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Showing posts with label Family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Family. Show all posts

Thursday 19 December 2013

For Sexual Relativism and Homophilia the Tide Is Turning




There are undoubted similarities between Muslim activists on one hand and LGBT and feminist activists on the other.

Both groups want to impose their views - and now, with same-sex marriage, laws - on everybody else.

And both react badly when they don't succeed.

At the moment, as I previously wrote, the trend towards total normalisation of homosexuality is experiencing a setback. Maybe people start having enough of it, and are waking up.

The above video shows events on 23rd-25th November, when a loud and threatening mob attempted to storm the Cathedral of San Juan Bautista (John the Baptist) in Argentina.

In the video, 7,000 lesbian and pro-abortion feminists mock, abuse, spray-paint, sexually harass, spit on and physically assault 1,500 young Catholic men just for forming a human shield, standing and praying around their own Cathedral, so that the activists could not storm in, desecrate and ransack it. Displaying their "tolerance", the feminists spray-paint writings the nicest of which is "Burn the church".

Then they burn an effigy of Argentinian-born Pope Francis. The similarity of behaviour with Muslim crowds is astonishing. The feminist, LGBT mob even ululates, as Muslim women do. Savagery replicates barbarism.

Many other similar attacks have been perpetrated against Christians, churches and other Christian symbols by homosexual activists, feminists and - guess whom - Muslims. Assaults that, had they been directed against the perpetrators themselves, would have been called "hate crimes", but committing them against Christians, for some inexplicable reason, makes them OK.

In Croatia, on 1st December people voted in a referendum to support the definition “marriage is matrimony between a man and a woman”, definition which will now become part of the country's constitution. 450,000 petition signatures were necessary to call for the referendum, but the pro-family campaigners collected 750,000 in only two weeks in a country of about 4.4 million (this would be the equivalent of getting 54 million signatures in the United States).

Two thirds of the electorate voted in favour of this new Constitutional Amendment: 66% to 34%. Liberty Counsel website elaborates and accuses:
Earlier this year, the Croatian government drafted a bill that would create homosexual “life partners.” Recognizing this as a step towards same-sex marriage, the Catholic Church organized the citizens’ referendum. The citizens stood strong against government, media, and even international pressure.

“The Obama administration is working to undermine marriage and family around the world,” said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel.

According to a White House fact sheet outlining President Obama’s actions, Advancing LGBT Rights at Home and Abroad, the Obama administration is actively proliferating homosexuality around the world:

• Working with the Global Equality Fund, LGBT Global Development Partnership, and government and private-sector partners to train LGBT leaders;

• Working with our embassies overseas and civil society on the ground to develop strategies to advance LGBT status in countries around the world;

• Supporting resolutions specific to LGBT issues;

• Cosponsoring the UN Human Rights Council resolution on LGBT rights; and

• Ensuring that LGBT persons are included in broader human rights resolutions.

In 2014 the United States will host an international conference of homosexual donors and activists to coordinate and strategize LGBT international public policy initiatives.

“The memories of so-called ‘progressive’ regimes controlling society are fresh in the minds of Eastern Europeans. They know if the people stand united, they can overcome these ‘progressive’ ideals that wreak havoc on families and communities,” Staver points out. Croatia joins Serbia, Montenegro, Poland, Hung[a]ry, Lithuania, Bulgaria, and Latvia in passing laws to affirm natural marriage.

“President Obama’s anticolonial ideology is shrinking America’s influence in national political affairs, but he is a colonist when it comes to forcing his anti-God and anti-values ideology upon foreign countries. Obama’s ideology is morally bankrupt and anti-American,” says Staver. [Emphasis added]
Indeed, Eastern European countries, although generally poorer than their Western counterparts, seem to be more politically aware and intelligent than those. Having experienced socialism (for Marx, the first stage towards communism) and a communist government, they know what those evils really are like, and correctly recognise Western "liberal" agendas in various areas, from the welfare state to the normalisation of homosexuality (not to mention transexuality), as different faces of the same monster they knew in the bad old days.

In Croatia, the referendum campaign came in response to proposals by the current Leftist government to extend marriage-like benefits to homosexual partners. Having witnessed what happened in the West, where this kind of stealth approach has led to homomarriage and same-sex couples' adoption rights - and we haven't seen the end of the process yet -, the Christian, pro-family activists have been endowed, so to speak, with the power of prediction and been able to stop this train of events before desensitisation stepped in and it became too late.

Similar story in Slovenia, Croatia’s neighbour which shares borders with Italy and Austria. In March 2012 the people of Slovenia rejected Leftist social engineering by repealing a new “Family Code” adopted the year before by the Slovenian Parliament, which would have cleared the path towards complete equalisation of the homosexual and conjugal marriage and towards homosexual child-adoption. It was the first referendum of this kind in an EU member state, and is likely to become an important point of reference for any further legislation in this area in Central Europe.

The piece "Croatia: post-communist nomenklatura wants to re-define marriage, but civil society resists", written before the Croatian referendum, explains:
In both Slovenia and Croatia, the debate around so-called “LGBT rights” evidences the growing disconnection between the ruling classes (which, due to their lack of genuine moral and intellectual qualities, one would hesitate to describe as “elites”) and the population. In both countries, politics and economy are under the control of a small – mostly ex-communist – nomenklatura seeking to ingratiate itself with the influential pressure-groups that currently act as opinion-makers throughout the greater part of Western and Northern Europe. These elites believe that, in order to be worthy members of the EU, their countries need to recognize same-sex “marriages”, and be it against the declared will of the people.

The nomenklatura’s contempt for democracy becomes apparent in a statement by the country’s president Ivo Josipović, a former communist, who said he had doubts “whether we need such a referendum”. The Minister of Social Politics and Youth, Milanka Opačić, called the referendum “expensive and completely unnecessary”. In addition, the Prime Minister of Croatia, Zoran Milanović, called the referendum “completely pointless” and said that “this will be the first and last time that such a referendum is announced”.

Pointless? Yes, because the government appears determined to simply ignore the outcome of the plebiscite. The Minister or [sic] Public Administration, Arsen Bauk, has defiantly announced that, in case the referendum is successful (and the introduction of same-sex marriages thus becomes impossible), a new bill will be drawn up to grant homosexual partnerships the same legal rights as marriages. Since the fall of Communism, one has never seen a Croatian politician treating a democratic expression of the electorate’s will with such arrogance.

However, arrogance and brazen contempt for democracy are by now known to be the trademarks of the homosexualist lobby. It suffices to remember the way in which the French government violently cracked down on the peaceful participants of a demonstration against the re-definition of marriage, or the fact that the European Commission funds the budget of ILGA-Europe, a radical homosexualist lobby group, with more than 1 million Euro of taxpayer’s money every year – a contribution without which this fake “non-governmental organization” would simply cease to exist.

But in the meantime, the real civil society is slowly awakening. The foreseeable outcome of the referendum in Croatia will provide further encouragement. [Emphasis added]
I conclude with Matt Barber, who writes in WND's article "America's chief export: Immorality":
Indeed, under this president, America’s chief export has become immorality. Sexual deviancy, murder of the unborn, redistribution of wealth and other evils have been sanitized and propagandized as “basic human rights.”

Thus, when this arrogant man stands before the U.N. and decries those nations that refuse to embrace his special brand of pagan relativism, we shouldn’t be surprised if those nations push back.

And so they push back...

For instance, there has been, of late, great weeping and gnashing of teeth among mainstream media – and other circles of intolerant “tolerance” – over successful efforts by several foreign governments to stem the tide of “LGBT” propaganda within their own sovereign borders.

Russia, India, Croatia, Peru, Jamaica and even Australia, for instance, along with other nations, are now moving to inoculate themselves from the fast-metastasizing cancer of sexual relativism.

Having witnessed, from afar, the poisonous results of such propaganda here in the U.S. (the hyper-sexualization of children, the deconstruction of natural marriage and family, the rampant spread of sexually transmitted disease, religious persecution and the like), there seems an emerging global recognition that the radical “LGBT” agenda – a pet cause of Obama’s – is not about securing “human rights,” but, rather, is about promulgating moral wrongs.

The world is finding that forcing others to “tolerate” – indeed, to celebrate – unfettered licentiousness, under penalty of law, is as harmful to society as is said licentiousness to those who practice it...

While America may be lost (though I pray not), it would seem that her traditional values – values still shared by many, if not most, of the American people – are, nonetheless, gaining momentum abroad.

And that is encouraging.

Now let’s pray those values come full circle.

Wednesday 18 December 2013

The Fight Against Redefining Marriage Is Not Over




I've received the latest email news from Coalition for Marriage, saying that the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has climbed down from its proposal of merging official figures for same-sex and traditional marriage with “no differentiation possible”. This would have airbrushed true marriage from official data.

Before the proposal was implemented, an ONS consultation asked whether it was “important” that “some tables” could show separate heterosexual and homosexual marriage figures, which received an enormous volume of responses from Coalition for Marriage supporters insisting for separate figures.

The ONS has now released a statement saying that it is not going to combine the figures, but “will publish marriage and divorce statistics in the future where figures for opposite sex and same sex couples are shown separately”.

Coalition for Marriage comments: "So the statistics for traditional marriage are not to be a state secret."



After the passing of the homomarriage law in Britain, several people have given up hoping and fighting.

This episode shows that there are still many differences that we could make. The homosexual marriage experiment may still not succeed, especially in the long term. Changes made can be reversed.

A piece of evidence for that comes from the PS to the email, saying:
[T]he Australian High Court has overturned a same-sex marriage law in the Australian Capital Territory. The law was passed a few weeks ago, but the judges unanimously ruled that it was inconsistent with federal law, which defines marriage in Australia as the union of one man and one woman.

Tuesday 26 November 2013

Paternal Uncertainty in a Godless Society

Paternal uncertainty's classic case: white couple with black baby


When I work until late at night, just about the only TV programme left to watch afterwards is often The Jeremy Kyle Show. At first I watched it for its comic value, as dysfunctional couples and families shout at each other over non-existing problems before turning to the namesake presenter of the show for guidance and, more importantly, to solve their real problems with DNA paternity and lie detector tests.

But then I realised that this broadcast is much more useful than an average comedy show. It has exposed at least two things.

The first is how in the lives of the people appearing in Kyles' studio - who are British reprentatives of what American sociologist Charles Murray and others call the "underclass" - Christianity has totally disappeared.

The underclass is a new social class, it is no longer the working class. It is not characterised by its economic status so much as by its behaviour, mores and ethos.

It has a disproportionately high illegitimacy rate, school drop-out rate, unemployment rate and crime rate. It is anti-social in its outlook, attitudes, rules and codes.

In the US the underclass is disproportionately black - which is why the American version of the JK Show has mostly black guests - but in Britain it is mainly formed by indigenous Britons.

The complete abandonment of Christian values and principles, particularly those of self-discipline in every area of life - ranging from what psychologists today call "anger management", and was once the fight against the sin of wrath, to sexual self-restraint -, seems more than a mere coincidence in the type of problems that Kyle guests face.

The second thing that this TV show evidences is how in today's society the pendulum has gone too far in favouring women over men, in many different fields but specifically here in the case of paternity issues.

Gerd Gigerenzer's book on risk and its statistical aspects, Reckoning with Risk: Learning to Live with Uncertainty (Amazon USA), (Amazon UK), explains how human males are exceptional in the animal kingdom in being expected to contribute to the rearing of a child without certainty of fatherhood. Paternity uncertainty coupled with parental responsibility is a very heavy burden that society forces men to bear:
Why is there wife battering all around the world? And why do many more men than women kill their partners? Although there are many contributing variables, such as alcoholism, the classic explanation is paternal uncertainty. Unlike in the majority of mammalian species, in which males contribute nothing to the upbringing of their offspring, in the human species males and females cooperate in providing parental care. Fathers face a problem that mothers do not, and which according to evolutionary theory is so serious that most mammalian fathers opt out of paternal investment entirely. This problem is cuckoldry. That is, a man has to accept some degree of uncertainty about whether he actually is the father of his children. A woman, in contrast, can be certain that she is the mother of her children (barring an accidental exchange of babies in the hospital). Paternal uncertainty can be reduced by many means, one of which is for a man to control his partner physically to ensure that she is not consorting with other men. According to this argument, the cost of male parental investment brings with it male sexual jealousy, which leads men to use methods ranging from vigilance to violence to controlling sexual access to their mates.

How certain should human fathers be about their paternity? Probably not as certain as is conceivably possible since the mid-1980s, when DNA fingerprinting became available as a highly reliable method for paternity testing. Using DNA fingerprinting, researchers found that 5 to 10 percent of children in Western countries who had been studied have a different biological father from the one they thought they had. [Emphases added]
Or, as the Romans put it in their lapidary, succinct way: Mater semper certa est, pater numquam (the mother is always certain, the father never).

At least since the advent of feminism, it's always been considered sexist (in the direction of misogyny) to stigmatise female adulterous and promiscuous behaviours in a way that male corresponding behaviours are not.

In fact, in light of the serious repercussions on paternal uncertainty, what is sexist (in the direction of misandry) is not to stigmatise women more than men for sexually promiscuous habits.

It has to be noted that Gerd Gigerenzer is not a political writer. He is a psychology academic, former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago and currently director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

The book from which I quoted deals with statistics, calculation and assessment of risk in human and medical sciences. It is a scientific work, with hardly any political implication.

His political views on this matter are unlikely to be similar to mine, i.e. right-wing or anti-feminist, firstly because he would by now have been sacked from his academic position, secondly because his work is highly recommended by openly Leftist, Guardian columnist and author of Bad Science (Amazon USA), (Amazon UK), Ben Goldacre, and thirdly because the application of DNA paternity tests that he mostly advocates is for catching fathers trying to avoid their responsibilities.

He writes, for instance:
Before DNA testing, court proceedings were often colored by the public humiliation of unmarried mothers...

DNA testing has helped to dispense with the humiliating [for the mother] character that court hearings had in the past. Now that DNA evidence for paternity exists, courts rarely subject mothers to cross-examinations about their sex lives...

My point is that the mere possibility of DNA fingerprinting can be sufficient to end denial, to spare the mother an inquisition into her sex life, and to oblige the father to pay child support.
I don't see anything wrong with public humiliation and stigma for unmarried mothers. It's because Western societies have abandoned this stigma that illegitimacy rates have been steadily rising in all EU countries, North America and Australia.

In 2009, 41% of children born in the US were illegitimate, from 5% a half century ago. As for the European Union:
In 2011, 39.5% of all births in the 27 EU countries were extramarital. In that year, births outside marriage represented a majority in Iceland (65.0%), Estonia (59.7%), Slovenia (56.8%), Bulgaria (56.1%), France (55.8%), Norway (55.0%), Sweden (54.3%), and Belgium (50%). The proportion of extramarital births is also approaching half in Denmark (49%), the United Kingdom (47.3%) and the Netherlands (45.3%)...

In the EU, the average percentage of extramarital births has risen steadily in recent years, from 27.4% in 2000 to 39.5% in 2011.
In the UK most children will be born out of wedlock by 2016.

While people were too concerned about sexual liberation and women's rights, children and society at large were paying the price. I cannot cover in this post all the consequences of fatherlessness - and they are all negative -, although I will in future articles.

But I'll say that the price is astronomical in terms of children's psychological wellbeing, children's poverty, crime levels, antisocial behavior, unemployment, and finally the welfare state bills for taxpayers.

Also, observe the double standard. Whereas hormonal and other biological factors are often utilised in women's favour, as excuses even for murders allegedly due to Pre-Menstrual Tension (PMT) or postpartum psychosis, similar factors are never employed to excuse men in cases of rape, for example, or, as in this case, paternity uncertainty is never recognised as an intense stressor for a man and used to justify his jealous, controlling or violent behaviour.

Men are expected to provide for and in other ways contribute to a child's upbringing, no questions asked.

Not many consider this immense factor of stress for men, in the same way as in public discourse it's very rare for someone to examine things from a man's perspective. It is politically incorrect. It's only from a woman's viewpoint that we are supposed to look at everything.

Whereas oceans of ink and light years of film have been devoted to all the various problems associated with the woman's role in reproduction, hardly anybody has paid even the scantest attention to those related to the man's role.


Photo by toledo clubber (Creative Commons CC BY-ND 2.0).

Monday 13 May 2013

See You on 15 May at London Event on Marriage

The joys of homosexual adoption: mommy, mama, and me


The Coalition for Marriage in the UK has planned a very interesting free event (or rather two events with the same presentation, one in central London on 15 May and one in Chessington on 14 May - details below), with a very interesting guest, Ryan Anderson, whom they call "the man who gave Piers Morgan a run for his money" because of the way he outsmarted the British Leftist journalist on a USA TV debate on marriage.

Another speaker at the events will be Adrian Smith, the Manchester housing manager who was demoted and lost 40 per cent of his salary just for having said on his personal Facebook page that "gay" weddings in churches would be "an equality too far".

I'll be at the London event, so if you attend too we could meet:
We would like to remind you that Ryan Anderson, who brilliantly stood his ground defending marriage against a sneering Piers Morgan on American TV, will be visiting the UK next [now this] week.

Mr Anderson is a bright, young, articulate academic and author from Washington DC and he knows the arguments for marriage inside-out. We have organised two special events so that our supporters can hear what he has to say.

Also speaking at the events will be Adrian Smith, the housing manager from Manchester who was demoted and lost 40 per cent of his salary just for saying on his personal Facebook page that gay weddings in churches would be "an equality too far".

Please join us at one of the two events:

Chessington, Tuesday 14 May, 8pm - 9.30pm
The King's Centre, Coppard Gardens,
Chessington, Surrey, KT9 2GZ
Click above for a map

London, Wednesday 15 May, 6pm - 7.30pm
The Honourable Society of the Inner Temple,
Crown Office Row, London, EC4Y 7HL
Click above for a map

The same presentation will be given at both meetings. The meetings are free of charge and there’s no need to book.

Tuesday 5 February 2013

Sorry, Gays, Equality Is a Different Thing




The TV news channel Russia Today's CrossTalk programme for once had a debate (in the above video) I am glad to report on.

"Unimarriage?", on the subject of gay marriage, was a discussion among the UK's prominent gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, UK Independence Party's Member of the European Parliament Godfrey Bloom and Thomas Peters of the USA's National Organization for Marriage who works in Washington DC.

It was introduced thus:
Should same-sex marriages be accepted? What's driving the change in the institution of marriage? Are equal marriage rights democratic? Why aren't civil unions enough for gay couples? And if marriage is about love and the emotional needs of adults, then what about their children?
The programme was also exceptional in that the supposedly "moderator" Peter Lavelle did not intervene with opinions of his own.

One of the recurring claims of the conversation was Peter Tatchell's insistence that the right to marry is one of the human rights recognized by the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to deny it to homosexuals violates a principle of equality for all individuals.

But is it true that opposing gay marriage means discriminating and denying equal rights to homosexuals?

Tatchell confuses equal rights with equal treatment. Equality for individuals who are different results in different treatment.

Peter Singer, a moral and political philosopher much respected by the Left and certainly one of the thinkers of our time who will be included in future history of philosophy books, begins his classic work Animal Liberation with a comparison between the objections usually raised against the case for moral equality of animals to humans and the derisive attacks that greeted the publication of early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in the late 18th-century.

One of the most frequent of those criticisms was to highlight the factual differences between men and women (analogous to the possible use of the differences between human and nonhuman animals to counter Singer's argument).

Singer responds to both in the same way: equal consideration of interests (the utilitarian Singer does not use the terminology of "rights") does not require equal treatment. The treatment for different sentient beings, the moral objects, will be different if their interests are given equal consideration (if they have equal rights).

The Australian philosopher says that equality does not entail that dogs have the right to vote because humans do and men have the right to abortion on demand if women do.

The incongruity of the idea that equality requires non-differential treatment in all cases can be seen if we think of, for instance, children not being allowed to drive a car or vote, even if they wanted to: developing the logic of Tatchell's argument to its full consequences would require giving children all the rights that adults have, including, for instance, driving and voting.

In the specific case of marriage, children, close blood relatives, threesomes are not allowed to marry, even if they so wished: are all those persons discriminated against? Most reasonable people would not think so.

This is probably why the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Thatchell invokes in his support does not include sexual orientation among the characteristics that should not limit the right to marry. It says:
Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.
Virtually nothing of what Peter Tatchell said throughout the debate had a leg to stand on.

His assertion that polls show that a majority favours same-sex marriage was dismantled with ease by Thomas Peters of the National Organization for Marriage. He explained that in 30 out of the 34 times when people were given the possibility to vote on this they voted against gay marriage. Polls on this subject are not reliable because people tend to say they are favourable to it even when they are not, since they think it makes them look good.

In these Orwellian times when accusation of "homophobia" are thrown so liberally (pun half-intended) it seems a highly plausible explanation.

In addition, "polls claiming a majority support redefining marriage offer those they poll a false binary choice between redefining marriage and no legal recognition whatsoever".

In the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron has been accused by the polling company ComRes to misrepresent its polling data in order to claim popular support for redefining marriage:
Andrew Hawkins, Chairman of the polling company, wrote to David Cameron to “put the record straight” about the number of people who are in favour of the Government’s plans to redefine marriage.

The Prime Minister had responded to a letter from MP Cheryl Gillan, in which she criticised the proposals. He said that more Tory-leaning voters were in favour of same-sex marriage than were put off by it.

Support

But Andrew Hawkins said his polling showed that redefining marriage was unlikely to win back support from disillusioned voters.

He also said it was “simply not the case” that all the published polls show more voters are in favour of same-sex marriage, something the Prime Minister asserted as fact in his letter.

Mr Hawkins said the level of agreement that marriage should stay as it is, varies between 55% and over 70%.

Ignore

He said that taking the polling as a whole, it is hard for David Cameron to ignore the fact there is less support for gay marriage than he makes out.

He said “the policy is likely to make it harder to retrieve many former Conservative supporters” and the issue is having a “detrimental effect on local Associations.”

Andrew Hawkins referred to a recent ComRes poll which showed that six out of ten Conservative Party chairmen believed the policy would lose the party more votes than it would gain.

Election

Earlier this week, Chancellor George Osborne said that gay marriage would win the party the next election, a claim quickly refuted by the Coalition for Marriage.

C4M Director Colin Hart said: “Yet again the Government’s spin doctors are trying to claim that redefining marriage is a vote winner. Quite the opposite is true.”

More than 610,000 people have signed the Coalition for Marriage petition to keep marriage as it is.
Tatchell's presentation of his battle for gay rights as a lonely one could have been realistic a few decades ago, but these days everybody knows that it cannot be delivered with a straight face. Peters pointed out that the three main associations for same-sex marriage in Washington receive many times the money his small organization gets, not to mention Obama's support and the Decmocratic Party's inclusion of legalization of gay marriage in its manifesto. Peters also said he receives death threats.

UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom argued that the gay claims, with which he used to agree, have now gone too far, and threaten other people's liberty, as in the case of Peter and Hazelmary Bull, the Christian husband and wife B&B owners who were successfully sued by a gay couple for offering them two rooms rather than one.

Peters summed up some of the reasons to keep marriage between a man and a woman:
There's an awful lot of civil society -- churches, communities, government -- that is all built to support marriage because marriage isn't easy. It's not easy to get men and women to commit to raising the children they make with their bodies. But that's what civil society has been doing and a healthy society does that. It is difficult and gay marriage makes it difficult for all of civil society to enshrine that value that children deserve a mom and a dad, and that men and women should stick around and love and raise the children they make with their bodies, and the distraction of gay marriage has made it impossible for things like the Catholic Church, for things like political/civil government to give that message and so when you say "gay marriage won't hurt anyone" it already has because now when I try to say "a child deserves both mom and a dad" you jump in and say "that's against equality!" and so you can actually see already that the more gay marriage becomes accepted and enshrined in law the more difficult it will become for the rest of us to communicate this life-saving propagating message for the next generation.
We must also not forget how the redefinition of marriage could pave the way to allowing for Islamic polygamy to become acceptable:
Muslim polygamy has been a much more easily accepted practice, with authorities and police in Western countries turning a blind eye to it, than it would have been the case in the past, when people knew what the word 'family' meant, before the time of constant redefinitions of the term to include homosexuals, threesomes, incestuous couples and all the ever-expanding circle of relationships that the concepts of marriage and family must now apply to.


Saturday 24 November 2012

Socialism at Work: Council's Foster Family Break-up




This is another bit of totalitarianism in Britain. We should not be surprised. After all, what we call, sarcastically but also kindly, "political correctness" is in fact socialism or outright Marxism, a totalitarian ideology.

Having the "wrong" ideas and being affiliated with real opposition parties is punished in totalitarian states. Welcome to the UK.

And after all, attacks on the family have been part of Marxism since its inception, when Frederick Engels wrote in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that family is a patriarchal, bourgeois institution oppressing women, that replaced the matrilineal clan as main domestic institution.

After the news that Labour-run Rotherham Council, in South Yorkshire, had removed children from a foster home only because the foster couple are members of the UK Independence Party broke out, Education Secretary Michael Gove said social workers at the council had made "the wrong decision in the wrong way for the wrong reasons".

Labour leader Ed Miliband also intervened calling for an urgent investigation, saying "being a member of UKIP should not be a bar to adopting children".

As a consequence of the criticisms from all sides, Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, whose original response had been to defend its decision, has now announced that it will carry out an urgent review of the case.

Foster parents 'stigmatised and slandered’ for being members of Ukip:
A couple had their three foster children taken away by a council on the grounds that their membership of the UK Independence Party meant that they supported “racist” policies.

The husband and wife, who have been fostering for nearly seven years, said they were made to feel like criminals when a social worker told them that their views on immigration made them unsuitable carers.

The couple said they feared that there was a black mark against their name and they would not be able to foster again.

Campaigners representing foster parents have described the decision as “ridiculous” and warned that it could deter other prospective foster parents from volunteering.

Nigel Farage, the leader of Ukip, described the actions of Rotherham borough council as “a bloody outrage” and “political prejudice of the very worst kind”.

Tim Loughton, the former children’s minister, said: “I will be very concerned if decisions have been made about the children’s future that were based on misguided political correctness around ethnic considerations.

"Being a supporter of a mainstream political party is not a deal-breaker when it comes to looking after children if it means they can have a loving family home.”

The couple, who do not want to be named to avoid identifying the children they have fostered, are in their late 50s and live in a neat detached house in a village in South Yorkshire.

The husband was a Royal Navy reservist for more than 30 years and works with disabled people, while his wife is a qualified nursery nurse.

Former Labour voters, they have been approved foster parents for nearly seven years and have looked after about a dozen different children, one of them in a placement lasting four years.

They took on the three children — a baby girl, a boy and an older girl, who were all from an ethnic minority and a troubled family background — in September in an emergency placement.

They believe that the youngsters thrived in their care. The couple were described as “exemplary” foster parents: the baby put on weight and the older girl even began calling them “mum and dad”.

However, just under eight weeks into the placement, they received a visit out of the blue from the children’s social worker at the Labour-run council and an official from their fostering agency.

They were told that the local safeguarding children team had received an anonymous tip-off that they were members of Ukip.

The wife recalled: “I was dumbfounded. Then my question to both of them was, 'What has Ukip got to do with having the children removed?’

“Then one of them said, 'Well, Ukip have got racist policies’. The implication was that we were racist. [The social worker] said Ukip does not like European people and wants them all out of the country to be returned to their own countries.

“I’m sat there and I’m thinking, 'What the hell is going off here?’ because I wouldn’t have joined Ukip if they thought that. I’ve got mixed race in my family. I said, 'I am absolutely offended that you could come in my house and accuse me of being a member of a racist party’.”

The wife said she told the social worker and agency official: “These kids have been loved. These kids have been treated no differently to our own children. We wouldn’t have taken these children on if we had been racist.”

The boy was taken away from them the following day and the two girls were removed at the end of that week.

The wife said the social worker told her: “We would not have placed these children with you had we known you were members of Ukip because it wouldn’t have been the right cultural match.” The wife said she was left “bereft”, adding: “We felt like we were criminals. From having a little baby in my arms, suddenly there was an empty cot. I knew she wouldn’t have been here for ever, but usually there is a build-up of several weeks. I was in tears.”

Her husband added: “If we were moving the children on to happier circumstances we would be feeling warm and happy. To have it done like that, it’s beyond the pale.”

The couple said they had been “stigmatised and slandered”.

A spokesman for Rotherham metropolitan borough council said last night: “After a group of sibling children were placed with agency foster carers, issues were raised regarding the long-term suitability of the carers for these particular children.

"With careful consideration, a decision was taken to move the children to alternative care. We continue to keep the situation under review.”

Ukip was once considered a single-issue fringe party but is now part of Britain’s political mainstream, with some recent national polls putting its support as high as nine per cent. Its manifesto includes a demand for Britain to pull out of Europe and to curb immigration.

It is also critical of multiculturalism and political correctness. It has a candidate in next week’s Rotherham by-election.

Mr Farage said: “I am outraged politically and very upset for them. I think this is the kind of thing where we need some sort of decree from a Government minister that Ukip is not a racist party.

“This is political prejudice of the very worst kind. It is just a bloody outrage.”

He pointed out that Ukip has a black candidate in the forthcoming Croydon North by-election.

David Goosey, the chairman of the trustees at Community Foster care, an independent fostering charity, said: “If this is accurate and there are no other extraneous matters that have concerned the authorities, then it is completely ridiculous and no self-respecting authority should be stopping people fostering on the grounds of their membership of Ukip.”

Rotherham metropolitan borough council’s equality policy states that it is committed to “promoting equality and good relations between people of different racial groups”.

Senior Tories have criticised “politically correct” rules requiring children to be adopted by families of the same ethnic background.

In March, David Cameron pledged to tackle “absurd” barriers to mixed-race adoption, while Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, said last year that “Left-wing prescriptions” were denying children loving new homes.
This is the way the council had initially defended its position, which is now reviewing:
But Joyce Thacker, the council's Director of Children and Young People's Services, today said the three ethnic minority children had been placed with the couple as an emergency and the arrangement was never going to be long-term.

She told the BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "We always try to place children in a sensible cultural placement. These children are not UK children and we were not aware of the foster parents having strong political views.

"There are some strong views in the Ukip party and we have to think of the future of the children."

"Also the fact of the matter is I have to look at the children's cultural and ethnic needs. The children have been in care proceedings before and the judge had previously criticised us for not looking after the children's cultural and ethnic needs, and we have had to really take that into consideration with the placement that they were in."

Asked what the specific problem was with the couple being Ukip members, Mrs Thacker told the BBC: "We have to think about the clear statements on ending multi-culturalism for example.

"These children are from EU migrant backgrounds and Ukip has very clear statements on ending multiculturalism, not having that going forward, and I have to think about how sensitive I am being to those children."

Thursday 15 November 2012

Why Paedophilia Concerns Have Come to Override Basic Rules of Law




Whether or not the BBC, as the Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson argues, should prove that the programme Newsnight was not acting with malice towards senior Tory politician Lord McAlpine wrongly accused of paedophilia by an abuse victim, one thing is clear.

The current obsession with paedophilia seems to have erased or greatly diluted the basic legal principles that a person is innocent until proven guilty and, even more importantly, that the burden of the proof is on the accuser.

Paedophilia and, to a lesser extent, rape have become such politically incorrect crimes that they are treated as if they were worse than even murder or mutilation.

Yet losing life or a limb is certainly worse than being a victim of sex crimes.

When another child abuse scandal connected to the BBC, that of Jimmy Savile, emerged, we heard a never-ending number of celebrities and commentators repeating ad nauseam that children must absolutely be believed without a doubt in the world when they make this kind of accusations, almost implying that disbelief is a crime in itself and echoing similar assertions made about rape and women who claim to have been raped.

Nobody should be believed absolutely and undoubtedly: children, adults, women and men. People who say they have been victims of a crime are witnesses; and it is a well known fact that crime witnesses are highly unreliable, as this latest case concerning Lord McAlpine confirms for the umpteenth time.

This applies to all crimes: the least unpopular as much as the most hated ones. It has nothing to do with the severity of the crime, or how much it is disliked, or how strong emotions it arises.

It is a simple rule of law. To punish an innocent is worse than to let a guilty off the hook.

In the case of paedophilia, even accusing an innocent may be worse than to let a guilty off the hook.

"To call someone a paedophile is to consign them to the lowest circle of hell – and while they are still alive" correctly writes Boris Johnson.

But why have we got to this point of insanity, where paediatricians have been lynch mobbed for having the same prefix as paedophiles (from the Greek for "child") in their name and accusations can fly around and be believed so liberally?

The reason is very simple. Starting from the 1960s "sexual revolution", strongly if not entirely consciously influenced by Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich theories that repressing sexual impulses is not good for you, sexual activity has been removed from the moral sphere.

Contemporary, influential moral philosopher Peter Singer writes in his Practical Ethics that ethics should not concern itself with sexuality, and that driving a car, due to what he believes to be its environmental impact, raises more moral issues than having sex.

This new dogma has been readily and happily accepted by a majority opinion, leading to such nice results as multiplication of marriage breakdowns, adultery, divorces, broken families, abortions, illegitimate births, multiple partners and fathers, AIDS, increase in sexually transmitted diseases, homosexualist agenda being imposed on everybody, incest and Muslim polygamy made quasi-legal or accepted.

But public opinion, seeing where all this was going, namely that sex with children woud be next on the list of morally permissible activities, strongly drew a line at that. Something similar happened with rape.

Given the very confused ideas about sexuality and morality that prevail in our societies (and I grant that the subject is complex), all the furore about paedophilia (and to a lesser degree rape) derives from and is directly proportional to the eagerness and almost desperation with which all other forms of sexuality have been embraced without a thought in the world.

It turns out that sexual activity is not beyond the realm of ethics after all.


Wednesday 12 September 2012

Christian Values Erosion Opens the Way to Muslim Polygamy

A typical example of how the erosion of our Christian values has left us without defence against the encroachment of Islam is that of polygamy.

Multiple divorces and remarriages in the West have created a situation which is similar to polygamy with a man or a woman having more than one family. The only difference with Muslim polygamy is that men and women in the Western variant of polygamy are on an equal footing or rather, if there is a discrimination, it is against men.

In these circumstances, Muslim polygamy has been a much more easily accepted practice, with authorities and police in Western countries turning a blind eye to it, than it would have been the case in the past, when people knew what the word 'family' meant, before the time of constant redefinitions of the term to include homosexuals, threesomes, incestuous couples and all the ever-expanding circle of relationships that the concepts of marriage and family must now apply to.

As it is, it's not clear what the ethical basis for the rejection of Muslim polygamy should be, since we have allowed things that have similar consequences for the children, for instance, left in many cases without a clear father figure or even without a father at all, as in the case of single-mother 'families'.

In many ways, there are a lot of similarities between Muhammed and Henry VIII: they both formed religious principles around their physical needs and personal desires.

Saturday 21 July 2012

120,000 Families Cost Taxpayers £9 billion

A year of research commissioned by Louise Casey, British Prime Minister David Cameron's adviser on dysfunctional or "troubled families", has found that Britain's 120,000 problem "families" are costing taxpayers £9 billion in benefits - almost as much as the London Olympic Games.

Notice that I don't put the inverted commas around the word "problem", as is usual practice, but around "families". Because we don't know what kind of "families" these are and indeed we don't know what the word "family" means any more.
Children from "troubled families" need practical help to avoid becoming locked in a cycle of abuse and welfare dependency, according to a Government report.

David Cameron's adviser Louise Casey has been tasked with turning around the lives of the 120,000 most dysfunctional families by 2015.

In her initial report on the challenge the Government faces, compiled after interviewing a dozen families, she painted a grim picture of generational dysfunction.

She found that violence was endemic in many households and there were "entrenched cycles of suffering problems and causing problems" which poisons whole social networks.

Ms Casey discovered experiences such as domestic and sexual abuse, teenage pregnancies, police call-outs and educational failure are often passed down the generations.

"The prevalence of child sexual and physical abuse and sometimes child rape was striking and shocking," the report said.

"It became clear that, in many of these families, the abuse of children by in many cases parents, siblings, half-siblings and extended family and friends was a factor in their dysfunction.

"Some discussed it as if as it was almost expected and just a part of what they had experienced in life. Children often had not been protected by their parents.

"In many of the families, the sexual abuse repeated itself in the next generation... There were also incidents where families talked about incest."

Other common themes included people having children very young, and large numbers of them - often with different partners.

The report backed tackling the inter-linked issues of a whole family, rather than dealing with single problems or single individuals within a household.

Ms Casey said: "I am not making excuses for any family failing to send their kids to school or causing trouble in their community.

"However, unless we really understand what it is about these families that means they behave in this way, we can't start to turn their lives around."

She added: "It is clearer than ever to me now that we cannot go on allowing troubled families to fail their children.

"None of the parents I spoke to wanted their children to repeat a life of chaos and trouble, but often they couldn't see how to put things right by themselves - they needed practical and persistent help to do so."

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles said the report provided a real insight into the families' dysfunctional lives.

The Government has promised to pay upper-tier local authorities up to £4,000 per eligible family for reducing truancy, youth crime and anti-social behaviour, or putting parents back into work.

The programme's £448m three-year budget, which applies to England, is drawn from seven departments in a bid to join up local services.