AGW

September Quadrant Article

ENVIRONMENT
The Cartoonist Who Questioned the Science on Global Warming
John Spooner
A state of scepticism and suspense may amuse a few inquisitive minds. But the practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitude, that if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the loss of their pleasing vision. Their love of the marvellous and supernatural, their curiosity with regard to future events, and their strong propensity to extend their hopes and fears beyond the limits of the visible world, were the principal causes which favoured the establishment of Polytheism. —Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

I was once approached by a friend who is concerned about the danger of human-caused global warming. He asserted that when it comes to scientific issues of major public concern like this, it is “not what you believe but who you believe”. I think he meant that my then hesitant scepticism about global warming was pointless, for as a cartoonist I must be as inadequate to judge the science as he was. For that matter it seems all of us who are untrained in “climate science” have no option but to respect the peer-reviewed authority of the climate science establishment. Of course, as a revered public intellectual, my friend did not see it as his duty to sit on his hands. He felt bound, as many have, to vigorously support the scientific and political authority of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and regional associates like the CSIRO.
I found my friend’s advice baffling. As anyone familiar with the judicial process knows, the gravest issues of liberty and fortune are often determined by a jury selected from the general public. During some trials, expert witnesses give evidence supporting either side in our adversarial system. The judge must rule which evidence is relevant or admissible, but in the end it is the jury that decides which version of the scientific evidence is to be believed. No one in a civilised society is daunted by this process. We accept the outcome unless a procedural mistake has been made. Often someone goes to jail because one cross-examined scientific expert is believed over another by ordinary jury persons. No big deal.
So what’s the problem? Everyone has the chance to do some reading until they hit the wall of their own ignorance or understanding. Then you ask for help. Acting as the foreman of your own jury, you can ask for more direction or for clarifications to help you follow the logic of the argument. But if in the end you cannot agree with your fellow jurors, then you cannot reach a verdict. It is surely the duty of scientists who wish to influence political events to explain themselves clearly. If they can’t do that to the degree that ordinary people (not to mention many of their equally qualified peers) understand and accept that there really is a dangerous global warming problem, then it is premature for governments to be setting expensive anti-carbon-dioxide measures in place.
But in matters to do with climate change there is no judge except the scientific method, that is, the proposition of a testable hypothesis followed by its testing against factual or experimental challenge. That it fails various empirical tests is, of course, precisely why the advocates of dangerous anthropogenic global warming (AGW) are attracted to the idea of a scientific consensus. And that is where things get difficult for cartoonists, public intellectuals, journalists, politicians, bloggers and the general public. The reason why the phrase “scientific consensus” emerges in this debate is because political activists want to get moving, and if they say that the so-called “scientific consensus” is scary and urgent, then cartoonists and others had better just get out of the way: the science is settled and procrastination is outrageously reckless. The question of whether there is, or can be, such a thing as a useful scientific consensus about a matter like dangerous AGW is a difficult theoretical and practical problem. Cutting through that uncertainty, AGW activists have preferred to use the political process to impose their consensus argument, mainly through the media.
The activist cause perhaps peaked in early 2007 when Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth became an international hit, winning two Academy Awards. This evidence might have seemed compelling to the uninitiated, but in October 2007 the British High Court found the film contained at least nine significant errors of fact and required British schools to refer to these errors when using the film in lessons. Though Professor Bob Carter gave evidence in this case, to date few people in Australia are aware of this severe embarrassment for Mr Gore.
Thanks mainly to media neglect, I never heard of the case at the time, and so, like nearly everyone else, I was initially taken in by the authoritative pronouncements of the former vice-president. However, I remember too that later in 2007, when the ABC broadcast Martin Durkin’s provocative documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, a lot of people got very upset indeed. How interesting. The science was settled; the debate was over; no more discussion was needed, yet all it took was one contrariantelevision program to cause an explosive and long-running public sensation.
Any media professional should have been aroused by such an excited censorship campaign, and it stimulated my first cartoon on the subject, which depicted the family television set as medieval stocks with an imprisoned climate sceptic being pelted by the family with their television dinner.
And what of Durkin’s documentary? I know it didn’t get one or two of the fine details of the science exactly right, but then very few documentaries ever do. For example, there has been much criticism that any influence of cosmic rays on clouds will apply only to lower-level clouds—not all clouds, as the program stated. But, as in many good documentaries, Swindlepresented some riveting interviews with high-calibre professional scientists. To take one example, we heard from Professor Paul Reiter, chief of the Insects and Infectious Diseases Unit at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. As if I were in a jury, I had the opportunity to see him as he spoke (remember that appeals courts won’t hear an appeal based on a written transcript), and I formed a strong impression that he was telling the truth—that mosquitoes are equally at home in freezing Siberia as they are in the tropics. The same goes for malaria, the disease that they carry. Professor Reiter also seemed credible when he spoke of his difficulties with the IPCC process, describing why he thought that the organisation was dysfunctional. Many of the other interviews with sceptics, including one with the co-founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, had a similar effect on me. Though I hadn’t seen all the evidence, after this film was broadcast the sceptics at the very least had my attention, and no doubt that of many other independent persons. So why did the media at large attack the film, and continue to vigorously promulgate their belief in dangerous AGW?
Up to the time of Swindle’s screening, the role of journalists in the global warming debate had perhaps been unexceptional. But things changed after the screening of the documentary and the outpouring of protest and criticism that it attracted. Then, and just as lobbyists do for matters of economic or social reform, the proselytisers for global warming alarm, who were feeling threatened as never before, got nasty.
Someone came up with the brilliantly clever but insidious idea of using the term “denier” to describe a person who remained agnostic or sceptical about the extent of human contribution to the global warming of the last 100 years. Why “denier”? Because it made the connection in people’s minds to “Holocaust denial”. Unbelievably, this malicious rhetoric henceforward came to be adopted by climate activists, media reporters and politicians up to the level of heads of state, and was applied to distinguished science professors such as Paul Reiter, Richard Lindzen, Freeman Dyson, William Happer and many others.
Holocaust denial describes the heartless and despicable refusal by anti-Semites to acknowledge the historical truth of the Jewish genocide that occurred during the Second World War. If you use the offensive term “denier” in another context, you do so for reasons best known to yourself. You may be calculating or you may be indifferent, but as politicians like Kevin Rudd, Penny Wong and Julia Gillard (all users of the term) would have known, the effect is pungent. No sensible, morally responsible person wants to be stigmatised in such a way.
Intimidation comes in many forms, and there can be no doubt that many people have been inhibited from entering the public debate on dangerous AGW because of the intimidatory power of this vicious language. And just in case you still haven’t got it, some prominent Australian public intellectuals to this day continue to explicitly endorse the moral equivalence between Holocaust and global warming denial. This endorsement is all the more incredible because it comes from academics who really understand the horror of the Holocaust.
Nonetheless, this blatant method of stigmatising those who questioned the so-called “consensus” view on AGW turned out not to be enough to suppress all independent views: many agnostic and sceptical scientists are made of tougher stuff. Accordingly, more stops had to be pulled out on the vilification organ, with sceptical scientists being compared by journalists and Labor politicians to eighteenth-century slave trade advocates, the odious tobacco lobby and recently even to paedophiles—a new low in public discourse.
Every cartoonist and satirist in the world, not to mention the investigative reporters, should by now have had their bullshit detectors on high alert. If the evidence was so good, and the sceptical scientists were so weak, wrong and few in number, then why the need for such rancorous politics? If you have the UN, the EU, the banks, the financial markets, most of the clergy and the media on your side, then why this dishonourable nastiness as well? I’ve always hated bullies and they have certainly been thick on the ground in this debate.
No good came of going back to my friend, the intellectual, for another discussion. I was referred to the “only” source of definitive knowledge on the subject; which was supposed to be Dr James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. By this time, the alarm bell in my head was ringing loudly. For example, I came to know that only 0.7 degrees of warming had occurred since 1910, and only 0.4 degrees of that since 1945 when carbon dioxide levels started to rise considerably. Next, I was told that the Arctic sea ice was melting in an “unprecedented” way, despite abundant scientific documentation that the Arctic Ocean was virtually ice-free during the Holocene climatic optimum, only 8000 years ago—nonetheless, the public continued to be told that this melting sea ice manifests a “tipping point” that will lead to catastrophe.
These things notwithstanding, if NASA was the “main authority” then I thought that I should do as I was advised and consult them. So I went to the NASA website and searched for material on Arctic sea-ice melt. Five items into that page I discovered that “a new NASA-led study” into the causes of Arctic sea-ice melting had reported “a 23 per cent loss” in the Arctic’s year-round sea-ice cover between 2005 and 2007. The research team was led by Dr Son Nghiem of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, who said that the rapid decline in winter perennial ice over the previous two years had been caused by unusual winds, which “compressed the sea ice … and then sped its flow out of the Arctic” where it rapidly melted in warmer waters. Dr Nghiem also said that “the winds causing this trend in ice reduction were set up by an unusual pattern of atmospheric pressure that began at the beginning of this century”. Yet nowhere in the public discussion of the dramatic sea-ice melt had we heard much about these real causes for its diminution, including the North Atlantic Oscillation, doubtless because it was easier to concentrate on the positive feedback loops created by the exposed Arctic sea. The real story was far more complicated and difficult to explain than in the glib terminology of AGW.
Furthermore, other than on Andrew Bolt’s and Joanne Nova’s blogs, it is extremely hard to find any widely-read popular public description in Australia (or worldwide for that matter) of the melting of Arctic sea ice that occurred between 1920 and 1940. Virtually all media coverage has related to the short satellite record of Arctic sea ice, which is only available since 1979. Rather than a simplistic alarming story of global warming, the NASA research was an accurate account of only part of a complex matter.
The real story in the Arctic Ocean obviously involves an intricate relationship between sea ice, ocean currents, atmospheric winds and temperature as affected by ocean–atmosphere oscillations like the North Atlantic Oscillation, and these modern changes need to be studied in the context of changes that have occurred through millennia. When viewed in these wider contexts, there is nothing untoward about the relatively minor changes in sea-ice cover that have occurred in the Arctic Ocean in modern times.
This was, of course, a great time for cartooning. John Howard saw the votes to be gained in crossing over to the warming camp, and Kevin Rudd promised to save the planet from the greatest moral, economic and spiritual threat of our time.
As the Arctic ice melted in 2007, Australia was suffering the continuation of an allegedly unprecedented, decade-long drought. The absence, indeed end, of sufficient rain to fill our rivers and dams was predicted by grim-faced climate scientists who invariably announced that things were far worse than their computer models had predicted. Yet the preceding severe droughts of the 1860s, the 1890s and during the First World War were rarely discussed in order to provide a needed perspective. With a simple Google search, anyone could, and still can, access photographs of horses and carriages on a bone-dry Murray River bed in 1914.
With so much political clout behind the dangerous-warming cause, and the Australian drought in full force, the next game-changing moment that captured my attention occurred on December 19, 2007. Dr David Whitehouse caused a stir by writing an article for the left-wing New Statesman magazine titled “Has Global Warming Stopped?” Dr Whitehouse stressed a point which concerned sceptics had long noticed: “The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001.” Because of the fundamental mechanism of global warming (the greenhouse effect), temperatures should have been increasing as carbon dioxide levels continued their relentless rise; but they were not. As Whitehouse, a PhD in astrophysics and former online science editor for the BBC, noted, “something else is happening [to the climate] and it is vital we find out what or else we may spend hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly”.
It was about this time that slowcoach denier cartoonists like me really started to wake up and look around, to discover the writings of experienced agnostic scientists like William Kininmonth, a former head of Australia’s National Climate Centre at the Bureau of Meteorology. Senior scientists like William had been publishing serious critiques of dangerous AGW way back in the 1990s, which was long before I and other slowcoaches had stopped our dreaming.
So just when those supporting climate alarm thought they had everything settled and nailed down, a gale of discontent started to blow. Cartoonist heaven, really: we love the spectacle of powerful people preparing their policy vessel against strong winds and rough seas, frantically rigging up fragile, flapping sails of spin and blather. If you’re going to spend over $15 billion of taxpayers’ money on desalinated water, or manage a potentially ruinous carbon dioxide trading scheme (please don’t stock our superannuation with the stuff), then you certainly don’t want to be questioned too closely, let alone lampooned, about the scientific details that you misunderstood or got wrong.
Nobody anticipated the next debacle: Climate¬gate. As the result of an apparent hacking attack on a server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (which might, or might not, have been mounted by an internal whistleblower), thousands of e-mails previously exchanged between senior IPCC scientists were leaked to the public a few weeks before the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. The e-mails reeked of scientific uncertainty, political manoeuvring, unreasonable secrecy and strange ethics.
The revelations that they contained undoubtedly exercised an influence on the failure of the Copenhagen conference. Climategate also prompted at least a short burst of candour from Professor Phil Jones, Director of the CRU, who confirmed in a BBC interview that the warming rates of the periods 1860–1880, 1910–1940 and 1975–1998 had been statistically similar; that from 1995 to 2009 there had been no statistically significant global warming; and that from 2002 to 2010 there had been slight but “insignificant” global cooling. In answer to a further question as to whether the “climate change (debate) is over”, Professor Jones stated, “I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists believe this.” I found this statement extremely encouraging, for the science was obviously not settled and the consensus was crumbling even amongst the warming devotees.
Since 2007 the non-scientific players in this great intellectual drama have been confronted by a creeping uncertainty (which some still do not want to acknowledge) concerning many contentious dangerous AGW issues. These have included: the composition of the IPCC and the credibility of its processes; the unusual melting, or not, of sea ice and glaciers; the evidence for medieval warm temperatures; the importance of sunspots; the measurement of claimed global warming; changes or not in patterns of extreme weather events; ocean “acidification”; ocean warming and sea-level rise; biomass absorption and the longevity of molecules of atmospheric carbon dioxide; the reliability of climate computer models; the influence of the short-period El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and other similar oscillations on a multi-decadal scale; the chaotic behaviour of clouds; the impact of cosmic rays on climate; realisation that it is just clean air that is being vented by the Yallourn power stations (carbon dioxide and water, with virtually no pollutants); and, to cap it all off, even a newly declared scepticism towards dangerous AGW by green gurus like James Lovelock, the founder of the Gaia movement.
By early 2010, it seemed that nearly every single element of the global warming debate was well and truly up for grabs. In addition, and not put off by having their sanity questioned, myriads of qualified agnostic and sceptical persons made public statements, or signed declarations or petitions, to the effect that whilst dangerous AGW was a theoretically possible outcome of human-related carbon dioxide emissions, it was a very unlikely one given that, despite strenuous efforts, no proven AGW at all had yet been identified at a measurable level. For example, in the Oregon Petition, starting in 1998, more than 31,000 scientists, including 9029 with PhDs, signed a statement of protest at the findings and recommendations of the IPCC.
In Australia, and against this hurricane of uncertainty, the tattered vessel of government climate policy heedlessly weighed anchor and began to implement the demonisation of carbon dioxide by introducing penal taxes against its emission. Instead of waiting out the storm in harbour, government activists set out to sea guided by the Green faith and a few bearings taken on scattered windmills along the shoreline.
All of this provided great material for a satirist, but it was bad news indeed for the average Australian citizen whose cost of living was inexorably on the rise. In addition to the continuing increases in direct costs, it is also painful to contemplate the things that could have been done to improve our schools or health services using the money that has instead been squandered in vain pursuit of irrational renewable energy targets and “stopping global warming”.
Imagine if the sceptics are right. Who is going to be accountable, and who is going to do the accounting?
What of the establishment activists, and their media supporters, who have so vilified a group of honest, brave and experienced scientists for merely staying true to the empirical values of their profession? Who will vindicate the sullied reputations of, to name but a few antipodean names: Michael Asten, Bob Carter, Chris de Freitas, David Evans, Stewart Franks, William Kininmonth, Bryan Leyland, Jennifer Marohasy, John McLean, Joanne Nova, Garth Paltridge, Ian Plimer, Peter Ridd and Walter Starck? And the same question applies also for economists like Henry Ergas, Martin Feil, David Murray and others, who have dared to suggest that the Stern and Garnaut reviews were a travesty on both scientific and economic grounds, and that the carbon dioxide pricing/taxing emperor actually has no clothes.
I would love to see a list of all those socially beneficial environmental, educational and health projects that could have been funded instead of the profligate and futile spending on dangerous AGW that has actually occurred. I would like, too, though I doubt that it will happen in my lifetime, to see a public apology from all those advocates, intellectuals and politicians who have so freely slandered and injured the moral reputations of those other Australian citizens and qualified scientists whom they call “deniers”.
History is usually written by the political victors, but the global warming issue seems set to continue as a ritualised tribal debate for a long time yet. I once asked a committed “warming” journalist how many years the present pause in warming would have to last to cause her to challenge her own belief. Calmly looking me dead in the eye, she said, “Fifty years.”


This is the introduction to the new book Taxing Air: Facts and Fallacies About Climate Change, by Bob Carter and John Spooner, with Bill Kininmonth, Martin Feil, Stewart Franks and Bryan Leyland, published by Kelpie Press and available at bookshops and at www.taxingair.com for $30. John Spooner has been a newspaper cartoonist and illustrator since the 1970s. In 2002 he won the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year Award.

Female Breadwinners

June 11, 2013

Rise in Female Breadwinners Means America Is a Loser

When women start doing what men have traditionally done, yours is a civilization of the setting sun. This is brought to mind when pondering a recent Pew Research Center study showing that women are now the primary or sole breadwinners in 40 percent of American households. You may have heard the story -- it created quite a stir on Fox News, with Greta Van Susteren and Megyn Kelly (who became quite hysterical) taking exception to male colleagues' warnings about the development's sociological implications. But if these two ladies, and the other critics, had reacted rationally and not emotionally, they would realize what is obvious:

The rise in female breadwinners is a sign of a civilization in decline.
Let's start by first examining the study. While the term "breadwinner" conjures up images of pleasingly plump paychecks, the real story here is the rise of poor single mothers. Among the 40 percent of women in the breadwinner group, 63 percent are single mothers. This isn't surprising, since the rate of single motherhood has risen from about 4 percent in the 1940s to 41 percent today (72 percent in the black community). So what kind of "bread" are we talking about? Writes Amy Langfield of CNBC, "The median income for a single mother who has never been married was $17,400 as of 2011." And, obviously, having large numbers of single mothers, with essentially fatherless children, struggling to make ends meet isn't good for the women, the children, or the society as a whole.
The picture looks better for the married 37 percent of the breadwinner group, but only by comparison. Twenty-nine percent of these women's husbands are unemployed. Moreover, Pew describes these women as older, college-educated, and white. Translation: they're the one-child wonders. These are often women who postpone childbirth in deference to careerism and then, perhaps after dropping a tidy sum at a fertility clinic, have their sole son or daughter. Why does this warrant mention? Because as the documentary Demographic Winter points out, this phenomenon is a significant contributing factor to the plummeting birth rates among Western peoples. Outside New Zealand, there isn't one major European-descent group with a replacement-level birth rate. And for all you secular-feminist chauvinists so proud of your cultural hegemony, what do you think happens to values that cause people to erase themselves?
So why can't the Megyn Kellys of the world perceive the rise in female breadwinners as the warning sign it is? Because their feminist dogma teaches that any female "gain" relative to men is positive, and any criticism of it is blind male chauvinism. These are the people who cheer girls' "better" performance in schools even though this is largely attributable to boys' worsening performance (and improved female test scores aren't relevant, because the exams, like the boys, have been dumbed down). It's a mindset that would consider it a good thing if women won every future marathon because men either lost their legs or stopped running.
And that is the point. If a warring nation must move a few divisions from the southern front to shore up the northern, it isn't a victory for those divisions; it means the war effort is waning. And if the divisions' generals view it as a personal victory because they'll have the opportunity to distinguish themselves, they're self-centered and ignorant.
Likewise, it was a sign of crisis when women had to assume men's roles in the factories during WWII, but the idea was that the crisis would end and normalcy resume. But today we are in perpetual war -- culture war -- in a never-ending crisis in which we fight ourselves and confuse losses with gains. No, the intersex wage gap isn't a bad thing, and it isn't good when it starts to close. The size of that gap correlates with the health of the nuclear family; the larger it is, the greater men's ability to support their families and women's opportunity to stay at home with the children. No, it isn't good when girls outshine boys in school, as this reflects a society of undisciplined lads and a hostile yet permissive, feminist-oriented academia.
And, no, it isn't good when you destroy patriarchy. Why? G.K. Chesterton put it best when he wrote, "What is called matriarchy is simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remains fixed because all the fathers are fugitive and irresponsible." If you want matriarchy, just go into the black community. Women rule the roost there, but they reign in a hell born of degraded morals and family breakdown. There has never been a successful matriarchy -- the notion of a matriarchal prehistory is a myth -- and there never will be.
This is why, ultimately, the feminist model is destined for the dustbin of history. The only system that ensures the perpetuation of civilization (replacement-level birth rates) is patriarchy; the only system that compels women and men to fulfill their responsibilities to hearth and home is patriarchy. And this is why, barring the end of man or a dystopian future in which children are lab-created assembly-line style to be the collective's drones, patriarchy is inevitable.
There is no substitute for tradition. The Soviets learned this the hard way, for after undermining the family, sex roles, and religion, mass murderer Joseph Stalin actually outlawed abortion in a vain attempt to combat a bottomed-out birth rate. But today Russia's population is still declining by 700,000 per year -- the wages of their statist sin.
When a people would be invaded or conquered years ago, the men and boys above a certain age would sometimes be killed. Emasculate a society, and it's no longer a force to be reckoned with. But we have emasculated ourselves, killing off manhood by neutering men emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. This won't end well, but for sure it will end. Because the feminist band can play on, but the rising water will soon drown out their music -- for good.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com.

Gay Marriage

Civilization Watch
First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC

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By Orson Scott Card

http://www.ornery.org/index.html February 15, 2004

Homosexual "Marriage" and Civilization

A little dialogue from Lewis Carroll:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."

The Massachusetts Supreme Court has not yet declared that "day" shall now be construed to include that which was formerly known as "night," but it might as well.

By declaring that homosexual couples are denied their constitutional rights by being forbidden to "marry," it is treading on the same ground.

Do you want to know whose constitutional rights are being violated? Everybody's. Because no constitution in the United States has ever granted the courts the right to make vast, sweeping changes in the law to reform society.

Regardless of their opinion of homosexual "marriage," every American who believes in democracy should be outraged that any court should take it upon itself to dictate such a social innovation without recourse to democratic process.

And we all know the course this thing will follow. Anyone who opposes this edict will be branded a bigot; any schoolchild who questions the legitimacy of homosexual marriage will be expelled for "hate speech." The fanatical Left will insist that anyone who upholds the fundamental meaning that marriage has always had, everywhere, until this generation, is a "homophobe" and therefore mentally ill.

Which is the modern Jacobin equivalent of crying, "Off with their heads!"

We will once again be performing a potentially devastating social experiment on ourselves without any attempt to predict the consequences and find out if the American people actually want them.

But anyone who has any understanding of how America -- or any civilization -- works, of the forces already at play, will realize that this new diktat of the courts will not have any of the intended effects, while the unintended effects are likely to be devastating.

Marriage Is Already Open to Everyone.

In the first place, no law in any state in the United States now or ever has forbidden homosexuals to marry. The law has never asked that a man prove his heterosexuality in order to marry a woman, or a woman hers in order to marry a man.

Any homosexual man who can persuade a woman to take him as her husband can avail himself of all the rights of husbandhood under the law. And, in fact, many homosexual men have done precisely that, without any legal prejudice at all.

Ditto with lesbian women. Many have married men and borne children. And while a fair number of such marriages in recent years have ended in divorce, there are many that have not.

So it is a flat lie to say that homosexuals are deprived of any civil right pertaining to marriage. To get those civil rights, all homosexuals have to do is find someone of the opposite sex willing to join them in marriage.

In order to claim that they are deprived, you have to change the meaning of "marriage" to include a relationship that it has never included before this generation, anywhere on earth.

Just because homosexual partners wish to be called "married" and wish to force everyone else around them to regard them as "married," does not mean that their Humpty-Dumpty-ish wish should be granted at the expense of the common language, democratic process, and the facts of human social organization.

However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be, what they are doing is not marriage. Nor does society benefit in any way from treating it as if it were.

Marrying Is Hard to Do.

Men and women, from childhood on, have very different biological and social imperatives. They are naturally disposed to different reproductive strategies; men are (on average) larger and stronger; the relative levels of various hormones, the difference in the rate of maturity, and many other factors make it far, far easier for women to get along with other women and men to get along with men.

Men, after all, know what men like far better than women do; women know how women think and feel far better than men do. But a man and a woman come together as strangers and their natural impulses remain at odds throughout their lives, requiring constant compromise, suppression of natural desires, and an unending effort to learn how to get through the intersexual swamp.

And yet, throughout the history of human society -- even in societies that tolerated relatively open homosexuality at some stages of life -- it was always expected that children would be born into and raised by families consisting of a father and mother.

And in those families where one or both parents were missing, usually because of death, either stepparents, adoptive parents, or society in general would step in to provide, not just nurturing, but also the appropriate role models.

It is a demonstrated tendency -- as well as the private experience of most people -- that when we become parents, we immediately find ourselves acting out most of the behaviors we observed in the parent of our own sex. We have to consciously make an effort to be different from them.

We also expect our spouse to behave, as a parent, in the way we have learned to expect from the experiences we had with our opposite-sex parent -- that's why so many men seem to marry women just like their mother, and so many women to marry men just like their father. It takes conscious effort to break away from this pattern.

So not only are two sexes required in order to conceive children, children also learn their sex-role expectations from the parents in their own family. This is precisely what large segments of the Left would like to see break down. And if it is found to have unpleasant results, they will, as always, insist that the cure is to break down the family even further.

The War On Marriage

Of course, in our current society we are two generations into the systematic destruction of the institution of marriage. In my childhood, it was rare to know someone whose parents were divorced; now, it seems almost as rare to find someone whose parents have never been divorced.

And a growing number of children grow up in partial families not because of divorce, but because there never was a marriage at all.

The damage caused to children by divorce and illegitimate birth is obvious and devastating. While apologists for the current system are quick to blame poverty resulting from "deadbeat dads" as the cause, the children themselves know this is ludicrous.

There are plenty of poor families with both parents present whose children grow up knowing they are loved and having good role models from both parents.

And there are plenty of kids whose divorced parents have scads of money -- but whose lives are deformed by the absence of one of their parents in their lives.

Most broken or wounded families are in that condition because of a missing father. There is substantial and growing evidence that our society's contempt for the role of the father in the family is responsible for a massive number of "lost" children.

Only when the father became powerless or absent in the lives of huge numbers of children did we start to realize some of the things people need a father for: laying the groundwork for a sense of moral judgment; praise that is believed so that it can instill genuine self-confidence.

People lacking in fundamental self-esteem don't need gold stars passed out to everyone in their class. Chances are, they need a father who will say -- and mean -- "I'm proud of you."

This is an oversimplification of a very complex system. There are marriages that desperately need to be dissolved for the safety of the children, for instance, and divorced parents who do a very good job of keeping both parents closely involved in the children's lives.

But you have to be in gross denial not to know that children would almost always rather have grown up with Dad and Mom in their proper places at home. Most kids would rather that, instead of divorcing, their parents would acquire the strength or maturity to stop doing the things that make the other parent want to leave.

Marriage Is Everybody's Business.

And it isn't just the damage that divorce and out-of-wedlock births do to the children in those broken families: Your divorce hurts my kids, too.

All American children grow up today in a society where they are keenly aware that marriages don't last. At the first sign of a quarrel even in a stable marriage that is in no danger, the children fear divorce. Is this how it begins? Will I now be like my friends at school, shunted from half-family to half-family?

This is not trivial damage. Kids thrive best in an environment that teaches them how to be adults. They need the confidence and role models that come from a stable home with father and mother in their proper places.

So long before the Massachusetts Supreme Court decided to play Humpty Dumpty, the American people had plunged into a terrible experiment on ourselves, guided only by the slogan of immaturity and barbarism: "If it feels good, do it!"

Civilization depends on people deliberately choosing not to do many things that feel good at the time, in order to accomplish more important, larger purposes. Having an affair; breaking up a marriage; oh, those can feel completely justified and the reasons very important at the time.

But society has a vital stake in child-rearing; and children have a vital stake in society.

Monogamous marriage is by far the most effective foundation for a civilization. It provides most males an opportunity to mate (polygamous systems always result in surplus males that have no reproductive stake in society); it provides most females an opportunity to have a mate who is exclusively devoted to her. Those who are successful in mating are the ones who will have the strongest loyalty to the social order; so the system that provides reproductive success to the largest number is the system that will be most likely to keep a civilization alive.

Monogamy depends on the vast majority of society both openly and privately obeying the rules. Since the natural reproductive strategy for males is to mate with every likely female at every opportunity, males who are not restrained by social pressure and expectations will soon devolve into a sort of Clintonesque chaos, where every man takes what he can get.

Civilization Is Rooted in Reproductive Security.

There is a very complex balance in maintaining a monogamous society, with plenty of lapses and exceptions and mechanisms to cope with the natural barbaric impulses of the male mating drive. There is always room to tolerate a small and covert number of exceptions to the rule.

But the rule must be largely observed, and must be seen to be observed even more than it actually is. If trust between the sexes breaks down, then males who are able will revert to the broadcast strategy of reproduction, while females will begin to compete for males who already have female mates. It is a reproductive free-for-all.

Civilization requires the suppression of natural impulses that would break down the social order. Civilization thrives only when most members can be persuaded to behave unnaturally, and when those who don't follow the rules are censured in a meaningful way.

Why would men submit to rules that deprive them of the chance to satisfy their natural desire to mate with every attractive female?

Why would women submit to rules that keep them from trying to mate with the strongest (richest, most physically imposing, etc.) male, just because he already has a wife?

Because civilization provides the best odds for their children to live to adulthood. So even though civilized individuals can't pursue the most obviously pleasurable and selfish (i.e., natural) strategies for reproduction, the fact is that they are far more likely to be successful at reproduction in a civilized society -- whether they personally like the rules or not.

Civilizations that enforce rules of marriage that give most males and most females a chance to have children that live to reproduce in their turn are the civilizations that last the longest. It's such an obvious principle that few civilizations have even attempted to flout it.

Even if the political system changes, as long as the marriage rules remain intact, the civilization can go on.

Balancing Family and Society

There's a lot of quid pro quo in civilization, though. Not all parents are good providers, for instance. So society, in one way or another, must provide for the children whose parents are either incapable or irresponsible.

Society must also step in to protect children from abusive adults; and the whole society must act in loco parentis, watching out for each other's children, trusting that someone else is also watching out for their own.

The degree of trust can be enormous. We send our children to school for an enormous portion of their childhood, trusting that the school will help civilize them while we parents devote more of our time to providing for them materially (or caring for younger children not yet in school).

At the same time, parents recognize that non-parents are not as trustworthy caretakers. The school provides some aspects of civilization, but not others. Schools expect the parents to civilize their children in certain ways in order to take part safely with other children; parents expect to be left alone with some aspects of child-rearing, such as religion.

In other words, there are countless ways that parents and society at large are constantly negotiating to find the best balance between the parents' natural desire to protect their children -- their entrants in the reproductive lottery -- and the civilization's need to bring the greatest number of children, not just to adulthood, but to parenthood as committed members of the society who will teach their children to also be good citizens.

America's Anti-Family Experiment

In this delicate balance, it is safe to say that beginning with a trickle in the 1950s, but becoming an overwhelming flood in the 1960s and 1970s, we took a pretty good system, and in order to solve problems that needed tweaking, we made massive, fundamental changes that have had devastating consequences.

Now huge numbers of Americans know that the schools are places where their children are indoctrinated in anti-family values. Trust is not just going -- for them it's gone.

Huge numbers of children are deprived of two-parent homes, because society has decided to give legal status and social acceptance to out-of-wedlock parenting and couples who break up their marriages with little regard for what is good for the children.

The result is a generation of children with no trust in marriage who are mating in, at best, merely "marriage-like" patterns, and bearing children with no sense of responsibility to society at large; while society is trying to take on an ever greater role in caring for the children who are suffering -- while doing an increasingly bad job of it.

Parents in a stable marriage are much better than schools at civilizing children. You have to be a fanatical ideologue not to recognize this as an obvious truth -- in other words, you have to dumb down or radically twist the definition of "civilizing children" in order to claim that parents are not, on the whole, better at it.

We are so far gone down this road that it would take a wrenching, almost revolutionary social change to reverse it. And with the forces of P.C. orthodoxy insisting that the solutions to the problems they have caused is ever-larger doses of the disease, it is certain that any such revolution would be hotly contested.

Now, in the midst of this tragic collapse of marriage, along comes the Massachusetts Supreme Court, attempting to redefine marriage in a way that is absurdly irrelevant to any purpose for which society needs marriage in the first place.

Humpty Has Struck Before.

We've already seen similar attempts at redefinition. The ideologues have demanded that we stop defining "families" as Dad, Mom, and the kids. Now any grouping of people might be called a "family."

But this doesn't turn them into families, or even make rational people believe they're families. It just makes it politically unacceptable to use the word family in any meaningful way.

The same thing will happen to the word marriage if the Massachusetts decision is allowed to stand, and is then enforced nationwide because of the "full faith and credit" clause in the Constitution.

Just because you give legal sanction to a homosexual couple and call their contract a "marriage" does not make it a marriage. It simply removes marriage as a legitimate word for the real thing.

If you declare that there is no longer any legal difference between low tide and high tide, it might stop people from publishing tide charts, but it won't change the fact that sometimes the water is lower and sometimes it's higher.

Calling a homosexual contract "marriage" does not make it reproductively relevant and will not make it contribute in any meaningful way to the propagation of civilization.

In fact, it will do harm. Nowhere near as much harm as we have already done through divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing. But it's another nail in the coffin. Maybe the last nail, precisely because it is the most obvious and outrageous attack on what is left of marriage in America.

Supporters of homosexual "marriage" dismiss warnings like mine as the predictable ranting of people who hate progress. But the Massachusetts Supreme Court has made its decision without even a cursory attempt to ascertain the social costs. The judges have taken it on faith that it will do no harm.

You can't add a runway to an airport in America without years of carefully researched environmental impact statements. But you can radically reorder the fundamental social unit of society without political process or serious research.

Let me put it another way. The sex life of the people around me is none of my business; the homosexuality of some of my friends and associates has made no barrier between us, and as far as I know, my heterosexuality hasn't bothered them. That's what tolerance looks like.

But homosexual "marriage" is an act of intolerance. It is an attempt to eliminate any special preference for marriage in society -- to erase the protected status of marriage in the constant balancing act between civilization and individual reproduction.

So if my friends insist on calling what they do "marriage," they are not turning their relationship into what my wife and I have created, because no court has the power to change what their relationship actually is.

Instead they are attempting to strike a death blow against the well-earned protected status of our, and every other,real marriage.

They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won't be married. They'll just be playing dress-up in their parents' clothes.

The Propaganda Mill

What happens now if children grow up in a society that overtly teaches that homosexual partnering is not "just as good as" but actually is marriage?

Once this is regarded as settled law, anyone who tries to teach children to aspire to create a child-centered family with a father and a mother will be labeled as a bigot and accused of hate speech.

Can you doubt that the textbooks will be far behind? Any depictions of "families" in schoolbooks will have to include a certain proportion of homosexual "marriages" as positive role models.

Television programs will start to show homosexual "marriages" as wonderful and happy (even as they continue to show heterosexual marriages as oppressive and conflict-ridden).

The propaganda mill will pound our children with homosexual marriage as a role model. We know this will happen because we have seen the fanatical Left do it many times before.

So when our children go through the normal adolescent period of sexual confusion and perplexity, which is precisely the time when parents have the least influence over their children and most depend on the rest of society to help their children grow through the last steps before adulthood, what will happen?

Already any child with any kind of sexual attraction to the same sex is told that this is an irresistible destiny, despite the large number of heterosexuals who move through this adolescent phase and never look back.

Already any child with androgynous appearance or mannerisms -- effeminite boys and masculine girls -- are being nurtured and guided (or taunted and abused) into "accepting" what many of them never suspected they had -- a desire to permanently move into homosexual society.

In other words, society will bend all its efforts to seize upon any hint of homosexuality in our young people and encourage it.

Now, there is a myth that homosexuals are "born that way," and we are pounded with this idea so thoroughly that many people think that somebody, somewhere, must have proved it.

In fact what evidence there is suggests that if there is a genetic component to homosexuality, an entire range of environmental influences are also involved. While there is no scientific research whatsoever that indicates that there is no such thing as a borderline child who could go either way.

Those who claim that there is "no danger" and that homosexuals are born, not made, are simply stating their faith.

The dark secret of homosexual society -- the one that dares not speak its name -- is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.

It's that desire for normality, that discontent with perpetual adolescent sexuality, that is at least partly behind this hunger for homosexual "marriage."

They are unhappy, but they think it's because the rest of us "don't fully accept them."

Homosexual "marriage" won't accomplish what they hope. They will still be just as far outside the reproductive cycle of life. And they will have inflicted real damage on those of us who are inside it.

They will make it harder for us to raise children with any confidence that they, in turn, will take their place in the reproductive cycle. They will use all the forces of our society to try to encourage our children that it is desirable to be like them.

Most kids won't be swayed, because the message of the hormones is clear for them. But for those parents who have kids who hover in confusion, their lives complicated by painful experiences, conflicting desires, and many fears, the P.C. elite will now demand that the full machinery of the state be employed to draw them away from the cycle of life.

Children from broken and wounded families, with missing parents, may be the ones most confused and most susceptible. Instead of society helping these children overcome the handicaps that come from a missing or dysfunctional father or mother, it may well be exacerbating the damage.

All the while, the P.C. elite will be shouting at dismayed parents that it is somehow evil and bigoted of them not to rejoice when their children commit themselves to a reproductive dead end.

But there is nothing irrational about parents grieving at the abduction-in-advance of their grandchildren.

Don't you see the absurd contradiction? A postulated but unproven genetic disposition toward homosexuality is supposed to be embraced and accepted by everyone as "perfectly natural" -- but the far stronger and almost universal genetic disposition toward having children and grandchildren is to be suppressed, kept to yourself, treated as a mental illness.

You're unhappy that your son wants to marry a boy? Then you're sick, dangerous, a homophobe, filled with hate. Control your natural desires or be branded as evil by every movie and TV show coming out of P.C. Hollywood!

Compassion and tolerance flow only one way in the "Wonderland" of the politically correct.

Loss of Trust

The proponents of this anti-family revolution are counting on most Americans to do what they have done through every stage of the monstrous social revolution that we are still suffering through -- nothing at all.

But that "nothing" is deceptive. In fact, the pro-family forces are already taking their most decisive action. It looks like "nothing" to the anti-family, politically correct elite, because it isn't using their ranting methodology.

The pro-family response consists of quietly withdrawing allegiance from the society that is attacking the family.

Would-be parents take part in civilization only when they trust society to enhance their chances of raising children who will, in turn, reproduce. Societies that create that trust survive; societies that lose it, disappear, one way or another.

But the most common way is for the people who have the most at stake -- parents and would-be parents -- to simply make the untrusted society disappear by ceasing to lift a finger to sustain it.

It is parents who have the greatest ability to transmit a culture from one generation to the next.

If parents stop transmitting the culture of the American elite to their children, and actively resist letting the schools and media do it in their place, then that culture willdisappear.

If America becomes a place where the laws of the nation declare that marriage no longer exists -- which is what the Massachusetts decision actually does -- then our allegiance to America will become zero. We will transfer our allegiance to a society that does protect marriage.

We will teach our children to have no loyalty to the culture of the American elite, and will instead teach them to be loyal to a competing culture that upholds the family. Whether we home school our kids or not, we will withdraw them at an early age from any sense of belonging to contemporary American culture.

We're already far down that road. Already most parents regard schools -- an institution of the state that most directly touches our children -- as the enemy, even though we like and trust the individual teachers -- because we perceive, correctly, that schools are being legally obligated to brainwash our children to despise the values that keep civilization alive.

And if marriage itself ceases to exist as a legally distinct social union with protection from the government, then why in the world should we trust that government enough to let it have authority over our children?

They Think They Have the Power.

The politically correct elite think they have the power to make these changes, because they control the courts.

They don't have to consult the people, because the courts nowadays have usurped the power to make new law.

Democracy? What a joke. These people hate putting questions like this to a vote. Like any good totalitarians, they know what's best for the people, and they'll force it down our throats any way they can.

That's what the Democratic filibuster in the Senate to block Bush's judicial appointments is all about -- to keep the anti-family values of the Massachusetts Supreme Court in control of our government.

And when you add this insult onto the already deep injuries to marriage caused by the widespread acceptance of nonmonogamous behavior, will there be anything left at all?

Sure. In my church and many other churches, people still cling fiercely to civilized values and struggle to raise civilized children despite the barbarians who now rule us through the courts.

The barbarians think that if they grab hold of the trunk of the tree, they've caught the birds in the branches. But the birds can fly to another tree.

And I don't mean that civilized Americans will move. I mean that they'll simply stop regarding the authority of the government as having any legitimacy.

It is the most morally conservative portion of society that is most successful in raising children who believe in loyalty and oath-keeping and self-control and self-sacrifice.

And we're tired of being subject to barbarian rules and laws that fight against our civilized values. We're not interested in risking our children's lives to defend a nation that does not defend us.

Who do you think is volunteering for the military to defend America against our enemies? Those who believe in the teachings of politically correct college professors? Or those who believe in the traditional values that the politically correct elite has been so successful in destroying?

Let's take a poll of our volunteer military -- especially those who specialize in combat areas -- and see what civilization it is that they actually volunteered to defend.

Since the politically correct are loudly unwilling to fight or die for their version of America, and they are actively trying to destroy the version of America that traditional Americansare willing to fight or die to defend, just how long will "America" last, once they've driven out the traditional culture?

Oh, it will still be called America.

But out of the old American mantras of "democracy" and "freedom" and "home" and "family," of "motherhood" and "apple pie," only the pie will be left.

And even if few people care enough to defend the old family values against the screaming hate speech of the Left -- which is what they're counting on, of course -- the end will be the same. Because with marriage finally killed, America will no longer be able to raise up children with any trust in or loyalty to or willingness to sacrifice for that society.

So either civilized people will succeed in establishing a government that protects the family; or civilized people will withdraw their allegiance from the government that won't protect it; or the politically correct barbarians will have complete victory over the family -- and, lacking the strong family structure on which civilization depends, our civilization will collapse or fade away.

Remember how long Iraq's powerful military lasted against a determined enemy, when the Iraqi soldiers no longer had any loyalty to the Iraqi leadership. That wasn't an aberration. It's how great nations and empires fall.

Depriving us of any democratic voice in these sweeping changes may not lead to revolution or even resistance. But it will be just as deadly if it leads to despair. For in the crisis, few citizens will lift a finger to protect or sustain the elite that treated the things we valued -- our marriages, our children, and our right to self-government -- with such contempt.

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After the above essay was published in the Rhinoceros Times, the paper received a letter to the editor criticizing it. This is OSC's response. (To see the text of the letter, visitthe Rhinoceros Times and scroll down to the letter titled "No Teetering Here".)

I toyed with publishing, along with my essay, a mock letter listing all the cliche "arguments" against it. I'm glad I didn't; Mr. Herman saved me the trouble. I'll take his points in reverse order:

My column made it very clear that homosexual "marriage" is merely the latest, not the worst, damage done to marriage in America; thus his penultimate paragraph, far from refuting my essay, reinforces my main point and suggests possible topics for public debate - if debate is still allowed in Mr. Herman's anti-democratic America.

"Inclusion" is an empty word when used as a general virtue. Its value depends entirely on what is and is not included. Every inclusion of one group is an exclusion of another. I think even Mr. Herman would agree with me that there are certain groups that should be perpetually excluded from civilized society. Where we differ is only on our list of those groups, not on the principle.

As for what "studies have shown," I'll pit my "studies" against Mr. Herman's "studies" and see who can outvague the other.

I already conceded the point that society must compensate for bad parenting. But this is not done by institutionalizing the absence of heterosexual role models, especially since this would result in the schools relentlessly propagandizing all children toward homosexual "marriage" as a desirable choice.

All heterosexual marriages, with or without children, present normalizing role models that affirm the institution of marriage; childless people can still function as effective surrogate parents in society at large, encouraging children to remain within the cycle of life. It is absurd to claim that homosexual "marriages" are in any way parallel to childless marriages in their effect on society in general.

Woman suffrage? Abolition of slavery? You can bet that I approve of those changes. But Mr. Herman, those social revolutions were introduced by the constitutional process of amendment. It took long public debate and national struggle - including civil war - before a consensus emerged.

The real precedents for what we're getting now are judicial diktats that imposed the view of an elite group on the whole nation without democratic process. One thinks of Plessy vs. Ferguson and Dred Scott. Wow. The courts do such a good job of inventing new constitutional laws when they don't have to wait for democracy.

Since the 1970s, judges have been bolder and bolder about inventing new laws and forcing them on the American people. Mr. Herman is content with this, because he is part of the elite that has seized control and agrees with the forced experiments. But I'm quite sure that if a different group were using the same mechanism to force social experiments on an unwilling people, he would have a very different opinion.

Courts that follow their own conscience instead of the letter of the law are an appalling form of government, however noble their intent. If Mr. Herman is so sure gay "marriage" is a good idea, then why doesn't he want us to reach that result by national debate and legislative process? Why does he despise the principle of majority rule? Why does he regard democracy with such distrust?

His entire attitude can be summed up by his closing paragraph, which ends with telling me: "Stick to what you know." So much for inclusion, eh?

What is it that disqualifies me to enter the public debate? The fact that I reach conclusions different from him and the rest of the current dictatorial elite.

In Iran, people whom the ayatollahs don't approve of are barred from running for office or taking part in public discussion. The ayatollahs have the right to impose their ideas on the whole nation because they're really really really sure that they are correct about everything. All their friends agree with them, and anybody who disagrees with them is obviously evil or stupid.

Apparently, as long as he and his friends get to be the ayatollahs, Mr. Herman thinks that's a good system.

Me, I prefer democracy - even if it means letting dumb people like me have our say - and our votes. Studies have shown that when you let dumb people vote, it works out way better than letting experts make all the political decisions.