Morality & Ethics

Victimless Crime

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Absent evidence of sexual trafficking, coercion, forced servitude or abuse of minors, I’ve never thought adult consensual prostitution (sex work) should be criminalized. That you can pay people to have sex if you film them and sell the resulting product (porn), but can’t pay them to have commercial sex that isn’t filmed for sale, seems absurd.

Charges against the owner of rentboy.com were originally brought in August 2015. The New York Times reported at that time on the odd circumstances behind the investigation, which was conducted by the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security in league with Kelly T. Currie, at the time the acting U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn:

It’s somewhat baffling, though, that taking down a website that operated in plain sight for nearly two decades suddenly became an investigative priority for the Department of Homeland Security and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn.

I guess there wasn’t enough on the terrorism front to keep DHS busy. Publicity seeking all round, particularly by Currie, who landed as a partner at NYC law firm Crowell & Moring.

More. Huffington Post noted that:

Germany legalized prostitution in 2001. A decade later, trafficking had decreased by 10 percent. New Zealand legalized it in 2003, and after five years a report found zero incidents of trafficking. But they did find that sex workers were more likely to report violence when it occurred.

After Canada legalized prostitution, sex workers experienced fewer homicides — and according to some reports, law enforcement harassment has made sex work more dangerous.

We even know how legal prostitution works in the US, since some Nevada counties regulate brothels. Researchers from the University of Nevada found brothels enforce monthly STI checks, mandatory condom usage and panic buttons in every room. Compare that to the NYPD, which has accused women of prostitution for carrying condoms.

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Twixt Left and Right

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Hatefulness gussied up as moral superiority can be found among conservatives and progressives. Ideologues, one and all.

Bad anti-LGBT conservatives:

Bad LGBT leftists:

As others have pointed out, these “useful idiots” (in Lenin’s famed words) wouldn’t last long on the streets of Gaza City or Ramallah. But no one would care in Tel Aviv.

Gee, maybe these aren’t just “isolated incidents”?

Some sanity:

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Gay Jerks Who Are Oh-So Proud of Themselves

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Via the New York Post, Passenger thrown off flight after confronting Ivanka Trump:

JetBlue kicked a Brooklyn lawyer and his Hunter College professor husband off a plane at JFK on Thursday morning — after he accosted fellow passenger and future first daughter Ivanka Trump right before takeoff.

“Your father is ruining the country!” lefty lawyer and avowed Hillary Clinton supporter Dan Goldstein shouted at Trump, as she sat with her husband, Jared Kushner, and their three kids in the main cabin, TMZ reported.

Totally obnoxious virtue-signaling by the gay guys, but I’m sure they’ll be celebrated by their fellow progressives as heroes. Incivility has become a defining value of progressivism.

More. Instapundit links to a roundup of tweets about this ugly incident, including this:

Naturally, all of this would have been presented and received differently had the harassment been directed at a famous liberal woman. However, wealthy liberals don’t fly coach. They prefer to sit in first class and discuss what’s best for average Americans.

A tweet from the Daily Mail, with a retweet from the perp’s husband: “Ivanka and Jared at JFK T5, flying commercial. My husband chasing them down to harass them.” (No mention of the small children sitting next to their parents.)

A comprehensive roudup of the incident, here.

As I’ve noted before, a Clinton staffer tasked with monitoring campaign polling wrote, post-election, in the Boston Globe, Understanding the undecided voters:

There was one moment when I saw more undecided voters shift to Trump than any other, when it all changed, when voters began to speak differently about their choice. … the conversation shifted the most during the weekend of Sept. 9, after Clinton said, “You can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.” All hell broke loose.

Clinton’s support among hard-pressed working- and lower-middle class people, in the rust belt and elsewhere, took a big hit afterward. That speech occurred, to wild applause, at an LGBT fundraiser in Manhattan where the ticket prices ranged from $1,200 to $250,000, and with many paying $50,000, according to reports.

Why do privileged LGBT progressives think that public displays of their contempt is helpful to either progressivism or to public perceptions of, you know, privileged LGBT progressives?

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The Fear that Someone, Somewhere, Might Be Aroused

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Donald Trump’s pick for labor secretary is Andy Puzder, the successful CEO of CKE Restaurants, which operates Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s. Puzder is a smart critic of Obama’s reign of regulatory terror against American businesses over the past eight years, which is a big reason for the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression.

But what our progressive friends seem most upset about concerning Puzder’s nomination is that, as Vox declares:

Like Trump, Puzder is very open about how much he enjoys objectifying women, and how he likes to use that objectification as a business strategy. … For the last decade or so, Carl’s Jr. has been known for running controversial TV ads featuring models eating hamburgers in various gross, oversexed ways.

Vox’s link is to the progressive feminist site Jezebel, which also has a big problem with images of beautiful women eating hamburgers. And ThinkProgress assumes a clear connection between using alluring women in an advertising campaign and opening the floodgates to systemic pay discrimination against working women.

I’m not the first to point out that all this anger and angst on the left is eerily similar to criticism from the Christian right during the 1980s over jiggly women on network sitcoms. Today’s progressives sound as shocked and appalled over the prospect that American men might become (gasp) aroused as the American Family Association and the Moral Majority were back then.

Which really shouldn’t be surprising. In today’s progressivism, feminist prudery and censoriousness (think campus fainting couches and safe spaces) extends to demands that erotic expressiveness be strictly controlled and regulated—or, if that’s not yet possible, treated with contempt—at least when its focus is heterosexuality and especially with regard to the working classes. This is evidenced by the scorn evoked by sexy waitresses at the restaurant chain Hooters. (If erotic imagery undermines heteronormality, it gets a pass.)

Female radio host Dana Loesch, author of the book “Hands Off My Gun,” blogged in defense of Puzder:

Are the ads modest? No. Are they sexist and exploitative? Well, that depends on whom is being exploited. … Were not the women in the ads paid? Were they unaware that they filmed a commercial? The audience for whom this commercial was made are the ones being exploited, exploited by a company, to part with their dollars.

To the left, however, marketing and commercialism are perhaps the gravest sins of all.

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Progressive ‘Tolerance”

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HGTV ‘Fixer Upper’ couple Chip and Joanna Gaines find themselves in the liberal media’s crosshairs for attending a church that has traditional view of homosexuality. Twitchy has a roundup of the tweets that link to the publications’ articles, including these:

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I liked this response:


And this one:

Perhaps for their faith crime, the state will force them to fix up a house for a gay wedding.

More. Obviously, the liberal news sites are looking to stoke a controversy along the lines of the Benham Brothers who, two years ago, had their upcoming “Flip It Forward” show on HGTV (helping “lower-income families purchase fixer uppers and transform them into dream homes”) dropped after an outcry and boycott threats over the brothers’ faith-based opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion. But Jason and David Benham were vocal about their views, which the Gaineses are not (if that should make a difference). The witch-hunt mentality of the liberal inquisitors also brings to mind the 2014 resignation of Mozilla’s co-founder and CEO Brendan Eich amid outrage following the discovery that he had contributed $1,000 in 2008 to a winning California ballot initiative against same-sex marriage.

But all Chip And Joanna Gaines did was go to church.

Furthermore. Guy Benson weighs in. Note: his post includes a tweet from a Stephen Miller who is not me.

Apparently, from some of the comments, this kind of mean-spirited, ritualized shaming is just a tempest in a teapot because the left is targeting conservatives. Nothing to see, move along, boy Miller is stupid (a recurring theme) for believing this might be of interest to anyone reading a site called CultureWatch.

And more. Not much buzz about this from the trendy lefty sites but the right has noticed (in responding to the left’s manufactured Gaines controversy): Likely DNC Chair Rep. Keith Ellison’s Imam: Homosexuality Is ‘Not What God Intended’.

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The Dichotomy

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Milo Yiannopoulos, a young gay conservative Brit and anti-political-correctness provocateur, and the student protesters at Rutgers. NJ.com reports:

“In my view, anybody who asks for a trigger warning or a safe space, should be immediately expelled” [Yiannopoulos said].

The audience loudly applauded his statement.

He said such reactivity merely demonstrates that those students “are incapable of exposing themselves to new ideas.”

“They are demonstrating that they are incapable of engaging in a humble pursuit of knowledge,” he said.

At which point, a woman yells from off camera, “This man represents hatred!” They also started chanting “Black lives matter.”

The video then pans to one side of the auditorium where two students appear to smear fake blood on their faces.

The evocative display was met with loud applause.

Members of the audience in support of Yiannopoulos booed and started chanting, “Trump, Trump, Trump!”

The protesters also splattered their fake blood, Breitbart reports:

the progressives stormed out of the auditorium, leaving a trail of red paint for the janitors to clean up.

Walls, seats, and doors were also vandalised by the protesters. Peaceful attendees who had come to hear a speech instead found themselves splashed with the fake blood. At least one attendee was allegedly assaulted by a protester, who covered him in red paint.

The rise of authoritarian-progressive political correctness, which seeks to stop the expression of ideas its adherents dislike, is met with support for Donald Trump. It’s action/reaction, and represents the sad state of left-dominated academia. It does not bode well for the country.

More. And in Britain, Peter Tatchell: snubbed by students for free speech stance:

The emails from the officer of the National Union of Students were unequivocal. Fran Cowling, the union’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) representative, said that she would not share a stage with a man whom she regarded as having been racist and “transphobic”.

That the man in question is Peter Tatchell – one of the country’s best-known gay rights campaigners, who next year celebrates his 50th year as an activist – is perhaps a mark of how fractured the debate on free speech and sexual politics has become.

In the emails, sent to the organisers of a talk at Canterbury Christ Church University on Monday on the topic of “re-radicalising queers”, Cowling refuses an invitation to speak unless Tatchell, who has also been invited, does not attend. In the emails she cites Tatchell’s signing of an open letter in the Observer last year in support of free speech and against the growing trend of universities to “no-platform” people, such as Germaine Greer, for holding views with which they disagree.

Cowling claims the letter supports the incitement of violence against transgender people. She also made an allegation against him of racism or of using racist language. Tatchell told the Observer that the incident was yet another example of “a witch-hunting, accusatory atmosphere” symptomatic of a decline in “open debate on some university campuses”.

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For Schism

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The primates of the worldwide Anglican Communion on Jan. 14 suspended the Episcopal Church USA “from full participation in the life and work of the Anglican Communion” for a period of three years, to give the Episcopal Church time to recant its pro-gay ways.

The motion, presented to a gathering of archbishops in Canterbury Cathedral, was backed by the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), which consists of conservative Anglican bishops and leaders working “to guard and proclaim the unchanging, transforming Gospel through biblically faithful preaching.”

To translate, the issue was the Episcopal Church’s ordination of gay clergy and its policy of allowing churches to perform and sanction same-sex marriages.

The anti-gay Anglicans include a small number of U.S. and U.K. “high church” or Anglo-Catholic traditionalists who seek to be more reactionary on matters theological than Rome. But the main thrust for disciplining the U.S. church comes from the vast majority of Anglicans who reside outside the West. Specifically, African bishops, representing 60 percent of Anglicans worldwide, resist Western tolerance of homosexuality, to put it mildly.

As David Boaz writes in Newsweek, there was fear that archbishops from six African countries—Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, South Sudan, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—might have walked out if the archbishop of Canterbury, the symbolic head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, didn’t sanction the U.S. Episcopal Church for consecrating gay bishops and allowing Episcopal churches to perform same-sex weddings. Boaz praises the Anglican archbishop of South Africa, who has urged his church to abandon its “practices of discrimination,” which distinguishes South Africa on a continent where virulent homophobia is treated as gospel. (Despite racial oppression, South Africa is a country where Western enlightenment values always had a foothold, Boaz notes, which was significant in defeating Apartheid.)

In contrast, let’s look at some of the churches that demanded the U.S. Episcopal Church be sanctioned. The Anglican church in Uganda has no problem with draconian laws persecuting gay people:

In response to the Anglican Church of Canada’s intervention, Bishop Joseph Abura of the Karamoja Diocese wrote an editorial saying, “Ugandan Parliament, the watch dog of our laws, please go ahead and put the anti-Gay laws in place. It is then that we become truly accountable to our young and to this country, not to Canada or England. We are in charge!” Although the Anglican Church in Uganda opposes the death penalty, its archbishop, Henry Luke Orombi, did not take a position on the bill.

Some prelates of the Rwanda church joined in their country’s tribal genocide:

Tutsis were murdered en masse in Rwanda in part because they flocked to places of worship for refuge…. In fact, both the Catholic and Anglican churches in Rwanda were deeply complicit in the genocide. … Astonishingly, church figures across Rwanda played a leading role in legitimizing and even inflicting genocidal killing.

These are the churches that anti-gay American Anglicans have chosen to affiliate themselves with.

The United Methodist Church—the nation’s largest mainline denomination—faces a similar issue as it remains officially opposed to same-sex marriage and defrocks it’s ministers who perform same-sex weddings. Here, too:

Many observers—both inside and outside of the [Methodist] church—note that the global nature of the church, in particular its growth in Africa, where homosexuality is often still taboo, is a major hurdle for those hoping to change church policy.

Let the churches of the light rise up to the Light; and those that present their hatred as righteousness dwell in the heart of darkness together.

More. I say, vote yes for independency, as Americans did in 1776.

Also, the Pilgrims, who were Separatists and not Puritans (despite the common misperception) had it right. They wanted to separate from the Anglican Church and believed attempting to “purify” it would only corrupt them.

Furthermore. Before the Jan. 14 vote, Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Michael B. Curry told the primates gathering in Canterbury:

Many of us have committed ourselves and our church to being ‘a house of prayer for all people,’ as the Bible says, when all are truly welcome. Our commitment to be an inclusive church is not based on a social theory or capitulation to the ways of the culture, but on our belief that the outstretched arms of Jesus on the cross are a sign of the very love of God reaching out to us all.

I also like this thought. Catherine M Wallace, a cultural historian and literary theologian, writes:

Like Christians of the past, we are to engage the tradition with the best critical tools and broadest moral sensitivity available to us, trusting that God is with us and within us, calling us always to courage and to compassion, calling us to be bread for a starving world. …

For some people, religion must be rigid, absolutist and judgmental in order to count as “religion.” That need for self-righteous absolutes is perhaps the deepest anxiety of all.

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Obama’s Canard

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At this delicate moment in the fight for the freedom to marry, the revelation that President Obama was not telling the truth while running for office and during his first years in the presidency, when he claimed he personally opposed same-sex marriage because he felt “marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman,” is not helpful.

Yes, many assumed Obama’s position was taken for political expediency, but being cleverly disingenuous doesn’t make the side fighting for marriage equality look good; it makes us look deceitful. The story of Obama having “evolved” on this issue was a better model of how we hoped others would shift their views.

Opponents of marriage equality will present this, with some justification, as an act to manipulate the stupid yokels (who cling to their guns and religion). This is not the way to win hearts and minds of those who view marriage equality with suspicion.

More. Obama has denied lying about his views on gay marriage, saying that Axelrod confused the president’s personal views with his policy position, and that his policy position evolved. That’s pretty good spin, even if it doesn’t quite address Obama’s campaign statements that clearly sounded as if he personally opposed same-sex marriage because of the “sanctity” issue.

The truth is surely that if the polls had shown a majority of Americans continuing to oppose gay marriage, Obama would have remained in opposition as well.

Furthermore. Kerry Eleveld writes in Politico:

But the candidate voters witnessed never seemed particularly tortured by his stance. Between 2004 and 2008, Obama stated his opposition to same-sex marriage and his support for one man-one woman marriage repeatedly, robotically, and without flinching on numerous occasions. Few of those pronouncements were quite as spectacular as the one he made in 2008 on Rick Warren’s stage at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, CA. “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman,” he told Warren’s flock of Evangelicals. “Now, for me as a Christian, it’s also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.”

The implication was that, in his view, same-sex unions were not holy enough to count as marriages. It wasn’t the statement of a candidate who was squeamish about the consequences of his comments. Rather, it revealed a candidate who was perfectly willing to leverage religious homophobia in his quest for the presidency. In fact, the only hesitation Obama experienced in that moment came from an interruption of excited applause from the crowd.

The president’s loyal LGBT base seems split between two responses: (1) Obama was struggling with the issue for many years and eventually thought it through to the correct conclusion, and (2) Obama, being a smart politician, had to say he opposed same-sex marriage in order to get elected and (eventually) support marriage equality. And the correct answer is (3) Obama followed the polling.

Final word? Via Reason:

It’s not difficult to imagine a pro-choice candidate winning the presidency. But imagine, if you can, a president whose position on abortion “evolves” after the election. Imagine this president advocating that all innocent human life is worth protecting. Imagine that she appoints judges to solidify her new pro-life attitude. And then imagine that the president’s top adviser informs us that the president was a pro-lifer all along. I imagine that would be a pretty big story.

I’m glad Obama has appointed pro-gay-marriage judges. But I can also see why his being duplicitous is so unsettling. It’s reflected in other campaign deceits aimed at wooing the center, including his promises to bridge the partisan divide and to cut the budget deficit by half (a pretense with immense consequences).

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The New Puritans

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Cultural historian Camille Paglia, a very un-politically correct lesbian, to be sure, on why the modern campus cannot comprehend evil:

Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.

Colleges should stick to academics and stop their infantilizing supervision of students’ dating lives, an authoritarian intrusion that borders on violation of civil liberties. Real crimes should be reported to the police, not to haphazard and ill-trained campus grievance committees.

When evil (as in sexual assault) is defined as that which makes you feel bad, in retrospect, then there is no language left to describe, or help defend against, true evil.

In a similar vein, Margaret Wente on the new campus sex puritans:

Sixty years ago, sexual behaviour among the young caused deep alarm among the puritanical religious right. Today, it causes deep alarm among the puritanical progressive left. Like their forebears, they are doing their best to restrict and regulate it.

This weekend, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill that makes universities redefine consensual sex. From now on, students must effectively obtain the “affirmative consent” of their partners, which must be “ongoing” every step of the way. Those accused of violating the consent rule will be judged on the preponderance of the evidence. Perpetrators face suspension or expulsion, and universities face heavy penalties for failure to enforce.

The new measure is designed to stem a tidal wave of rape on campus that, in fact, does not exist. (Violent crime, including sexual assault, has been in decline for 20 years.) Even so, universities across North America have set up vast new administrative apparatuses to deal with the crisis. Many of them have also expanded the meaning of “sexual violence” to include anything that makes you feel bad.

Not dissimilar from the way the campus free speech movement of the sixties has morphed into the rule of progressive speech codes that stifle debate which veers away from progressive orthodoxy.

(As I posted recently, gay relationships among students also become embroiled in these star-chamber proceedings—On Campus, Absence of Due Process Extended to Gays.)

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