“Biology is not bigotry”: teacher blasts bill that would force teachers to receive LGBT “training”

An elementary school teacher packed a powerful punch in a two-minute testimony last month against a proposed law that would require teachers to affirm homosexual, lesbian, and transgender students.

Source: ‘Biology is not bigotry’: teacher blasts bill that would force teachers to receive LGBT ‘training’ | The Pulse | Lifesitenews

One of the most basic principles of my philosophy on living has been and remains this: if you don’t bother me, I won’t bother you; but your right to swing your fist ends at my nose.

With regard to this specific issue, that means that what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home(s) is their business, unless they make it my business: either by requesting my personal or professional (as a Christian clergyman) opinion on the matter, or more generally, by insisting that I “affirm” or even “celebrate” their life choices. That’s when the fist impacts the nasal structure.

Piers Morgan: Populism Is Rising Because Liberals Have Become Unbearable | Video | RealClearPolitics

 

“Populism is rising because liberals have become unbearable. In my core, I’m probably more liberal than not although fundamentally I see myself as a journalist and I like to see both sides and I can argue both sides of all these things, but liberals have become utterly, pathetically illiberal and it is a massive problem.”

Source: Piers Morgan: Populism Is Rising Because Liberals Have Become Unbearable | Video | RealClearPolitics

Couple of thoughts on this: first, I’m not a big fan of Piers Morgan, but he’s an intelligent man, and he’s gotten less objectionable since getting back to the UK. Maybe he’s seeing some things that he couldn’t see as clearly, here in the US? Or maybe it’s just like my father used to say: “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day”…? I dunno. But he’s right about this!

Not all populists are alt-right or far-right or whatever you want to call it, by any means. Most are just ordinary folks who are tired of seeing their own people being crapped on by privileged, entitled elites who claim that the ordinary people are the “privileged” ones. But I’ve said since the 2016 Presidential campaign that maybe the alt-right are antibodies for Antifa, cultural Marxists, and their ilk.

As a historian, I would say that you don’t get something like what happened in Germany in the 1930s because of people like Trump. You get it because of people like Antifa, and their apologists in the media, academia, and so on, until finally ordinary folks get sick and tired of it, and either hit back, or throw their support behind people who are willing to hit back.

A Tale of Two Germanies | Chronicles Magazine

Under communism the State tried but failed to subjugate the Nation; under liberalism, the State gradually and gently destroyed the Nation.

Source: A Tale of Two Germanies | Chronicles Magazine

“An important foreign story consistently underreported in the U.S. is the remarkable rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the eastern states of the Federal Republic…

“Immigration and asylum laws remain a very important issue for millions of Germans, although the mainstream parties and Germany’s uniformly liberal media machine pretend otherwise. It is the most important issue in Saxony, closely followed by the related problem of internal security, with the economy, education, housing, and social policy lagging far behind.

“This order of priorities, eminently rational, confirms what we have known for a long time: that Soviet communism, with its crude Pavlovian methods of control, has been far less corrosive to the health of nations and communities than Western liberalism and internationalism, which rely on the implantation of subliminal messages by Freudian means.

“The key pillar of that message is that all nations are but social arrangements, artificial, temporary, and–especially in Germany’s case–potentially dangerous. This has made the liberal German state deeply hostile even to the most benign understanding of national or ethnic coherence. Estranged from their parents, ignorant of their culture, ashamed of their history, millions of young western Germans subjected to denazification were duly de-Germanized.”

The full article is well worth a read!

By royal disappointment: Meghan and Harry’s behaviour is undermining the monarchy | The Spectator

What must the Queen think of the younger royals’ actions?

Source: By royal disappointment: Meghan and Harry’s behaviour is undermining the monarchy | The Spectator

“Yet there is a feeling that, while the Queen deserves our respect, certain other members of her family should try harder. Much harder. There is a turbulence in the air, a contagion of bad behaviour that taints the good deeds and hard work of other royals, causing understandable resentment. These miscreants could do worse than follow the example of the Queen; this force of nature in pastel separates who has never put a foot wrong nor allowed selfish needs or creature comforts to impede her sense of duty.”

This excellent if sobering essay on the sense of duty and propriety of Her Majesty The Queen, as contrasted against the behavior of certain other members of the Royal Family, devotes – as its title would indicate – a fair amount of its space to pointing out the foibles of The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, a.k.a. Prince Harry and the former Meghan Markle. As well it should.

The Tragic Decline of Music Literacy (and Quality) | Intellectual Takeout

Over the last 20 years, fewer people are learning how to read and compose music. What impact has that had on the music we listen to?

Source: The Tragic Decline of Music Literacy (and Quality) | Intellectual Takeout

“Oh yes, we need a little Christmas, right this very minute:
Candles in the window, carols at the spinet!”

These famous lines, from the still-popular secular Christmas song “We Need a Little Christmas” (1966) are not just me longing for Christmas, in this steamy central Maryland August (although neither would I deny it), but an illustration of the linked essay‘s point: that although most people listening to it today probably gloss right over the line without a clue as to what is meant, the song would have been unlikely to contain those lyrics, if “carols at the spinet” (a once-popular type of small, drop-action piano) had not been an easily-recognizable feature of Christmas cheer at the time it was written.

It’s certainly recognizable to me! Born in 1965, the third and much the youngest of three brothers, I grew up with a “spinet” (actually a furniture console piano) in our home: one which my father had purchased for my mother years before – at a time when they were still struggling financially – because he knew how much music meant to her.

“Churches could win back teens like me if they were more welcoming and less judgmental” | USA Today

“Church should offer more open-ended resources such as meditation, discussion groups and even nature walks. Let teens come to God in their own way.” – Stacia Datskovska, Opinion contributor: USA Today

Source: Churches could win back teens like me if they were more welcoming and less judgmental | USA Today

As I read this essay, I am reminded of the introduction to C.S. Lewis’ essay, “Priestesses in the Church”:

“I should like Balls infinitely better,” said Caroline Bingley, “if they were carried on in a different manner … It would surely be much more rational if conversation instead of dancing made the order of the day.”

“Much more rational, I dare say,” replied her brother, “but it would not be near so much like a Ball.”

I am not defending the gratuitous self-righteousness of the woman with whose example this young woman opens her essay; lack of charity is never excusable.

But when Miss Datskovska jumps from the unkind words of an unpleasant person to generalize, “many Christian denominations are too deeply rooted in tradition. Whatever this ‘tradition’ comes dressed as, we find it a turnoff,” she is basically saying “I should like church much better if it were less like a church.”

The Civil War on America’s Horizon | The American Conservative

“You accuse us of overturning our patrie by rebellion, but it is you, who, subverting all principles of the religious and political order, were the first to proclaim that insurrection is the most sacred of duties.” — French Royalist rebel to the newly-installed Jacobin government in 1793

Source: The Civil War on America’s Horizon | The American Conservative

I disagree with the author of this piece’s knee-jerk anti-Trumpism, and more generally his assertion of what amounts to moral equivalency between the President’s supporters and America’s radical Left. But that doesn’t mean the essay’s depiction of the situation in which we find ourselves is wrong. Sadly!

But I like better the analysis of both the article and the situation it describes, from Clergy in Support of the 2nd Amendment, which posted a link to this article:

The Tyranny of Artistic Modernism: Ugly Buildings, Ugly Paintings, Ugly Words, Ugly Life

We who live in the Western world at the present time continue to suffer under the reign of a great tyranny — the tyranny of artistic modernism.

Source: The Tyranny of Artistic Modernism | New English Review

The four “uglies” in the title above are the assessment – all too accurate – of William Briggs, in his post on the subject. I cannot disagree! Here, at any rate, are some quotes from Mark Anthony Signorelli and Nikos A. Salingaros’s piece at New English Review, linked above, with my reflections thereon:

“We who live in the Western world at the present time continue to suffer under the reign of a great tyranny — the tyranny of artistic modernism. The modernist aesthetic, which dominates our age, takes a variety of forms in the respective arts — in architecture, a lack of scale and ornamentation combined with the overwhelming deployment of materials like glass, steel, and brutalist concrete; in the plastic arts, a rejection of natural forms mixed with an unmistakable tendency towards the repulsive or meretricious; in literature, non-linear narrative, esoteric [*] imagery, and an almost perfect lack of poetic form and diction.”

That’s not who we are!

I am The Anglophilic Anglican. But I am also an American; and what goes on in the United States of America, for better or for worse – sadly, much of it “for worse,” these days – is obviously of considerable concern to me. And this, unfortunately, hits the matter pretty square-on!

What people think I mean – Christian music

Just gonna leave this here……..