Is Gay Marriage Destructive to Society?
- Traditional marriage is beneficial to the public welfare.
- Homosexual behavior is destructive to the public welfare.
- The law is a great teacher; it encourages or discourages behavior and attitudes.
- Legalization of homosexual marriage would encourage more homosexual behavior, which is inherently destructive. It also would weaken the perceived importance of traditional marriage and its parenting role, thereby resulting in further destruction of the family and society itself.
- The law should endorse behaviors that are beneficial and restrain (or certainly not endorse) behaviors that are destructive.
- Therefore, the law should endorse traditional marriage and it should restrain (or certainly not endorse) homosexual marriage.
Alito Nominee and Liberal Illogic
So, I am reviewing the many reactions to the nomination on NPR (Reactions to the Alito Nomination), and the left seems to make the same tired objections, which I think are invalid.
1. Fairness Demands a Nominee with Similar Viewpoint to O’Connor
No, fairness demands appointing a judge that will interpret, not legislate from the bench. We need a better type of judge, not just one in the mold of O’Connor.
Also, fairness demands a judge that represents the people, not just a "balance" between left and right. While I don’t want a bunch of hyperfundie Christian conservatives on the bench, arguably, the people have elected a conservative president and congress. A conservative, therefore, is more mainstream than out of the mainstream. But we need to careful not to have a totally homogenous court. I am sorry that Janis Rogers Brown was not nominated instead of another white male.
Just because O’Connor was a swing vote doesn’t mean we need to put another swing voter on the court – I think many of her votes swung the wrong way (left). Good legislation should not, in general, need a swing vote – it should easily gain a majority. Of course, there will be edge cases that, for reasons of timing or complexity, may need a more nuanced approach, but I’d hate to make a choice on outliers while making bad judgements on the majority of cases.
Spare me the faux outrage
Today is one of the few days that I can say with certainty I have more respect for Ted Kennedy than I do for Harry Reid.
Christian Worldview in action
I had the privilege of attending the Christian Worldview Center’s VisionQuest 2005 with Dr. Richard Land and Nancy Pearcey. I have never been more challenged and comforted, informed and inspired than I was this weekend.
Later today and this week I will delve into specifics discussed at the conference, but I wanted to give my general impression of the weekend and the speakers.
Video game news
I grew up on video games and although my current work and home situation does not allow me much time to play, I still enjoy ever chance I get to play video games by myself or to get together with some old friends and “throw down.”
That being said, it appears video games are not quite what they used to be.
The soul of wit, the body of untruth
Shakespeare concluded that “brevity is the soul of wit.” While that may be true, Aldous Huxley’s take on brevity in the foreword of Brave New World Revisited may be even truer.
The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth.
Those words seem even more relevant in the age of 24-hour news and blogging than they were when Huxley wrote them in the 1950′s. How often do we allow our quest for wit overtake our responsibility to truth?
The problem of race and the media – Part 2
My last post addressed the media bascially ignoring horrible racist statements by a black professor (Michelle Malkin has links to the video).
I failed to mention the only time the MSM seems to enjoy showing a minority in a bad light – when they are a conservative.
Hate Speech and Homosexuality
The Swedish Supreme Court is about to hear the case of Ake Green, a pastor who was previously convicted, then acquitted of hate speech under the three year old Swedish hate-speech legislation (good link). There are four interesting things about this case.
1. Right to Free Speech
First, his acquittal balanced his right to free speech with the hate speech legislation.
The court ruled that Sweden’s free speech laws protected Pastor Green from prosecution, accepting the argument from The Becket Fund’s brief that the guarantee of freedom of expression means that “it is not the role of a government composed of men to declare what is orthodoxy by punishing those who publicly teach one religious view of what is right, even if that view may offend others.”
The court ruled that Pastor Green had a right to preach about “the Bible’s categorical condemnation of homosexual relations as a sin,” even if such views were “alien to most citizens.”
The Plausibility of Life
A new book from Yale University press, called The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma is trying to explain one of the main weaknesses of Darwinian theory:
The real problem facing neo-Darwinism [is], namely, the mystery of the origin of novelty — how new structures arise and succeed in real environments. "What is striking about these recent books that air revisionist views of evolution," he writes (p. 179), "is that they fail to adequately address the success of phenotypic novelty."
Viruses, Transposons, and Creationism
I have an ongoing debate here at work with an coworker who never tires of looking for reasons to support materialistic atheism evolution – yesterday, he brought up the topic of viruses, and how they obviously are a mechanism that moves evolution forward. Of course, like natural selection and adaptation, the functions of viruses can easily be explained within a Creationist framework – in fact, as the two articles below argue, viruses and transposable elements (TEs) are not selfish genes that inadvertently move genetics forward, but part of the normal repair and functioning of life – i.e. they were designed as part of a wholistic, self-repairing and self-replicating system.
Science’s Third Wave
Many of us probably remember Alvin Toffler’s book The Third Wave, in which he talked about the three waves of our modern economies – agrarian, then industrial, and finally at present, the information-based economy. When he wrote his book, the information economy was not yet a reality.
In a piece entitled The New Age of Information (reprinted from World Magazine 2004), William Dembski proposes that by 2025 or so, science will have undergone it’s own third wave transformation, having dumped the narrow and probably incorrect naturalistic, materialistic evolution view for an information view of reality.
Primer on Creation Science
As I mentioned in my previous post, Opal Formation – An Example of "Creationist" Research, anti-creationists can not get past the name "Creation Science" because they have a simplistic, inaccurate view of what this term means, and they reject the idea of it a priori. As I alluded, Creation science operates on the same scientific principles as naturalistic science, but has differing underlying assumptions, i.e. different underlying philosophies of science.
A Theory of Creation: A Response to the Pretense that No Creation Theory Exists outlines the differences between the two views of science, and how creation science is both scientific, and superior as a scientific model. Any anti-creationist who wants to move past low-brow mockery of creation science ought to start by understanding this article.
Does the Left drink their own Kool-Aid?
Not according to Peter Schweizer and his new book Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy.
In an interview with Kathryn Lopez of National Review, Schweizer outlines some of the more outrageous examples.
The problem of race and the media
Bill Bennett said aborting every black would reduce the crime rate, but it was "impossibly ridiculous and morally reprehensible." This caused a media firestorm chastizing Bennett for his insensitivity.
Recently, a lesser known individual made the following remarks during a conference broadcast on CSPAN:
And the one idea is, how we are going to exterminate black people because that in my estimation is the only conclusion I have come to. We have to exterminate black people off the face of the planet to solve this problem. … the problem on the planet is black people.
Global warming leads to more ice?
Is there any weather phenomenon that liberals will not blame on global warming?
If it gets warmer, then man induced global warming caused it. If we have more hurricanes, global warming. If we have more rain, global warming. If we have more ice…global warming?
Opal Formation – An Example of “Creationist” Research
One evolutionary canard I am tired of is the "you can’t design scientific experiments on Creationism." In part, they say this because they do not understand creation science, holding to a charicature of if that suits their willful ignorance. In part, they say this because they truly do not see their own faith suppositions and assumptions, and therefore, are truly unable to rightly evalutate anyone else’s. To be clear, biblical creationism isn’t "if we can’t understand it, God must have done it," (God in the gaps), but rather, we believe things like:
- everthing was fully formed and perfect from the start, and has been degenerating since then (from order to chaos) following the law of entropy, rather than moving from chaos to order.
- the geographical strata do not represent millions of years of accumulation, but represent short periods of catastrophic activity, including but not limited to a global flood
New Narnia Trailer Online
A second teaser trailer for "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe" is now available at this site. In some ways, this one is better than the first and gives you a bigger glimpse into the visual effects that were involved in making this film. If this is any indication of the quality of the production then it promises to be one of the best films to have been made in a long time.
Saving the Saved
Many churches are turning to flashy marketing to draw people in to church services, but by investigating the example of Europe (yes, I did say Europe) we may find a better way of re-establishing the prominence of the church in everyday life in America.
New Blog from Nancy Pearcey
Nancy Pearcey, author of the award-winning book Total Truth (and one of my favorite writers) has started her own blog with her husband Richard called The Pearcey Report. This will be a blog that you will want to check often. Hat tip: Writing Right.
How Liberals are Changing Their Abortion Views
In the Washington Post yesterday, liberal columnist Richard Cohen wrote a very interesting article entitled Support Choice, Not Roe. He admits what pro-lifers have been saying since the beginning – that abortion is not just a question of choice for the woman, but of life for the child.
I no longer see abortion as directly related to sexual freedom or feminism, and I no longer see it strictly as a matter of personal privacy, either. It entails questions about life — maybe more so at the end of the process than at the beginning, but life nonetheless.
This is not a fashionable view in some circles, but it is one that usually gets grudging acceptance when I mention it. I know of no one who has flipped on the abortion issue, but I do know of plenty of people who no longer think of it as a minor procedure that only prudes and right-wingers oppose. The antiabortion movement has made headway.
