, by definition this attack meets all the elements of domestic terrorism.

But none of this is surprising. The flames of violence against Lively, AFTAH and Christian Liberty Academy were ignited long ago. On the other end of the fuse is the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a hard-left outfit known in past years for monitoring true hate groups like the KKK and neo-Nazis.

After partnering with the admittedly communist GLN, the SPLC had declared, with much media fanfare, both AFTAH and Lively's organization, Abiding Truth Ministries, along with several other highly respected Christian organizations, official "hate groups."
This propagandist smear tactic has been increasingly used by the SPLC in an effort to marginalize Christian and conservative organizations with which the group disagrees. Unfortunately, however, we now see that this strategy to dehumanize, can also have unintended (presumably) consequences.

As in Illinois, the SPLC's dangerous and irresponsible disinformation campaign can embolden and give license to like-minded, though less stable, left-wing extremists, creating a climate of true hate. Such a climate is ripe for violence. After all, these "hate groups" are just like the KKK, right?

Despite all this, even today the SPLC has somehow managed to maintain some level of mainstream credibility. But as it quickly moves further from its left-of-center moorings toward the far fringes of left-wing extremism, its own deceptive activities threaten to undo much of the good for which the organization was once recognized.

After the anti-Christian attack, Bob Schwartz, cofounder of GLN, refused to condemn the violence noting precisely that the victims were "SPLC-designated hate groups." This comes as little surprise in that Schwartz once threatened to push AFTAH founder Peter LaBarbera into oncoming traffic.

Still, what is a bit surprising is that, like its GLN ally, the SPLC – a self-styled domestic terrorist watchdog organization – has additionally refused to condemn this overt act of domestic terrorism.

Instead, the SPLC released a statement, dripping with sarcasm, that piled on the victims. Rather than denouncing the attack, the organization simply lamented that the violence "only strengthened the absurd argument, promulgated by many [Christians]" that left-wing extremists "want to take over America and persecute Christians."

Yes, it's official. The SPLC has abandoned all pretense of objectivity.

And so, as left-wing violence continues to spike in coming months, not only should we expect to hear little about it from a sympathetic mainstream media; we should also expect little help from the once-respected Southern Poverty Law Center.
Indeed, it's hard to do much about the problem when you're a driving force behind it.

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Matt Barber (@jmattbarber on Twitter) is an attorney concentrating in constitutional law. He serves as vice president of Liberty Counsel Action. (This information is provided for identification purposes only.)

Conservative -- the new cool

By: Matt Barber

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive. – C.S. Lewis

Comedian Jim Wiegand -- aka "Jim Wiggins, the last hippie in America" -- is a throwback to a bygone era. The hilarious 70-year-old wisecracker is known for, among other things, a quite liberal worldview. He's also known for raising Joe Wiegand, his rebellious, good-for-nothing son. Apart from sharing both a sharp sense of humor and mutual love and admiration, father and son see eye to eye on little else.

Joe, a good friend of mine, isn't a rebellious good-for-nothing in the conventional sense. He's a 40-something Illinois-based GOP strategist, a Teddy Roosevelt impersonator without equal and a buttoned-up evangelical Christian.

The elder Mr. Wiegand can't figure out where he went wrong. He jokes that when Joe was a youngster, he once discovered magazines hidden under the boy's mattress. He was shocked to find his son looking at such smut: National Review.

Hippies once were the counterculture. Liberals were the nonconformist rebels, boldly wearing unwashed anarchy on tattered sleeve. They loudly and proudly raged against the establishment machine.

Today, they are the establishment machine.

All of our ruling-class institutions -- academia, courts, government, media and entertainment industries -- are teeming with closed-minded, hard-left ideologues who seek to "fundamentally transform America."

Consider that, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, self-identified liberals outweigh their conservative counterparts in the mainstream media by a 5-1 margin.

Likewise, a 1999 North American Academic Study Survey (NAASS) of students, faculty and administrators in colleges and universities throughout the United States determined that five times as many college faculty members vote Democratic as Republican. In fact, 72 percent described themselves as "to the left of center," while a mere 15 percent identified themselves as "right of center."

One can only imagine that in the ensuing decade, the ideological disparity has increased. Ask any kid in the halls of academia, and he'll tell you, with few exceptions, that professor so-and-so is a liberal so-and-so.

Still, liberals -- or "progressives," as they prefer to be called -- persist in laboring under an embarrassing misconception: They honestly believe they remain the nonconformists. It's precious.

In fact, today's liberals are nothing of the sort. They compliantly conform -- like little windup, patchouli-daubed lemmings -- to a carnival-prize caricature of what they imagine nonconformity to look like. You know, the usual stuff: neo-Marxism, environmentalist activism, sexual relativism, big-government nanny statism, an actions-without-consequences rendering of reproductive rights, and other such populist nonsense. Simply put, today's progressive nonconformist conforms.

Indeed, the "Stepford Wives" have become the "Stepford Lesbians." The prudish, judgmental church lady has swapped spots with the easy -- yet somehow self-righteous -- birth-bashing feminist.

So what is a young person -- brimming over with that instinctive, defiant impulse to rebel against "the man" -- to do?

Well, in this up-is-down, spend-money-to-save-money world, conservatives have become the contemporary nonconformists. Today's rebellious youth are telling the progressive establishment to put its moral-relativist, redistributionist party-line pig swill in its well-used chamber pipe and smoke it.

Kids: Really want to get under your obnoxiously "tolerant," Volvo-driving, MSNBC-watching folks' skin? Try this: Go to church, abstain from premarital sex, join the Young America's Foundation, attend a Tea Party rally, enroll at Liberty University, listen to Rush Limbaugh and vote Republican.

You'll have them writhing in their Birkenstocks.

I've often said that President Obama could either be the best thing to happen to America or the worst. The best insofar as this man's policies are so radical, so extreme that, in keeping with Newton's third law of motion, the "opposite reaction" might well trigger Republican rule in perpetuity.

First, the bad news: So far, Mr. Obama is the worst. Now, the good news: I believe he has awakened a sleeping giant in the millennial generation (ages 18 to 29). Today's counterculture is rejecting the tired progressive policies pushed by this president and his secular-socialist sycophants.

For instance, a 2010 Marist Institute for Public Opinion poll determined that nearly 60 percent of millennials believe abortion is "morally wrong," a nearly 10-point increase over the more progressive baby-boomer generation. The tide is turning.

Similarly, a recent survey from Harvard University's Institute of Politics found that millennials are worried sick about their futures. Yet President Hopey Changey and Democrats in Congress continue to play back-alley dice with their lives via incomprehensible deficit spending and a national debt that swells annually by the trillions.

Do you think these kids won't rebel as the clouds quickly darken?

Winston Churchill once observed, "If you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain." Liberalism is emotion-based and rooted in soaring, knee-jerk notions of "social justice." Conservatism is logic-based and rooted in reality.

Today's rebellious youth have the heart part down. I'm glad to see they're developing some brains.

Matt Barber (jmattbarber@comcast.net) is an attorney concentrating in constitutional law, and author of the book "The Right Hook – From the Ring to the Culture War." He serves as Vice President of Liberty Counsel Action.