I usually follow much of the religious right rhetoric from a
place of detachment like Jacque Custo marveling at sealife. Sometimes I will engage someone in an
email back-and-forth but the conversation is never very deep. But this week, Star Parker posted an
article that appeared on Townhall, WND, and AFTAH’s web sites, just to name a
few. It is utterly bananas. One reason I think this issue has been
so intractable is because of the tenor and irrationality of some of the
rhetoric. It transcends disagreement
to an Alice In Wonderland level of absurdity. Here, I respond to and critique Ms. Parker’s bizarre,
scattered column. It will not move
her opinion nor convince anyone to make a coherent argument. But it will provide some relief even if
it is nothing more than screaming into the darkness. Because I’m a gentleman, her words are in bold.
Sodom in the Nation’s Capital
- Star Parker [cut and pasted,
with spelling and grammatical errors left intact]
There is a
centrality of the traditional family to the American dream of opportunity and a
centrality of family breakdown to poverty. At a time when our country is sick, it shouldn’t surprise
that one our sickest places is our nation’s capital. The poverty rate of Washington, D.C., almost 20 percent, is
one of the highest in the nation. Its child poverty rate is the nation’s
highest. D.C.’s public school system, with a graduation rate of less than 50
percent, is one of the worst in the country.
Ok, these are
all bad things to point out. But,
oddly enough, guess who is to blame for poverty and bad schools…
According to
D.C.’s HIV/AIDS office, three percent of the local population has HIV or AIDS.
The Administrator of this office notes that this HIV/AIDS incidence is “…higher
than West Africa…on par with Uganda and some parts of Kenya.” And the principal
way that HIV is transmitted continues to be through male homosexual activity.
Is she saying
Africa is mostly gay? If you take
her “facts” at face value, and you think there is a role for government to play,
wouldn’t you want legislation that encourages fidelity and discourages
promiscuity? Wouldn’t you want the
segment of the population that you blame to view long-term relationships as an
option?
Amidst this
dismal picture, the D.C .City Council, perhaps on the theory that serving up
another glass of wine is the way to help a drunk, is scheduled to vote on
December 1 to legalize same-sex “marriage” in America’s capital city. Looking at realities in Washington, D.C.
should make clear why George Washington said, “Of all the dispositions and
habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are
indispensable supports.”
What does the
Washington quote have to do with the DC City Council vote? How does legalizing same-sex marriage
increase poverty or make the public school system worse? Where’s the logical chain of events
here.
But the
America that our first president had in mind was very different from the vision
of our DC government officials.
Yeah. There’s no 3/5 of a person compromise
anymore and the majority of people no longer believe in abiogenists, the
understood “science” of the 18th Century. What is your point?
George
Washington’s America was one in which the point of freedom is to allow Man to
rise to what he can become. To do this, the greatest challenge he faces is
conquering himself. To rise above his baser instincts, to rise above the many
temptations that lead him astray. And to achieve this end, as Washington said,
“religion and morality are indispensible supports.”
First, why is
man capitalized? More importantly,
if the purpose of morality is to help humans rise above their baser,
animalistic instincts, again, shouldn’t the law encourage fidelity and the
development of long-term relationships?
Is it fair to say to an entire group that you believe they have no
chance of ever forming meaningful, intimate, loving relationships and then
condemn them for promiscuity? I
should also point out that painting a group of people as uniformly promiscuous
in order to justify legal obstacles for their relationships is circular and
counter productive. Finally, and I
haven’t forgotten about this, I still have yet to see the connection to poverty
and bad public schools in D.C.
In left-wing
America, of which the D.C. government is a poster child, freedom means to
indulge every instinct that the tradition and religion of George Washington
would have us overcome.
Who says
this? What self-described lefty,
liberal, or progressive person summarizes their worldview in terms of
uninhibited hedonism? It’s a case
of refusing to argue the merits of the case, equal treatment under the law, by
universally labeling the opposition with absurd baseless claims.
Where does
it lead? Well, look at D.C. It is
tempting to look at D.C.’s realities and just call this a black thing. And by
and large it is. DC is largely
black — almost 60 percent. Its poverty is black poverty. Its public school
system serves mostly black children. And its AIDS crisis is mostly among blacks.
Ok, it is at
this point that I am completely lost.
I’m also uncomfortable with the unnecessary racist turn the column took
for no reason. Let me get this
straight; two people of the same sex should not have any legal recognition of
their relationship because there are bad schools in D.C. and this is largely because
of black people. Where is the
connective thread? We should have
a 10mph speed limit in Tulsa because some peanut butter was contaminated with
salmonella.
But the
pathologies that strike the weakest parts of our population most brutally are
nonetheless pathologies of the nation.
Now we’re into
pathologies. What is the
pathology? Based on the organization
of this column is she saying that there’s a black pathology or a gay
pathology? And how do we expand
the problems of a large city to the nation? Gay people should not have legally recognized relationships
because there is poverty in D.C. and that signals some as yet unnamed national
pathology that spreads like swine flu.
The
Brookings Institution is one of our oldest policy institutes and certainly no
bastion of conservatism. But in a recently published volume, Brookings scholars
Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill
point out the centrality of the traditional family to the American dream of
opportunity and the centrality of family breakdown to poverty. Reporting data showing the general
breakdown of the traditional American family, they say, “Some claim that anyone
who is concerned about these trends is simply out of touch with modern culture;
we respond that, if that be the case, then, “modern culture is out of touch
with the needs of children.”
Ok, here’s a
clue as to how she connects all this in her mind. Because too many families are not intact in D.C. there is a
higher level of poverty. But how
is the solution to discourage long-term relationships? It would make more sense that children
being raised by same-sex parents would have their family recognized in law and
both parents acknowledged as parents.
Do children need homes in which repressed gay men instead enter into
loveless faux unions with clueless straight women and then pretend until daddy
is caught tapping his foot in a public restroom? Is this her application of the Brookings Institute?
I am still not
sure what gay people have to do with bad public schools but apparently to Ms.
Parker the solution to poverty is stopping gay marriage. You see, if you scapegoat one segment
of the population then it’s easy to blame them for all problems. Then you can use examples of problems
to justify legal discrimination!
It’s perfect! You never
have to address an actual problem or contribute to its solution. You just find some unpopular group and
connect them to it.
The Catholic
Archdiocese of D.C. announced that legalization of same sex marriage would make
it impossible to continue its relationship with the D.C. government and require
termination of the social services it provides to some 68,000 of the city’s
poor — including about one third of its homeless. The reaction of D.C. Council member David Catania was essentially “so
what.” According to him, “their services are not indispensable.” Is Catania out
of touch with the needs of D.C.’s poor?
No, I think the
Catholic Church in D.C. is out of touch with the poor and with their role as a
CHURCH. Threatening to remove all charitable
community services if you don’t get your way on a City Council vote is not
exactly what Jesus had in mind when he commanded his follower’s to feed the
hungry and clothe the poor.
Nothing about same-sex marriage would make it impossible to feed homeless people. The church is using this
threat to bully a governing body.
No. He just
has different priorities. More important to him, and more important to D.C.’s
left-wing city council, is advancing moral relativism and the indulgences it
feeds. This is more important to them than feeding the poor or recognizing the
values that would get them out of poverty. It should concern every American as we watch our nation’s
capital city transform officially into Sodom.
No, the
Catholic Diocese in D.C. prioritizes anti-gay discrimination over their
obligations to the poor. Also, how
is any marriage “moral relativism” or an “indulgence”? I’m missing something here. And because the capital of a liberal
democracy operates from the standpoint of equal treatment under the law and a
lack of an established religion, D.C. magically transforms into an ancient
desert civilization?
To review,
poverty and poor public schools are bad.
These problems are exasperated by same-sex marriage. Two guys get a marriage license and
someone loses their job or fails a standardized test. This epidemic of gay-induced poverty catches on nationwide
in the form of a vague, unnamed pathology. Eventually, life-long commitments to the person you love and
families become signifiers of moral relevancy and indulgence. Then, after the pathology has infected
enough areas, the capital city falls into a primitive state of sandy hedonism
based on the story of a city told in Sunday school that probably never really
existed.
I get it now. This
makes perfect sense!
