More on New York vs. D.C.

One thing about New Yorkers that visitors from Washington tend to notice right away is a frankness about sexuality that much of the country lacks. A friend who has lived in New York since the seventies tells me that that frankness has been toned down since the seventies, but it is still there. In D.C., by contrast, no matter what happens on the back porch of the leather bar, we observe the polite fiction that we are all asexual and that the goddess has assigned us our sexual orientations solely as a social statement.

My friend also mentioned an aspect of growing up in New York, namely, exposure to viewpoint diversity. Such diversity has traditionally been anathema in D.C., although we see more of it as a more diverse crowd moves into the capital.

Quote of the week

"[F]reedom of speech is not freedom for the thought you agree with, but the one you hate the most." — Larry Flynt, quoted in The Times of London, May 28, 2011

President Barack H. Bush (3): The Patriot Act

Now that Obama has signed the extension of the Patriot Act, Obama voters are expressing regret over having voted for him, Bush supporters are gloating, and the true-blue Obamapologists are oddly silent. According to the one-dimensional political spectrum so beloved by one-dimensional political thinkers, Obama has placed himself to the right of that person whom progressives love to hate, Rand Paul.

Quote of the week

"[We're winning the younger generation on abortion, at least in theory. What about same-sex marriage?] We're losing on that one, especially among the 20- and 30-somethings: 65 to 70 percent of them favor same-sex marriage. I don't know if that's going to change with a little more age—demographers would say probably not. We've probably lost that. I don't want to be extremist here, but I think we need to start calculating where we are in the culture." — Jim Daly, President and CEO of Focus on the Family, interviewed by WORLD Magazine (June 4, 2011, issue).

Religious right or P.C. left? Quote 24

In this series of blog posts, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to read each quote and guess, before doing a Web search, whether someone in the religious right or the politically correct left said it.

24.

I believe, however, that sadomasochism--both on the part of its practitioners and of the community of media voyeurs which propagates it--is not a deviation from the philosophical origins of liberalism but a realization of them.

* * *

We have become reluctant to be labelled as moral crusaders in an age when human potential has degenerated to "doing your own thing." We are conditioned to making bland observations and cynical jokes in response to obscenities of a national scale and perversity of universal magnitude. We are numbed to the point of being at home with cruelty and despair. Sadomasochism is but one more absurdity to be greeted with a blank stare. But to do that is to yield to yet another assault upon our own decency. Whatever contempt the human race may have merited in the past and may have brought upon itself, we are not destined to live by the traditions which perpetuate it. We cannot capitulate to the liberal dogma which treats as normal and neutral the volitional debasement and humiliation of one human being by another. If this is the logic of liberalism, then [our] philosophy can and must do better. Traditional philosophy would be well served by such revision.

My first post-Rapture post

The Rapture happened just as scheduled, but I'll bet you were too busy sinning to notice. I'm still here, as are, I'm sure, all of Congress and the Virginia General Assembly.

Power failure

One aspect of the undergraduate navel-gazing that passes for analysis in much of the LGBT community is the talk of power. While I realize that power imbalances exist in the real world, they do not work the same way in the real world as in the politically correct world. In the latter, broadly defined groups of people (e.g., younger vs. older gay men) have more or less power than others, strictly on the say-so of the person talking about such power. The talk of power has the earmarks of politically correct silliness: exalting emotion over reason and speculation over evidence, painting with an extremely broad brush, presenting a cartoonish oversimplification of an issue, "knowing" all about the lives of people whom one has never met, and proclaiming one's own martyrdom.