Reality of Islam!!

MAY 4, 2016

Crisis Magazine

Good Islam vs. Bad Islam

WILLIAM KILPATRICK

The February 11 edition of FrontPage Magazine contains an insightful piece by Daniel Greenfield on our failed counterterrorism strategy. Our policy, he wrote, is based on an artificial distinction between “Good Islam” and “Bad Islam.” Our aim, he continued, is to “convince Good Islam to have nothing to do with Bad Islam.”

Ironically, as Greenfield observed, “our diplomats and politicians don’t verbally acknowledge the existence of Bad Islam.” Instead they claim that the “bad Muslims” (the terrorists) aren’t really Muslims at all. To paraphrase various world leaders, the terrorists have “nothing to do with Islam,” “speak for no religion,” and have completely “perverted” the meaning of Islam. Technically, they’re not bad Muslims, because they’re no kind of Muslim. At least, that’s what the theory says.

In other words, our strategy is based on a circular argument: if you start with the premise that Islam is a peaceful religion, then those who break the peace cannot, by definition, be followers of Islam. They must be motivated by something else: grievances over imperialism, lust for power, or even some kind of psychological defect.

What Greenfield says about government policy toward Islam can also be applied to Church policy. Church leaders are also in the habit of saying that terrorism is a “perversion” of Islam. They claim that the jihadists use religion as a “pretext” to disguise other motives. And, on occasion, they have even urged Muslims to be more faithful to Islam. For example, when speaking to a group of Muslim refugees in Rome two years ago, Pope Francis told them to study the Koran as a means of expelling bitterness, and to follow the faith of their parents. Here’s what I had to say on the topic a year ago:

Church policy should be aimed at weakening faith in Islam. This the reverse of the current policy which is built on the assumption that there is a good (authentic) Islam and a bad (inauthentic) Islam and we should therefore reinforce Muslims’ faith in “true” Islam and encourage them to go deeper into it.

This, as I argued at the time, is an impossible project: “‘Good’ Islam and ‘bad’ Islam are as intimately related as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Mr. Hyde always predominates in the end.” Or, as Greenfield puts it:

Good Islam and Bad Islam are two halves of the same coin … we’re trying to convince Dr. Jekyll to help us fight Mr. Hyde. And Dr. Jekyll might even help us out, until he turns into Mr. Hyde.

The proof of this thesis lies in our fear that the slightest criticism of Islam will force the moderates (good Muslims) to join the extremists (bad Muslims). But if Muslims can so readily convert from Jekyll to Hyde, can there have been much difference between the two in the first place? Nobody worries that an insult to the Catholic Church or even to Jesus is going to suddenly turn moderate Catholics into masked terrorists. The almost universal fear that moderate Muslims can be easily driven into the radical camp is an acknowledgement that the distance between the two is not that great.

In short, Good Islam and Bad Islam are not separated by a gulf; they are on a continuum. Many of the things that the “bad” Muslims do are done by our allies, the “good” Muslims. Thus, as Greenfield points out:

Our Good Islam allies in Pakistan fight Bad Islam’s terror, when they aren’t hiding Osama bin Laden. Bad Islam in the Islamic State beheads people and takes slaves and Good Islam in Saudi Arabia does too… The moderate Iranian government signs a nuclear deal and then the extremist Iranian government calls for “Death to America.”

Is the moderate Muslim nothing but a mirage? Not exactly. But there are probably far fewer of them than is generally assumed. It’s true that at any given time the vast majority of Muslims are peacefully going about their business. But “not-currently-killing-others” is a poor gauge of moderation. If the peaceful Muslims subscribe to more or less the same tenets as the “bad” Muslims, they should not be assumed to be moderate.

Numerous polls have shown that the majority of Muslims worldwide are supportive of extreme (and therefore immoderate) sharia punishments such as amputation for theft, stoning for adultery, and death for apostasy. There is also widespread support for blasphemy laws, which are often used as an excuse to persecute Christians. In Pakistan not long ago, 100,000 people attended the funeral of a man who murdered an opponent of the blasphemy laws. The victim was what we would call a moderate but his murderer seems to have been far more honored. About the same time, representatives of more than thirty-five religious parties and groups called for the revocation of a new Pakistani law protecting women from abuse. Meanwhile, the Nigerian Senate rejected a gender equality bill because Muslim senators said it was un-Islamic.

Such “moderate” Muslims may not be willing to kill, but they may be willing to support those who do. After the bombings in Brussels, it was revealed that the terrorists enjoyed wide support in the Muslim district where they were hiding. And, according to a New York Times article, ninety percent of teens in Muslim districts considered the attackers to be “heroes.” On the other side of the Channel, a poll of UK Muslims revealed that two-thirds of them would not report someone with terrorist ties to the police.

Are there any Muslims who would qualify for the more rigorous definition of moderate? There are indeed. But they are nowhere near a majority and their moderation often reflects a lack of commitment to mainstream Islamic beliefs. Many moderate Muslims are like “cafeteria Catholics.” They pick and choose those aspects of Islam that suit their inclinations and ignore the rest. For them, as for many a liberal Christian, religion is often a personal construct that bears little resemblance to the official version. While we may look upon such people as good Muslims, their co-religionists often look upon them with contempt.

Why, in the face of so much evidence, do so many in the West and in the Church believe that mainstream Islam is a model of moderation? The answer, in a word, is “projection.” When John Kerry says “the real face of Islam is a peaceful religion based on the dignity of all human beings,” he is projecting Western and Christian values onto a culture that is decidedly anti-Western and anti-Christian. When he says that “our faiths and our fates are inextricably linked,” Kerry, a Catholic, may be influenced by the many Catholic prelates who hold a similar view.

Catholics who hold to the more optimistic view of Islam like to think of themselves as champions of multiculturalism. But far from being sensitive to diversity, they are, in reality, being ethnocentric. In short, they assume that everyone else is just like them. They look at Islam through Catholic eyes and conclude, contrary to 1,400 years of evidence, that Islam is just an exotic form of Catholicism. They seem convinced that the vast majority of Muslims share the same concern for social justice, human dignity, and women’s rights that Christians have.

Again, this is an ethnocentric and even egocentric way of viewing the “other.” As Greenfield puts it, “moderate Islam isn’t what most Muslims believe. It’s what most liberals believe that Muslims believe.” Moderate Islam or Good Islam is an invention—“an imaginary religion that they imagine Muslims must practice because the alternative is the end of everything that they believe in.”

The assumption that there is a sharp divide between Good Islam and Bad Islam is a comforting illusion, but it is also a dangerous illusion. In the short run, holding such an assumption will make us feel good about our broad-mindedness. In the long run, we will be very sorry for having played this dangerous game of let’s pretend.

Reality Of Aboriginal Life

Quadrant Online

TONY THOMAS

Genuflecting Before Savagery

The University of NSW demands a keen reverence for the ways and customs of "pre-invasion" Aborigines -- an astonishing admonition in the light of current attention to domestic violence. Were those same standards embraced on campus, few female professors, lecturers or students would go unscarred

OK, the University of NSW wants its students to refer to Australia from 1788 as “invaded, occupied and colonized”. Moreover, students should be reverential towards the, er, invadees. For example, “the word ‘Elders’ should be written with a capital letter as a mark of respect.”

These Elders, say the guidelines, are “men and women in Aboriginal communities who are respected for their wisdom and knowledge of their culture, particularly the Law. Male and female Elders, who have higher levels of knowledge, maintain social order according to the Law.” The guidelines note that the “sophistication of Indigenous Australian social organization (is) starting to be more recognized.”

This is all terrific, but I don’t think it quite gets the flavor of pre-contact, and sometimes post-contact, Aboriginal social customs. Helpfully, the earliest white arrivals jotted down their impressions. Sensitive UNSW students and their lecturers, professors, administrators and campus thought-police, may find the rest of my piece upsetting. So I immediately issue them a ‘trigger warning’ and ‘need for safe space’ alert.

Newly-arrived British and French were shocked at the local misogyny they encountered. First Fleeter Watkin Tench noticed a young woman’s head “covered by contusions, and mangled by scars”. She also had a spear wound above the left knee caused by a man who dragged her from her home to rape her. Tench wrote,

They  (Aboriginal women) are in all respects treated with savage barbarity; condemned not only to carry the children, but all other burthens, they meet in return for submission only with blows, kicks and every other mark of brutality.[1]

He also wrote,

When an Indian [sic] is provoked by a woman, he either spears her, or knocks her down on the spot; on this occasion he always strikes on the head, using indiscriminately a hatchet, a club, or any other weapon, which may chance to be in his hand.

Marine Lt. William Collins wrote, “We have seen some of these unfortunate beings with more scars upon their shorn heads, cut in every direction, than could be well distinguished or counted.”

Governor Phillip’s confidant, Bennelong, in 1790 had taken a woman to Port Jackson to kill her because her relatives were his enemies. He gave her two severe wounds on the head and one on the shoulder, saying this was his rightful vengeance.

Phillip was appalled that an Eora mother within a few days of delivery had fresh wounds on her head, where her husband had beaten her with wood.

In 1802 an explorer in the Blue Mountains wrote how, for a trivial reason, an Aboriginal called Gogy “took his club and struck his wife’s head such a blow that she fell to the ground unconscious. After dinner…he got infuriated and again struck his wife on the head with his club, and left her on the ground nearly dying.”

In 1825, French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville wrote “young girls are brutally kidnapped from their families, violently dragged to isolated spots and are ravished after being subjected to a good deal of cruelty.”[2]

George Robinson in Tasmania said in the 1830s that men courted their women by stabbing them with sharp sticks and cutting them with knives prior to rape. The men bartered their women to brutal sealers for dogs and food; in one case, such a woman voluntarily went back to the sealers rather than face further tribal violence.[3]

Also in the 1830s, ex-convict Lingard wrote: “I scarcely ever saw a married woman, but she had got six or seven cuts in her head, given by her husband with a tomahawk, several inches in length and very deep.”[4]

Explorer Edward John Eyre, who was very sympathetic towards Aborigines, nevertheless recorded:

Women are often sadly ill-treated by their husbands and friends…they are frequently beaten about the head, with waddies, in the most dreadful manner, or speared in the limbs for the most trivial offences…

…few women will be found, upon examination, to be free from frightful scars upon the head, or the marks of spear wounds about the body. I have seen a young woman, who, from the number of these marks, appeared to have been almost riddled with spear wounds.[5]

Louis Nowra visited outback communities and found them astonishingly brutal: “Some of the women’s faces ended up looking as though an incompetent butcher had conducted plastic surgery with a hammer and saw. The fear in the women’s eyes reminded me of dogs whipped into cringing submission.”[6]

Bashing of women’s heads appears to have been the custom for millennia. Paleopathologist Stephen Webb in 1995 published his analysis of 4500 individuals’ bones from mainland Australia going back 50,000 years. (Priceless bone collections at the time were being officially handed over to Aboriginal communities for re-burial, which stopped follow-up studies).[7] Webb found highly disproportionate rates of injuries and fractures to women’s skulls, with the injuries suggesting deliberate attack and often attacks from behind, perhaps in domestic squabbles. In the tropics, for example, female head-injury frequency was about 20-33%, versus 6.5-26% for males. The most extreme results were on the south coast, from Swanport and Adelaide, with female cranial trauma rates as high as 40-44% — two to four times the rate of male cranial trauma. In desert and South Coast areas, 5-6% of female skulls had three separate head injuries, and 11-12% had two injuries.

Webb could not rule out women-on-women attacks but thought them less probable. The high rate of injuries to female heads was the reverse of results from studies of other peoples. His findings, according to anthropologist Peter Sutton, confirm that serious armed assaults were common in Australia over thousands of years prior to conquest. Settlers reported that sexual violence, including pack rapes and horrific genital wounding, was inflicted in many groups on girls barely out of the toddler stage.

Solicitor/historian Joan Kimm wrote: “The sexual use of young girls by older men, indeed often much older men, was an intrinsic part of Aboriginal culture, a heritage that cannot easily be denied.”[8]

Nowra quotes Walter Roth (1861-1933) a doctor, anthropologist and Chief Protector of Aborigines in Queensland.[9] Roth described at the turn of the 20th century how, when a Pitta-Pitta girl first showed signs of puberty, “several men would drag her into the bush and forcibly enlarge the vaginal orifice by tearing it downwards with the first three fingers wound round and round with opossum string. Other men come forward from all directions, and the struggling victim has to submit in rotation to promiscuous coition with all the ‘bucks’ present.”

Even worse was his description of practices around Glenormiston:

A group of men, with cooperation from old women, ambush a young woman, and pin her so an old man can slit up the shrieking girl’s perineum with a stone knife, followed by sweeping three fingers round the inside of the virginal orifice. She is next compelled to undergo copulation with all the bucks present; again the same night, and a third time, on the following morning.

In Birdsville, a hardwood stick two feet long with a crude life-sized penis carving at the top, was used to tear the hymen and posterior vaginal wall.

In the Tully area, a very young man would give his betrothed to an old man to sleep with her and train her for him. The idea was that the elder would ‘make the little child’s genitalia develop all the more speedily’. There was no restriction on age or social status at which the bride would be delivered up. As Roth observed, ‘It is of no uncommon occurrence to see an individual carrying on his shoulder his little child-wife who is perhaps too tired to toddle any further.

Accounts from the missionary era are daunting. In 1905, the local telegraph operator at Fitzroy River reported that a five-year-old half-caste girl, Polly, “was out with the old woman, Mary Ann, when a bush black took her away for two nights during which time the blacks here said he made use of her. Such actions as that of Polly and the men are very common among the natives.”[10]
Anglican lay missionary Mary Bennett in 1934 testified,

The practice to which I refer is that of intercision of the girls at the age of puberty. The vagina is cut with glass by the old men, and that involves a great deal of suffering…I remember my old Aboriginal nurse speak with horror of the suffering which she had been made to undergo.

A practice as bad as female genital mutilation is still inflicted on hundreds of boys annually – involuntary sub-incision, the slitting open of the urethra.

In contemporary Australia, polygamy and traditions of promised- brides continue in Arnhem Land and other remote areas. Until recently, the judiciary was lenient in such cases involving forced under-age sex. Jarrett writes,

There are Aboriginal men who still claim these modern young girls as their promised possession, and have cars, guns, outstations and kin to help them secure and punish these resistant girls, well away from public purview … A man’s traditional sense of entitlement, and use of violence to enforce it, can still triumph over the emancipation of a young Aboriginal woman’s mind.[11]

In 2004 , at Yarralin near Katherine, a 55-year-old married man physically and sexually assaulted his 14-year-old promised bride for two days even as she pleaded she was too young for sex. In August, 2005, in an under-the-tree session, Justice Brian Martin noted the cultural context and gave the man a one-month suspended sentence. On appeal the sentence was increased to three years and a defence appeal to the High Court was lost. Justice Martin later admitted he had been too lenient.

In 2002, at Maningrida, Jackie Pascoe Jamilmira, a 50-year-old wife killer, had forced sex on a 15-year-old promised bride, for whom he had given presents to the ‘bride’s’ parents. He then fired a shotgun into the air to warn off the girls’ family members. Justice John Gallop of the NT Supreme Court sentenced him to 24 hours jail for unlawful sex, saying the matter should never have come to court. Pascoe, he said, was exercising his conjugal rights in traditional society and the girl ‘knew what was expected of her. It’s surprising to me [that the defendant] was charged at all’.[12]

The North Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service relied on expert anthropological evidence to argue that promised marriages were common and morally correct under Aboriginal law, and supported his application to the High Court. Nowra cites the case of a middle-aged Aboriginal man who anally raped a 14-year-old promised bride, and who was sentenced merely to detention for the duration of the NT court session.[13]

Tribal warfare and paybacks were endemic. In Journey to Horseshoe Bend, anthropologist T.G.H. Strehlow described a black-on-black massacre in 1875 in the Finke River area of Central Australia, triggered by a perceived sacrilege:

The warriors turned their murderous attention to the women and older children and either clubbed or speared them to death. Finally, according to the grim custom of warriors and avengers they broke the limbs of the infants, leaving them to die ‘natural deaths’. The final number of the dead could well have reached the high figure of 80 to 100 men, women and children.[14]

Revenge killings by the victims’ clan involved more than 60 people, with the two exchanges accounting for about 20% of members of the two clans. When Pauline Hanson, then member for Oxley, quoted this account in 1996, an Aboriginal woman elder  (or “Elder” as UNSW would write it) replied, “Mrs Hanson should receive a traditional Urgarapul punishment: having her hands and feet crippled.”

Escaped convict William Buckley, who lived for three decades with tribes around Port Phillip, recounted constant raids, ambushes and small battles, typically involving one to three fatalities. He noted the Watouronga of Geelong in night raids ‘destroyed without mercy men, women and children.’[15]

Historian Geoff Blainey concluded that annual death rates from North-East Arnhem Land and Port Philip, were comparable with countries involved in the two world wars, although Blainey’s estimate could be somewhat on the high side.[16]

Other black-on-black massacres include accounts from anthropologist Bill Stanner of an entire camp massacre, an Aurukun massacre in the early 20th century, Strehlow’s account of the wiping out of the Plenty River local group of Udebatara in Central Australia, and the killing of a large group of men, women and children near Mt Eba, also in Central Australia.

Strehlow’s wife, Kathleen, wrote:

It would be no exaggeration to say that the system worked as one of sheer terror in the days before the white man came. This terror was instilled from earliest childhood and continued unabated through life until the extremity of old age seemed to guarantee some immunity from the attentions of blood avenger or sorcerer alike for wrongs real or imaginary…children were not exempted from capital punishment for persistent offences against the old tribal code.

The Murngin (now Yolngu) in north-east Arnhem Land during 1920s practiced a deadly warfare that placed it among the world’s most lethal societies. The then-rate for homicides of 330 per 100,000 (which author Stephanie Jarrett suggests could be grossly under-estimated) was 15 times the 2006-07 “very remote national Indigenous rate” of 22, and 300 times the 2006-7 national non-Indigenous rate. That Murngin rate was worse than in Mexico’s present Ciudad Juarez drug capital (300 homicides per 100,000), and more than three times worse than the worst national current rate (Honduras).

Aboriginal practices extant during white settlement were not all that worthy of current required genuflection by academia. Nor, of course, did the settlers effect much, or any net improvement, given the fatal diseases they introduced and the  dispossession and cultural collapse they precipitated. What was, was; what happened, happened. There’s no need for UNSW to smother historical realities in a haze of political correctness.

Tony Thomas blogs at No B-S Here, I Hope

ChildrensPlea

Dear Gay Community: Your Kids Are Hurting

I loved my mom’s partner, but another mom could never have replaced the father I lost.

By Heather Barwick

MARCH 17, 2015

Gay community, I am your daughter. My mom raised me with her same-sex partner back in the ’80s and ’90s. She and my dad were married for a little while. She knew she was gay before they got married, but things were different back then. That’s how I got here. It was complicated as you can imagine. She left him when I was two or three because she wanted a chance to be happy with someone she really loved: a woman.

My dad wasn’t a great guy, and after she left him he didn’t bother coming around anymore.

Do you remember that book, “Heather Has Two Mommies”? That was my life. My mom, her partner, and I lived in a cozy little house in the ‘burbs of a very liberal and open-minded area. Her partner treated me as if I was her own daughter. Along with my mom’s partner, I also inherited her tight-knit community of gay and lesbian friends. Or maybe they inherited me?

Either way, I still feel like gay people are mypeople. I’ve learned so much from you. You taught me how to be brave, especially when it is hard. You taught me empathy. You taught me how to listen. And how to dance. You taught me not be afraid of things that are different. And you taught me how to stand up for myself, even if that means I stand alone.

I’m writing to you because I’m letting myself out of the closet: I don’t support gay marriage. But it might not be for the reasons that you think.

Children Need a Mother and Father

It’s not because you’re gay. I love you, so much. It’s because of the nature of the same-sex relationship itself.

It’s only now, as I watch my children loving and being loved by their father each day, that I can see the beauty and wisdom in traditional marriage and parenting.

Growing up, and even into my 20s, I supported and advocated for gay marriage. It’s only with some time and distance from my childhood that I’m able to reflect on my experiences and recognize the long-term consequences that same-sex parenting had on me. And it’s only now, as I watch my children loving and being loved by their father each day, that I can see the beauty and wisdom in traditional marriage and parenting.

Same-sex marriage and parenting withholds either a mother or father from a child while telling him or her that it doesn’t matter. That it’s all the same. But it’s not. A lot of us, a lot of your kids, are hurting. My father’s absence created a huge hole in me, and I ached every day for a dad. I loved my mom’s partner, but another mom could never have replaced the father I lost.

I grew up surrounded by women who said they didn’t need or want a man. Yet, as a little girl, I so desperately wanted a daddy. It is a strange and confusing thing to walk around with this deep-down unquenchable ache for a father, for a man, in a community that says that men are unnecessary. There were times I felt so angry with my dad for not being there for me, and then times I felt angry with myself for even wanting a father to begin with. There are parts of me that still grieve over that loss today.

I’m not saying that you can’t be good parents. You can. I had one of the best. I’m also not saying that being raised by straight parents means everything will turn out okay. We know there are so many different ways that the family unit can break down and cause kids to suffer: divorce, abandonment, infidelity, abuse, death, etc. But by and large, the best and most successful family structure is one in which kids are being raised by both their mother and father.

Why Can’t Gay People’s Kids Be Honest?

Gay marriage doesn’t just redefine marriage, but also parenting. It promotes and normalizes a family structure that necessarily denies us something precious and foundational. It denies us something we need and long for, while at the same time tells us that we don’t need what we naturally crave. That we will be okay. But we’re not. We’re hurting.

If anyone can talk about hard things, it’s us.

Kids of divorced parents are allowed to say, “Hey, mom and dad, I love you, but the divorce crushed me and has been so hard. It shattered my trust and made me feel like it was my fault. It is so hard living in two different houses.” Kids of adoption are allowed to say, “Hey, adoptive parents, I love you. But this is really hard for me. I suffer because my relationship with my first parents was broken. I’m confused and I miss them even though I’ve never met them.”

But children of same-sex parents haven’t been given the same voice. It’s not just me. There are so many of us. Many of us are too scared to speak up and tell you about our hurt and pain, because for whatever reason it feels like you’re not listening. That you don’t want to hear. If we say we are hurting because we were raised by same-sex parents, we are either ignored or labeled a hater.

This isn’t about hate at all. I know you understand the pain of a label that doesn’t fit and the pain of a label that is used to malign or silence you. And I know that you really havebeen hated and that you really have been hurt. I was there, at the marches, when they held up signs that said, “God hates fags” and “AIDS cures homosexuality.” I cried and turned hot with anger right there in the street with you. But that’s not me. That’s not us.

I know this is a hard conversation. But we need to talk about it. If anyone can talk about hard things, it’s us. You taught me that.

Heather Barwick was raised by her mother and her mother's same-sex partner. She is a former gay-marriage advocate turned children's rights activist. She is a wife and mother of four rambunctious kids.

Gender issues and children

Bill Muehlenberg's commentary on issues of the day…




Gender Benders Harming our Children


The sexual revolutionaries have done more to destroy culture, society, marriage, family and all that has made the West great than perhaps any other radical activist movement. Every day we find the bitter fruit of this wrecking crew. And sadly it is children who are so often the biggest losers.


Here in Australia children have been targeted big time by the sexual activists especially in the form of the so-called Safe Schools Coalition, and social engineering groups like Early Childhood Australia. I have written about both a number of times now, exposing their militant pro-homosexual, pro-trans everything and anti-heterosexual agenda.


These groups do not run with the evidence and the research, but run with social activism, pushing radical agendas. And I am not alone in my concerns about all this. Miranda Devine has just written about both groups and rightly asks:


Why are national programs being imposed that take away parental discretion in teaching their own children about such intimate issues. Each family is entitled to pass on its own values, at a time of its own choosing, whether they are religiously based or not. It was bad enough when we heard 11-year-olds were being advised to bind their breasts and tuck in their penises to practice being a member of the opposite sex. But the thought police invading preschools is positively Orwellian. Has the world gone mad?


Since these activist groups refuse to deal with the actual science and evidence (all of it, not just those bits which seem to make their case), it is up to others to bring this into the debate. Here I will again do just that, with two recent pieces we all should be aware of.


The first is by Margaret A. Hagen, JD, PhD, Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University. Her vitally important piece “Transgenderism Has No Basis in Science or Law” should be read by everyone. Let me quote just a few parts of it:


Where Is the Evidence?

More fundamentally, there is no consensus on the etiology of the diverse expressions of “gender identity variants.” Some LGBTQ advocates theorize that nonconforming sexuality is caused by certain family dynamics in the context of a bi-gendered patriarchal society. Others postulate that unidentified genetically based sex-hormone abnormalities cause transgenderism or homosexuality, even when there are no abnormalities of the reproductive anatomy.

Evidence-based conclusions are utterly lacking, whatever the claims of activists. Without clear distinctions not only among categories of the potentially mentally disordered but also between the mentally disordered and the normal population, how are diagnosis and treatment decisions to be made? It is hardly possible to pass disability laws without reliable diagnostic categories.

Most proposed legislation is driven not by medical research or theoretical differences but by the desire to make private or government insurance money available for hormone and surgical “treatment” for nonconformists experiencing psychological distress. The American Psychiatric Association has stated this unambiguously in its DSM-5, the current diagnostic manual. Pathologizing states of mind – even distress – simply to make insurance money available for attempts to change those states through surgical, medical, and cosmetic alterations to the body is simply not sound science. Neither is it just to the larger community that pays for medical insurance and funds the Affordable Care Act. Surely, in a domain with such drastic proposed “therapy,” it is not too much to ask for a solid evidence-based statement of who is being treated, for what, and why, before writing the prescription.

Our society cannot reasonably be expected to unquestioningly accept psychiatric “treatments” that strain our concepts of medical ethics, standards of care, and malpractice up to and past the breaking point.


She concludes:


Many both in and out of the mental health community see the conviction of oneself as “transgender” as a delusion – a technical term referring to a fixed belief that is not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence.

The larger community should not accommodate this delusion by pretending to accept it as reality. A deluded person is not “treated” by requiring everyone who encounters him to accept the validity of his or her delusion, contrary to all reality.

Up until the very recent past, reality testing was a fundamental component of psychotherapy. The opposite approach is irrational and indefensible. Indeed, one prominent psychiatrist in this field has termed this accommodation “collaborating with madness.” That is what American society is being asked to do by people who are well-meaning but profoundly confused about the realities of transgenderism.

We expect our legislators to have rational bases for the laws they enact. We expect our judges to have rational bases for the decisions they reach. Even amid political pandering by those seeking reelection, we expect at least a veneer of rationality in the exercise of legislative and judicial powers. There is simply no rational basis for the laws being proposed and imposed in the realm of transgenderism. There is very little knowledge at all – no common definitions of terms, no accepted methodology, no outcome analyses, no testing and rejecting of hypotheses, no agreed-upon standards, no science. There currently exists no reliable foundation for making these laws that will shape the actions of the larger community as they relate to sexually nonconforming individuals.

Laws that restrict our freedoms and direct our actions should never be passed without a clear definition of the interests and parties to be affected and a precise explication of the ways the laws will serve those interests. At present, we have no such definitions or explanations. Put the brakes on transgender lawmaking until we do.


The next expert to call upon is The American College of Pediatricians. It has recently put out an important statement called, “Gender Ideology Harms Children”. Let me offer it to you in full:


The American College of Pediatricians urges educators and legislators to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex. Facts – not ideology – determine reality.

1. Human sexuality is an objective biological binary trait: “XY” and “XX” are genetic markers of health – not genetic markers of a disorder. The norm for human design is to be conceived either male or female. Human sexuality is binary by design with the obvious purpose being the reproduction and flourishing of our species. This principle is self-evident. The exceedingly rare disorders of sexual differentiation (DSDs), including but not limited to testicular feminization and congenital adrenal hyperplasia, are all medically identifiable deviations from the sexual binary norm, and are rightly recognized as disorders of human design. Individuals with DSDs do not constitute a third sex.

2. No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one. No one is born with an awareness of themselves as male or female; this awareness develops over time and, like all developmental processes, may be derailed by a child’s subjective perceptions, relationships, and adverse experiences from infancy forward. People who identify as “feeling like the opposite sex” or “somewhere in between” do not comprise a third sex. They remain biological men or biological women.

3. A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking. When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such. These children suffer from gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria (GD), formerly listed as Gender Identity Disorder (GID), is a recognized mental disorder in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-V). The psychodynamic and social learning theories of GD/GID have never been disproved.

4. Puberty is not a disease and puberty-blocking hormones can be dangerous. Reversible or not, puberty- blocking hormones induce a state of disease – the absence of puberty – and inhibit growth and fertility in a previously biologically healthy child.

5. According to the DSM-V, as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.

6. Children who use puberty blockers to impersonate the opposite sex will require cross-sex hormones in late adolescence. Cross-sex hormones are associated with dangerous health risks including but not limited to high blood pressure, blood clots, stroke and cancer.

7. Rates of suicide are twenty times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery, even in Sweden which is among the most LGBQT – affirming countries. What compassionate and reasonable person would condemn young children to this fate knowing that after puberty as many as 88% of girls and 98% of boys will eventually accept reality and achieve a state of mental and physical health?

8. Conditioning children into believing a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse. Endorsing gender discordance as normal via public education and legal policies will confuse children and parents, leading more children to present to “gender clinics” where they will be given puberty-blocking drugs. This, in turn, virtually ensures that they will “choose” a lifetime of carcinogenic and otherwise toxic cross-sex hormones, and likely consider unnecessary surgical mutilation of their healthy body parts as young adults.

Michelle A. Cretella, M.D.

President of the American College of Pediatricians

Quentin Van Meter, M.D.

Vice President of the American College of Pediatricians

Pediatric Endocrinologist

Paul McHugh, M.D.

University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School and the former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital


This is the sort of information and evidence we need in this debate, not the emotional stories and political activism of the sexual revolutionaries. For the sake of our children, our families, and our society, we must get this truth out there, and say no to the ugly agenda of the gender benders.

TheWayThingsWere

FEBRUARY 16, 2016
Crisis Magazine

What Would Our Ancestors Think of Us?

ANTHONY ESOLEN

What is the worst thing about living near an open sewer? It is not that you sicken at the stench of it every time you leave your front door. It is that the noisome vapors are so pervasive, and you have lived with them so long, you no longer notice it. What is the worst thing about living in the rubble of a civilization? It is not that you shed a tear for the noble churches and courts and town halls you once knew, as you recall years filled with religious services, parades, block parties, and all the bumptious folderol of an ordinary civic life. It is that you do not even suspect that such things existed.

But how would it be if a time traveler were to go back behind the upheaval and let the people glance into the future? It’s a feature of the American narrative that in all respects things improve over time, so that you can point to vaccines that have eliminated such dreaded diseases as polio and tuberculosis, or to ribbons of highways that bind up the country, or to the machine on which I am writing this essay now—the computer that puts in my grasp a vast library of human knowledge.

Our time traveler reveals these things, and the eyes of his audience grow glassy with wonder. Imagine—the poems of Tennyson, a few seconds away! The Dorsey band in person, Van Cliburn on the piano, Paderewski on the violin, Rembrandt in bold color, great things for everyone and not only for the rich who can travel. But then you will have to explain. No, a thousand to one, ten thousand to one, the people who use the instrument will be gazing at pornography rather than at the Masters. Then you will have to explain the term “pornography”: smut. And say that most high school students will never have heard of Tennyson, much less read his poems, but that almost all of them will have gazed at smut, some of them day after day.

The faces of the audience darken. Then one among them, wiser than the rest, asks the obvious question: “How then shall we live?”

There is a country road that straggles its way over a mountain nearby. Lovers go there and pull over at a lookout, where they listen to music and engage in what’s called “necking.” It never goes beyond that, because most of them are pretty good kids and understand that bearing children is for marriage, and so is the child-making thing. That understanding allows them to be there in the first place. Innocence—even such compromised and sometimes failing innocence as we possess in a healthy culture—makes for freedom. You will have to tell the audience that there is no necking anymore. You will tell them that, as a rule, it is either sex or nothing. For the worst or the weakest among us, then, there is danger and heartbreak and, eventually, the protective callus of nihilism, even the shedding of blood. For the purest among us, and the most responsible, there is loneliness.

They have dances all the time, don’t they? Merry things that bring out young people in flocks, chaperoned by their elders, who usually partake in the dancing too, since music and dance are shared by all. Hardly a week goes by without a big dance somewhere. You will tell them that that’s all gone. You will tell them that the older generation feels absolutely no duty to bring young people together in a healthy and decent way. They are too busy engaging in their own debauches, or they are simply alienated. They wouldn’t know where to begin.

“Where is the sweetness of young love?” they ask you. “Don’t people get married anymore?” You point their attention to their streets. There are families in every house. Sometimes it’s a grandmother and grandfather whose children have moved “away,” to the next block over, or across town, or, since this is America, to the neighboring county. Otherwise it’s a mother and father with children, and the children are everywhere. If the weather is fair, you can hear the music of their games. A boy covers his eyes with his hands and leans against a telephone pole, counting down from 100 by fives, till he cries out, “Ready or not, here I come!” Or is that a ball that’s scooting through the “outfield” down the pavement, while the kids cry, “Go, go, go”? What crime can such a place fear, when the streets and alleyways and back yards and porches are governed by spies more restless than any the CIA have ever trained, not to mention their grandmothers rocking on their porches and chatting with one another? Tell them that that is gone.

Tell them that a majority of the houses have no children in them. Tell them that this house here has a married couple who have no children, because they don’t want any. Tell them that in these houses some people are shacking up. Tell them that a single woman has bought that house. Tell them that two men live in that other one. Tell them that youth is spent not thinking about marriage and then being married, nor even thinking about love and being in love, but thinking about money, college, career, and sex. Tell them that because of these habits, the houses grow more and more expensive, because more and more “households” are chasing them, households that are not households really, but atoms of self-fashioning.

Tell them that there are by far more women in the workplace than ever before, and that they are respected lawyers, doctors, college professors, and career politicians. Tell them that we have cracked the back of public racism, so that there are no more segregated hotels or restaurants or schools or businesses. Tell them also that there are by far more women living alone than ever before. Tell them about “trigger warnings” and anti-depressant drugs and boys who are persuaded by their mothers that they are “really” girls and that they want to have their genitals cut off. Tell them that nearly half of all marriages end in divorce. Tell them that far more than half of long sexual liaisons end in “divorce.” Tell them that three out of four black children in America are born out of wedlock. Tell them that one out of three young black men will spend time in prison.

Then there are things you can’t tell at all, because words would not suffice, or because any attempt on your part to describe them would be met with blank incomprehension or disbelief. So you will have to show them. Bring a single copy of a women’s magazine chosen at random. Bring a copy of Men’s Health. Bring pictures from a Gay Pride parade. Bring a five minute clip of a television “comedy” again chosen at random. Bring the sex education curriculum for fifth graders in a school district in the United States or Canada. Go to the Young Adult Fiction stacks at your local library, shut your eyes, and bring the first book your hand grasps.

Bring a five minute clip of The View, or of a public high school cafeteria at lunchtime. Bring a typical video game. Bring photographs of the interior of their churches during services, or of the parking lot where the church used to be. Bring a copy of one of the “art” weeklies in their metropolitan area, and be sure it features the advice column of Dan Savage, or the personal ads.

Go to what was once an ethnic neighborhood in an old city, and take pictures, plenty of pictures, of gang graffiti, “gentrified” homes turned into law offices, and alleys empty of children. Bring a picture of the security guard posted at a local high school.

Try to explain that some people want to let confused boys strip and shower in a girls’ locker room. Try to explain same-sex mirage. Try to explain that women are going to be sent to the front lines. Try to explain the fifty or some odd “genders,” two of them genders and the rest of them odd. Try to explain that everything they take for granted about the role of religion in public life is abominated. Try to explain the new meaning of “theocratic.”

Bring an ultrasound picture of a child in the womb. Try to explain that the same people who have seen these wondrous pictures believe in the right to cut that child to ribbons, as the fail-safe for fornication or careerism. Try to explain the Belgian Quik-Mart Suicide vans. Try to explain that syphilis and gonorrhea have recruited about thirty more diseases to join their ranks. Try to explain why teenage girls are prone to gonorrhea of the throat. Try to explain “feminism” and why it champions that same “empowerment” of the girls, with the concomitant corruption of the boys. Try to explain why church after church fell to the sibilant seducer of the age, who was “a murderer from the beginning,” and “a liar and the father of lies.” Place a photograph of an episcopal pederast or protector of pederasts beside a photograph of Fulton Sheen, and try to explain why the former was a media darling, but the latter an object of posthumous scorn.

Take an old prayer book and a scissors, and cut from the book every prayer that has been dismissed or forgotten. Take an old hymnal, and cut from it every song that was meant to stir the heart of the Christian soldier. Take an old Catholic calendar, and black out every feast that has been de-feasted. Take a photograph of the interior of a Catholic church, and white out with acid every work of art that has been whitewashed or reduced to splinters and rubble.

Fall to your knees and beg forgiveness. Then get back in your time machine, return to the present, and begin the long slow process of restoration.

Bullying

Bullying message lost in all the LGBTI rainbow flag-waving

• THE AUSTRALIAN
• FEBRUARY 13, 2016 12:00AM
• SAVE
• PRINT

• Angela Shanahan

  Columnist

  Canberra

Children are terrible bullies. They are prone to dishing it out and being on the receiving end. When I was a kid I had a terrible stutter. Bullying? Tell me about it. At least I wasn’t fat. The fat kids really copped it, particularly in a girls school.

There weren’t any lesbians when I was at school. Like Queen Victoria, we hadn’t heard about them. But at boys schools there was often a boy in the outer group who was designated ‘‘gay’’, whether he turned out to be gay or not.

All these things still happen in schools, despite intensive anti-bullying policies. But these days most parents are aware that putting kids on the outer and intimidating them can make lives miserable and in extreme cases cause kids to feel suicidal. They have a right to expect that the schools cultivate an atmosphere of tolerance and sheer kindness towards people who seem different for whatever reason.

However, as reported by The Australian earlier this week, a lot of parents in Victoria are worried about a new program that by 2018 will become compulsory in that state. The program, Safe Schools, is ostensibly about bullying. Some parents have pulled their children out of state schools because of it.

For something purporting to be about bullying, there is nothing in the program about the usual victims — the fat, the slow, the very clever kids or stutterers — or anyone else who may have to endure bullying. This program really is nothing about bullying; it is about one group, and not a large one. Nor is it about tolerance or kindness. It is a radical form of sex education that promotes a fluid gender ideology. It is aimed at children as young as 11.

Don’t like the sex you are born with? Well, you can change it. If you are a boy who doesn’t like wearing the boys’ uniform, wear the girls’ one. There is a picture of a boy doing just that on the front cover of one of the booklets used. Boys in girls’ toilets, girls in boys’ toilets; that should be encouraged. Teachers should introduce discussion of gender in every aspect of school life. Children are actively discouraged from regarding heterosexuality as normal and even an innocent question about whether a baby is a boy or a girl is branded “heteronormative”.

Rainbow and purple days are encouraged, and parents are rarely consulted. One school even invited a drag queen. Some state MPs have had testimonies from parents who have claimed that where these events have happened, children who have been singled out as homophobic — for whatever reason: religious, ethical biological — are now the ones bullied as “unaccepting”.

There is more than just rainbow flag-waving going on. The Minus 18 website linked to the program is particularly explicit. Students who want to access this website are advised to ask the teachers to unblock it for them.

Says Lyle Shelton from the Australian Christian Lobby: “Parents have a right to know about this … Minus 18 talks about breast binding, penis tucking, oral sex and hook-ups, two virginities (one with a girl, one with a boy), and trivialises gonorrhoea. It is putting the ideology of Mardi Gras into schools. I went to Scott Ryan, deputy minister for education, about this and when we showed him some of the material he was horrified. The office raised it with then (education) minister (Christopher) Pyne, but we got nowhere. Lobbying failed so we have stepped up the public campaign. Parents have a right to know.”

The researchers who put the program together knew that parents would object and set out to woo government departments and teachers for when parents complained (not if).

The ACL has been criticised by Greens senator Robert Simms for not supporting a program aimed at affirmation for the gay and lesbian students. But as the ACL points out, the program isn’t just aimed at support.

The Safe Schools program is aimed at the idea that any type of sexual experimentation and sexual fluidity and transgenderism, which some people regard as gender dysmorphia, is acceptable and good — even in this age of children being prematurely sexualised.

But in reality this is a cultural push that is going hand in hand with a political push steamrollering us.

With a plebiscite on same-sex marriage looming, it is no wonder that at some schools the purple days also have included marriage equality slogans, even though schools have been warned to keep politics out of the discussion of sex and gender issues.

If same-sex marriage becomes legal it will be difficult for any schools to remain aloof from the encroachments of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex lobby’s education policies, including the Safe Schools program.

These types of sex education programs have been adopted in other parts of the world following on from same-sex marriage, including in The Netherlands, Britain, Ireland, parts of the US and recently Alberta, Canada.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews went to the election with a promise to the LGBTI lobby to make the program mandatory by 2018. Victoria, it turns out, is a bellwether for the rest of the country for radical gender laws.

So who is bullying whom?