650 Gay-loving Westerners vs redneck Russia

Gay-loving Westerners vs redneck Russia

Newsletter published on 18-3-2014

(1) Gay-loving Westerners vs redneck Russia
(2) Elton John rebukes Russia's anti-gay law, cites Moscow visit
(3) Pussy Riot chicken Vagina
(4) Is Putin One of Us? by Pat Buchanan
(5) Russia defending traditional family values against 'genderless and
infertile' Western tolerance
(6) Strange bedfellows: Pat Buchanan and Putin
(7) Billy Graham's son Franklin backs Putin's Stance On Gay Rights
(8) Putin appoints traditionalist head to RIA Novosti, Russia's
state-owned news agency
(9) Camille Paglia: civilization commits suicide, when it denies the
biological differences between men and women
(10) Psychic Change: How Homosexuality Became Normalized - David Rosen
(11) Jews and gays - birds of a feather? by Simon Jones (Eric Walberg)

(1) Gay-loving Westerners vs redneck Russia

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/gay-loving-westerners-vs-redneck-russia/14638

Gay-loving Westerners vs redneck Russia

The hysteria over Sochi confirms that the Culture Wars have gone global

10 February 2014

by Brendan O'Neill {editor of spiked online}

Have you tweeted, Facebooked, Instagrammed, YouTubed, blogged or in some
other fashion publicly declared your love for gays and your loathing of
Vladimir Putin? If not, why not? Everyone who's anyone is at it. No
sooner had the Winter Olympics in Sochi been declared open than Western
newspapers and magazines were redesigning their mastheads to include the
gay rainbow flag, Google was splashing the gay colours across its
homepage, Channel 4 was running an archly camp skit featuring a fat man
in hotpants dancing to Russian-style music, globally famous authors were
penning angry letters about Putin, and virtually everyone with access to
social media was making their profile pic super gay-friendly or was
frantically sharing Buzzfeed's '16 Most Homoerotic Photos of Vladimir
Putin'. Forget curling or luge - the main event at this Winter Olympics
is the mass wrestling match between gay-loving Westerners and redneck
Russia.

The thoroughness with which Sochi has been turned into a platform for a
showdown between enlightened Westerners who like gays and wicked Ruskies
who apparently do not, with a vast outpouring of ersatz homophilia from
every Westerner with a conscience and an internet connection, confirms
that the Culture Wars have gone global. The increasingly bitter
lifestyle spats that have been a feature of domestic Western politics
for at least 30 years - pitching liberals against conservatives, the
gay-friendly against the traditionalist, the cosmopolitan against the
parochial - have now well and truly broken through to the international
stage. Westerners' pointing of a big fat finger at allegedly homophobic
Russia - a gay-coloured, comedy-sized foam finger, of course - shows
that now even between nations the politics of lifestyle trumps older
realpolitik matters. Where once the West would have sought to assert its
superiority to Russia in economic or ideological terms, now, like a
bespectacled East Coast American liberal looking with horror upon
redneck Southerners who, shudder, do not support gay marriage, it tries
to get one over on Russia through the issue of lifestyle, through
culture, through waging a Culture War rather than a political one.

The nodding-dog enthusiasm with which virtually every Western
institution and publication has embraced Sochi as an opportunity to
lambast backward Russians, and more importantly to demonstrate their own
gay-friendly decency, has been extraordinary. Every day brings news of
another corporation or outlet waving the gay flag, ostensibly to express
fury with Putin's recent passing of a deeply authoritarian law that
forbids the promotion of homosexuality to under-18s, but really as a way
of saying: 'Look at me! I like gays! I am good!' This Will and Gracing
of the modern political sphere can be seen in the Guardian's and New
Statesman's gay-themed refashioning of their mastheads for Sochi, in the
furious spread around the internet of a meme showing Putin wearing
lipstick (like a gay person!), in a hipster British brewer's release of
a 'queer beer' called 'Hello, my name is Vladimir', in Toronto City
Hall's raising of the gay flag for the duration of Sochi, in the United
Nations' decree that everyone in the West should 'raise their voices'
for the gay community, and - get this - in Jon Snow's decision to wear a
gay flag-coloured tie on Channel 4 News during Sochi. If that doesn't
topple Putin, I don't know what will.

What is striking about this coming together of the corporate, political,
media and activist spheres in a collective expression of gay-friendly
angst with once-Communist, still-backward Russia - kind of pinks against
pinkos - is how little practical consequence it is designed to have. So
Toronto may have raised the gay flag, but there is no discussion of
Canada breaking off relations with Russia. The UN has made gay-friendly
comments about Sochi, but Russia remains a permanent member of the UN
Security Council. Google made its logo gay-coloured for Sochi, but it
won't be pulling out of the Russian market. Every Western commentator
and campaigner keen to be thought of highly has added the gay flag to
his or her Twitterfeed, Facebook page or Tumblr, but this will of course
have zero impact on Russia's internal politics. This disparity between
the intensity of Western displays of Sochi-related gay-friendliness and
the likely impact they will have on the ground in and around the Kremlin
is striking: it suggests we are witnessing the emergence of a new form
of international politicking, one designed not to achieve tangible
political or territorial goals but simply to send a message across the
internet, through the media, into the ether, effectively, about
ourselves and our cultural superiority to the backward hordes. All that
rainbow flag-waving is really about drawing attention to us, and our
goodness, not to Russia or its gays.

What we are witnessing is a real-world version of that old TV show Queer
Eye for the Straight Guy in which five camp, well-dressed men would tell
straight fatties with beards to lose weight, clean their teeth and
invest in a Prada shirt. Over Sochi, the same sense of camp disgust with
gruff blokes is being expressed, only this time an army of both straight
and gay Westerners are wagging a finger at the backward antics of
super-hetero Putin and his dumb, automaton supporters among the Russian
masses. The Queer Eye vibe of the Sochi protests can be seen in the now
incredibly popular pastime of Western journalists complaining about
their hotels in Sochi, which has given rise to the exact same joke on
every Twitterfeed in Christendom: 'If you scare off gays, interior
design goes to hell.' Geddit?! Because gays are really good at interior
design and Putin has gotten rid of all gays! This sort of shallow global
posturing doesn't only vastly exaggerate what Putin has done to Russia's
homosexuals - no, Stephen Fry, they do not face Nazi-style extermination
- but it is also incredibly patronising to homosexuals. They wear
lipstick, they dance about in hotpants, they are brilliant at decorating
living rooms, and Russia will be really, really drab until it embraces
them - that is the message of much of the gay-friendly uprising of
Westerners against Putin.

The self-promoting nature of the Sochi protests speaks to a broader
truth about today's Culture Wars in the West: these conflicts over
lifestyle and identity are driven less by a serious attachment to
universal values or proper liberalism than by a desire to demonstrate
one's superiority over Others, over communities whose traditions and
ways of thinking one judges to be lesser, backward, dangerous. Across
America and increasingly in Europe, too, the big divide within various
nations is no longer between left and right or between different
economic classes, but rather between lifestyle tribes and cultural
groups. Our cultural outlook, our beliefs on matters such as gay
marriage, abortion, gun ownership, immigration and so on, have been
dramatically politicised in recent years, to the extent that a person's
entire moral worth can now be judged by whether he is pro- or anti-gay
marriage, with no regard whatsoever to his economic views, his broader
ideological beliefs, or his class attachments. Increasingly, people are
judged, sorted into boxes marked 'Good' or 'Bad', according to the
position they take on relatively isolated issues of culture and tradition.

This has nurtured gaping, often bitter new divides, between those
presumed to be culturally enlightened and 'white trash', between cosmo
EU-lovers and rude blokes who wave their national flag, between people
who are pro-gay marriage and religious folks who are not ('bigots', as
Britain's deputy PM Nick Clegg calls them). The politicisation of
culture, and the use of such cultural issues to demarcate oneself from
the 'swivel-eyed loons' who dare to believe differently, has nurtured an
increasingly tempestuous, even spiteful political landscape, in which,
ironically, liberals behave increasingly illiberally by insisting that
we cannot tolerate the intolerant (ie, those who don't conform to the
apparently right way of thinking). Where once those who think of
themselves as liberal would have made the case for the universalism of
values such as freedom and choice, now their Culture Warmongering is
driven by precisely the opposite urge - by a belief that universalism is
impossible in a society peopled by so many unchangeable, unthinking
bigots, and by a desire to advertise their own particularism and
superiority through the politicisation of lifestyle.

The gay issue has in recent years been absolutely central to the ramping
up of the Culture Wars, to the fashioning of a new divide between
allegedly enlightened elites and apparently bigoted mobs. In Western
societies, being gay-friendly has become absolutely the least
controversial stance a politician or corporation can take. Indeed,
gayness has become a kind of sacred symbol of moral authority, and
celebrating it has become a means of winning almost instant media and
activist support. Supporting gay issues has become the key mechanism
through which modern Western leaders do that thing they're all so keen
to do - distance themselves from traditionalism, from the past, from
what are now viewed as outdated ideas and institutions, such as
old-style marriage, long-term commitment, traditional family set-ups.
The reason the gay-marriage campaign has been feverishly embraced by
everyone from President Barack Obama to David Cameron to Goldman Sachs
to Google and Coca-Cola (both of which kicked off 2014 with adverts
depicting gay marriage) is because this most highly politicised of
cultural issues is a shortcut to the moral highground as defined by the
media and political classes, and it allows political parties to jettison
their more traditionalist supporters and constituencies in favour of
garnering favour with urbanites, younger voters, and the upwardly mobile.

And now, through Sochi, the Culture Wars in general and the
politicisation of gayness specifically have gone global. A West bereft
of its old economic clout and lacking serious ideological beliefs now
attempts to assert its moral authority in global affairs through
tangential cultural issues, and most notably through being gay-friendly.
So the UN is forever drawing up lists of non-gay-friendly countries,
Washington has threatened to cut off aid to countries that are not
gay-friendly, and Russia is today demonised not on the basis of its
economic manoeuvring or ideological positioning but because of its
attitude to gays. Where once the world was divided between the civilised
and the savage, now it's split between the gay-friendly and the
homophobic. Welcome to the era of Queer Imperialism. How long before a
Western nation goes so far as to bomb a country that is insufficiently
gay-friendly? Don't laugh. Serious commentators already referred to
America's war on Afghanistan in the early 2000s as one 'in which gay
America can take a proud and central part' on the basis that it routed
the Taliban, who of course were homophobic. Up next on the international
stage: Straights Die for the Queer Guy?

(2) Elton John rebukes Russia's anti-gay law, cites Moscow visit

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Entertainment/Celebrities/2014/Jan-23/245011-elton-john-rebukes-russias-anti-gay-law-cites-moscow-visit.ashx

January 23, 2014 10:35 AM

By Eric Kelsey

This Oct. 30, 2013 file photo shows entertainer Elton John speaking
during a panel discussion after receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award
from the Rockefeller Foundation in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon,
File)

LOS ANGELES: Pop singer Elton John spoke out on Wednesday against
Russia's ban on homosexual propaganda, saying the law legitimized
homophobia and provided legal cover to extremists.

John's 500-word statement comes a month after he performed in the
country and three days after Russian President Vladimir Putin said his
country was welcoming to gays, citing the popularity of the openly gay
66-year-old singer as evidence.

The law has come under fire from human rights activists as Russia
prepares to host the Winter Olympics next month.

During a visit to Moscow in December, John performed a concert at which
he condemned the law, and said he was keen to gain a first-hand
understanding of its effect on the LGBT community.

"What I heard reinforced all the media stories that have been circling
since the propaganda bill became federal law: that vicious homophobia
has been legitimised by this legislation and given extremists the cover
to abuse people's basic human rights," John said.

"Everyone shared stories of verbal and physical abuse - at work, in bars
and restaurants or in the street - since the legislation came into force
last June," he said. He added that he would welcome the chance to
introduce Putin to gay Russians.

Russia's law bans the dissemination of "gay propaganda" among minors,
and has become a focal point of criticism by the West and human rights
activists who say the law is discriminatory and represents a crackdown
on rights and freedoms under Putin.

"THE REAL SITUATION"

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev defended the law in an interview
with CNN and said the Western criticism "has nothing in common with the
real situation in our country and wih the rights of representatives of
sexual minorities."

According to a transcript published on his government's website,
Medvedev said Russian gays are not complaining about the law or its
effects on the way they are treated.

"Speaking honestly, I have not seen a single appeal, even on the
Internet, from representives of sexual minorities in which they say that
their rights are being infringed upon," he said.

Putin has addressed the controversy around the law with journalists
several times in the past weeks ahead of next month's Winter Olympic
Games in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, a showcase that Russia hopes
will burnish its image abroad.

He invoked John as proof that Russians do not discriminate against gays.

"Millions of our people sincerely love him despite his orientation,"
Putin told foreign journalists on Sunday. Putin also said that he had
gay acquaintances and told the BBC that he would "definitely" talk with
gay celebrities like John and actor Ian McKellen.

The "Tiny Dancer" singer became a target of the law's supporters last
September when a parents' group asked Putin to cancel John's December
concerts in Moscow and Kazan. John first performed in the former Soviet
Union in 1979.

John, one of the world's most prominent gay celebrities who has two
children with his partner, said the law has also promoted
misunderstanding and ignorance among the Russian people, and implies
that gays are dangerous to children.

"In particular, it is very disappointing that the law explicitly links
homosexuality with child sex abuse, which countless studies have shown
to be conclusively wrong," said John who has campaigned for gay rights.

(3) Pussy Riot chicken Vagina
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 07:19:02 +0900 Subject: Meet Princetown U
professor StephenCohen, Vladimir Putin's Best  Friend in the American
Media - The Daily Beast
From: chris lancenet <chrislancenet@gmail.com>

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/16/meet-stephen-f-cohen-vladimir-putin-s-best-friend-in-the-american-media.html

Meet Stephen F. Cohen, Vladimir Putin's Best Friend in the American Media

He is a great historian of Stalinism who has been celebrated by
colleagues on the left and right. So why is Stephen F. Cohen so eager to
act as a propagandist for Putin?

Cathy Young

the Daily Beast, March 16, 2014

[...] And he hits an all-time low when asked about Pussy Riot, the
activist punk rockers given a two-year prison sentence in 2012 for an
anti-Putin protest performance in a Moscow cathedral. After noting that
“in 82 countries they would have been executed” (a statement later
amended to say that the women “would have faced criminal charges in many
countries and the death penalty in several of them”), Cohen tells the
interviewer, “You know what they were doing before they went to prison?
They would go into supermarkets, strip, lay on their back, spread their
legs apart and stuff frozen chickens in their vagina. There were people
in there with their kids shopping and Russian authorities did nothing.
They didn’t arrest them.”

The very slight factual basis for this outlandish claim is that two
members of Pussy Riot once belonged to an activist performance art group
called Voina (War). In one of its “performances,” a woman discreetly
stuffed a supermarket chicken inside her panties and into her vagina (an
act not witnessed by anyone except other group members who took photos),
then left the store and “birthed” the chicken in an empty lot outside.
However tacky, this was hardly the flagrant public obscenity Cohen
alleges. What’s more, the chicken stunt did not actually involve any of
the Pussy Riot defendants—though Russian television falsely implied that
it did. [...]

Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine. She is the
author ofGrowing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood (Ticknor &
Fields, 1989). You can follow her on Twitter at @CathyYoung63

(4) Is Putin One of Us? by Pat Buchanan

From: ReporterNotebook <RePorterNoteBook@Gmail.com> Date: Sat, 28 Dec
2013 13:25:36 -0500 Subject: Is Putin One of Us? Patrick J. Buchanan

http://www.creators.com/conservative/pat-buchanan/is-putin-one-of-us.html

Is Putin One of Us?

by Pat Buchanan

December 17, 2013

Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative?

In the culture war for mankind's future, is he one of us?

While such a question may be blasphemous in Western circles, consider
the content of the Russian president's state of the nation address.

With America clearly in mind, Putin declared, "In many countries today,
moral and ethical norms are being reconsidered."

"They're now requiring not only the proper acknowledgment of freedom of
conscience, political views and private life, but also the mandatory
acknowledgment of the equality of good and evil."

Translation: While privacy and freedom of thought, religion and speech
are cherished rights, to equate traditional marriage and same-sex
marriage is to equate good with evil.

No moral confusion here, this is moral clarity, agree or disagree.

President Reagan once called the old Soviet Empire "the focus of evil in
the modern world." President Putin is implying that Barack Obama's
America may deserve the title in the 21st century.

Nor is he without an argument when we reflect on America's embrace of
abortion on demand, homosexual marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and
the whole panoply of Hollywood values.

Our grandparents would not recognize the America in which we live.

Moreover, Putin asserts, the new immorality has been imposed
undemocratically.

The "destruction of traditional values" in these countries, he said,
comes "from the top" and is "inherently undemocratic because it is based
on abstract ideas and runs counter to the will of the majority of people."

Does he not have a point?

Unelected justices declared abortion and homosexual acts to be
constitutionally protected rights. Judges have been the driving force
behind the imposition of same-sex marriage. Attorney General Eric Holder
refused to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act.

America was de-Christianized in the second half of the 20th century by
court orders, over the vehement objections of a huge majority of a
country that was overwhelmingly Christian.

And same-sex marriage is indeed an "abstract" idea unrooted in the
history or tradition of the West. Where did it come from?

Peoples all over the world, claims Putin, are supporting Russia's
"defense of traditional values" against a "so-called tolerance" that is
"genderless and infertile."

While his stance as a defender of traditional values has drawn the
mockery of Western media and cultural elites, Putin is not wrong in
saying that he can speak for much of mankind.

Same-sex marriage is supported by America's young, but most states still
resist it, with black pastors visible in the vanguard of the
counterrevolution.

In France, a million people took to the streets of Paris to denounce the
Socialists' imposition of homosexual marriage.

Only 15 nations out of more than 190 have recognized it.

In India, the world's largest democracy, the Supreme Court has struck
down a lower court ruling that made same-sex marriage a right. And the
parliament in this socially conservative nation of more than a billion
people is unlikely soon to reverse the high court.

In the four dozen nations that are predominantly Muslim, which make up a
fourth of the U.N. General Assembly and a fifth of mankind, same-sex
marriage is not even on the table. And Pope Francis has reaffirmed
Catholic doctrine on the issue for over a billion Catholics.

While much of American and Western media dismiss him as an authoritarian
and reactionary, a throwback, Putin may be seeing the future with more
clarity than Americans still caught up in a Cold War paradigm.

As the decisive struggle in the second half of the 20th century was
vertical, East vs. West, the 21st century struggle may be horizontal,
with conservatives and traditionalists in every country arrayed against
the militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.

And though America's elite may be found at the epicenter of
anti-conservatism and anti-traditionalism, the American people have
never been more alienated or more divided culturally, socially and morally.

We are two countries now.

Putin says his mother had him secretly baptized as a baby and professes
to be a Christian. And what he is talking about here is ambitious, even
audacious.

He is seeking to redefine the "Us vs. Them" world conflict of the future
as one in which conservatives, traditionalists and nationalists of all
continents and countries stand up against the cultural and ideological
imperialism of what he sees as a decadent west.

"We do not infringe on anyone's interests," said Putin, "or try to teach
anyone how to live." The adversary he has identified is not the America
we grew up in, but the America we live in, which Putin sees as pagan and
wildly progressive.

Without naming any country, Putin attacked "attempts to enforce more
progressive development models" on other nations, which have led to
"decline, barbarity and big blood," a straight shot at the U.S.
interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Egypt.

In his speech, Putin cited Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev whom
Solzhenitsyn had hailed for his courage in defying his Bolshevik
inquisitors. Though no household word, Berdyaev is favorably known at
the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.

Which raises this question: Who is writing Putin's stuff?

(5) Russia defending traditional family values against 'genderless and
infertile' Western tolerance

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/12/12/russia-is-defending-traditional-family-values-against-genderless-and-infertile-western-tolerance-putin-says/

Russia is defending traditional family values against 'genderless and
infertile' Western tolerance, Putin says

VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV AND NATALIYA VASILYEVA, ASSOCIATED PRESS | December
12, 2013 5:23 PM ET

MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin cast Russia Thursday as a defender of
conservative values against the “genderless and infertile” Western
tolerance that he said equates good and evil.

Putin's 70-minute state-of-the nation address marked a determined effort
to burnish Russia's image that has been dented by Western criticism of
an anti-gay law which has stoked calls for a boycott of the Winter
Olympics in Sochi, his pet project.

Putin's speech also contained a strong warning to those abroad who he
claimed were seeking a military edge over Russia — a clear nod at the
U.S. effort to develop long range non-nuclear weapons that Russia sees
as a threat to its nuclear deterrent.

Russia has insisted that a law banning “propaganda of non-traditional
relations” does not discriminate against gays, but gay rights group say
it has given a green light to harassment and intimidation.

Without directly referring to the anti-gay law, Putin focused on
upholding traditional family values, which he said were the foundation
of Russia's greatness and a bulwark against “so-called tolerance —
genderless and infertile.”

Putin's posture as a protector of conservative values and his scathing
criticism of the West have been part of efforts to shore up his domestic
support base of blue-collar workers, farmers and state employees against
mounting criticism from the urban middle class. But his speech also was
pitched to conservatives worldwide.

“Many countries today are reviewing moral norms and erasing national
traditions and distinctions between nationalities and cultures,” Putin
said. “The society is now required to demonstrate not only the sensible
recognition of everyone's right to freedom of conscience, political
outlook and private life, but also the mandatory recognition of the
equivalence of good and evil, no matter how odd that may seem.”

He argued that the “destruction of traditional values from the top”
going on in other countries is “inherently undemocratic because it is
based on abstract ideas and runs counter to the will of the majority of
people.”

Without naming any specific country, he blasted “attempts to enforce
allegedly more progressive development models” on other nations, saying
they have led only to “decline, barbarity and big blood” in the Middle
East and North Africa.

In an apparent jab at the U.S., Putin said that Russia is not “seeking a
superpower status or trying to claim a global or regional hegemony … not
trying to patronize or teach anyone.”

He denied that Russia was trying to coerce Ukraine into joining a
Moscow-led free trade pact. The Ukrainian president's decision last
month to spurn an alliance with the European Union in favour of closer
ties with Russia has triggered massive protests in Ukraine's capital
that have been going on for three weeks.

Without naming the United States, Putin described the U.S. program of
developing “prompt global strike” weapons as an attempt to tilt the
strategic balance in its favour and vowed to counter it.

The U.S. program envisages creating long-range non-nuclear weapons that
could strike targets anywhere in the world in as little as an hour with
deadly precision.

Putin said that Russia sees the effort a threat to its nuclear deterrent
and will take countermeasures.

“Expanding the potential of strategic non-nuclear precision weapons
along with developing missile defence systems could nullify all earlier
nuclear arms reduction agreements and upset the strategic balance,”
Putin said. “Russia will respond to all those challenges, both political
and technological. No one should have an illusion that it's possible to
achieve a military superiority over Russia.”

He boasted about the nation's nuclear arsenal, saying that foreign
powers will have to catch up with the level of new Russian nuclear weapons.

A day earlier, a senior Russian official warned that Moscow reserves the
right to use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional strike.

Russia-U.S. relations long have been strained by a dispute over the
U.S.-led NATO missile defence system, Moscow's human rights record, and,
most recently, Ukraine.

Putin also announced a sweeping crackdown on Russian offshore companies
to bring billions of dollars home.

“You want to have offshores? Fine. But get the money here,” he said.

For years, many Russian companies registered in countries such as Cyprus
or Luxembourg to avoid Moscow's heavy-handed regulation and
unpredictable legal and tax practices.

Putin insisted that foreign-registered companies that operate in Russia
and are owned by Russian citizens should be obliged to pay taxes in Russia.

He said that Russian companies registered offshore will not be allowed
to bid for state contracts, a major source of income for many Russian
businesses.

The Associated Press

(6) Strange bedfellows: Pat Buchanan and Putin

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-pat-buchanan-vladimir-putin-and-strange-bedfellows/2013/12/24/f8159f22-68bf-11e3-a0b9-249bbb34602c_story.html

By Harold Meyerson

washington Post, December 24, 2013

Just in time for Christmas, Pat Buchanan has come along to alert us to
the shifting alliances in the conflict between tradition and modernity.
While Buchanan's pugnacity in the culture wars has long since ceased to
be news, his latest entry is jaw-dropping nonetheless. Writing last week
on a right-wing Web site , he announced he'd found a new star in the
paleoconservative firmament: Vladimir Putin.

In the article “Is Putin One of Us?,” Buchanan noted that while a
“de-Christianized” United States has been embracing “homosexual
marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and the whole panoply of Hollywood
values,” Putin has stood up for the old-time virtues. Indeed, Putin
sounds increasingly like Buchanan himself. Tolerance for gay sex, Putin
has said, is an “acknowledgement of the equality of good and evil.” This
“so-called tolerance,” he continues, “is genderless and infertile.” And
the United States, having committed itself to the “destruction of
traditional values” and the promotion of “abstract ideas” (Equality?
Democracy? The pursuit of happiness?), has set itself against the
greater part of humankind and religious orthodoxy everywhere.

Buchanan wasn't content just to acclaim Putin for his “moral clarity.”
In embracing Putin, he suggested that a new global conservative bloc may
be, and certainly should be, forming. Though many Americans are “still
caught up in a Cold War paradigm,” he wrote, “the 21st century struggle
may be horizontal, with conservatives and traditionalists in every
country arrayed against the militant secularism of a multicultural and
transnational elite.”

Buchanan has come full circle. Raised in a household marked by fervent
support for fascist Francisco Franco in his war against the secular
democratic government of Spain, he has turned in his 75th year to the
anti-Western authoritarian leader of Russia. The moral arc of Buchanan's
universe may be long, but it keeps plopping him down in the company of
thugs.

It's not Buchanan's trajectory that's of interest here, however. It's
his argument that the American Cultural Right should make common cause
with enemies of the Enlightenment wherever they may be. He applauds the
recent decision of India's Supreme Court restoring the 1861 law that
criminalized gay sex. He notes approvingly that, “in the four dozen
nations that are predominantly Muslim, same-sex marriage is not even on
the table.”

Buchanan's epiphany that his brand of nationalism and religious
orthodoxy has believers the world over is surely right — but can he
convince his permanently enraged American acolytes that some of the
people they most fear and despise are actually the people they should be
hailing as their comrades? Will “Duck Dynasty” patriarch Phil Robertson
embrace non-Christians who are as homophobic as he is? Will Texans
maintain their composure when they realize that the only people who go
in for capital punishment as much as they do are Chinese communists and
Saudi sheiks? Can particularists who believe that their race, religion
and nation are threatened by immigrants and nonbelievers, by outsiders
and cosmopolitans, form a transnational, cross-cultural alliance? An
Intolerant International?

Crazy as it may sound, a European nativist prototype may be in the
works. Last month, Marine Le Pen of France's National Front and Geert
Wilders of the Dutch Freedom Party — two parties with long histories of
anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-European-Union demagoguery —
announced that they intended to campaign on similar platforms in next
year's European Parliament elections and to form a bloc in the
parliament once it convenes. One such bloc formed briefly in 2007 under
the banner of “Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty,” but it fell apart
after a European Parliament member from Italy, Alessandra Mussolini
(yes, the granddaughter of that Mussolini), referred to Romanians as
habitual lawbreakers. The Romanian members of Identity, Tradition,
Sovereignty up and left.

Such are the perils of an Intolerant International, but Buchanan seems
to think it's worth the risk. For Buchanan, Putin's abhorrence of
secularism apparently outweighs his suppression of political dissent.
His imprisonment of rock musicians who performed an irreverent concert
in a cathedral apparently outweighs — well, his imprisonment of rock
musicians who performed an irreverent concert in a cathedral. If it
comes down to a fight between democracy and religious orthodoxy, as was
true in Franco's day, so is it true in Putin's: Orthodoxy must prevail.

The Intolerant International. Bigots of the world, unite.

(7) Billy Graham's son Franklin backs Putin's Stance On Gay Rights

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/14/franklin-graham-putin-gay-obama_n_4966399.html

Franklin Graham Thinks Putin's Stance On Gay Rights Is Better Than Obama's

Religion News Service  | by  Kevin Eckstrom

Posted: 03/14/2014 3:45 pm EDT Updated: 03/14/2014 3:59 pm EDT

(RNS) Evangelist Franklin Graham is praising Russian President Vladimir
Putin for his aggressive crackdown on homosexuality, saying his record
on protecting children from gay “propaganda” is better than President
Obama's “shameful” embrace of gay rights.

Graham, who now heads the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association started
by his famous father, praises Putin in the March issue of the group's
Decision magazine for signing a bill that imposes fines for adults who
promote “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations to minors.”

The Russian law came under heavy criticism from gay rights activists,
and from Obama, ahead of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. In
response, Obama included openly gay athletes as part of the official
U.S. delegation to Sochi.

“In my opinion, Putin is right on these issues,” Graham writes.
“Obviously, he may be wrong about many things, but he has taken a stand
to protect his nation's children from the damaging effects of any gay
and lesbian agenda.”

“Our president and his attorney general have turned their backs on God
and His standards, and many in the Congress are following the
administration's lead. This is shameful.”

With the caveat that “I am not endorsing President Putin,” Graham
nonetheless praised Russia's get-tough approach toward gay rights.

“Isn't it sad, though, that America's own morality has fallen so far
that on this issue — protecting children from any homosexual agenda or
propaganda — Russia's standard is higher than our own?”

Graham also implicitly seems to side with Putin's ally, embattled Syrian
President Bashar Assad, in the ongoing civil war that has claimed more
than 140,000 lives. Syria's small Christian population has largely sided
with the Assad regime throughout the three-year conflict.

“Syria, for all its problems, at least has a constitution that
guarantees equal protection of citizens,” Graham writes. “Around the
world, we have seen that this is essential where Christians are a
minority and are not protected. … Christians in Syria know that if the
radicals overthrow Assad, there will be widespread persecution and
wholesale slaughter of Christians.” [...]

(Adelle M. Banks and Cathy Lynn Grossman contributed to this report)

(8) Putin appoints traditionalist head to RIA Novosti, Russia's
state-owned news agency

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/12/09/ria-novosti-russias-state-owned-news-agency-restructured-as-vladimir-putin-puts-ultraconservative-anchor-dmitry-kiselyov-in-charge/

RIA Novosti, Russia's state-owned news agency, restructured as Vladimir
Putin puts ultraconservative anchor Dmitry Kiselyov in charge

LAURA MILLS, ASSOCIATED PRESS | December 9, 2013 11:39 AM ET

MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin on Monday appointed a controversial
news anchor to head a restructured state news agency, a move signalling
the Kremlin's intention to tighten control over the media and use it
increasingly for propaganda of ultraconservative views.

Dmitry Kiselyov, who spent much of his weekly news program on state
Rossiya television maligning homosexuality and speculating about
Western-led conspiracies, was put in charge of all the resources of the
former RIA Novosti, which was renamed Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today).

The agency has been known for news coverage that at times appeared too
comprehensive for the government's comfort, including active reportage
on the anti-Putin protest movement.

The appointment makes Kiselyov the chief executive in a company of 2,300
employees, removable only by Putin himself. That promotion has come as a
shock to many who previously derided the pro-Kremlin pundit — who
controversially suggested that the internal organs of homosexuals should
be burned and buried rather than donated — as an irrelevant lackey.

Kiselyov's conspiratorial, almost coquettish grin and over enthusiastic
hand gestures have made him a recognizable staple of Russian television.
But it's his toxic cocktail of punditry and sensationalism that has
gained him his reputation as one of Russia's most famous — and reviled —
news anchors.

Kiselyov has often led the attack in taking down the opposition
movement, the West, homosexuals, and other groups that top the Kremlin
agenda. His pugnacious punditry contrasts with that of some other
anchors on state-owned channels, who often are more eager to censor
issues out of the limelight than attack them head-on.

When Ukrainians flooded the streets last week to protest their
president's shelving of a treaty with the European Union, Kiselyov
lambasted Sweden and Poland, accusing them of encouraging massive
protests in Kiev to take revenge for military defeats by czarist Russia
centuries ago.

Kiselyov, who earned his degree in Scandinavian literature, rolled a
clip of a Swedish children's program called Poop and Pee, designed to
teach children about their bodily functions. After the clip finished
rolling, Kiselyov turned to the camera to suggest that this was the kind
of European decadence awaiting Ukraine, if it signed a deal with the EU.

In Sweden there is “the radical growth of child abortions, early sex —
the norm is nine years old, and at age 12 there is already child
impotency,” he said after the clip rolled.

That reportage gained him few friends in Ukraine, where one man bounded
over to hand “an Oscar for the nonsense and lies” of Dmitry Kiselyov to
the state television correspondent standing on Kiev's main square. He
was brusquely pushed out of the shot before finishing his speech.

Kiselyov has also proven an avid attack dog on the issue of
homosexuality, as international criticism over a Russian law banning gay
“propaganda” reached a fever pitch this summer. The TV anchor said that
homosexuals' hearts should be buried or burned, and that gays should be
banned from donating blood or organs, which were “unsuitable for the
prolongation of anyone's life.”

He has turned his guns as well on the Kremlin's internal foes, airing
critical accounts of opposition activists such as Alexei Navalny, who
garnered nearly a third of the vote in an election for Moscow mayor in
September. Kiselyov ran footage of Nazi marches, directly comparing the
crowd's adulation of Hitler to that of Navalny's own audience: “A
recognizable exultation, is it not?”

Russian media outlets speculated that the reshuffle was aimed at RIA
Novosti's former director, Svetlana Mironyuk, who presided over the
company's more objective coverage of massive anti-Putin protests sparked
by a fraud-tainted parliamentary vote in 2011. While Mironyuk was said
to be backed by some liberal figures in the Kremlin, that reportage
received a more critical reception among its hawkish wing.

RIA Novosti's relatively broad coverage — particularly in its foreign
language services — was even on display in the report on its own
dissolution that said the changes “appear to point toward a tightening
of state control in the already heavily regulated media sector.”

While officials have claimed that the move is simply an attempt to make
the company run more efficiently, Kremlin chief of staff Sergei Ivanov
asserted the importance of the company's new political message in
comments on Monday: “Russia … strongly defends its national interests:
it's difficult to explain this to the world but we can do this, and we
must do this.”

In 2005, RIA Novosti helped found Russia Today television, or RT, which
now employs more than 1,000 people and broadcasts in English, Spanish
and Arabic. It will remain separate from the revamped news agency, and
Kiselyov will have no say in its operation.

From: ReporterNotebook <RePorterNoteBook@Gmail.com> Date: Mon, 30 Dec
2013 06:03:55 -0500 Subject: The Weekend Interview With Camille Paglia:
A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues - WSJ.com


(9) Camille Paglia: civilization commits suicide, when it denies the
biological differences between men and women

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303997604579240022857012920?mod=trending_now_1

The Weekend Interview With Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of
Masculine Virtues

Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues

The cultural critic on why ignoring the biological differences between
men and women risks undermining Western civilization.

Philadelphia , updated Dec. 28, 2013 10:46 p.m. ET

'What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," says Camille
Paglia. This self-described "notorious Amazon feminist" isn't telling
anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can't Have It All. No, her
indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is
out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male
students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and
women, and sexiness is dead. And that's just 20 minutes of our
three-hour conversation.

When Ms. Paglia, now 66, burst onto the national stage in 1990 with the
publishing of "Sexual Personae," she immediately established herself as
a feminist who was the scourge of the movement's establishment, a
heretic to its orthodoxy. Pick up the 700-page tome, subtitled "Art and
Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, " and it's easy to see why.
"If civilization had been left in female hands," she wrote, "we would
still be living in grass huts."

The fact that the acclaimed book—the first of six; her latest,
"Glittering Images," is a survey of Western art—was rejected by seven
publishers and five agents before being printed by Yale University Press
only added to Ms. Paglia's sense of herself as a provocateur in a class
with Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. But unlike those radio jocks, Ms.
Paglia has scholarly chops: Her dissertation adviser at Yale was Harold
Bloom, and she is as likely to discuss Freud, Oscar Wilde or early
Native American art as to talk about Miley Cyrus.

Ms. Paglia relishes her outsider persona, having previously described
herself as an egomaniac and "abrasive, strident and obnoxious." Talking
to her is like a mental CrossFit workout. One moment she's praising pop
star Rihanna ("a true artist"), then blasting ObamaCare ("a
monstrosity," though she voted for the president), global warming ("a
religious dogma"), and the idea that all gay people are born gay ("the
biggest canard," yet she herself is a lesbian).

But no subject gets her going more than when I ask if she really sees a
connection between society's attempts to paper over the biological
distinction between men and women and the collapse of Western civilization.

She starts by pointing to the diminished status of military service.
"The entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on, none of
them have military service—hardly anyone, there are a few. But there is
no prestige attached to it anymore. That is a recipe for disaster," she
says. "These people don't think in military ways, so there's this
illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically
kind, if we're just nice and benevolent to everyone they'll be nice too.
They literally don't have any sense of evil or criminality."

The results, she says, can be seen in everything from the dysfunction in
Washington (where politicians "lack practical skills of analysis and
construction") to what women wear. "So many women don't realize how
vulnerable they are by what they're doing on the street," she says,
referring to women who wear sexy clothes.

When she has made this point in the past, Ms. Paglia—who dresses in
androgynous jackets and slacks—has been told that she believes "women
are at fault for their own victimization." Nonsense, she says. "I
believe that every person, male and female, needs to be in a protective
mode at all times of alertness to potential danger. The world is full of
potential attacks, potential disasters." She calls it "street-smart
feminism."

Ms. Paglia argues that the softening of modern American society begins
as early as kindergarten. "Primary-school education is a crock,
basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially
guys," she says, pointing to the most obvious example: the way many
schools have cut recess. "They're making a toxic environment for boys.
Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters."

She is not the first to make this argument, as Ms. Paglia readily notes.
Fellow feminist Christina Hoff Sommers has written about the "war
against boys" for more than a decade. The notion was once met with
derision, but now data back it up: Almost one in five high-school-age
boys has been diagnosed with ADHD, boys get worse grades than girls and
are less likely to go to college.

Ms. Paglia observes this phenomenon up close with her 11-year-old son,
Lucien, whom she is raising with her ex-partner, Alison Maddex, an
artist and public-school teacher who lives 2 miles away. She sees the
tacit elevation of "female values"—such as sensitivity, socialization
and cooperation—as the main aim of teachers, Philadelphia  fostering
creative energy and teaching hard geographical and historical facts.

By her lights, things only get worse in higher education. "This PC
gender politics thing—the way gender is being taught in the
universities—in a very anti-male way, it's all about neutralization of
maleness." The result: Upper-middle-class men who are "intimidated" and
"can't say anything. ... They understand the agenda." In other words:
They avoid goring certain sacred cows by "never telling the truth to
women" about sex, and by keeping "raunchy" thoughts and sexual fantasies
to themselves and their laptops.

Politically correct, inadequate education, along with the decline of
America's brawny industrial base, leaves many men with "no models of
manhood," she says. "Masculinity is just becoming something that is
imitated from the movies. There's nothing left. There's no room for
anything manly right now." The only place you can hear what men really
feel these days, she claims, is on sports radio. No surprise, she is an
avid listener. The energy and enthusiasm "inspires me as a writer," she
says, adding: "If we had to go to war," the callers "are the men that
would save the nation."

And men aren't the only ones suffering from the decline of men. Women,
particularly elite upper-middle-class women, have become "clones"
condemned to "Pilates for the next 30 years," Ms. Paglia says. "Our
culture doesn't allow women to know how to be womanly," adding that
online pornography is increasingly the only place where men and women in
our sexless culture tap into "primal energy" in a way they can't in real
life.

A key part of the remedy, she believes, is a "revalorization" of
traditional male trades—the ones that allow women's studies professors
to drive to work (roads), take the elevator to their office
(construction), read in the library (electricity), and go to
gender-neutral restrooms (plumbing).

" Michelle Obama's going on: 'Everybody must have college.' Why? Why?
What is the reason why everyone has to go to college? Especially when
college is so utterly meaningless right now, it has no core curriculum"
and "people end up saddled with huge debts," says Ms. Paglia. What's
driving the push toward universal college is "social snobbery on the
part of a lot of upper-middle-class families who want the sticker in the
window."

Ms. Paglia, who has been a professor of humanities and media studies at
the University of the Arts in Philadelphia since 1984, sees her own
students as examples. "I have woodworking students who, even while
they're in class, are already earning money making furniture and so on,"
she says. "My career has been in art schools cause I don't get along
with normal academics."

To hear her tell it, getting along has never been Ms. Paglia's strong
suit. As a child, she felt stifled by the expectations of girlhood in
the 1950s. She fantasized about being a knight, not a princess.
Discovering pioneering female figures as a teenager, most notably Amelia
Earhart, transformed Ms. Paglia's understanding of what her future might
hold.

These iconoclastic women of the 1930s, like Earhart and Katharine
Hepburn, remain her ideal feminist role models: independent, brave,
enterprising, capable of competing with men without bashing them. But
since at least the late 1960s, she says, fellow feminists in the academy
stopped sharing her vision of "equal-opportunity feminism" that demands
a level playing field without demanding special quotas or protections
for women.

She proudly recounts her battle, while a graduate student at Yale in the
late 1960s and early '70s, with the New Haven Women's Liberation Rock
Band over the Rolling Stones: Ms. Paglia loved "Under My Thumb," a song
the others regarded as chauvinist. Then there was the time she "barely
got through the dinner" with a group of women's studies professors at
Bennington College, where she had her first teaching job, who insisted
that there is no hormonal difference between men and women. "I left
before dessert."

In her view, these ideological excesses bear much of the blame for the
current cultural decline. She calls out activists like Gloria Steinem,
Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi for pushing a version of feminism that says
gender is nothing more than a social construct, and groups like the
National Organization for Women for making abortion the singular women's
issue.

By denying the role of nature in women's lives, she argues, leading
feminists created a "denatured, antiseptic" movement that "protected
their bourgeois lifestyle" and falsely promised that women could "have
it all." And by impugning women who chose to forgo careers to stay at
home with children, feminists turned off many who might have happily
joined their ranks.

But Ms. Paglia's criticism shouldn't be mistaken for nostalgia for the
socially prescribed roles for men and women before the 1960s. Quite the
contrary. "I personally have disobeyed every single item of the gender
code," says Ms. Paglia. But men, and especially women, need to be honest
about the role biology plays and clear-eyed about the choices they are
making.

Sex education, she says, simply focuses on mechanics without conveying
the real "facts of life," especially for girls: "I want every
14-year-old girl . . . to be told: You better start thinking what do you
want in life. If you just want a career and no children you don't have
much to worry about. If, however, you are thinking you'd like to have
children some day you should start thinking about when do you want to
have them. Early or late? To have them early means you are going to make
a career sacrifice, but you're going to have more energy and less risks.
Both the pros and the cons should be presented."

For all of Ms. Paglia's barbs about the women's movement, it seems clear
that feminism—at least of the equal-opportunity variety—has triumphed in
its basic goals. There is surely a lack of women in the C-Suite and
Congress, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a man who would admit that
he believes women are less capable. To save feminism as a political
movement from irrelevance, Ms. Paglia says, the women's movement should
return to its roots. That means abandoning the "nanny state" mentality
that led to politically correct speech codes and college disciplinary
committees that have come to replace courts. The movement can win
converts, she says, but it needs to become a big tent, one "open to
stay-at-home moms" and "not just the career woman."

More important, Ms. Paglia says, if the women's movement wants to be
taken seriously again, it should tackle serious matters, like rape in
India and honor killings in the Muslim world, that are "more of an
outrage than some woman going on a date on the Brown University campus."

Ms. Weiss is an associate editorial features editor at the Journal

(10) Psychic Change: How Homosexuality Became Normalized - David Rosen

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/06/how-homosexuality-became-normalized/

Weekend Edition December 6-8, 2013

Psychic Change: How Homosexuality Became Normalized

by DAVID ROSEN

Much of America's social life has changed over the last forty years.
Perhaps most dramatic, the U.S. has evolved from a nation deeply
contesting race relations to one with a mixed-race, African-American
president. In the wake of the 1973 Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision,
the Culture Wars rose to a bitter confrontation over values and, while
sputtering, persists in a never-ending war against a woman's right to
chose an abortion.

Equally surprising, the moralistic, Christian right suffered a nearly
complete defeat in the second front of the Culture Wars, homosexuality.
Homosexuality has been normalized, with gay marriage legal in 15 states,
accepted within the macho military and recognized as a personal privacy
right by the Supreme Court. Not unlike the relative accepance of “black”
people as part of the American mosaic, “gay” people are inceasingly,
unashamedly accepted as one's children, friends, neighbors and fellow
employees.

To appreciate how this happened, one needs to recall the battle over the
definition of homosexuality that has raged for the last four centuries.
This new nation was founded on strict moral principles, so for righteous
Puritans old-fashion sodomy was a hanging offense. As the U.S. has
increasingly secularized, refashioned by a commodity-sectacle consumer
market economy, medicine, as a form of “neutral” science, came to
mediate the conflict over moral values. [...]

Inspired by the civil rights movement's challenge to racism, the antiwar
movement's confrontation with the military-industrial complex and the
women's movement battle against patriarchy, gay activists set their
sights not only on disrupting the public presentations of a number of
psychiatry's leading spokesmen but, most importantly, redefining the
APA's DSM. While the then-current DSM-II did not use the term
“perversion,” it did refer to homosexuality and other sexual deviances
as mental disorders, “pathological deviation[s] of normal sexual
development.” [...].

Those advocating the orthodox perspective did so partly within terms of
Freud's famous 1935 letter to an American mother concerned about her
son's homosexuality:

  … May I question you, why do you avoid it? Homosexuality is assuredly
no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no
degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be
a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of
sexual development. … It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality
as a crime, and cruelty too. [Freud, 1935, pp. 606-07]

Both Bieber and Socarides went out of their way to separate themselves
from those who persecuted homosexuals, thus directly repudiating charges
that they were homophobic or opposed civil rights for gays.

For them and others opposed to the de-classification of homosexuality as
a disorder, everything hinged on it being understood, in Freud's words,
as a “sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual
development.” Arrested development, for Bieber and Socarides, is rooted
in a young male's maladaptation (they say nothing about females) to a
dysfunctional heterosexual family. [...]

(11) Jews and gays - birds of a feather? by Simon Jones (Eric Walberg)

http://www.thehandstand.org/archive/march2004/articles/sjones.htm

THE HANDSTAND

MARCH 2004

Jews and gays - birds of a feather?

By Simon Jones©2004 <sj958@yahoo.com>

Ben Stein, noting that about 60% of the top positions in Hollywood are
held by Jews, says "Do Jews run Hollywood? You bet they do - and what of
it?" Well, let's look at what this spectacular freedom for Jews during
the past half century has resulted in:

*Israel and America are terrorizing the entire world with unrelenting,
vicious, bloody wars and occupations.

*The collapse of the only serious attempt (if it was indeed serious) by
Israel to make peace with the Palestinians in the mid-90s and the
subsequent ascendancy of the Zionist neocons in Washington have ended
any illusions about the innocence of the Jews in all this.

*Apart from Israel, most Jews (including a half million Israelis) live
in the US; 80% blindly support Israel; many of the fanatical settlers in
occupied Palestine are American Jews; and the US government provides $6
BILLION per year to Israel in foreign aid (which is promptly used to
further persecute Palestinians). All US politicians must pass the AIPAC
test before they can be 'elected' formally (the ADL and the AJC, all
basically lobbyists for Israel, do not have to register as agents of a
foreign government). A truly vicious circle, if there ever was one.

*Meanwhile, the entire international world order, so painstakingly
constructed over the past 300 years is collapsing, as nuclear and
environmental Armageddon approach with each passing day. While goys are
equally complicit in this nightmare world order, the fact that Jews have
never had it so good and have climbed to the top of the West's economic,
cultural and political ladder with unprecedented speed cannot be
ignored. Enough with the coincidences already!

It is astounding that so few people have removed their blinkers. Mine
were ripped off early for a very good reason: though not Jewish (though
who really knows?), and from a well-off white family, I have the
(dubious or otherwise) distinction of being a member of another
persecuted minority, one
strikingly similar to the Jews, though with significant differences.
Yes, gay, faggot, queer, pansy, poof, etc. Watching another prominent
minority GAIN, and then promptly MISUSE its newly won freedom, I have
become increasingly angry. The justified reaction against the injustices
that Jews are, to a very large extent, responsible for these days is
gaining momentum, and I can see it spilling over onto other groups - my
own not surprisingly comes immediately to mind.

I generally resist identifying myself as 'gay', as I consider it is no
business of anyone besides my sexual partner, and it has nothing to do
with the quality of the work I do, or even how I relate to my friends.
But the times demand that we wrestle with both the Jewish and gay issues
- in a way they are key issues of modern society and must be dealt with,
so my cards are on the table.

Similarities

Like Jews, gays have ancient roots of persecution and have been mostly
outcasts since the rise of Christianity (though the roots of
persecution, ironically, are in the Torah). This persecution complex - I
know it first-hand - leaves an indelible mark on one's character -
defiance of a hypocritical, unjust society, a desire for revenge, a
feeling of superiority (warranted or not), a lack of patriotism./ *(i)So
gays automatically empathize with Jews. At the same time, gays often
crossed paths with Jews professionally - in the arts, as writers,
philosophers, councilors, etc.

In Jungian terms we can say that gays function as a psychological shadow
for straights (having a dominance of traits usually associated with the
opposite sex), just as Jews are a kind of social shadow for mainstream
society (practicing forbidden activities such as usury (updated today to
include stock market fraud and the like) and fomenting revolution).
Think of Jews and gays as the spice in society, giving it flavor,
variety, acting as catalysts in the arts and in social relations.

To be or to do - that is the question

Gays and Jews face a common problem of just what makes them what they
are. 'Is it a breath mint or a candy mint?' Is there some genetic code
at work or is a gay/ Jewish identity merely a social construct?

Jews love to attack critics by labelling them 'anti-Semites', a late
19th century construct which is completely inaccurate, as most Jews are
Caucasian Ashkenazy, while Arabs and the relatively few Sephardic Jews
are the real Semites. It is a term which underlines the essentially
racist attitude of contemporary Jews in describing themselves,
anti-SEMITE emphasizing inherent and unchangeable inborn qualities (vs
anti-Jewish, emphasizing the Jew as a socio-religious construct, a
reaction to the dominant society). The Jews can 't face a reasoned,
rational objection to their IDEAS, and stick to the mantra "It is
because of what we are, not of what we do."

Few gays feel comfortable defining themselves as genetic oddities (only
the militants), and apart from people born with both sexual organs, gays
only begin to differentiate themselves at the earliest at 5-10 years of
age. Most do not 'realize' they are gay until puberty or even as late as
30-40. In reality, neither group really has much of a claim for genetic
exceptionalism.

So this similarity in the problem of even defining what 'gay' or 'Jew'
means is in fact a very big difference. Unlike the Jews, who secretly or
proudly relish the idea of genetic difference (read: superiority),*(ii)
the gut instinct of gays is to dismiss this as the loony idea of some
homophobic
genetic engineer, hoping to find the 'faulty' gene and provide an
instant 'cure'. Even if we accept that being gay has some genetic basis,
and while gays (likes Jews) are economically much better off than
others, there has never been a serious attempt to maintain that gays are
SUPERIOR in any way to straights.

Jews will insist that they are not racists, that it is the goys that are
racist, and then, without batting an eye, talk about their DNA *(iii)and
defend unconditionally the only blatantly racist state - Israel, unique
among sovereign states (except for Nazi Germany). Judaism is a veritable
'shell game': a religion, no - an identity, oops - a culture, wrong
again - a tradition. It is a slippery fish - whatever fits the bill at
the moment.

Clearly not fair, but you question it at your own risk. The standard
response to the slightest whiff of criticism is "Anti-Semite!" Whatever
you may think of gays (queers, faggots, etc) or whether they were found
under a cabbage leaf or not, they clearly define themselves by what they
DO as predominantly MSM (men-having-sex-with-men) or WSW in the case of
lesbians. There's no confusion there. The buck stops here, if you'll
forgive the pun.

Assimilationist or outsider

This brings me to the second important difference. While most gays are
'that way' from an early age (5-10 years old), and like Jews have had to
live their lives as outcasts, gays have traditionally never had much
group identity. And they have mostly (with varying degrees of success)
tried to assimilate, hide themselves, marry and otherwise blend in to
society. Indeed gays have almost always had sexual relations primarily
with straights. The very idea of gays living in a closed 'ghetto' is a
very late-20thC one, and like the Jewish ghetto (or Israel, as a monster
Jewish ghetto) is bizarre, if not repulsive, to most gays, despite
Greenwich village and San Francisco as 'gay meccas'. Mecca, after all,
is a place of pilgrimage. Who in their right mind wants to LIVE there?

Jews, however, at least those who have not assimilated, are famous for
stubbornly remaining aloof, reveling in their persecution as God's
Chosen People, alienated from society. Otto Weininger, a 19thC German
Jewish philosophy described Judaism as a state of mind. That's cutting
to the quick. Yes, for some the focus is on the rituals, for some - the
tribal solidarity, for others - the supposed superiority, etc. But while
you may be born a Jew, there's nothing to stop you from NOT being a Jew
whenever you like, as most have done in the past, including hundreds of
thousands of immigrants to America over the past 200 years. It's as easy
as (apple) pie to move, change your name, join a church and blend in.
But these assimilationists are no longer Jews. As for gays, they can
never REALLY stop being gay, despite bogus claims by Bible-thumping
evangelicals. The gay 'state of mind' always comes up against the brick
wall, the implacable, insatiable sex drive, whatever IT is.

Let history judge

Historically, wherever Jews settled and maintained their Jewish
identity, they eventually gained more and more economic, political and
cultural power, and then started to manipulate it for their own group
purposes, inevitably inciting an angry reaction. Today's wave of
revulsion in light of Israel's outrages backed by a Zionist-inspired,
corrupt US government is just the tip of a huge, ancient iceberg, which
despite global warming (read: holocaust worship and human rights
legislation) refuses to melt.

Gays have also been persecuted - mostly by the church, though Islam and
Judaism (yes, our fellow sufferers!) traditionally also forbid and
punish homosexuality. But there were never any instances of hysterical,
mass expulsion of gays, as there were of Jews. Why? Clearly, because
gays never really posed a threat to the dominant society.

Will the real Chosen People please stand up?

Indeed, in many pre-Christian cultures (including the native American),
gays were often respected as special people and made shamans, priests,
artists, musicians etc. Ironically there is a much stronger argument in
the million-odd years of human existence that the 'Chosen People' are in
fact GAYS rather than Jews. But even if this is true, you will never
find gays creating a state and migrating en masse to live there (kicking
out the natives in the process). A (brave) Jewish comedian recently
commented to the effect that 'Jews are like spice, a little is good.
Putting them all together in one country is a recipe for indigestion.'
The same goes for gays - living on the edge of the mainstream society,
they provide that 'je ne sais quoi' for the social stew. No wonder Jews
and gays have produced so many great comedians, able to stand back and
poke fun at mainstream society.

Effects of freedom for gays and Jews

How many parallels, coincidences there are! The most significant, of
course, is the WWII holocausts against BOTH gays and Jews, and the
subsequent post-WWII process of creating TOTAL freedom for both Jews and
gays. Not only the ADL can take people to court for perceived slights
these days, but gays can too (though it's much harder). Painting
swastikas on Jewish grave and gay-bashing are both grounds for violation
of hate crimes (again, much harder for gays, and there is much more
gay-bashing than Jew-bashing). We can both publicly flaunt what many
perceive as antisocial behavior and not suffer any consequences. Books
about the holocaust are part of children's curricula, just as story
books where 'Susie has two daddies' (at least in
the most 'progressive' schools).

Look at the effect of Jewish freedom, the triumph of the Jewish idea, on
the modern world: the eternal torment of war in the Middle East, the
collapse of the Soviet Union (a largely Jewish intellectual elite - a
million people - up and left in the 1970s-90s), the rampant
commercialization of the entire world, the accelerated destruction of
nature ('And God made Man to have dominion over the Earth')... Within US
politics, where Jews have gained control of the main levers of power, we
see total cynicism and corruption, blind support of one Israeli outrage
after another, an all-out war against Islam. Why? It is not all the
fault of the Jews of course, but their prominence in all facets of
Western society means they have to account for themselves. Freedom
implies responsibility for one's actions.

I would phrase it as 'They want to have their cake and eat it.' They
have full, equal rights now in the advanced countries, have gained
unprecedented control of these societies, and yet continue to support
their own racist, outcast state, persecuting and displacing millions of
Muslims. Any criticism of them and this 'shitty little country' is
simply dismissed as anti-Semitism; they refuse to recognize that they
are in fact to blame.*(iv)

What of the effect of gay freedom? Gays, lacking a cohesive tribal
identity, have no clout economically (except maybe as consumers of
expensive toiletry and clothing). Politically, true, gays have
successfully lobbied and won remarkable changes to laws in their favor.
The crowning achievement (the equivalent of the creation of the state of
Israel for Jews?) is/ will be marriage rights. The icing on the cake
after decades of pushing the loosening of morals from the 1960s on.

But it is culturally and socially that gays have had the most influence,
and the results are mixed at best. The past 40 years have witnessed a
sustained crisis in the traditional family - divorces up, single-parent
families up, teens much more openly rebellious, the rise of the
'metrosexual' .

Why? Just as the Jews are not solely to blame for the world's political
problems, it is not fair to blame gays for the virtual collapse of the
family in the West or the perceived castration of men. It is a result of
the long-term decline of western societies, the invasion of the family
by commercial media, with its questioning of traditional values and its
manipulation of sex in the promotion of consumption. However, equally
crucial have been post-WWII liberal social reforms, including equal
rights for women and the legalization of homosexuality. In claiming our
rights, gays played an important role in rebelling AGAINST the
traditional family and the male/ female stereotypes. Unfortunately, what
is replacing them - serial parents, one-parent families, now gay
families, and the wimpy metrosexual - are poor substitutes. I am the
first to acknowledge that our society is in crisis, just as is our
world, and my fellow gays and my sometime Jewish allies have a
disproportionately large role in this.

But again there are differences

While there were no pogroms of gays, I would suggest that gays have
taken more of a beating on a day-to-day basis, even in this age of
Political Correctness. In most of the world, it is much more dangerous
to be openly gay than openly Jewish. And historically, despite
occasional outbreaks of anti-Jewish anger, Jews have traditionally had
much greater freedom. Compare the infamous Oscar Wilde trial with that
of Dreyfus - coincidentally at about the same time. Dreyfus, an obscure
officer, became the cause celebre of Victor Hugo and other prominent
figures and was rehabilitated, while Wilde, the greatest 19th c
playwright, died broken and abandoned. Ironically, these historic trials
were a kind of swan song for civilization' s overt repression of Jews
AND gays.

Of course, the barbarian holocausts of Hitler against Jews AND gays were
yet to come, but again, look at the difference. The Jews (at least the
Zionists and the 80+% of Jews that actively support them) have used this
tragedy to reap billions of dollars in reparations and, by creating
their own racist state, inflict an equally tragic fate on the
Palestinians. No gays (or relatives) received reparations for their
suffering (let alone communists or Roma). Gays have not used their new
freedom to inflict suffering on others claiming that it is justified
because of Hitler's holocaust. Perhaps gays are just wimps, unlike the
more aggressive, self-promoting Jewish tribe. But then, perhaps being a
wimp is not such a bad thing.

Gays and Jews - cool

I have traditionally felt sympathy for Jews, knowing what it feels like
to be an outsider to society. My upbringing taught me to respect
education and economic success, much like Jews do. My doctors, dentists,
musician friends, quite a few profs were all Jews - perhaps my strongest
influences growing up, though just as I never spoke about being gay,
they never spoke about being Jewish. It was always assumed that we were
basically assimilationists, that being Jewish or gay was something
secondary, spicy, if you like. Something that made life interesting but
that was not essential.

But that seems to have changed over my lifetime (since the '67 war?).
Jews are now much more up front about their Jewishness. In the US, it is
now 'cool' to be 'Jewcy', as some young Jews flaunt on their t-shirts.
Israel has no small part to play in this. God knows, it has been ITEM
NUMBER ONE on news and in the deluge of holocaust films and museums for
decades now (since the '67 war?). The once staunchly ant-racist
assimilationist Jews have disappeared or been drown out. Increasingly,
Jews are casting aside their quiet assimilationism, promoting themselves
as a race both in their host countries and as supporters of Israel,
their second or even first loyalty (since the '67 war?).

Consider what it is like for a child growing up in Israel, where little
Ariel is taught that he is superior to other races, especially the
'darkies' living in excruciating poverty in concentration camps close by
because Ariel 's parents kicked them out of their homes. Imagine growing
up with a political role model like Netanyahu or Sharon - bloodthirsty,
cynical, corrupt, soulless, lying but clever leaders. Imagine being
brought up by parents, BOTH of whom, otherwise traditional mommies and
daddies, have killed dozens of innocent, defenseless Palestinians in
cold blood. Imagine the children in your country loathing the children a
few kilometers away, considering them animals to slaughter when they
grow up, with nuclear bombs in necessary. Brrr. It's ice cold down in
Dante's Inferno.

It is now 'cool' to be gay now, too. There are now many people who
identify themselves first and foremost as gays, rather than as, say
Canadians or socialists, though being gay by itself means very little
when it comes down to it. Some have taken the 'battle' to another level,
demanding the right to marry and adopt children. WHAT?! I always thought
being gay meant liberation FROM the nuclear family. Enough with all this
irony, PULLEASE!

Call me a social conservative if you like, but I don't much like the
idea of 'two daddies' or 'two mummies'. It's a way of forcing complex
issues of sexual identity on children who just aren't ready or
interested in such things, and makes their own difficult process of
growing up more difficult than it already is. Children need to grow up
in fairly conventional arrangements where they can love and learn from
both male and female role models. Yes ROLE models, so they can
experience first-hand, while their own sexual identities are forming,
how 'standard' adults relate. Being gay will always be the exception
that proves the rule. By all means, provide some alternatives -
collective child-rearing, day care. OK, even the odd gay 'families' (God
knows there are thousands of children in dysfunctional hetero families
who would be much better off with 'two daddies'), but the rule of thumb
should be to provide a mainstream hetero blueprint.

Gays and Jews have a common choice

I understand why some gays are so eager for these hetero trappings: they
WANT to assimilate, really! They want to be accepted as upstanding,
patriotic, even right-wing citizens. They don't relish their
(God-given?) special status and want to paper it over, to take comfort
in their two-car garage and their Big Macs, their X-Files and Calvin
Klein. They like the commodity fetishism that has replaced the
straight-laced asceticism of Christianity, with its suspicion of all
sexuality and indulgence.

As for this pathetic attempt by gays to totally assimilate, count me
out. I EMBRACE my role as outcast, gadfly, the 'other', much like Jean
Genet. 'Gay is good' but in small amounts and on the fringe. It curdles
the milk of straight society if it becomes too in-your-face. It is
boring if it becomes
your raison d'etre. In small quantities, gays are great. En masse, they
are insufferable.

The same goes for Judaism. Assimilate OR remain an outcast. But there's
an added caveat with respect to the Jews: you can't have your cake and
eat it. You can be an assimilationist, like the 'two mommy' gays, and
blend into goy society (much more successfully), or live in a secular
Palestine side-by-side with the original population if you have a thing
about the Bible, the 'Promised Land' etc (IF that's OK by the natives).
OR you can choose to stay a Cohen, a Jew, an outsider, staying aloof,
amassing economic, political and social power (that certainly seems to
be the historical record), and taking the risk that goes along with this
wherever you happen to be born (with your basic rights protected, of
course). But take note: you can't at the same time promote another,
outcast country and call it your REAL homeland. Trust the eternal
outsiders to reinvent themselves on a international level as a rogue
state. If there's a hell on Earth, it's got to be present-day Judaicized
America and Israel.

And, non-assimilationists, be prepared: as Shylock found out to his
dismay, your daughter may up and marry a goy, and if you try to take
your 'pound of flesh', you've got to be prepared for a backlash of some
kind. Hopefully not a holocaust, but control of goy society by an alien
tribe is just not in the books. You should have learned at least THAT
much from history. Take it from a fellow sufferer. As the Russians say
'The farther you go, the quieter you should proceed." [...]