UNLV Sponsors Youth Sexuality Activism Conference For CCSD Educators

A disturbing email went out to my school’s electronic bulletin board today.  Presumably it went out to every school in the district.  The message included two attachments giving details about an alternative sexuality conference on the UNLV campus on November 14 which will feature a series of workshops.  Are these workshops meant to help educators with their personal lives?  No, nothing like that.  Is it to assist them in avoiding the creation of a classroom environment where teasing and bullying of homosexual students might occur?  Partly. 

But the most unnerving thing about this conference is the inclusion of sessions meant to instruct teachers in training students “to get involved with the LGTBQ community in order to effect positive change. We will look at already established youth LGBTQ community groups, recent movements and types of youth activism.”  Is this serious?  Is UNLV actually promoting, and CCSD tacitly allowing, public teachers preparing to indoctrinate young people in alternative sexual lifestyles, to the point where these children will be encouraged to go out into the community and advocate for them? 

This is beyond political. 

The Underdog in the Culture War

I had a letter printed in the Las Vegas Review-Journal this morning.  In response to local citizens’ and the media’s universal lambasting of parents who are protesting a high school’s performances of Rent and The Laramie Project, I wrote:

As soon as news broke of a parental protest to Green Valley High School’s productions of two socially progressive plays, a chorus of indignation started singing the praises of the brave teachers and actors and decrying the “obvious” hatred and ignorance of the parents. What actually bothers me far more than the political agenda at work in the play selections or the reflexive mob sanctimony of the aggrieved is the monolithic, vitriolic reaction of the community — including the Review-Journal — to the parents’ opposition.

What lessons will the children who likewise oppose the performances learn from this controversy? If your opinion is different from the majority, be quiet. If you question the assumptions of the majority, they will have free rein to slander you. If you think something is deeply wrong but it’s popular, you have no right to oppose it.

If these aren’t the true lessons to take from this matter, then we have to ask why the media isn’t also sympathetically profiling the students who oppose the biased selection of plays, or why local commentators aren’t applauding the courage of a handful of people for standing up to a smug establishment.

This treatment appears to be just another example of the mainstream’s one-way tolerance.

 

UPDATE: The comments section at the end of the page on the newspaper’s web site where my letter was printed has some very interesting debate, which largely illustrates my point–only those with officially sanctioned views should participate in cultural discussions.  All others should stay home, and will be stigmatized as knuckle-draggers if they dare speak up.  The democratic process is moot–the decisions about culture have been made for us. 

Also, apparently, someone in those comments thought to “expose” me by googling my name and listing the results.  How strange and sad. 

 

Guest Post: Teenage Philosophy

After seeing this amazingly inane drivel about teenagers with trendy, extreme body decorations defending their honor in yesterday’s Las Vegas Review-Journal, I thought I’d try to understand the teenage mindset better by letting one of them take this space and explain their fascinating insights into the egalitarian tradition and their innovative adaptations thereof.  Our anonymous adolescent offers the following:

 

Dont be hatin on me!  It dont matter if I be getting earrings or tattoos or mohawks or implants or wearin bikinis to school or bitin my toenails in class or stuff like that.  Thats just who I am!  You cant judge me!  Stop hatin!

Im just expressin myself!  If I want to cover myself in egg yolk and run screaming through the parking lot, it dont make no difference to you.  I was born that way.  Its a free country.  Dont give me your bad looks.  And quit hatin up on me!

You think smearing pig slop on my feet and dancin in front you wherever you go is like bad or somethin?  You dont know, you just hatin.  You wrong.  Thats just the way we is now.  We likes to go out in public and fill our mouths with raw fish guts and spit em at each other an yell out catch phrases from this weeks popular movie and thats cool.  That dont make us bad. 

Its a fact that some of us who likes digging up graves and dragging bodies behind their cars is all goin to Harvard and stuff now.  Yeah!  Take that!  Tons of folks who go around wearing baggy clothes overflowin with maggots is like doctors and lawyers and stuff now.  So dont be stereotypin!  It dont matter to you–its a free country.  You just dont understand, so dont be hatin!

Everything that everybody does is cool now.  Aint nothin bad no more.  Except the stuff that you old folks like that I dont like.  That stuff sucks. 

 

Etc. Etc.  Ad nauseum.

The Left Needs To Make Up Its Mind About Marriage

It’s ironic that America is now embroiled in an all out cultural war over whether or not gay couples should be able to get married.  It’s ironic because for the last several decades the cultural left has been waging a war against marriage itself.  The mantra with which we’ve all been bombarded is that marriage is “just a piece of paper.” 

So on one hand, a huge segment of the cultural left in America clings to its established dogma that marriage is outdated, oppressive, or irrelevant, while a growing faction of the same population battles to convince us that marriage is a crucial necessity worth fighting over.  Thousands of flexible, hip, cohabitating straight couples all blithely ignore the foundational covenant of civilization, while at the same time thousands of aggrieved, angry, entitled gay couples take to the streets to campaign for what seems to be a life-or-death need.

Perhaps it’s just traditional marriage that’s bad.  Alternative marriages–surprise!–are great.

This contradiction makes the convenient, experimental wishes of the left ever more difficult to take seriously.  Will America’s counter culture please make up its mind?  Either marriage is important or it isn’t.  Either it’s a vital ceremony with real value, or it’s just an optional piece of paper.  It can’t be both.

When you come to a consensus, let us know.  Then we can talk.

The Use and Abuse of Barack Obama

Which argument is better?

A) The world is round because, you know, it just like totally is and everybody knows it.

B) The world is flat because, if perception is reality, then we must acknowledge that most aspects of our lives are based on an understanding of the world being flat: we don’t see the curvature of the Earth with any regularity, so we are comfortable with two dimensional maps and measure the fastest travel routes over land, not through the ground. 

While the premise of argument A is true, argument B is superior.  Ideally, we want arguments that are both true and intelligently defended, but that is neither here nor there.  My point is that too many people today are comfortable with the first kind of thinking, and such logical sloppiness can only lead to trouble. 

Sadly, this is the case with the election of Barack Obama. 

I don’t have anything against President Obama personally, nor do I wish ill for him or his administration.  I hope he turns out to be the greatest president we’ve ever had, because that would be good for the country.  This is not a criticism of him, but it is absolutely a criticism of many who voted for him.  I don’t fault anyone for voting their conscience, and anyone who voted for him because they considered and prefered his politics has my respect, but just as I cannot respect someone who says the Earth is round because “it just like totally is,” I cannot respect the vote of someone who elected a man for the wrong reason.

Barack Obama became president of the United States not because of his experience, policies, or vision, nor even his character.  Barack Obama won the election because he’s black.  Besides the fact that fully 96% of black voters opted for Obama, the race factor is baldly advertised with such blatantly racist posturing as Tom Brokaw trumpeting Obama’s election as a slap in the face to “bigots and rednecks,” Joseph Lowery’s scathing indictment of white people during a prayer at the inauguration when he yearned for a time “when white will embrace the right,” and even hinted at when Obama himself pronounced in his inauguration speech that his election was a victory of “hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.”  (Does this mean that a vote for McCain was a vote for fear?  How so?  And how tactless is that to say?)

An Example Of Genuinely Bad Behavior Towards Gay People

The burgeoning physical culture war over gay marriage (as evinced by a rowdy protest that almost looked like a riot at the LDS church’s Los Angeles temple and an older Christian woman being savagely harrassed in Palm Springs) is sobering and scary.

I’ve already explained my defense of barring “gay marriage” at length elsewhere on this blog, but today I have a more sympathetic thought about this culture war in mind.

The 2005 crossword puzzle documentary Wordplay is one of my favorite movies.  As it celebrates the English language and the joy of being well educated in it, I’ve shown it several times to various high school classes and even in English 101.  It enjoys the mark of a successful lesson: intelligent, serious students always love it, and truculent, lazy people tend to hate it. 

One of the great puzzle solvers featured in the film is a man named Trip Payne.  In one scene, Trip refers to his boyfriend as “dear,” then gives him a quick peck, the kind of chaste little kiss that any of us would feel comfortable giving to our mother.  Invariably, any time I ever show this award-winning documentary about real-world linguistics to students, this scene elicits groans, laughs, and even crude comments.

Nobody would ever think of treating a racial minority this way.  I honestly believe that racism is dead in our society.  Sure, pockets of ignorance might still pulsate here and there, but then there are still some people out there who think the world is flat and that Star Trek V was a good movie.  People might criticize or be leery of social mores that seem to condone, or even encourage, what the mainstream would view as anti-social criminal behavior, but that’s a far cry from assuming inherent inferiority, and you just don’t see public belittling of any racial minority just for being a racial minority.  The very thought is unspeakable. 

And yet, regardless of our views about law, religion, or family, almost every segment of our society is comfortable openly mocking gay people. 

An Old Man Looks Back On The Obama Administration

“Grandpa, tell me again about the Hard Times.”

“Oh, Jimmy, I love telling you stories, but I just told you that one yesterday!”

“I know, Gramps, but that was just the same stuff they tell us at the new school–the constant experimenting, the violence, the confusion and chaos–but you were there.  Tell me what it was really like, please.”

Grandpa sighed and ran a hand through his thinning hair as he sank into his comfortable chair by the window.  “The Hard Times?  You know, nobody thought of calling it that until it had been around for years.  The name first popped up on the underground web sites of traditionalists–’the haters,’ most people called them at the time; people who ‘hated’ subversion, hedonism, socialism, who wouldn’t ‘tolerate’ the demands of others for radical, unprecedented change in the name of ‘fairness.’  The government took a cue from China and shut down most of those sites just as quickly as they shut down the talk radio shows those rebels started out on, but still, the resistance lingered.

“I was never a part of that resistance.  It wasn’t that I was too young to join in, but that I was too young to know that I should join in.  Especially when so many of my elders sanctioned that radicalism with their zealous endorsements, also all in the name of ‘progress.’  I was taken in by the idea of generations, centuries, of wrongdoing about to be undone by an earth-shattering revolutionary who would finally get everyone what they had been taught by the media their whole lives they deserved.  It was exciting, it felt righteous, it was this mass mob mentality that you just can’t understand unless you were part of it–totally convinced that the more you taunted and censored the ones you labelled the ‘enemy,’ the more just you were.  It was like a contest to see who could be coolest by being the most extreme.”

Grandpa paused for breath and rolled his eyes up to the ceiling, seeming to search for words to give his thoughts form.  His face looked lost.  “Good grief, how did we get so far that the majority of a country could fall for such a childish scheme and think we were saving the world?”

He leaned forward and rested his hands on his knees, and when he didn’t speak for a minute, Jimmy tried to get him to continue with a question: “So President Obama was evil?”

Grandpa’s face instantly looked up.  “Evil?  Heavens, no.  Not ‘evil,’ just very, very wrong.  He genuinely thought he was doing the right things, there’s no doubt that he sincerely wanted to do the most good for the most people, with no ulterior motives for his own aggrandizement…but they say that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.  No, Obama wasn’t evil…but his policies had that effect.  And some of the people around him…yes, some of them were evil.

“They haven’t taught you in school yet about the law of unintended consequences.  That’s one of the very best reasons to be cautious when people want to change what has obviously worked for hundreds of years.  You never know what all the effects of a new action will be.  But in retrospect, I think we should have seen what would happen.  Yes, the chess pieces were all moved into place by 2008.  When the last of our defenses was removed, endgame was ready.

“As soon as Obama was elected, the marginalized anti-social goons came out of the woodwork.  Up until then, there were restraints on public conduct; the leftist fetishists almost reveled in being underdogs.  But the minute they sensed that, after forty years of seeping into the American consciousness, the reigns of power were theirs, what with the Unholy Trinity of Obama-Reid-Pelosi in power, they sprung the trap.

“By the end of the first year, bills fast tracked through the legislative and executive branches mandating that we would never fight another war for any reason, because all violence is always a tool of corporations to exploit peace lovers, that nobody would ever be able to be excluded from anything–especially marriage or citizenship–for any reason, because setting any criteria for anything is discrimination, and that’s an ugly word and always bad, and that everybody would always be able to call on the government to have the exact same quality of life that the most well off Americans could conceivably enjoy, because, again, anything less was clearly evidence of some kind of discrimination, and if ‘all men are created equal,’ then nobody should have to suffer anything that everybody doesn’t have to suffer.

Hip Hop’s Pervasively Negative Influence On Our Society

 First, a letter of mine printed in the March 9, 2006 issue of Las Vegas CityLife:

Regarding Presley Vance Conkle’s tirade against Sheriff Bill Young in the March 2 issue ["Thug lite," Your Opinion], Conkle is yet another zombie wetting himself with excitement over an opportunity to get his merit badge for Standing Up To The Man In Defense Of Anything Demonstrably Harmful. Sheriff Young’s effort to reduce hip-hop violence has hardly been tarnished. Cockiness is not an argument, Mr. Conkle, and being sarcastic does not make you right.

Nobody is muzzling the expression of rappers — their music will always be readily available. Asking business owners to voluntarily not book shows that will incite crime isn’t censorship, it’s citizenship.

Rap music never killed anybody, Mr. Conkle? We don’t need to go back to Ice-T’s “Cop Killer” or Boyz in da Hood. Just last week, a man was shot at a 50 Cent concert. This is the same 50 Cent whose recent movie, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, was greeted in Philadelphia with a murder in the theater lobby.

Conkle can’t really defend hip-hop. All he can do is make up lame comparisons, but the many incidents of fatal violence caused directly by hip-hop in our city in recent years, as reported by the Review-Journal on Feb. 12, are significant. Mr. Conkle, what has hip-hop done in our schools? Are the honors classes full of students whose diligence is driven by their Eminem CDs? Are the dean’s offices full of students whose negative behavior stems from indoctrination by Norah Jones, or Snoop Dogg? Are the truants marching out of school proudly brandishing the fashionable poses of Vince Gill, or P. Diddy?

Hip-hop encourages people to adopt the most destructive antisocial attitudes. Instead of extolling Western civilization, it specializes in bitter self-segregation. Hip-hop has become an all-pervasive media cult that makes its followers into Nelly’s image, complete with high priests ready to condemn all critics of hip-hop as heretics, accuracy of their assessments notwithstanding.

Our children already have a legion of mentally flabby teachers who themselves are the products of hip-hop’s endless apologia. Mr. Conkle, as Clark County teens continue to do worse on math tests and increasingly imitate thug stereotypes, they don’t need any more.

 

Interestingly, not long after this letter ran, the perfect illustration of my cult meatphor played out: 50 Cent, Ludacris, and other rappers publicly excoriated the most powerful woman in the world, Oprah Winfrey, not because she had campaigned against hip hop, but only because she wasn’t endorsing it enough.  Apparently, the Salem judges thought Goody Winfrey hadn’t sufficiently toed the party line on this issue, and condemned her as a witch accordingly.  Oprah, for her part, played into this sad farce, not by chastising anyone for having the audacity to challenge her priorities, but by bowing and scraping before the professionally aggrieved, whining about how she really did have some rap songs on her iPod.

And thus it is.  Questions of artistic merit notwithstanding, anyone who dares to criticize the obviously harmful effects of hip hop in the world is quickly branded a racist (yours truly has been the target of such slander before), so that their argument may be safely ignored.  What the media machine doesn’t want us to get past is that the problems with hip hop aren’t based on race (though it’s tragic that so many people have bought into that artificial, commercial identity, which only limits those so self-defined and creates unnecessary social strife), but that hip hop simply thrives on negativity. 

If I single it out for blame over other similar media brands such as heavy metal, it’s because hip hop has ruled youth culture as the single omnipotent, omnipresent force in shaping the character of children for an entire generation now.  The occasional op-ed about “the death of hip hop” can’t nullify the truth seen on every street corner and at every mall in America–this juggernaut isn’t going away anytime soon.

Though those with a vested interest in the continued success of hip hop–from Madison Avenue execs to the permanent juveniles whose minds have been stunted so as not to realize that they have had Stockholm Syndrome forced upon them–will jeer at anyone who says it, I maintain my stand, if only because all the evidence of my eyes reinforces the conclusion that this media empire will be remembered for ruining as many lives as any actual war in history.

Charlton Heston, “Winning the Cultural War”

 

Moses died this weekend.  So did Michaelangelo.  So did Ben Hur, John the Baptist, and Marc Antony, not to mention the heroes from The Omega Man and Planet of the Apes. 

Charlton Heston was cool.  Not only did he build an impressive catalogue of work, he helped shape my political understanding.  Around the time I graduated college, I read the now-famous speech he had recently given at Harvard Law School.  Just starting to come out of the fog of juvenile liberalism, I found a lot in Heston’s speech that rang true, and it really helped set me on the path to conservatism. 

In short, Heston encouraged us to resist being cowed by political correctness, and to speak up for decent common sense no matter what the cost.  If you haven’t read it, you should.  In Heston’s memory, here it is:

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/charltonhestonculturalwar.htm