A little anti-Semitism to go with your nonsense?

There is a right-wing web site called Big Hollywood, which is primarily conservatives lamenting the state of the culture and entertainment. Gee, as if that's news. They've been lamenting the state of the culture since slavery was abolished. So there is nothing new there. The nature of the conservative is to whine and bitch because life evolves and they don't believe in evolution. They believe the best is always behind us and cling tenaciously to the past.

Now what does it take to be a columnist on Hollywood for Big Hollywood? David Swindle, one of their writers, lists his credentials as having written for various right-wing websites, doing film reviews for an Indiana TV station and living near Hollywood "awith (sic) his wife and their Siberian Husky puppy." Okay, in other words, he doesn't have any credibility, just the politically correct (in right-wing circles) views. His own comments seem to limit his knowledge of Hollywood to "doing political, ideological readings of films."

Swindle, with his huge credentials in the entertainment business—sarcasm alert for conservatives who wouldn't know better—sings the praises of the smarmy, oily whiner named Ben Shapiro. Shapiro is a right-wing media whore who makes a pretty penny telling conservatives what they most want to hear. He got his leg up, so too speak, by bragging to conservatives that he was a virgin. Apparently his lack of experience in the field gave him all the credentials to talk about sex that conservatives thought he needed.

Now Shapiro is out to attack evil Hollywood. What I found rather interesting is that Swindle was quick to pay the "Jew card" in this promotion piece for Shapiro's smear book. Here is how he describes it: "Shapiro wore his Harvard Law baseball cap and interviewed some of Hollywood's most influential television creators. Assuming from his alma mater and last name that he was one of them, the Hollywood insiders were too honest for their own good."

Get that? They assumed based on Shapiro's "last name" that "he was one of them." One of who? A Hollywood television producer? Nope. A Jew! Sorry folks, but when conservatives start pulling out the Jew card and pointing to "Jews" as being behind the destruction of American values, I get nervous. Normally they hide anti-Semitism a bit more than that. The anti-gay shit they spew, well that's just fund-raising heaven for them, from their bigoted base. But referring to someone as "one of them," because he has a Jewish name, is scrapping the bottom of the barrel. Though I do have to say that the picture of Swindle does look like someone who would hang out at white power rallies, right down to the "working man" baseball cap and, what appears to be, a vein attempt to grow a mustache—but it could just be dirt.

Swindle says that little Ben "documents the subversion of the cop and legal dramas from the early day of righteous cops and prosecutors to the nihilism of Hill Street Blues and Picket Fences." Wow! This clearly shows how out of touch with reality that Swindle and Shapiro happen to be. Yes, the early fiction on television portrayed cops and prosecutors as righteous. It was pure, unadulterated bullshit. Reality was never that way. And any unbiased reading of history shows that police and prosecutors frequently were corrupt and dishonest. They still are!

It doesn't take much to document the violent tendencies of cops and how they will frequently lie in court and invent evidence to convict people wrongly, and exonerate themselves from any wrong doing. Any accurate portrayal of these two groups will show this happening—just as the news reports show on a daily basis. Right now Corey Maye is seeing freedom again. Cops wrongly raided his home, breaking down his doors in the middle of the night in a no-knock raid. Maye defended himself from violent attackers and killed one of them. He was sentenced to death based on dicey evidence. He was defending his home, as he had the right to do, and there was no valid search warrant for his house. The cop who died was white, Maye was black and it was the deep South. The cop went along on the raid for the fun of it. He was on a joy ride basically. Maye sat in prison for years based on a police screw up. Should we portray those officers as "righteous?"

Sorry, but Swindle lives in a fairytale if he thinks cops and prosecutors are always "righteous." They aren't. This love for authority betrays the "freedom" slogans that conservatives chant. In the end, they abandon freedom every time and cling to the lash of the police state because it makes them safe. That's important to Swindle who once wrote that living on "Chetamon court," as a child, made him feel safe, and gave him "a sense of security." That is what Swindle wants, security, to feel safe—and freedom is just so damn risky. Bad things might happen. So, in the end freedom loses out.

Now let's also be clear that Shapiro can easily bias his book by selecting, in advance, precisely who he will or won't interview. It's that simple. And you can then crow that everyone you talked to was a Leftist. Just don't talk to the libertarians like Clint Eastwood, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, John Larroquette, Drew Carey, Kurt Russell, Raquel Welch, Orson Bean, Penn and Teller, Jason Reitman, Tom Selleck, Wil Wheaton, Marc Cherry, Tracy Torme, Dennis Leary and others.

Conservatism has various branches, from the Ron Paul paleoconservatives to the neoCons, to the Religious Right, to Buckleyite Catholics, for instance. I could do an expose of the "Conservative Movement" and then only interview the real loons like Pat Robertson, Bryan Fischer, Michelle Bachmann, Gary North and other theocratic authoritarians. Such a book would be dishonest. And I suspect some on the Left would lap it up as indicative of the conservative movement. It wouldn't be accurate but it might be popular.

Shapiro can easily do the same thing simply by ignoring all people in the entertainment world who are not openly left-wing. Here is what I suspect happened. Shapiro decides to make money pimping to the Right again. He can't sell the virgin story again, he's too old and too married to make that fly. And, since the Right loves books bashing someone, he decides to bash Hollywood, a favorite target of the Right for decades. (Contrary to their love fest with the 1950s, the conservatives of the 50s didn't like Hollywood then either, which just illustrates the conservative tendency to consistently like whatever is old, even if they didn't like it when it was new.)

Shapiro then sits down and makes a list of the people he already knows are Left-wing and goes out of his way to interview them. The end result proves what he set out to prove. Which, of course, is precisely what you would expect.

Hollywood is far better than conservatives admit. It is often promoting freedom precisely in those areas where conservatives are enamored with Big Government. While conservatives were still supporting Jim Crow laws, white Southern racism, and "keeping those people in their place," Hollywood was depicting the drama of what happens when you allow racism to dominate politics. Hollywood, not conservatives, was on the side of freedom in that battle. While conservatives were engaging in their "polite" anti-Semitism, while ignoring the more vile kinds that would break out in Right-wing circles, it was Hollywood exposing this sordid bigotry in films like Gentleman's Agreement (1947). Again conservatives were supporting the violation of individual rights while Hollywood took the right side of the battle. Today, slimy toadies of the Right, like Shapiro, are beating the anti-gay drum for what it is worth. Hollywood first portrayed gay people as normal human beings, something that horrified the Right. Hollywood was correct, the Right was wrong, again!

I don't think weasels like Ben Shapiro have a leg to stand on. They are big government advocates themselves, just as long as it's big moralistic, Bible-wielding, intolerant government. For them to chastise Hollywood is ludicrous since their own track record promoting individual rights is so damn pathetic.

And, in closing, Hollywood is market driven. The TV shows that conservatives love to hate tend to be popular and that drives the Right nuts. Glee makes money but conservatives see it as imposition on them, a violation of their rights to control what other people watch. Ditto for the various shows they hate. Yes, now and then, they hate a show that bombs and then they crow this proves they were right. But Hollywood continues to make billions year after year because, more often than not, they sell what the public wants to see. Hate the culture if you want, but don't ignore that it is markets at work, the very markets conservative pretend to support.

How surprising is this? Not much, really.

California State Senator Roy Ashburn, a Republican, "has reportedly voted against every gay rights measure in the state senate since taking office", says KGPE news in Fresno, the local CBS affiliate. Ashburn was arrested last night for drunk driving. Of course, there's more.

Ashburn was pulled over, driving a state issued vehicle (as if State Senators can't afford their own cars). Ashburn was pulled over because of erratic driving. It was around 2 am. He failed a field sobriety test and his alcohol level later was shown to be .14. Ashburn was not alone. He had another man in the car with him, who has not been identified because he was not arrested.

Various media outlets are reporting that Ashburn, and apparently his male friend, had just left a well-known gay club in Sacramento. However, the manager of the club says she doesn't remember seeing him there. Ashburn, a divorced "family values" Republican, has admitted he was drunk. He has said he was sorry for his actions. But so far, he has not said a word about the reports that he and his male friend had just a gay club together. Ashburn didn't show up on the floor of the legislature today and is not returning phone calls. As of this morning, Monday, March 8, Ashburn admits he is gay.

UPDATE: Apparently we need to look at the Vatican, which is now tangled in another gay sex scandal. Angelo Balducci held the Vatican post of The Gentleman of His Holiness, an elite position within the Vatican. Balducci apparently used Ghinedu Ehiem, a member of the choir for St. Peter's Basilica, within the Vatican, to secure prostitutes. Actually it appears that the young men so procured were not necessarily prositutes but did prostitute themselves. Some of the men were studying for priesthood, others appear to have been choir members, and others were immigrants desperate to secure legal status in the country.

Other sources say that Ehiem, and his assistate at the choir, Lorenzo Renzi, both helped secure males for sexual purposes. One wiretap, set up during a corruption investigation, has Renzi telling one male "You'll get up to 2,000 euors... Do not touch his balls. You need the money. Put on some music, take out the [inaudible], swallow the Viagra, and adelante." European papers are reporting that Ehiem has admitted he pimped men for Balducci and instructed "to do it in great secrecy."

Hates "deviate" sex — you know what that means.

To paraphrase someone: Before you point out the deviance in your brother's sex life remove the kink from your own. Not exactly what was said, but it is the same principle. Unfortunately the political Right seems to have a hard time learning that lesson.

Take the antics of Rod Jetton. Jetton is the former house speaker in Missouri and a conservative Republican. His father is a Southern Baptist minister, Jetton attended a Baptist university (oxymoronic as that may sound). After leaving office he started something called Common Sense Conservative Consulting. Jetton is now known for two incidents.

The first incident was in 2007. Jetton had the chair of the Committee on Crime Prevention and Public Safety removed from his position as punishment. The chair, Scott Lipke, had included a revision in a law that revoked the law making it a criminal offense to have gay sex in Missouri. Like your typical Southern Baptist Neanderthal, Jetton explained in great detail why he had to punish Lipke.

He wrote Lipke "chose to use the bill to delete 14 words from our laws in order to repeal the gay sex ban in Missouri. Thanks to that deletion, it is now legal to engage in deviate sexual intercourse with someone of the same sex here in Missouri. This law had been on our books for decades."Jetton bragged: "I have fought attempts by liberals to repeal the gay sex ban for years..." It should be noted that gay sex was legal regardless since the Supreme Court ruled sodomy laws unconstitutional. But don't pay attention to the facts. I suspect that Jetton regrets using the term "deviate sexual intercourse."

It appears that Mr. Jetton is no stranger to "deviate sexual intercourse" himself. Here is how the story goes so far, in regards to the second incident.

Jetton, who divorced his wife (in violation of what Southern Baptist's call Biblical principles) was having sex with a woman. Actually he was having a "deviant" one-night stand with the woman that combined violence with sex. The woman says that he gave her some wine that he brought (another sin by Southern Baptist standards) which she thinks included a date rape drug as she started losing consciousness. Jetton began hitting her and choking her while having sex with her.

One newspaper blog says: "The woman says that she and Jetton talked about having sex when they were on the phone earlier in the day, but that she and Jetton had never dated or been in relationship before the night of Nov. 15. She told the detective that... she and Jetton agreed on a safe word of 'green balloons' to use to stop sexual relations."

Okay! Now let's unravel this for a second. First, safe words are something used by people into sadomasochism. To each their own, but dude, that isn't your everyday sexual intercourse. It's pretty "deviant" by most standards—not that I care if people voluntarily inflict pain as a form of pleasure. But it didn't seem so voluntary here. So, Jetton had made it clear, in advance, that he preferred violent sex thus requiring a "safe word" for the woman to use to stop the violence when it went too far. But the woman says that because she was unconscious from the wine Jetton provided that she couldn't use the word to stop his violent intercourse. That makes it rape as well as kinky.

As tolerant as I am on such matters, I do find it disturbing that a man enjoys choking a woman while having sex with her.

After the incident, when the woman complained about what he had done to her, he allegedly told her: "You should have said 'green balloons.'"

Let us also note that the couple had not previously met. That indicates that they "hooked up" through some sort of sex hotline, Internet group, or ad that caters to people seeking sex. So this wasn't even a relationship, just a screw. Again, if adults want to do that, it's not my business. I just note that it violates the Christian conservative values that Jetton was so hot about. Add in the violent nature of his sex life, which most conservative Christians would find appalling, and it becomes clear that Jetton is a major hypocrite.

Just the fact that Jetton had thought of using "safe words" in his sexual encounters implies that he was experienced in violent sex, or at least spent some time researching how to have sadomasochistic sex.

We have someone who divorced his wife, in violation of Baptist morality. He pushed wine on a woman, also a violation. And it may have been wine that he drugged. He was not married to the woman but went there to have sex, again in violation of Biblical morality. And his sex involves violence and choking the woman. And this man had the audacity to preach against "deviate sexual intercourse" for gay people!

Like so many hypocritical, sexually-obsessed conservatives Jetton immediately announces that now that he has been arrested he will "spend more time with his family." How predictable. Why do these conservatives assume their family wants them to spend more time with them just because they got caught violating the very "biblical morality" that want to impose on others? Of course, we now know why Jetton wants to use state power to force his sexual values on others—he likes combining sex and force. You could say that he gets his sexual kicks imposing his will on others. So all this time, when people thought he was standing up for God, Country, Mother and Apple Pie, he was really proposing the use of force because that's how he gets his rocks off. Lovely man.

Photo: His booking photo from his arrest.

Politician, "family values" man, sex fiend.

Mike Duvall is one of those Theopublicans, that combination of a Republican and a theocrat. Duvall had a reputation because he was strongly opposed to equal marriage rights for gay couples. Duvall shouted that his position was because he supports traditional family values. The Religious-Right group, Capitol Resource Institute, praised Duvall as a “consistent trooper” who “has voted time and time again to protect and preserve family values in California.” Remember, that in Christianese, that family doesn’t mean family, not in the sense most people mean. It only means hetereosexuals. Apparently gay people are without families.

Duvall was, as expected, a supporter of the hateful Proposition 8. He is a Christian, who would have prayer in public in the state assembly. He was also something of a sex fiend and a pervert, as least by “family values” standards.

Mr. Duvall was sitting a meeting room at the state capitol chatting with someone. The microphone in front of him was on as the hearing was about to be broadcast. Duvall launched into a bragging sessions about screwing two women, neither of whom are his wife. To make it worse, it appears that one of them, and possibly both of them, are lobbyists in Sacramento. So, instead of giving Duvall inappropriate cash bribes to vote their way, they apparently were giving him a horizontal rumba instead. Duvall bragged about cheating on his wife and, in the same conversation, bragged about cheating on his mistress as well. But hey, they’re women, so he’s still a “family values” kind of guy.

Duvall got caught. Of course many “family values” politicians just haven’t been caught—yet. Duvall apologized, but not for the affairs, not for the inappropriate relationships with a lobbyist, not for cheating on his wife, but for “the comments I made in what I believed to be a private conservation.” So he’s sorry he said something and got caught but not sorry about lying to his wife, lying to his mistress, or any the violtions of common sense ethics for a politician. He’s just sorry he said something, not sorry he did something.

Duvall whined: “This is a private matter and I asked that everyone respect the privacy of all involved.” Really! What cheek!

Duvall is a conservative and today’s religiously-obsessed Right do not believe that one’s sex life is a “private matter.” Mr. Duvall has regularly voted on policies making the private lives of others a matter of state concern. You would think that whether two people marry one another is a “private matter” that ought to be left to “all involved.” Mr. Duvall said it wasn’t. He wanted state legislation banning some couples from making that “private” decision.

This is typical of conservatives. Their sex life is a private matter. Your sex life is a matter of state regulation.

I’m glad this moralistic, two-faced, lying theocrat has resigned his office. He deserves the shame and the ridicule. But, since he chose to use his state office to bed a lobbyist who was employed to secure his votes, I suggest that much more ought to be coming. Duvall ought to face legal charges. No one seems to think these female lobbyists were screwing Duvall because of his looks or physique—he’s fat and old. But he had what every lobbyist wants—a vote in the state assembly. And that changes the dynamics. I suggest the lobbyists traded sex for influence and Duvall traded influence for sex. It was an act of prostitution with both Duvall and the lobbyists all playing the whore.

I just wish some of these Republicans would start talking about how sex is a “private matter” before they caught in some scandal.

Photo: Duvall: it was Brad Pitt looks that got him screwed.

Conservative money corrupts libertarian thinking.

Over the years institutions evolve, change or slide away from their original purpose. It is inevitable, sometimes good, and sometimes not so good.

One depressing change in recent years is with the Atlas Foundation. Atlas began as a libertarian-oriented, free-market foundation that was there to help think tanks around the world with similar purposes.

But in recent years Atlas has begun to heavily rely on one specific donor or family, that is the money coming from John Templeton’s foundation or estate. As they have taken millions and millions from Templeton they started pandering to Templeton’s religious bias and prejudices.

The Templeton family, it might be noted, was a major contributor to viciously bigoted Prop 8 campaign in California. John Templeton Jr, (the father is deceased) is no libertarian. He is a conservative who gave $900,000 to the Prop 8 campaign. Josephine Templeton, his wife, gave another $300,000. This makes the Templetons the largest individual donors to this campaign. Their individual donations were almost equal to the sum donated by the Catholic Knights of Columbus, which has millions of members.

Atlas was not particularly conservative for decades. Now that Templeton is paying the piper it appears he is calling the tune. He may not explicitly demand that Atlas toe the Religious Right line but Atlas has begun to move in that direction – something that was previously anathema to libertarians.

Atlas was, and is, a major sponsor of the Acton Institute run by former faith healer, evangelical, gay community organizer, and now Catholic priest, Bob Sirico. Sirico ran fundamentalist faith healing meetings until he came out as gay. Then he moved on to the Metropolitan Community Churches and started running the Gay Community Center in Hollywood. Then he read Atlas Shrugged and became a libertarian. He was also one of the first ministers in the country to perform gay marriages as early as 1975. Sirico’s outfit started out as an organization that was going to sell free market ideas to the religious community. But it also got involved in “morals” campaigns.

Acton officials got heavily involved in the debate on gay marriage. With Sirico back in the closet (though some conservatives don’t think so) the position they have been taking has been to pander to bigots on the Religious Right. The rather odious Jennifer Roback Morse (Jenny to her friends, which I am no longer) is heavily involved in Acton affairs and she was a major spokesman for the antigay cause that Templeton was funding. Other Acton officials published op-eds in newspapers attacking the idea of either civil unions or gay marriage at all.

All of them forget that their beloved Father Bob performed same-sex marriages. And in one press interview at the time Sirico told the reporter “I’m hoping to be married to a beautiful man in Los Angeles whose work is translating for the deaf.” By 1977 Sirico was listed by the LA Times as the “organizer of Libertarians for Gay Rights. When it was later revealed that the ACLU once cooperated with the FBI in building files on radicals Sirico told the Times: “We turn out to be to the left of the ACLU.” Sirico then outlined the libertarian position to the Times (as he held to it then):

He listed five areas where the Libertarians and “liberals” are in agreement: deregulation of drug manufacture, possession and use; decriminalizing of prostitution and pornography; extending rights to homosexuals, and allowing mental patients to be free if they don’t break any law.

“Conservatives are trying to use pornography and (stirring up a reaction to) gay rights to turn America around, to conservatize America,” he said. Los Angeles Times, Sept 26, 1977 (attached, click to enlarge).

By the 1980s Sirico was back in the Catholic fold and now a Paulist priest. Apparently he was concerned about spreading free-market ideas among religious folk and Atlas and Templeton were his sources for funding. When Sirico tried to go back into the closet is hard for me to determine. But certainly by the time he was taking money from the anti-gay Templeton network it would have been prudent for him to be closeted. Certainly by 1997 Sirico was criticizing another priest for telling his congregation that he was gay. Sirico told the Grand Rapids Press that honesty about the matter was “irresponsible” and that the priest should have kept it a secret between him and a few close friends. The paper wrote:

"I think this kind of thing is irresponsible," said the Rev. Robert Sirico, president of the Grand Rapids-based Acton Institute, a conservative think tank. A priest should discuss his sexual orientation with a counselor or close friend, not with his congregation. Sirico said, "The priest as a celibate is called to sublimate his sexuality," Sirico said. "Too much talk in that direction indicated a breach of the pastoral boundary."

It should be noted that some conservative Catholic groups are not happy with Sirico because of his past but also because many of them do not believe his claim to be celibate these days. One anti-Sirico organization implies rather strongly that Sirico is involved in a relationship with a Father David Grondz. Grondz and Sirico live together in a house (left) shared with two other priests. Given Sirico's public position that a priest should not be honest with the public about his sexual orientation it would be difficult to assume any answers he gives on the matter would be forthright.

None of this history has prevented Sirico from acting in a very antigay manner or allowing his Acton associates from doing so. Sirico, as we saw, was attacking another priest for honestly admitting to being gay. When Prop 8 was being funded by the Templeton network (who fund Sirico as well) we saw Roback, who is on the Acton Institute Board of Advisors, running around California demanding that gays be treated as second class citizens based on hyper-Catholic fundamentalism.

When New Zealand was debating, and eventually passing, civil unions for gay couples an Acton staff member, Samuel Gregg was sending op-eds to the Kiwi press. Gregg was taking the conservative, not the libertarian position. He said that “discrimination is not unjust” and “denying such benefits [to gay couples] is not unjust.” He dismisses the claim “that a homosexual couple’s relationship can be equal to a man and woman’s relationship.” Gregg, instead of present libertarian ideas presents hard-core Catholicism says that marriage has one purpose only and that is “procreating and raising children.” He says: “By definition, homosexual relationships are incapable of service such an end.”

Gregg goes further than promoting the Catholic view, forged in antiquated theology. He says, “legal recognition [of gay couples] might actually constitute discrimination against all those exclusive, enduring, dependent relationships that also lack a non-procreative, indeed non-sexual dimension, such as an unmarried son caring for his invalid father.” Gregg already dismissed the idea that this is similar to any loving life-long partnership simply because it does not produce children. All sex, in Catholic teaching, must be procreative or it is sinful. All Gregg is doing is claiming that Catholic theology (and this is uniquely Catholic) must have the force of law.

Gregg ended his piece claiming that giving any legal rights to gay couples “appear[s] contrary to justice’s demands and society’s common good.”

Roback-Morse has also published publicly using her “Acton” credentials as a “senior fellow at the Acton Institute” to attack equality for gay couples. Morse was particular dishonest in her piece repeating claims that the Templeton funded Prop 8 campaign made and which we debunked here long ago.

Morse claimed that legalized gay marriage brought “state regulation of other parts of society” and used as examples the wedding photographer in New Mexico, the Methodist social center in New Jersey and Catholic Charities in Boston. There is no gay marriage in New Mexico so how was that related? Morse intentionally muddles cases based on anti-discrimination laws and claimed they were involved with gay marriage laws. They were completely unrelated and banning gay marriage wouldn’t solve that. But under her Acton credentials she published this lies in “America’s most complete Catholic newsweekly.” Apparently Morse’s hyper-Catholicism doesn’t say anything about not lying to the public.

One has to wonder if the substantial salary that Sirico receives, well in excess of $100,000, influences what Sirico allows to happen. Certainly the money that Acton receives comes largely from Templeton directly, or from Templeton indirectly through the Atlas Foundation.

Acton has also worked hard to subvert libertarian principles by convincing libertarians to basically become social conservatives. They wrote that libertarians “have an incentive to consider at least some policy activities of social conservatives as potentially justifiable and beneficial even within a libertarian framework.” Their argument is that a free society must have “social capital” which is widely defined as virtue, trust, etc. This then becomes “morals” which apparently then justifies a theocratic view on sex, pornography, drugs, prostitution, gambling, etc. By using vague concepts like “social capital” they convert the ideas like trust, which markets rewards and help encourage, into morals legislation that controls.

Acton also tells libertarians, falsely; that all conservatives have done is “attempt to preserve laws under attack by an activist judiciary.” That is a lie. Conservatives have also tried to prevent legislative change. Libertarianism is not inherently opposed to an activist judiciary if it is constrained by the views of the Constitution. Numerous libertarian legal scholars like Randy Barnett, Clint Bolick, and Stephen Macedo have written about that topic. Here Acton is again substituting the conservative position for the libertarian one and telling libertarians that the new view is really libertarian.

A Right-wing religious group called the Maxim Institute ran the campaign in New Zealand to deny equal treatment before the law for gay couples. Maxim was explicitly anti-free market and attacked Milton Friedman when he died. Maxim said Friedman was "simplistic" and said he ignored the "social good". They say that "the individualist view, espoused by Friedman" is just as wrong as the collectivist view mainly because it ignores the desire of theocrats like Maxim to impose Christian morality by the force of law. They couch their theocracy with left-wing phrases like "the interconnectedness of community and the relational nature of human society." Apparently this interconnectedness means they gain the right to use state imposed violence to make people obey their moral agenda.

Maxim has run campaigns exclusively on socially conservative issues. It has never taken an explicitly libertarian position on anything. Maxim spent most their budget in two years to combat the legalization of brothels and the civil unions legislation.

These campaigns were funded, in part, with money that Atlas Foundation gave them. In fact this money was just Templeton money channeled through Atlas. In 2005 alone Maxim received three “awards” from Atlas for their anti-libertarian positions.

…The US-based Atlas Economic Research Foundation awarded Maxim Institute three Templeton Freedom Prizes, for: Institute Excellence (1st place) Social Entrepreneurship (2nd place) and Initiative in Public Relations (2nd place).

Some of the awards, which are all accompanied by healthy doses of Templeton money, were precisely for Maxim pushing an anti-gay, morally conservative position. Maxim was doing nothing else at the time. Atlas had begun openly funding anti-liberty campaigns by the Religious Right. This, no doubt, satisfied the ultra-Right views of the Templeton family. But it represented a substantial betrayal by Atlas of their previous role in promoting libertarianism. On the Atlas website they acknowledged that Maxim got funds because they “conducted comprehensive research into pending legislation on civil unions that threatened to weaken the nuclear family.”
Acton also lies when they say: “Social conservatives have not fought for some new regime of moral authority at the expense of freedom. Rather, they have tried to save the old one because of the educational effect of law.” So drug laws don’t incarcerate people or strip them of their rights it merely educates them. Apparently arresting people for sodomy is merely educational not a violation of rights.

To a degree conservatives are fighting to defend an old order, which is what conservatives do. Such is the nature of conservatism. But when did the "old order" become necessarily libertarian. Conservatives were defending the old moral order when it denied blacks equal rights. They are now defending the old moral order when it denies gay couples the rights that other couples have. But defending the old moral order is precisely why libertarians condemn conservatives, even conservatives like the Acton crowd who pretend to be libertarians.

Another notorious socially conservative outfit is the Sutherland Institute. They are so antigay that they didn't want gay people to have the right to visit their partners in hospital. Granting even that legal right, they contend, is a trick. Any recognition of the rights of gay couples, they say, means that gay marriage will eventually be recognized and that shocks them. They have also worked closely with the new agenda of Atlas. In 2004 Atlas and Sutherland hosted a conference in Utah which brought together anti-gay, social conservatives like Daniel Lapin, Samuel Gregg of Acton, and Greg Fleming of the Maxim Institute.

What is clear is that Templeton money is corrupting libertarian think tanks and individuals. Templeton has worked hard to push a religious agenda. Atlas did not previously cater to the Religious Right. It was quite openly secular. And while it focused on economic issues it was not opposed to social liberty. It certainly never actively funded a Right-wing moralistic agenda until they gave money to the notorious Maxim Institute. For most of its history Atlas didn’t try to merge religion and politics.

In recent years, with large amounts of Templeton money funding Atlas and its programs it has drifted further and further from libertarian shores toward the choppy, open waters of social conservatism. One indication has been how Atlas regularly ties their annual conference for think tanks to those held by the conservative, religious-right Heritage Foundation. Even there, where Heritage was constantly invoking God and having public prayers, Atlas did no such thing – until this year. Now they are sending a message to the Religious Right and the Templeton family that they are on board. At the Atlas Liberty Forum in Los Angeles they have announced an excursion for participants to the “award-winning Gospel Brunch” of “live music” and dining “sure to excite the senses and ignite the soul.” The entire thrust of this breakfast is “different gospel groups from around the region”. As the Gospel Brunch site says: “Praise the Lord and pass the biscuits?”
The demand for such a “Gospel Brunch” among the Atlas circle of think tanks, I would think, would be rather low. Atlas works with a worldwide network of think tanks. Despite the funding of Maxim, few of these other think tanks explicitly adopt a Christianist viewpoint. Most Atlas affiliates in Europe are run by individuals who see themselves as secular. Some might be nominal Christian, most not even that. A large percentage of them would call themselves atheists or agnostic. In other parts of the world the Atlas affiliated think tanks are run by secular oriented Hindus or Buddhists and even Muslims.

Promoting a “Gospel Brunch” to the Atlas affiliates makes little sense. The demand for such a thing is not coming from the affiliates. Some, I suspect, will be downright stunned at the idea and even a few offended. Why Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, atheists or Hindus would be interested in promoting the Gospel is not immediately clear. Certainly outside the United States I would guess that the majority of the heads of Atlas affiliates are not Christians and fewer still would be anything more than nominal Christians. Is Atlas just letting the Templetons know they are willing to bend libertarianism in order to receive conservative money?

The conversion of genuine libertarian groups into conservative groups is happening before our eyes. At first the libertarians decide they want conservative money. To get that cash they start to downplay the issues that divide libertarians from conservatives. Here and there they will make a token gesture toward libertarianism, but the civil liberties issues and foreign policy issues begin to disappear from the agenda. Eventually they disappear altogether.

At this point the groups still claim to be libertarian because they are not openly opposing libertarian viewpoints on these issues. They claim to be only focusing on economic issues and not on social issues. But over time the conservatives gain more and more control. The think tanks and groups then hire conservatives with Religious-Right motivations. But since it is only economics that is on the agenda they say this is justified. Slowly the theocratic tendencies of the Religious Right assert themselves.

Father Sirico is a perfect example. He went from a hard-core libertarian to promoting just the economic agenda. He then started covering up his past and went so far as to try to go back into the closet in regards to his own homosexuality. From pioneering gay marriage, to being silent on it, he now heads an organization with notorious antigay bigots who openly attack gay equality in the name of his organization.

I doubt that Sirico changed his personal views that much. But the funding from Templeton and other antigay bigots is very lucrative. We don’t see Sirico attacking gay people, and I doubt we will. But his underlings do the job instead.

Eventually these “libertarian” think tanks become conservative think tanks. Acton clearly is not libertarian anymore but actively promoting a conservative agenda. One reason is the funding and the Templeton money is a big part of that. Atlas, unfortunately, seems to be moving in that direction. For years it was simply silent on social freedom and concentrated on economics. In funding Maxim they finally financed a group that was not pushing economic freedom at all (they derided it in fact) but pushed nothing but a pure Religious-Right moral agenda.

Now Atlas is promoting a “Gospel Brunch” which makes no sense given the nature of the groups that have affiliated with them. While this may be baffling, or even offensive, to some in the Atlas network, it will send a positive message to the Templeton network and that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And to think I thought they were anti-prostitution when they funded Maxim.

Note: For the full context of what we wrote about Maxim and their "eulogy" for Milton Friedman, go here.

Images: 1) John Templeton; 2) a press clipping showing Sirico performing the gay marriage; 3) the LA Times article on the radical Sirico and 4) the house that Sirico shares, 5) the Atlas promotion on the Gospel Brunch.

When Jonah swallowed the whale

Right-wing pundit Jonah Goldberg had a swipe at the idea that libertarians and progressives (who he insists on calling liberals) have something in common. He says the idea that there is this belief that "social liberalism and the social aspect of libertarianism are one and the same."

Mr. Goldberg says "I do not dispute that there is much overlap between libertarian views and Democratic views on social issues. But the overlap isn't nearly as transparent as it is between conservatives and libertarians on economic issues."

Apparently Mr. Goldberg hasn't been paying attention. It has been a long time indeed since there was any meaningful overlap between "conservatives and libertarians on economic issues." Conservatives do NOT believe in depoliticized markets. And we have enough years of conservative rule in this country to prove that. Conservatives, like Democrats want politically-controlled markets. They just think that a corporatist agenda makes that "capitalism". Hence they smear capitalism in the process. The economic policies of the Left and of conservatives differs very little in practice.

If the last four terms of the presidency are an example then the Democrats are more free market than the Republicans -- though I'm sure Mr. Obama will try to trump GW's disgusting record.

More bizarre is Goldberg's assertion that if you are "an economic conservative ... you are a libertarian on 95% of the relevant issues." Actually this is false. If you are a conservative then you are out there advocating spending on lots of issues that libertarians would oppose. You will tax and spend for the war, tax and spend for the drug war, tax and spend for the phony war on terror, and tax and spend to harass landscapers and busboys who are here without state permission.

It is impossible to be a conservative and support a free market. Conservatives want oodles of regulations on the market -- they always have. Some products they want banned outright, such as drugs and porn. They will spend billions in tax funds to fight those wars. The funding of their moral campaign relies on government confiscating the wealth of the free market in order to impose their moral agenda. If you take government spending on drugs, government spending on military adventurism and government spending to stop Mexicans seeking work in America, we are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions.

How can Jonah say that conservatives are 95% a libertarian if they are willing to steal billions from the productive economy just on those three measures alone?

Look at other ways the conservative social agenda promotes Big Government. To harass busboys and gardeners the conservatives have pushed for mandatory state ID in order to be employed. In other words, they say that government has to be between every employer in the country and their potential employees. Government has to monitor employers and use state force in order to "enforce the law". Government has to be prepared to arrest businessmen and incarcerate them if they don't obey conservative regulations. Have you seen what you are legally required to do just to open a checking account these days? All that was imposed by conservatives in Washington.

The dishonesty of the conservative is that he pretends his moral agenda doesn't impinge on free markets. Conservatives pretend that these are such separate categories that they can call themselves free marketers while they are regulation labor markets, banning the ownership of certain private property, forbidding the sales of specific items, and incarcerating people who are involved in the free trade of products that Jesus would frown upon.

As has been said of prostitution: its a combination of sex and free enterprise -- which do you oppose? The conservative moral agenda requires the violation of property rights, restrictions on labor markets, and massive amounts of taxation. Plain and simple, conservatives put their moralistic outrages ahead of free markets.

Goldberg says that libertarians "make a terrible mistake when they assume that a few shared values about what constitutes 'social goods' or 'tolerance' means that libertarians and liberals (sic) actually share a common vision of the role of government."

Actually very few libertarians, if any, think that. What they think is that modern day progressives have more in common with libertarians than modern day conservatives. The few issues that conservatives were supposedly good on (taxes, regulations, etc.) are out the window. In office conservatives abandoned the few issues where we had some commonality. In other words, the modern day conservative doesn't even have a few issues of commonality with libertarians. Conservatives have proven themselves worthless when it comes to economics. Maybe in the opposition they have a chance at improving -- only time will tell.

We libertarians realize that progressives have some flaws in their social agenda. But some flaws in their social agenda is better than the conservative agenda which is flawed throughout. Many progressives have abandoned the worst fallacies of progressivism. Unfortunately the religious rot in conservatism has yet to be rejected. Progressives learned a few lessons from their errors but conservatives haven't. They are still sucking up to the bigoted assholes in Christian fundamentalism.

What Goldberg ignores is the ability to communicate with many progressives. In my experience talking to a progressive is easier than talking to a conservative. Progressives know little about economics but they can learn. And we can sit down and debate the issues and argue from evidence.

But conservatism today is infested with religious lunatics who are immune to reason and logic. There is no common ground for discussion. They spout their hate about gays and argue that God wants them kept at the back of the bus. They will make assertions of facts about gay marriage but when those are refuted they don't care. In the end they will say that the facts don't matter, only God's will matters. And they have a direct line to the Almighty and he has told them precisely who he hates and why they should hate them too. Evidence doesn't matter. They have such disdain for facts and evidence that they think nothing of making it up to further their hate-filled agenda, as we saw in the Prop 8 campaign.

How does a libertarian talk to a religious conservative? You can't use logic since logic can't trump "God's word". And facts are worthless to them. The 200 years of accumulated evidence supporting evolution barely dents their armour. Evidence can't be taken as more important that the Bible or the Book of Mormon. They are happy to chuck out centuries of scientific testing and retesting in order to cling to the dusty pages of a manuscript written by men who didn't understand the most basic facts of reality.

In addition Mr. Goldberg ignores the war mongering tendencies of the conservative movement, and with good reason. War has long divided libertarians from conservatives. And while many leaders in the Obama administration are just as damn awful as conservatives on war there is a significant number of the rank and file progressives who share the libertarian aversion to empire building. The conservative rank and file is not nearly so keen on issues like peace.

Sure there are major differences between progressives and libertarians. But I would argue the gap between these two camps, when it comes to the issues, is less than the gap between libertarians and conservatives. When it comes to basic principles of logic, evidence, and reasoning the gap between libertarians and progressives is not large. But a Grand Canyon of ignorance separates the conservative movement of today from libertarians.

The simple fact is that conservatives are lousy allies for libertarians. They always have been lousy allies. If the conservatives ever decide to throw out the morons from the Moral Majority wing of the GOP then there may be some possibility of dialogue. In the meantime I'd rather try to talk to people who still value some of the basic principles of logic and who don't think that "divine revelation" trumps the Bill of Rights. I consider it a whale of a lie to think conservatives and libertarians have common ground but it is a lie that Jonah is willing to swallow.

Right wing confab honors gay porn star.

We all know about the CPAC conference, the big conference of Right-wing luminaries that is held every year. It was hear that Screech Coulter went into her tirade about John Edwards being a faggot. It was also here that they honored Corporal Matt Sanchez with the Jeane Kirkpatrict Academic Freedom Award. In fact here is Sanchez with the Screech herself.



But it seems that try as hard they want the Right can’t get away from the gay issue. Apparently the man the conservatives just honored is a gay porn star. Or was a gay porn star. I don’t know if he is gay or not. But he supposedly sold his sexual services to men at one time. (This is supposedly the ad he used to do so.) We do know he had sex with men and that is enough to have him thrown out of the military.

Now I would like to see the Right deal with this. The man is worthy enough for them to give him an award but at the same time he shouldn’t be allowed in the military. We will see what Mr. Sanchez has to say about all this on his blog. We will also see what the military does about this. As far as I know Sanchez is not denying the story but confirming it. I suspect he won't be invited back to the Bill O'Reilly show. If you absolutely must see some evidence of Mr. Sanchez's career go here.

The Ann Coulter Cesspool

I certainly do remember the first time I had heard of Ann Coulter. It was a few years ago and I was flying into the United States to speak at a conference. I had not been to the US for several years. I landed at Los Angeles and went into a bookstore at the airport.

There was a row of the newest conservative books. Previously I had a relatively healthy respect for conservatives in spite of various disagreements. I leaned Republican, by which I mean in a normal race I would prefer to see the Republican win over the Democrat. I had read Buckley frequently, read National Review, Human Events and even had a membership in the Conservative Book Club though I did not consider myself a conservative.

I don’t remember which book of Coulter’s was out that day. They all seem pretty interchangeable to me. I picked it up and started reading. And I was shocked. One of the things conservatives had always claimed was that they were the defenders of honor, tradition, civilization, etiquette, and civility. Coulter was dishonorable, uncivilized, rude and vile.

I had older views of what it meant “to be a lady” and Ann Coulter was no lady. Nor is she a gentleman. She lacked every one of the graces that I associated with being a decent human being.

I was shocked by her dishonesty. I am fairly well informed on what people think or don’t think. I read vociferously from across the political spectrum and I kept finding that she misquoted, misstated or invented comments from her opponents. She twisted things into grotesque distortions. I saw no necessity to lie. Ann Coulter apparently saw no necessity to tell the truth.

I was taken aback that she would stoop to slander as a form of argument. Conservatives argued that thinking was important. I was used to individuals who would take what the Left was saying and carefully analysis it and dissect it and repudiate it. But Coulter was the stereotype of the brainless blond bimbo. She never engaged her opponents intellectually. I can only assume this was due to a lack of ability on her part. Those who think argue, those who can’t think slander.

It was as if all intellectual argument was too difficult for her to grasp. Instead she slandered, smeared and attacked. And hers were dishonest attacks, not based on reality but based on her twisted view of others.

She writes with such bitterness and hatred that one wonders what kind of demons she faces herself. Her venomous tirades are so utterly devoid of human decency that one can only conclude that she is a very unhappy individual intent on inflicting her misery on others.

She seems to find a particular need to attack gay men perhaps because she so often looks like a badly done drag queen. Al Gore, she announced,was a “total fag”. At a recent hate festival for the Right she spit out the comment: “I was going to comment on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the world faggot, so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.”

There was a time that words like faggot, nigger and such were reserved to the uncultured, uncouth, lower classes, particularly those with a penchant for boozing and scraping in the gutters. Now the conservative movement holds it up as the epitome of intellectual debate. Hate Buckley if you want but at least he was civilized and if he insisted on insults he usually did them in a somewhat cultured way -- his exception, and low point, was his vile attacks on Ayn Rand when she died.

But Coulter never gets out of the gutter. She seems incapable of logic and fairness. And she is devoid of writing talent. I love a well constructed sentence or paragraph. The beauty and inspiration of words is something I appreciate. It is something that, now and then, I manage to accomplish but not nearly as oft as I wish. But with Coulter there was never any beauty in what she wrote. Her words were perfect reflections of her own personality.

Her words were scratchy, her logic emaciated, her books steeped in make-up to hid the true ugliness underneath. Her screeds are bitter tirades that scream loneliness and boil over with hatred and contempt. She writes the conservative equivalent of pornography and not even the run of the mill kind of porn. Hers is packed with violence and disgusting perversions.

What makes Coulter so bitter? I don’t know. A lesbian friend of mine suggested that Coulter could be a closet case. Certainly when someone regularly uses crude words for gay people as a term of slander I start to wonder. She is unmarried but that doesn’t necessarily surprise me. I see what’s she like after she’s had the full day to prepare and I can understand why no sane man (or woman for that matter) would wish to crawl into bed with her. She could bath in gravy and a German shepherd would still head for the hills. I couldn’t imagine sleeping with her next to me. One would stay awake all night with one eye askew lest she sink her fangs into one’s jugular to feed.

Now I will confess there is one aspect of Coulter I appreciate. I believe the new theocratically inclined Right is a danger to individual rights, limited government, free markets and social tolerance. I think they are a threat to decency. Ann Coulter is on their side. So many in the modern Right are mimicking her and the more vicious they become the more they disgust the voting public. It is people like Ann Coulter, Fred Phelps, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and others who are infesting the Right with irrational, indecent, rhetoric. And that alienates people.

They are so ugly in their temperaments that they make it almost impossible for the civil, the humane and the decent to cast a vote for the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan built up the modern conservative movement with his devotion to the concept of individual liberty and his basic personal decency. He preferred his wit and humor to verbal assaults. Coulter despises liberty and baths herself in the most indecent of rhetoric. She, and those like her, are dismantling the conservative movement and putting it out with the trash in the gutter -- a place she knows so well.

So Ann, keep up the good work. There are still a few people who actually believe that conservatism is about decency and civility and the higher virtues of Western civilizaiton. A few more speeches by you and that myth ought to be dead once and for all. If I were the Left, instead of trying to fund Air America, I’d be running radio stations that are all-Ann Coulter, all day, 7 days a week. But what I find really amusing is that modern conservatives are so detached from reality and sanity that they actually think she is helping them. I guess that is even better. They are undermining their own cause by promoting her.

So dear Republican friends. Give Ann a hand. I would think you can find her books remaindered for pennies on the dollar. Buy they by the hundreds. Hand them out. Learn her rhetoric by heart and repeat it often. if you father is a Democrat call him a “faggot”. if you sister is worried about global warming tell her that she’s a genocidal Nazi wanting to exterminate Jews. Spare no one. I want to see a conservative movement that is made up of Ann Coulter clones. Nothing would kill the conservative Right faster.

Prominent conservative wants alliance with Islamists against the West.

How morally bankrupt has the modern American conservative movement become? More than I ever dreamed. Since the rise of shrill, non-intellectuals like Ann Coulter the American Right has become shriller and shriller and ever more incoherent. The love for liberty that one found in Goldwater and Reagan has vanished. Today’s Right is inspired more by an intense hatred for “the Left” even on those few issues where the Left is pro-freedom.

The American Right has become the caricature that the far Left painted of them. If the Left is for something then they are against it. Certainly the Left has used this insulting reactionary label for decades and most of the time it was false. Now it is true. And one of the best cases for it is the insanity of Dinesh D’Souza. D’Souza wasn’t always insane. In fact some of his early writing was fairly good and worthwhile. But he has also penned some crap. But the pile of crap got much bigger and deeper with his newest book The Enemy Within.

Now imagine a Leftist arguing the following case in 1955. “The Communists hate America. They hate America because of economic inequality, poverty, etc.” Fairly typical Left-wing rhetoric. But if they then said: “The best response to these attacks on America is for us to abandon economic freedom and impose socialist redistribution of wealth. If what offends the communists is economic freedom then we can end this Cold War easily. All we have to do is give up economic freedom” Well you can imagine what the Right would have to say about that.

They would attack this as pure insanity. It would be deemed treasonous and surrendering to the worst aspects of the Communists. But that would appear to be the D’Souza strategy.

What I mean is that in his newest Coulteresque book (they supposedly used to date so perhaps she infected him) D’Souza says that America can defeat Islamic extremism by giving up social freedom. And he thinks we ought to do this since Christian conservatives don’t like social freedom anyway.

D’Souza gave an interview to National Review Online where he outlined his theory of surrendering to Islamic fundamentalism. He first dismisses what he calls “illusions” such as “radical Muslims are against modernity and science and democracy” or that they “are upset because of colonialism and the Crusades.” These views, says D’Souza, are “all rubbish”. See they aren’t upset about American support for Israel -- what upsets them is that we don’t stone homosexuals to death.


American social freedom means, “Muslims must rise up in a defensive jihad against America because their religion and their values are under attack.” What does he mean by “under attack”. He means that the Western countries don’t embrace fundamentalist Islamic moral values, values shared by the fundamentalist Christians for the most part. But how is that an attack?

To D’Souza the fact that films, books, and American culture embrace social freedom is the same thing as attacking Muslims. I eat pork. Orthodox Jews don’t eat pork. Am I attacking their values because I eat a ham sandwich? By D’Souza’s insane logic I would be. Now most orthodox Jews recognize I’m not a Jew. I’m not forcing them to eat ham and they won’t force me to shun ham. We respect one another’s rights. The Islamist fundamentalists however does not embrace that central Western value -- tolerance for the equal liberty and rights of others. So he is offended when I don’t follow his moral code.

Because our women wear bathing suits on the beach, we let homosexuals live together, we don’t burn books (or heretics), outlaw alcohol, etc. we are “attacking” Islam. This is a complete distortion of the concept. Leaving them alone is not attacking them. If we are socially free that is some sort of cultural imperialism but if we give in to their moral values that isn’t. Do American films promote American social values? Of course. But I’ve not heard of anyone dragged into a cinema and forced to watch Brokeback Mountain. No one is imprisoning Muslims and making them listen to Western music or imposing Playboy on them at the point of the gun. If they listen to the music it is because they choose to do so. If they go to our movies or read Playboy or the Bible it is because they make that choice. It's called freedom.

This is the core hoax of D’Souza entire demand for America to join jihad. What upsets the Islamists is that many Muslims are adopting Western values. Hollywood can’t force cinemas to show their films. D’Souza and other theocrats might hate Will and Grace but no Islamic televisions station is forced at gunpoint to air the show. No one is forcing American books on Muslims. What upsets the Islamists is that Muslims around the world have been embracing Western values -- and with good reason. Like it or not Western values are better values. (You’d think that I wouldn’t have to preach that message to conservatives but then today’s conservatives are a rather disgusting lot at war with conservative history.) It is this voluntary acceptance of Western values among Muslims that upset Islamists.

D’Souza says he is not attacking classical liberalism. Rubbish, he is doing precisely that. He wants to form an alliance to strip people of the freedom to choose their own values. He thinks the old Tribal values should be imposed from the top down. He calls that freedom. Real freedom he calls force. Things are really distorted on the Right these days.

D’Souza wants us to surrender to the worst aspects of Islam. It is our fault, he says, that the Islamists hate America. We do terrible things. We don’t generally impose censorship so things get published which offend Muslims. We don’t jail homosexuals but give them rights. They can hold hands. That offends the Muslims. Our women are “loose” and immoral and that offends the Muslims. By being free we attack the Muslims. It’s our fault. If we had just embraced the Christianists values of Jerry Falwell then 9/11 would never have happened. We insulted Muslims by being socially liberal so we started the problem. We ought to surrender to the Islamists and stamp out social freedom.

D’Souza says that the Islamists “see the dimension of America that in their view corrupts the innocence of children, and undermines the family, and promotes homosexuality as a normal way of life. In fact this is the America of the cultural Left. What the Left considers ‘liberating,’ much of the world considers a scandalous assault on modesty and decency.”

Rhetorical overkill. In fact it’s bullshit. The Islamist world may feel this way. But throughout much of the world the same socially liberal views are being adopted. America is still having epileptic fits over gay marriage. But recently two regions of Mexico adopted civil unions for gays, South Africa legalized gay marriage and most of the rest of Western nations are not on an anti-gay jihad. In Asia the trends are all in a socially liberal direction for the most part. Western freedom, social and economic, has been embraced because people want the right to control their own lives.

The fundamentalists, Christian and Islamic, want to control the lives of people for them. They are socialists of the soul. The believe that man’s private morals belong to the collective and the State must intervene to punish sins as a well as crimes. All D’Souza is doing is advocating a form of Statism -- he wants a moralistic Big Brother regulating the private lives of everyone.

The hold outs on social freedom are Islamic nations and the core supporters of George Bush -- the American fundamentalist. Most the world is not scandalized by American social values. Only Theopublicans and Islamists. Even the British Conservative Party endorses civil unions for gays. D’Souza is wrong.

D’Souza wants the Christian Right in America to forge an alliance with the Islamists. “Our concerns should be the traditional Muslims, who are the majority in the Muslim world. These people are also religious and socially conservative, and they are our natural allies. ...we as conservatives have no choice but to ally with the traditional Muslims. ...Our values are quite similar to those of traditional Muslims. ...The traditional Muslims are our best bet.”

If that doesn’t make you want to throw up what will? Here is a prominent conservative in the American Right (though D’Souza is an immigrant from India) literally arguing that Islamism and the Bushite conservatives are natural allies and ought to gang up to stamp out social freedom and those damn homosexuals. When people argue that allowing immigration dilutes American values I generally think they are wrong. But thinking of D’Souza I have to wonder if they weren’t right -- at least in this one case.

D’Souza claims that all the Muslims want is for “us not to attack their religion... They’re asking us not force secularism and separation of church and state on their society, another foolish cause to which some conservatives subscribe.” Separation of church and state, something Thomas Jefferson championed, is “a foolish cause” according to D’Souza.

Some years ago I wrote a university paper defending free markets. My professor was a Marxist who hated my views. He scribbled across the front page: “You just want to force people to be free.” D’Souza is even more daft than that. In his mind we are forcing Muslims to adopt secular, liberal values because we are not adopting their values.

The only person I know of who has attempted to force any sort of American values on Muslims is George Bush who invaded two Muslim nations in order to impose our “values” on them. No one has launched an armed attack on a Muslim state forcing them to respect freedom of the press, freedom of religion, honor the rights of gays, emancipate women or act in a civilzed way. They have been crticized and rightfully so. But criticism is not force. They are still free to act like barbaric tribalists and D’Souza is free to drool over their “traditional morality” when they do.

D’Souza says he wants “American conservatives [to] join the Muslims and others in condemning the global moral degeneracy that is produced by liberal values.” Liberal values? Those would be things like freedom of speech, freedom of association, equal rights before the law, respecting the rights of others, leaving people alone. Those values go right back to Jefferson and the Founding Fathers. What D’Souza wants is to dewesternize the West and instead adopt the value system of primitive Middle Eastern tribal cults.

D’Souza wants is a Christianist society. And he is using the Islamic terrorist threat to try to create it. He basically says that most Muslims are not terrorists they just hate Western social freedom. It is this intense hatred for such values which gets so many of them to blow up buildings and kill people. Therefore social freedom causes terrorism.

If we abandon social freedom and adopt Right-wing moral values, i.e. use the coercive powers of the state to force them on the American people, then the terrorists would not be able to recruit the typical Muslim. So if Theopublicans form an alliance with Muslims and destroy Western social freedom the terrorists won’t be able to recruit most Muslims and the West will win!

See, when we surrender our long held values of social freedom and adopt the values of Muslim tribalists then they won’t bomb us. So we win! What D’Souza is advocating is appeasement and surrender not victory. The American voters wisely turned their backs on the Theopublicans. They are getting sick of the theocrats and moral busybodies, the socialists of the soul. D’Souza is a walking case for abandoning the Republicans. Many libertarians and classical liberals are already disgusted by the authoritarianism of the Republicans but are unhappy with the Nanny-statism and socialism of the Democrats. D’Souza is a walking promotion for why libertarians have to totally abandon their alliance with the American conservative movement.

I will admit I appreciate what D'Souza has done. I've been arguing that libertarians need to end their alliance with conservatives immediately and completely. D'Souza's views will make that far more likely. I've been hoping that Americans will continue to turn away from the extremism that has gripped the Republican Party. D'Souza's call for jihad in America will speed up the decay of the Republican Party. If I didn't know better I'd almost think he was paid to write this sort of rubbish by the Democrats as a means of destorying the Republican Party. But then the Democrats don't have to destroy the Republicans. The Republicans are destroying themselves.

Imagine the Pied Piper playing his tune. But instead of rats the elephants start marching to his music. And the plays his song and leads them to a cliff where in some mass suicide the elephants dance off the edge to their oblivion. The Pied Piper leading the suicide march of Republicans is D'Souza. Dinesh: Keep up the good work.

Conservatives, gay cowboys and Hayek

Social conservatives have a real passion about "gay cowboys". They are obsessed over the film Brokeback Mountain.

This site doesn't review films unless they are of particular interest from a liberal position. And Brokeback Mountain doesn't qualify. But the response from conservatives is worth commenting upon.

Take the conservative, sometimes libertarian, website Tech Central Station. They recently published an article which was simply false. John Merline wrote a thinly disguised anti-Hollywood article "And the winner... Isn't Hollywood." His basic point was that films should win Academy Awards based on their popularity. He said it wasn't his point but he spends his entire article singing only that tune.

Of course Oscars are awards to the industry from the industry. It has nothing to do with popularity. But the part that is really dicey is when Mr. Merline says: “Not one of the nominees for Best Picture managed to make it into Top 20 in terms of box office receipts. Brokeback Mountain came in 26th, according to Box Office Mojo. Capote barely made it into the Top 100. The winner, Crash, was ranked 49th.” This is not true.

We can take Brokeback Mountain as the example. The film was released in December and it placed somewhere between 15th and 18th place consistently. That alone would prove he was wrong when he said it never made into the Top 20. But it didn't end there. One week after it premiered it entered the top ten. It slipped a bit but didn't go below 20th place. It then jumped back into the top ten. For three days, January 17 to 19, it was the top grossing film in the US. After that it remained in the top five for just over three weeks. And since then the lowest it has fallen is 14th place. In other words not only has it been in the Top 20, contrary to Merline's claim, but it has never been out of the Top 20 as of today. Of course eventually it will have to and probably soon as it's reaching the end of its theatrical life cycle and will be out on DVD shortly.

The oddest, and most absurd, claim by Merline was a comment that said that by nominating films that are not box office hits the Academy is insulting those attending the films. He snidely said that while people might be "too stupid to understand quality film making" the drop in ratings for the Academy Awards show proves they are "not stupid enough to take such insults lying down." This is so irrational that one can only conclude that Mr. Merline is acting out conservative prejudices against Hollywood. Big Macs are more popular than Filet Mignon with Merlot Cream Sauce. That the Michelin Guide rates many restaurants highly, but that McDonalds isn't one of them, is no insult to those of us who enjoy McDonalds.

Conservatives frequently praise the quality of books which are shunned by most readers and pan books that are embraced by the public. Does that sort of critique of literature mean they are insulting people? Of course not. Merline is merely Hollywood bashing. The classical liberal is not as uncomfortable with Hollywood as is the conservative. Conservatives oppose social freedom. Conservatives were especially upset because Brokeback Mountain showed two men, who they falsely called cowboys, as gay. It's not quite accurate but it's not critical either. Even before anyone saw the film the Religious Right, which has US conservatives by the gonads, was attacking the film. The most verbal among them never bothered to see the film. They simply knew it was evil. And so they harped on the issue of Hollywood being out of touch with their audience. It's part of the conservative mantra. The classical liberal may disagree with some of the messages of Hollywood films when it comes to anti-business attitudes and the like. But there are also good films and very libertarian films. And the liberal has no problem with Brokeback Mountain.

Actually one of the best statements on the "out of touch" theory was made by George Clooney. And while Clooney is often wrong on this issue he was spot on. Clooney noted that conservatives attack Hollywood for being "out of touch" (which is really Merline's thinly disguised message). Clooney said that Hollywood was sometimes out of touch and that it was a good thing. He said: "We're the ones who talk about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn't really popular. And we, you know, we bring up subjects. This Academy, this group of people gave Hattie McDaniel an Oscar in 1939 when blacks were still sitting in the backs of theaters. I'm proud to be a part of this Academy. Proud to be part of this community, and proud to be out of touch."

Clooney reminded me of something the great liberal, free market economist Ludwig von Mises once said. While he was writing about literature it applies to film as well. "Those authors who merely repeat what everybody approves and wants to hear are of no importance. What counts alone is the innovator, the dissenter, the harbinger of things unheard of, the man who rejects the traditional standards and aims at substituting new values and ideas for old ones. he is by necessity anti-authoritarian and anti-governmental, irreconcilably opposed to the immense majority of his contemporaries. He is precisely the author whose books the greater part of the public does not buy." Or the film the greater part of the public does not view.

The great student of Mises was F.A. Hayek and in his essay "Why I am Not a Conservative" he made clear one distinction between the conservative and the classical liberal. The conservative wanted to stop change: "But the main point about liberalism is that it wants to go elsewhere, not to stand still." Hayek noted that libealism is "not averse to evolution and change". Liberalism always wants to see liberty extended and the equality of rights applied more consistently.

Hayek wrote: "This brings me to the first point on which the conservative and the liberal dispositions differ radically. As has often been acknowledged by conservative writers, one of the fundamental traits of the conservative attitude is a fear of change, a timid distrust of the new as such, while the liberal position is based on courage and confidence, on a preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict where it will lead. There would not be much to object to if the conservatives merely disliked too rapid change in institutions and public policy; here the case for caution and slow process is indeed strong. But the conservatives are inclined to use the powers of government to prevent change or to limit its rate to whatever appeals to the more timid mind. In looking forward, they lack the faith in the spontaneous forces of adjustment which makes the liberal accept changes without apprehension, even though he does not know how the necessary adaptations will be brought about. It is, indeed, part of the liberal attitude to assume that, especially in the economic field, the self - regulating forces of the market will somehow bring about the required adjustments to new conditions, although no one can foretell how they will do this in a particular instance. There is perhaps no single factor contributing so much to people's frequent reluctance to let the market work as their inability to conceive how some necessary balance, between demand and supply, between exports and imports, or the like, will be brought about without deliberate control. The conservative feels safe and content only if he is assured that some higher wisdom watches and supervises change, only if he knows that some authority is charged with keeping the change "orderly."

And those "gay cowboys" up on Brokeback Mountain help illustrate the point.