#1 Robert Oscar Lopez: Stop Crying over Mozilla and Start Fighting Back!
04-14-2014, 12:32 PM
- Join Date
- Jun 2008
Stop Crying over Mozilla and Start Fighting Back!
By Robert Oscar Lopez
...There was still a belief among many defenders of marriage that compassion, civility, and professionalism could overwhelm the gay lobby with kindness.
The result was that troublemakers like me were banished to Europe. Spineless conservatives started “evolving” to the other side in droves, and the gay lobby’s shills opened fire on the Family Research Council’s Washington offices, eviscerated the careers of performers like Michelle Shocked and Rupert Everett, and became the party of full-fledged Orwellian totalitarianism....
Why did the situation get so bad that Brendan Eich could be the victim of character assassination on such a shameless scale? Is it because the gay lobby is that evil? Yes, of course, the gay lobby has succeeded because its leaders have been willing to employ every kind of wickedness simultaneously: lying, manipulating, betraying, playing the victim, using human shields, accusing, intimidating, buying friends, and destroying enemies.
But that’s not news. In all honesty, I think that the gay lobby’s fascism has reached this tipping point not because of the gay lobby per se – the real problem has been, all along, that conservatives have never been willing to fight back.
Gay parenting is built on sheer adult selfishness, but too many conservatives are scared of saying so because they have family members and colleagues they don’t want to offend. It wouldn’t be so bad if they chose to live in silence but at least supported those of us who are willing to call people out for doing things that are wrong. Yet when I say things like this, conservatives get scared; the radio silence deepens, and I end up in Europe again...
I can’t say I understand fully why conservatives have been so defensive and small in the way they engage the gay lobby. All during 2012 and 2013, there were signs that the gay movement – never to be conflated with gay people themselves – had become an engine of world-historical evil. These are people who are comfortable outing other homosexuals, humiliating gay people who transition out of the lifestyle (even if they have been abused), gunning down nonprofit offices, and closing orphanages to force adoption agencies to set aside quotas of abandoned children for gay homes. They compare people who support marriage to the KKK, slave-owners, Nazis, and Bull Connor on a regular basis. They harass and torment people who have gay parents if they don’t sing utopian paeans to the joys of same-sex parenting.
As Brendan Eich is brought down by the terrible hand of fascism, it is time for people who feel outraged by it to move beyond crying over the fallout of a supposedly lost battle for marriage. It’s time to get off the defensive. It’s time to fight for marriage and children’s rights. Eich’s ouster was pushed by a political gay lobby that lost its principles after years of arguing for something unjust and indefensible – the transformation of children into uprooted property designed to meet the emotional demands of adults. If we do not defend marriage as the institution that exists to safeguard against such objectification of children, we are doomed merely to manage the fallout of our own weakness. We will be begging to be left alone, and our begging will not work, because we will have surrendered what really mattered in the first place: justice for the vulnerable. Having failed to speak for those too young to speak for themselves, we will reap the punishment of having nobody to speak for us when the great beast comes to devour us next.
Stop crying. Get moving already.
Virginia, Utah, Texas, Oklahoma, and Michigan have still not finalized gay marriage. The cases are still pending. Whatever happens with those cases, there are midterm elections coming up. Make candidates know that we aren’t buying the gay marriage swindle. There are countless nations overseas that have not legalized gay marriage yet. And even if gay marriage goes worldwide, we can still rally to pass a constitutional amendment or global resolutions affirming the inalienable right of a child to his mother and father wherever possible.
Instead of crying over the predictable misdeeds of a lobby that has revealed itself for all its evil, we need to fight. Fight to win. Fight gay marriage, because the gay lobby chose to yoke marriage to a “right to have a child.” Fight gay adoption, because the gay “right to have a child” means that children become objects, and adults become slave-owners again. Stop worrying about your gay neighbor, getting a regular spot on the radio, being accepted, distinguishing yourself from the supposed bigots (the folks who are really doing all your fighting for you). Fight, for God’s sake. Fight.
04-14-2014, 01:23 PM
The Michigan case is about gay adoption/gay marriage. The couple involved each adopted a child. They can't adopt the children together, because Michigan does not recognize gay marriage. If one of them dies, her child goes into foster care, because the other parent has no legal right to the child. It's being argued as a children's rights case, that the children have the right to have legal relationships with both of the people raising them, and the right to be legal siblings. I have no idea how the USSC will rule on it in the long run, but I know our AG, who is arguing against gay marriage, is not the brightest legal mind in the USA.
This author's argument that gay marriage is equal to slavery for the children involved is complete and utter bs. If that's the case, then the same is true for straight adoption of children who are unrelated to the adoptive parent(s). If gay couples adopting children are about safisfying their own emotional needs, then isn't the same of infertile straight couples?
I agree with him that it was wrong for gay groups to blackball the guy from Mozilla, whatever Mozilla is. But that's quite a jump from there to comparing gays who adopt to slaveowners.
04-14-2014, 03:47 PM
- Join Date
- Jun 2008
...Allow me to explain in simple terms: Gay marriage equality means that motherhood and fatherhood are effectively removed as a legal principle from the entire nation's judicial system. With gay marriage equality decreed by the Supreme Court, there is no way for any state to express investment in the rational desirability for a child to be under the "custody" of those who conceived the child.
Instead, in order to comply with the Fourteenth Amendment, children would be placed under the control of two adults who acquired their rights to the child, either by taking it from someone else, uncompensated, using the force of the state; or by purchasing the child. In the former means, the government becomes the means to pirate human bodies from their natural guardians, while in the latter means, human beings are being bought and sold. In either case "slavery" is occurring, with very predictable social ills. A quick gloss on the history of human bondage that led to the Thirteenth Amendment is worth keeping in mind here.
Much to the worry of philosophers from Hobbes to Rousseau, human beings are born helpless and needing the dominion of adults in order to survive and develop. Under whose dominion should babies and children fall? So long as marriage is defined as a husband and wife, the answer is relatively simple. Impressionable dependents are to be the charges of those who conceived them through lovemaking, first and foremost, before any other arrangement is decided upon by the state. Only under extraordinary measures would a biological father or mother be legally replaced by, and would his or her dominion be transferred to, a second mother or second father not biologically interested in the child. If one parent died, abandoned, or proved unfit for the child, then of course an adoption could occur. Otherwise, the force of the state would always, in a basic ethical sense, wish to avoid chattel slavery by prioritizing the parental powers of actual parents, always by definition a man and a woman.
Slavery had existed for thousands of years before Samuel Sewall wrote "The Selling of Joseph" in 1700, arguably the first anti-slavery document in English (based largely on scripture). It would take another 165 years for the Thirteenth Amendment to pass:
Note: A portion of Article IV, section 2, of the Constitution was superseded by the 13th amendment. Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Note first of all that slavery is not limited to simply being forced to work against one's will. The phrasing is specific: "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude." The text reflects the American understanding that there was more to slavery than simply being made to do hard labor. Slavery was a larger system of buying, selling, and owning human life.
The text doesn't make an exception saying that children can be bought and sold as long as the purpose is the good-faith desire of loving adults to have a child that they can't conceive. The text does not state that as long as conditions are documented as decent, livable, even beneficial, it is appropriate to buy, sell, or own human beings. The argument that slavery was better for blacks than being left in Africa had been put forward, already, by black poet Phillis Wheatley (see "On Being Brought from Africa to America") as well as Thomas Jefferson (see Notes on the State of Virginia) and James Fenimore Cooper (see American Democrat.) The Thirteenth Amendment had to be passed because the American republic, as well as other nations of the nineteenth century, determined that regardless of the qualify of life, the very idea of buying, selling, or owning human beings as property was harmful to society and a crime against humanity. It was an evil in and of itself.
For thousands of years slavery, serfdom, and bondage were accepted all around the world. The reason that the nineteenth century saw the first universal condemnations of slavery is to be found in the Romantic Era's construction of "childhood." It was only in the nineteenth century that children were fully understood as humans with imaginations, emotional faculties, and understandings at all comparable to adults.
The fact that children were dependent on adults who had to keep them in a state of subservience for their own good could no longer, after the Romantic Era, be used as a rationale to keep in place slavery in its typically justified form. Slavery was justified, quite often, based on the fact that orphaned or abandoned children were best put to use by exchanging some sort of stewardship for the compensation of the child's labor. Hence, someone bought a baby and took care of it, and then expected to get a return on the investment through the grown child's labor, as a kind of bond debt. The word "bond" grew out of such an arrangement.
The abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, pursuant to an act signed by Thomas Jefferson, came six decades before slavery was abolished. After January 1, 1808, it was technically illegal to import new slaves to the United States. Why did slavery experience six decades of life after being, it would seem, legally debunked by Thomas Jefferson?
Children and procreation are the key to answering that question. It was clear that slavery was wrong in the eyes of most Americans by 1807, but there remained the matter of black children. If slave-owners could breed existing black slaves and then create a stock of helpless black infants, then there was a continued rationale for needing a legal system that allocated power over such infants within the same framework that structured the pre-existing slave trade.
The result of the 1807 abolition was a traumatic epidemic of rape, forced sex, surrogacy, incubation, baby farming, and "insemination", combined with the systematic removal of infants from any contact with their biological parents. Babies were bought and sold under this system. (For instance, a female infant could be worth as much as $40,000 in today's money, because it held the promise of further babies for sale once the girl became a woman.)
It is because of the horrors that came with severing guardianship of children from their biological parents, combined with changing views of childhood, that slavery finally became repudiated as a concept. The forced labor and whippings of slaves were of course terrible, but these were not entirely shocking to people of the nineteenth century, all of whom had to labor for long hours to survive, and most of whom knew what it was like to be beaten. Women were beaten by their husbands, young men were flogged on ships until President Franklin Pierce's anti-flogging act of 1853, schoolmasters could still whip children, corporal punishment was inflicted by mothers and fathers on children, etc.
What made nineteenth-century people willing to debunk "slavery" in its entire conception as the sale and purchase of human beings was what they saw it doing to the sacred bond between child and biological parent. Even the racial aspect of slavery was only alarming to the extent that a race was being specifically targeted for these emotionally scarring manipulations of their lineage, heritage, and bonds to children.
The nineteenth-century slave narratives document extensively the physical abuse of adult slaves, but these are not the parts of their texts that would have provoked the largely female audience for such works in the nineteenth century. It was the discussion of black women's bodies being used to incubate children they were then denied access to, the reduction of black men to sources of sperm, and the use of children as human chattel, that finally made the word "slavery" in all its force an ethically bankrupt concept with no place in our republic.
Gay marriage is the single most prominent means of reversing the Thirteenth Amendment and bringing slavery back to the United States, even under many of the same guises. "Gays" have been deemed a race with biologically ordained rights not to share property with the opposite sex, as a result of the Fourteenth Amendment being applied to their case. Hence gays are a race biologically ensured the right to buy and sell babies of the "straight" or "mixed" races.
If gay marriage is given the full force of law, then children are no longer the natural charges of mothers and fathers who conceived them through lovemaking. Rather, they are the property of two adults who have stolen or bought the power over such children -- not only in the de facto sense of extraordinary circumstances arising (such as a divorce) but in the de jure sense. Gay marriage equality guarantees that the two adults who have bought a child can demand that the police, family court, schools, and other public powers use force, if necessary, to keep their charges under their control, should a child run away, misbehave, or be taken up by its excluded biological parent. This is how the world got Dred Scott, because slave-owners argued that for their full property rights as citizens to be respected by law, the state had to physically constrain their charges who wanted not to be under their power.
What I am describing is not a fanciful image of the distant future. India recently had to ban gay surrogacy contracts, Russia has blocked gay adoptions, and a high court of Europe is now considering the case of two lesbians who invoke human rights to replace all custodial rights of a child's biological father with an unrelated woman who's simply romantically involved with his biological mother. This is going global, like the African slave trade. It is wreaking havoc on families, courts, international governments, and most of all, children....
04-15-2014, 09:06 AM
Again, I see no difference between a gay couple adopting a child and an infertile heterosexual couple doing so-neither can have children with their partner naturally, so they seek one through legal means. That can be through an adoption agency and/or the foster care system, through a surrogate, or through a family connection.
If it is a baby adoption, a surrogate mother or an overseas adoption, it is most likely a situation in which the adoptive parents are paying money for that child, in legal fees, and sometimes medical bills for the bio mother and/or the child. How is that slavery for a gay couple, but a wonderful, humanitarian deed for a hetero one?
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