Voters override high school gag order on abstinence by electing Chris Lind to the school board

Chris Lind won't be silenced anymore.

Voters sent a clear message to Prior Lake-Savage schools last night by electing Chris Lind to the school board. Lind, who received 13.96 percent of the vote was the only non-incumbent elected.

Last June Lind was fired from his job as Prior Lake-Savage high school campus supervisor because of job performance. A closer look revealed that Lind was told by Tony Massaros, District 719 Director of Human Resources, that he could not talk about sexaul abstinence with students during or after school, on or off campus, during or after school hours.

Massaros also told Lind he could not talk about abstinence in a bible study in his own home, “in youth groups at church or in small group study off campus.” Massaros allegedly censored Lind from discussing abstinence with anyone who had ever attended the district.

Looks like voters have given Lind, and his healthy message of abstinence, the bully pulpit.

ENDA , sexual orientation and the logical extension of protecting sexual orientation

The U.S. House is expected to vote sometime this week on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act or ENDA. ENDA would add "sexual orientation" to the federal anti-discrimination laws which currently provides protected class status for people based on such categories as race, sex, and age.

One of the objections to ENDA is it will give special legal protection to people based on their sexual behaviors and desires which fundamentally undercuts the purpose of giving protections based on morally neutral, immutable traits like race.

However proponents argue sexual orientation is not a choice therefore appropriately included.

A couple of problems with the "it's not a choice" mantra. For one, a genetic basis for sexual orientation has never been discovered. (An even if there was one we can't conclude that something is fundamentally good simply because its genetic. What about sickle cell anemia or alcoholism; the latter many believe has a genetic component.) And second, the only way one knows a person's sexual orientation is by a person's behavior. And of course we all are responsible for our behaviors. Otherwise, what's to stop a person from saying whatever they want about their sexual orientation. Third, this sexual orientation concept is very fluid. People are constantly moving in and out of different sexual behaviors. And fourth, homosexual behavior is not a morally neutral activity. All the major religions have viewed such behavior as immoral.

What's also interesting are all the other sexual orientations which exist. The debate over ENDA revolves around homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgenderism. (One bill includes transgender and another doesn't.) But what about the wide range of other sexual orientations recognized by the American Psychiatric Association. If these sexual orientation should be protected why not all the other sexual orientations? Why shouldn't they be afforded civil rights protection as well?

Here are a few examples taken from Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders produced by the American Psychiatric Association. They include:

1. Coprophilia - sexual arousal associated with feces (p. 576)
2. Exhibitionism - the act of exposing one’s genitals to an unwilling observer to obtain sexual gratification (p. 569)
3. Fetishism/Sexual Fetishism - obtaining sexual excitement primarily or exclusively from an inanimate object or a particular part of the body (p. 570)
4. Frotteurism - approaching an unknown woman from the rear and pressing or rubbing the penis against her buttocks (p. 570)
5. Gender Identity Disorder - a strong and persistent cross-gender identification, which is the desire to be, or the insistence that one is, or the other sex, "along with" persistent discomfort about one’s assigned sex or a sense of the inappropriateness in the gender role of that sex (p. 576)
6. Klismaphilia - erotic pleasure derived from enemas (p. 576)
7. Necrophilia - sexual arousal and/or activity with a corpse (p. 576)
8. Partialism - A fetish in which a person is sexually attracted to a specific body part exclusive of the person (p. 576)
9. Pedophilia - Sexual activity with a prepubescent child (generally age 13 years or younger). The individual with pedophilia must be age 16 years or older and at least 5 years older than the child. For individuals in late adolescence with pedophilia, no precise age difference is specified, and clinical judgment must be used; both the sexual maturity of the child and the age difference must be taken into account; the adult may be sexually attracted to opposite sex, same sex, or prefer either (p. 571)

These are bizarre to say the least. But if they too aren't chosen, but determinative of who a person is, then why shouldn't they be afforded civil rights protections like homosexuality, bisexuality and transgenderism?

The problem is once one crosses the line of appropriate sexual relations between a man and a woman within the context of a lifelong, marriage relationship, there's no rational place to redraw the line.

The ultimate result? Social anarchy. The practice of sex outside of marriage has already resulted in fatherlessness, poverty, problems for children and adults, epidemic of STDs, higher rates of domestic abuse, abortion. On and on the list goes.

ENDA serves ultimately to give further legitimacy to sexual behaviors which violate "the laws of nature and nature's God."

ENDA vote delayed again

The House vote on ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act has been delayed again. The vote was removed from the agenda at the last minute.

At issue is the inclusion of gender identity. If included, gender identity would force organizations like the Boy Scouts, or an Orthodox Jewish day care center to hire a man dressed in women's clothing.

In the last few days, Rep. Jim Ramstad, (GOP Dist 3,) Rep. Tim Walz, (DFL Dist. 1), and Rep. Colin Peterson, (DFL Dist. 7), have received thousands of calls urging them to veto ENDA.

Call your Congressman and tell him to "vote no" on all versions of ENDA.

Star Tribune's circulation for last six months continues to plunge

The circulation of major newspapers continues to decline. For the six month time period ending September 2007, the 538 daily newspapers nationwide witnessed a 2.5% drop in newspaper circulation. Of the top 25 newspapers only 4 experienced gains in circulation. For 638 newspapers with Sunday editions, the average drop was 3.5%.

In the case of the Star Tribune, the situation was much worse. It's daily circulation declined 6.5% to 335,443 and Sunday circulation was down 4.3% to 570,443. The Pioneer Press' circulation was flat, up .1% for both dailies and Sunday - 184,474 and 245,930 respectively.

I'm sure the overall circulation is down because of the advent of Internet and the increase of other media sources. I wonder how much of it is due to the overwhelming liberal bias which has characterized the mainstream media. If that's an important factor, then it's understandable that the Star Tribune's decline was even greater because it has certainly been one of the more liberal newspapers in the country.

Along those lines, the two most prominent liberal newspapers nationally - NY Times and Washington Post - saw their circulations drop more than the national average. The New York Times daily circulation dropped 4.51% to 1,03,828 and Washington Post saw a drop of 3.2% to 635,087. Their Sunday circulation declines were also greater than the national average.

The atheist as intolerant and narrow minded

There is an interesting column in City Journal written by Theodore Dalrymple entitled what "What the New Atheists Don't See. It on the new crop of atheist writers, Chrisotpher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins who are making the New York Times best seller list.

He takes to task the new atheists who cavalierly heaping scorn on religious folks and their belief in meaning and purpose beyond themselves. These folks say we can do it on our own without the help of God who transcends our little worlds. Dalrymple goes on to point out the consequences of men who think they can do it on their own. He says,

"Of course, men—that is to say, some men—have denied this truth ["we continue to long for a transcendent purpose immanent in existence itself, independent of our own wills."] ever since the Enlightenment, and have sought to find a way of life based entirely on reason. Far as I am from decrying reason, the attempt leads at best to Gradgrind and at worst to Stalin. Reason can never be the absolute dictator of man’s mental or moral economy.

He especially goes after Harris when he says,

This sloppiness and lack of intellectual scruple, with the assumption of certainty where there is none, combined with adolescent shrillness and intolerance, reach an apogee in Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith. It is not easy to do justice to the book’s nastiness...

Harris tells us, for example, that “we must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it. Given the present state of the world, there appears to be no other future worth wanting.” I am glad that I am old enough that I shall not see the future of reason as laid down by Harris; but I am puzzled by the status of the compulsion in the first sentence that I have quoted. Is Harris writing of a historical inevitability? Of a categorical imperative? Or is he merely making a legislative proposal? This is who-will-rid-me-of-this-troublesome-priest language, ambiguous no doubt, but not open to a generous interpretation.

It becomes even more sinister when considered in conjunction with the following sentences, quite possibly the most disgraceful that I have read in a book by a man posing as a rationalist: “The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live.”

Let us leave aside the metaphysical problems that these three sentences raise. For Harris, the most important question about genocide would seem to be: “Who is genociding whom?” To adapt Dostoyevsky slightly, starting from universal reason, I arrive at universal madness.

Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents sometimes told lies and violated their own precepts and rules. It can be summed up in Christopher Hitchens’s drumbeat in God Is Not Great: “Religion spoils everything.”

What are the consequences of the loss of the religious foundations of our society and culture? Dalrymple says,

The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a deleterious effect upon human character and personality. If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.

He also makes the interesting observation that atheists often heap scorn on religious people for their metaphysical beliefs. Dalrymple points out that the atheist belief in Darwinian natural selection is also making a religious statement.

It is true that he would say that everything is part of God’s providence, but, again, this is no more (and no less) a metaphysical belief than the belief in natural selection as an all-explanatory principle.

What makes Dalrymple's comments especially interesting is he does not consider himself "a believer."