Daniel Greenfield - The Deconstruction of Marriage

Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blog

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The only question worth asking about gay marriage is whether anyone on the left would care about this crusade if it didn't come with the privilege of bulldozing another civilizational institution.



Gay marriage is not about men marrying men or women marrying women, it is about the deconstruction of marriage between men and women. That is a thing that many men and women of one generation understand but have trouble conveying to another generation for whom marriage has already largely been deconstructed.

The statistics about the falling marriage rate tell the tale well enough. Marriage is a fading institution. Family is a flickering light in the evening of the West.

The deconstruction is destruction. Entire countries are fading away, their populations being replaced by emigrants from more traditional lands whose understanding of the male-female relationship is positively reactionary. These emigrants may lack technology or the virtues of civilization, and their idea of marriage resembles slavery more than any modern ideal, but it fulfills the minimum purpose of any group, tribe or country-- it produces its next generation.

The deconstruction of marriage is not a mere matter of front page photos of men kissing. It began with the deconstruction of the family. Gay marriage is only one small stop on a tour that includes rising divorce rates, falling childbirth rates and the abandonment of responsibility by twenty and even thirty-somethings.

Each step on the tour takes apart the definition and structure of marriage until there is nothing left. Gay marriage is not inclusive, it is yet another attempt at eliminating marriage as a social institution by deconstructing it until it no longer exists.

There are two ways to destroy a thing. You can either run at it while swinging a hammer with both hands or you can attack its structure until it no longer means anything.

The left hasn't gone all out by outlawing marriage, instead it has deconstructed it, taking apart each of its assumptions, from the economic to the cooperative to the emotional to the social, until it no longer means anything at all. Until there is no way to distinguish marriage from a temporary liaison between members of uncertain sexes for reasons that due to their vagueness cannot be held to have any solemn and meaningful purpose.

You can abolish democracy by banning the vote or you can do it by letting people vote as many times as they want, by letting small children and foreigners vote, until no one sees the point in counting the votes or taking the process seriously. The same goes for marriage or any other institution. You can destroy it by outlawing it or by eliminating its meaningfulness until it becomes so open that it is absurd.

Every aspect of marriage is deconstructed and then eliminated until it no longer means anything. And once marriage is no longer a lifetime commitment between a man and a woman, but a ceremony with no deeper meaning than most modern ceremonies, then the deconstruction and destruction will be complete.

The deconstruction of marriage eroded it as an enduring institution and then as an exclusive institution and finally as a meaningful institution. The trendy folk who claim to be holding off on getting married until gay marriage is enacted are not eager for marriage equality, they are using it as an excuse for an ongoing rejection of marriage.

Gay marriage was never the issue. It was always marriage.

In the world that the deconstructionists are striving to build, there will be marriage, but it will mean nothing. Like a greeting card holiday, it will be an event, but not an institution. An old ritual with no further meaning. An egotistical exercise in attention-seeking and self-celebration with no deeper purpose. It will be a display every bit as hollow as the churches and synagogues it takes place in.

The deconstruction of marriage is only a subset of the deconstruction of gender from a state of being to a state of mind. The decline of marriage was preceded by the deconstruction of gender roles and gay marriage is being succeeded by the destruction of gender as anything other than a voluntary identity, a costume that one puts on and takes off.

Destroying gender roles was a prerequisite to destroying gender. Each deconstruction leads naturally to the next deconstruction with no final destination except total deconstruction.

Gay marriage is not a stopping point, just as men in women's clothing using the ladies room is not a stopping point. There is no stopping point at all.

The left's deconstruction of social institutions is not a quest for equality, but for destruction. As long as the institutions that preceded it exist, it will go on deconstructing them until there is nothing left but a blank canvas, an unthinking anarchy, on which it can impose its perfect and ideal conception of how everyone should live.

Equality is merely a pretext for deconstruction. Change the parameters of a thing and it ceases to function. Redefine it and expand it and it no longer means anything at all. A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but if you change 'rose' to mean anything that sticks out of the ground, then the entire notion of what is being discussed has gone and cannot be reclaimed without also reclaiming language.

The left's social deconstruction program is a war of ideas and concepts. Claims of equality are used to expand institutions and ways of living until they are so broad as to encompass everything and nothing. And once a thing encompasses everything, once a rose represents everything rising out of the ground, then it also represents nothing at all.

Deconstruction is a war against definitions, borders and parameters. It is a war against defining things by criminalizing the limitation of definitions. With inclusivity as the mandate, exclusivity, in marriage, or any other realm, quickly meets with social disapproval and then becomes a hate crime. If the social good is achieved only through maximum inclusivity and infinite tolerance, then any form of exclusivity, from property to person to ideas, is a selfish act that refuses the collective impulse to make all things into a common property with no lasting meaning or value.

As Orwell understood in 1984, tyranny is essentially about definitions. It is hard to fight for freedom if you lack the word. It is hard to maintain a marriage if the idea no longer exists. Orwell's Oceania made basic human ideas into contradictory things. The left's deconstruction of social values does the same thing to such essential institutions as marriage; which becomes an important impermanent thing of no fixed nature or value.

The left's greatest trick is making things mean the opposite of what they do. Stealing is sharing. Crime is justice. Property is theft. Each deconstruction is accompanied by an inversion so that a thing, once examined, comes to seem the opposite of what it is, and once that is done, it no longer has the old innate value, but a new enlightened one.

To deconstruct man, you deconstruct his beliefs and then his way of living. You deconstruct freedom until it means slavery. You deconstruct peace until it means war. You deconstruct property until it means theft. And you deconstruct marriage until it means a physical relationship between any group of people for any duration. And that is the opposite of what marriage is.

The deconstruction of marriage is part of the deconstruction of gender and family and those are part of the long program of deconstructing man. Once each basic value has been rendered null and void, inverted and revealed to be random and meaningless, then man is likewise revealed to be a random and meaningless creature whose existence requires shaping by those who know better.

The final deconstruction eliminates nation, religion, family and even gender to reduce the soul of man to a blank slate waiting to be written on.

That is what is at stake here. This is not a struggle about the right of equality, but the right of definition. It is not about whether men can get married, but whether marriage will mean anything at all. It is about preserving the shapes and structures of basic social concepts that define our identities in order to preserve those very concepts, rather than accepting their deconstruction into nullification.

The question on the table is whether the institutions that give us meaning will be allowed to retain that meaning. And that question is a matter of survival. Societies cannot survive without definitions. Peoples do not go on existing through the act of occupying space. The deconstruction of identity is also the destruction of identity.

And that is what we are truly fighting against.

Daniel Greenfield

Visit Daniel's Blog Sultan Knish by clicking HERE

Daniel Greenfield is a blogger and columnist born in Israel and living in New York City. Daniel is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and a contributing editor at Family Security Matters.

Daniel's original biweekly column appears at Front Page Magazine and his blog articles regularly appear at Family Security Matters, the Jewish Press, Times of Israel, Act for America and Right Side News, as well as daily at the Canada Free Press and a number of other outlets. Daniel has a column titled Western Front at Israel National News and his op eds have also appeared in the New York Sun, the Jewish Press and at FOX Nation.

Daniel was named one of the Jewish Press' Most Worthwhile Blogs from 2006-2011 and his writing has been cited by Rush Limbaugh, Melanie Philips, Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Judith Klinghoffer, John Podhoretz, Jeff Jacoby and Michelle Malkin, among others.

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Wild Bill for America - God and Country

The enemies of freedom ram socialism down our throats, time to ram "God and Country" down theirs!

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Wild Bill for America - Deadly Liberals

Who does the Secret Service need to watch closest? The answer may surprise you!

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Wild Bill for America - The Green Panther Pervert Jihad Party

Perhaps it is time us to start a new liberal party to split the Democrat vote and help get conservatives elected.

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Daniel Greenfield - The Land of the Free or the Home of the Slave?

Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blog

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Any code of laws that has been set down in the past in order to guide the future organization of a nation is vulnerable to being rewritten by the dominant political or cultural forces of a later period. These forces will inevitably attempt to rewrite that document to give themselves absolute and unlimited power to rule as they see fit, while also providing themselves with immunity from any of its laws.

The United States Constitution was assembled with complete awareness of this reality of human affairs, and so it was designed to limit to the power of government, more than to empower it. But enough pressure against any object, physical or legal, will in time cause it to buckle. Water against a dam will find an opening in it. So too with the United States Constitution. It is startling to consider what an upheaval in the rights of individuals and states was snuck in through the Commerce clause. This was one of the weak points in the Constitution that was bored at and expanded into a hole through which the governing of the nation as a whole was transformed, and the dominant political and cultural movement, liberalism, accrued to itself unlimited power.

Not that there was anything the Framers could have done about it. Given time even the most perfect of documents can be perverted, set aside and turned into the instrument of tyrants and monsters. And they could not have hoped to better the Almighty, whose own document had been perverted in the hands of evil men. All they could hope to do was pass down a legacy of intention that would ward freedom for a time, and then hope that it would serve to keep the flame of freedom burning through the generations. That men would remember the sort of government that had been intended for them to have, the gift set aside for them, even when it was no longer present.

This history is of course a matter of some debate. Those who would alter the future, begin with the present begin with the past, and then the future. Revisionist history is required by every ideology that wishes to radically change the world. The revisionist history of liberalism in particularly is quite revealing when it comes to exposing its own motives and agendas.

Those whose revisionist history recasts the past of their own people as a long series of cruel and oppressive acts, expose themselves as revolutionaries who seek to recast their own history as evil, all the better to rule over the future in the name of justice and mercy. This is altogether true of liberal revisionist history, which recreates America as a shameless tyranny ruled over by greed and lies. A typical and influential example of the genre, is A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, in which the gullible college student learns that all of American history is a sham by the wealthy to control commerce and territory. This naturally prepares him to accept liberalism's mandate for destroying America in order to turn it into a land of liberty, equality and justice.

For the left, the United States Constitution has always been a dangerous document, because it limits the power of government. Their power. And for all that the left inveighs against power and authority, it only does so because its leaders are driven to be the ones in power and wielding that envied authority. The left's model is not democracy, but aristocracy. The aristocracy of the revolutionary faithful. Back to the days of the French Revolution, the radicalism of the left sought to replace inherited aristocracy with ideological aristocracy. Instead of an elite that ruled over the masses because their descended from nobility, they wanted an elite that ruled over the masses because it had the passionate idealism to fight for social justice.

The Constitution is dangerous to them because it limits government power. Its Framers viewed government power as inherently dangerous. This is not a view shared by the left which only sees government power as dangerous-- when it's in the wrong hands. The wrong hands being the hands of the reactionary authorities or that of their political rivals who lack the same ideological commitment that they do. Rather the left believes in the transformative effects of government power to remake a society so that it can reach a perfect state of liberty, fraternity and equality. And this they do not believe can be achieved by limiting government power, but by wielding it in the name of the cause.

Representative democracy is another thing the left has never liked very much. Because its compass turns toward the false south of ideology, not the true north of the will of the people. The left will always choose ideology over the popular will, because their morality is political. The idea that a bad popular decision is better than a good imposed decision is one that is foreign to them. Representative democracy is threatening to them because majority rule is populist without being revolutionary. And what they desire is revolutionary populism employed in the service of their political ends.

The left's determination of who is allowed to participate in elections and other forms of decision making is ideological citizenship, not national citizenship. Only those who believe exactly as they do are allowed to participate in the process. Only those who share their goals and beliefs have a valid vote. As the revolution gets underway, a winnowing process occurs that purges any who do not share their exact beliefs to create a narrower and narrower standard through which no one but those in perfect agreement with their views are allowed to pass. Even when those views change. Especially when those views change.

Without any limitation on government power and with no popular representation, what you have is tyranny. The left does not see it that way, because they are incapable of defining their own actions as tyrannical. This block prevented them from condemning Stalin, even when he was carrying on spectacular acts of mass murder, and killing their own comrades and friends. This block still prevents even most liberals from equating Communism and Nazism. Because to them morality itself is political. A murder or a tyrant are never objective variables, but subjective ones defined by the moral equivalency of their ideological alliances. A Castro or a Saddam to them, will never be as awful as a Pinochet or a Franco, not based on their deeds, but on their ideological allegiances.

To the left all things are political. And if a thing is not political, they cannot be bothered to care about it. And the foundation of their morality is rooted in the ability to elevate oppressed groups out of their oppression. If the left cannot reduce an issue to an oppressed-oppressor formula, then the entire situation has no meaning to them. That is why unlike the right, the left does not care a great deal about what goes on in the bedroom, aside from areas such as rape or gay rights, which they can nudge into their oppressed-oppressor class formula. That is not to suggest that their ability to expand their political morality everywhere can or should be underestimated. The left has managed to treat everything from breakfast cereals to SUV's to brand labels as counters in their political morality. And there is no telling where, if anywhere, it will actually end.

As the dominant cultural and political movement, the left has fought a long war to transform America along the guidelines of its own political morality, exploiting social and economic fault lines, harnessing culture and organizing sections of the public to carry on its war for it. The ends however have never been what they appeared to be. While individually the left appeared to be fighting against injustice or for higher standards, from a bird's eye view it was pursuing a long range struggle whose goal was to consolidate power and remove all obstacles to the free exercise of that power.

Because the United States was a representative democracy with strong limitations on government power, the left's task was two-fold. In a dictatorship, the left could have simply attacked the power structure itself. However in the United States, power rested with the American people. They were the ruling class. Which is why they had to be co-opted, replaced or destroyed. In a dictatorship, the left could have also simply taken power and exercised it. Because of Constitutional limitations, the left has instead had to undermine those limitations by pretending to embrace them, and then get the public used to expanding them in the name of preserving their freedoms. Judicial advocacy allowed the left to imitate Lenin's "Two Steps Backward, One Step Forward", expanding Constitutional intent to seemingly provide more freedoms, in order to ultimately destroy it and any protection against government authority it offered with it. This two-fold approach allowed the left to play civil libertarians, as they always have, even as their ultimate goal remained what it has always been, absolute power.

They are now closer to harnessing that power than ever before. Their plan is proceeding on schedule. The fall of free enterprise. The transformation of religion into social justice. The unworkability of government. All of it is leading down one road. Their road.

The left is the product of absolute arrogance that has directed all its aims toward achieving absolute power. For all its progressive posturing, it is run by egotists who believe that if they were in charge, things would finally be set to right. Their ideas are medieval. Their tactics are utterly amoral. They have no boundaries, because they like to think that their enemies have none. And we are their enemies.

The American Experiment was built to elevate a people and their laws above being tools of their government. This noble achievement succeeded. That is why so many who believe that laws exist to enable a government to use its people as mere tools, have been so determined to destroy it. To the left there are no individuals and no people, only classes. Only groups crying out to be equitably redistributed in the name of creating a perfect order. And they have always despised the American Experiment, castigating the idea that the popular vote without the oversight of the guardians of social justice can achieve an equitable society, as hypocritical and deceitful. That is an idea that the American liberals of the day are driven by. It burns through their revisionist history and their rhetoric. It is what drives their exposes and condemnations. All of it aimed at one thing. The replacement of America as we know it, with their system. And they are closer to it than ever before.

Where the Constitution promised Freedom, the Left promises Equality. But the former did so by limiting government. The latter promises to do so through the unlimited exercise of government power. Those are the stakes here in a very old contest, ever since Thomas Paine sailed back to the Continent in a huff accusing Washington of betraying the revolution. The original American Revolution took power only to return it back to the people. The left's Second American Revolution would remove power from the people in exchange for protecting them from each other. The state of freemen vs the nanny state. That is the choice here.

When you limit government power, you expand individual freedom. When you expand government power, you limit individual freedom. As government power expands, it begins to impose a particular social order. This social order benefits those who are already in power. Law then becomes a tool by which the dominant cultural and political forces remain in power and impose their will on the people.

The Framers understood this, as even we cannot, because to truly understand freedom, one must experience tyranny. Freedom has no meaning except in the context of oppression. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were Documents of Resistance, created to stand against tyranny as doctors would create antibiotics against infection. But the infection still crept in and we are all sick with the disease. The documentary antibiotics forced it to come through a back way, to use more guile and stealth than it would have needed to otherwise. But the crisis is nevertheless here.

Given a chance, the left will do to America, what they have done to nation after nation. Suck it dry and destroy it. Because their ideology represents a dead end. Their ideas are so old, that there is sand and dust on their breath. It is the promise of a benevolent tyranny, the protectors of the people who will protect the people from everything, but what they really need protecting from, themselves. They have no new ideas. Only old ones relabeled, rebranded and polished to make them seem new again. The American Experiment was a chance to break the cycle of kings and tyrants that had dominated so much of human history. The left would destroy that experiment, in the name of their own experiment. And their experiment has always proven to be fatal to the test subject.

The question before us is whether freedom will survive or perish. Whether we will be the land of the free and the home of the brave, or the land of the fee and the home of the slave.

Daniel Greenfield

Visit Daniel's Blog Sultan Knish by clicking HERE

Daniel Greenfield is a blogger and columnist born in Israel and living in New York City. Daniel is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and a contributing editor at Family Security Matters.

Daniel's original biweekly column appears at Front Page Magazine and his blog articles regularly appear at Family Security Matters, the Jewish Press, Times of Israel, Act for America and Right Side News, as well as daily at the Canada Free Press and a number of other outlets. Daniel has a column titled Western Front at Israel National News and his op eds have also appeared in the New York Sun, the Jewish Press and at FOX Nation.

Daniel was named one of the Jewish Press' Most Worthwhile Blogs from 2006-2011 and his writing has been cited by Rush Limbaugh, Melanie Philips, Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Judith Klinghoffer, John Podhoretz, Jeff Jacoby and Michelle Malkin, among others.

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Star Parker - Preserve Gun Rights - Save Black Lives

This past Friday [2-15-2013] my organization, CURE, sponsored a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, to bring attention to the importance of rigorously defending the right of all Americans, guaranteed under the 2nd Amendment of our Constitution, to own a gun.

Our event provided a forum for black leaders from the world of politics and public policy in Washington, from the business community, from academia, and from the clergy to express their deep concern about efforts currently underway to limit our God-given and constitutional individual right of self-defense.

Why would an organization like CURE, whose mission focuses on the relevance of American values of faith and freedom to minorities, be so concerned about guns?

Because, as conservative black Americans, we know that the soul of America is kept alive with the free flow of the oxygen of freedom. And we know that when that flow is interrupted in any way, the group that suffers first and most are blacks.

New gun control initiatives coming from our President and from Democrats in congress to respond to a highly publicized tragedy by wanting to expand the power of government and limit the freedom of citizens comes as no surprise.

There is no problem facing America today that liberals do not believe should be solved by more government and less freedom. And liberals are consistent and predictable in their indifference to facts and experience that show whenever they do succeed in growing government and limiting freedom, they make matters worse, not better.

A substantial body of research already shows that gun controls empower criminals and weaken law-abiding citizens.

As John Lott, former chief economist of the US Sentencing Commission, recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “With just a single exception, the attack in Tucson last year, every public shooting in the U.S. in which three or more people have been killed since at least 1950 have occurred in a place where people are not allowed to carry their own firearms.”

Regarding black reality, blacks are the least armed, least protected and defended, and the most assaulted citizens in our country.

According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 42 percent of whites and 16 percent of blacks say that they have a pistol or rifle at home.

And, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, for the period 1980 to 2008, “Blacks were six times more likely than whites to be homicide victims and eight times more likely to commit a homicide.”

Law abiding black citizens live under siege in crime ridden urban centers. Somehow they are supposed to buy the logic that giving more power to those in law enforcement already charged with maintaining order but don’t, while stripping down the freedoms of those that do obey the law, will make them better off?

In a Pew Research Center survey in 2009, 46 percent of whites compared to 24 percent of blacks said they have a “great deal” of confidence in the local police to enforce the law.

Can anyone whom God has blessed with a brain actually think that universal background checks will keep guns out of the hands of gang thugs? Or that these same checks, in which some past legal infraction might nullify a gun application, will not result in even fewer urban law abiding blacks obtaining a weapon for protection?

Perhaps even worse than another make-pretend big government “answer” that will not only not solve a problem, but will make it worse, gun control initiatives mask over the issues that really need attention.

A culture that devalues personal responsibility, that fosters government dependence, that trashes traditional understanding of sex, marriage, and family, and that bans these traditional values from our public schools and our public life.

Americans of all backgrounds must fight yet another misguided liberal attempt to undermine our personal freedom and sap the vitality of our nation.

Star Parker

Black conservative leaders discuss how the NRA was created to protect freed slaves and how important the 2nd Amendment is to ALL Americans.

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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Socialism Explained

A socialist attempts to explain why she thinks socialism will work...this time.

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William Sullivan - Weighing the Gun Control Argument

Originally posted at American Thinker.

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It is a bit misleading to call our current national discussion about gun control a "debate." Simply put, politicians and the media directing the discussion aren't interested in evidence or conclusions contrary to those that they have a vested interest in disseminating. They are interested merely in silencing any opposition, and they rely on their devoted acolytes to continue empowering them to do so.

It's about belief for these acolytes, not proof. Because they believe in the moral imperative, whether or not facts support their beliefs is unimportant. They just blindly accept that what they've been told is true, and they look upon those who believe otherwise as dangerous heretics.

Yet in a somewhat intellectually quixotic self-perception, these gun-control zealots declare themselves the rational thinkers on the subject and believe their conclusions infallible, despite the fact that the hypotheses to which they are so devoted are rarely measured in the crucible of evidence.

Consider the most basic of their arguments -- that access to guns needs to be restricted by the government, because access to guns is the most convincing variable that determines murder rates in our society. Let's just briefly weigh that assertion in the balance, and see how well it holds up to scrutiny.

In 1960, data suggests that there were roughly 77.5 million guns owned by a population of just over 179 million, meaning that there was somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.3 guns per 10 Americans. In that year, the murder rate in America was roughly 5.1 per 100,000 Americans.

Fast-forward to 2009. According to a Congressional Research Service report by William J. Krouse, 310 million guns were owned by Americans in that year by a population estimated to be 307 million, meaning there were probably more guns in America than there were Americans.

Now pause a moment, and remember that gun-control advocates contend that there exists a positive correlation between the number of readily accessible guns and the number of murders. If true, we might expect such a surge in gun ownership (and guns that are owned are as readily accessible as guns get) to yield a much higher murder rate. But in fact, the murder rate was lower in 2009 than in 1960 -- at 5.0 per 100,000 Americans.

Such inconsistency and an obviously flawed hypothesis might send a reasonable person back to the drawing board. But gun control zealots just double down and get more specific. Currently, the fashionable tactic is to appear a bit centrist by suggesting that it's not all guns or the Second Amendment that they oppose, but rather just those scary looking semi-automatic guns people call "assault weapons" and high-capacity magazines. No one needs that kind of gun, and no one needs to fire that many bullets, they argue.

In terms of the practical purpose of the Second Amendment -- that is, the preservation of individual liberty -- it should be obvious, as I have argued before, why such weapons and such payloads are essential, and explicit in the verbiage of the Second Amendment is unquestionable proof that the federal government has no legal right to infringe upon a law-abiding American's right to own them. But since it is a common objection among the left that supporters of gun rights cling to their archaic Constitution (or that "little book," as Piers Morgan calls it), rather than just accepting the idea that a new assault weapons ban would curtail violence, let's examine a bit of data surrounding their claim.

That data can tell a pretty simple story to those willing to hear it. The 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban expired in 2004, and in that year, the murder rate was 5.5 per 100,000 Americans. In 2011, that murder rate had declined to 4.7 per 100,000 Americans, which, incidentally, is the lowest murder rate in nearly four decades. If the laws banning "assault weapons" were so incredibly effective, why have murder rates significantly fallen since it expired? Not only did the federal government lift laws restricting "assault weapons," but since then, many states expanded "concealed carry" rights, meaning that guns were all the more prevalent in public life during these years, with both criminals and the law-abiding being totally aware of that fact -- and the result was a lower murder rate.

This is not to say the data shows a constant trend opposite of the one that gun control advocates suggest. Murder rates have vacillated in big swings throughout the years, sometimes rising, sometimes falling, despite the fact that gun ownership has steadily increased. Therefore, we must accept that more guns don't always result in less murder, either, in terms of the data. The point, however, is that the primary hypotheses that are the foundation of current gun control arguments are fatally flawed. Neither the presence of guns (whether semi-automatic or outfitted with a large payload) nor the laws restricting them (which lawless murderers invariably ignore) are the most convincing variable that determines rates of murder in this country.

It would certainly be valuable to have a discussion about how we can best reduce incidents of murder in America. But it should be a discussion based upon reason, not emotional agendas to rob Americans of their fundamental liberties based upon specious and unsubstantiated arguments. There are far more convincing variables to explain high rates of murder, whether we're talking about large quantities of unheralded murders or isolated and sensationalized killing sprees. And regarding the latter, considering that it has recently surfaced that Adam Lanza's likely motivation for the massacre in Newtown was to surpass Oslo spree-killer Anders Breivik in notoriety, it might make sense that we examine the practical impact of the self-centered nature of our culture that values celebrity above all things. And maybe it is a good idea to address the media's sensationalism of the actions of demented spree-killers like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Seung-Hui Cho, Jared Loughner, Anders Breivik, and Aurora shooter James Holmes, all of whom were granted larger-than-life notoriety by the media for their actions.

But at these suggestions, gun control advocates generally return full circle to that flawed argument with which we began -- that fewer guns and more gun control are the answer to curtail murder in America. It's as if the above-mentioned data roundly disproving the claim never existed, and they go on arguing their hypothesis in other ways, like comparing this place that has gun control to that place that doesn't.

For example, gun-control advocates are very quick to point out that England has a lower murder rate than America and extremely restrictive gun control laws. Notably absent from these keen observations, however, is the multitude of comparisons where the opposite is true, such as a comparison between America and, say, Russia, which has extremely strict gun control laws and few guns, but a murder rate that eclipses our own.

Of course, they generally neglect to use domestic examples, too, and with good reason -- the opposite of their contention is almost invariably true in domestic comparisons. Urban areas, for example, typically have stricter gun control laws and lower rates of gun ownership than rural areas, yet they have much higher murder rates. And then there is the glaring example of Obama's hometown, Chicago, which proudly touts its extremely progressive gun control laws while owning the highest murder rate in the nation. But that doesn't stop the devout masses from cheering in passionate agreement when the president suggests, with a repetitive cadence that would make Goebbels proud, that Chicago-style gun regulation be applied federally.

The implication of such ignorance is too grave to find any humor in that sad irony.

The hypothesis we should be discussing is that cultural factors are much more convincing variables correlating to murder rates. Take the consideration that widespread poverty and unemployment could have potentially contributed to the spike in murder rates in the late seventies, or that the proliferation of a culture of gang violence likely contributed to the sustained high murder rates in the early nineties, or the possibility that our current culture of celebrity and sensationalized violence is perhaps now leading to isolated spree-killing endeavors, if one is to take Adam Lanza's supposed motive into consideration.

If there is to be any progress in the gun control "debate," America must forego the commonly held fallacy that gun regulations upon the law-abiding will regulate the lawless. Until then, we may be doomed to have reasonable arguments against gun control fall on deaf ears.

William Sullivan

Political Palaver is a blog created by William Sullivan and Calvin Parker and is intended to be an outlet for thoughts and ideas about current events and politics.

William Sullivan blogs at http://politicalpalaverblog.blogspot.com/ and can be followed on Twitter.

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Piers Morgan Makes It Happen

Piers Morgan infamous host of CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight is afflicted with the same self induced mind-control that most if not all Liberals suffer from - if Reality does not match their Liberal feelings then they create an alternate reality that does match their feelings.

Piers Morgan was so dissatisfied with the War in Iraq in 2004 while he was Editor of the UK Newspaper The Daily Mirror, that he published doctored and/or fake pictures of British troops torturing an Iraqi detainee.

In one picture a soldier is seen urinating on a hooded man while in another the hooded man is being hit with a rifle in the groin. The Queen's Lancashire Regiment (QLR) said the Mirror had endangered British troops by running the pictures. The regiment's Brigadier Geoff Sheldon said the vehicle featured in the photographs had been located in a Territorial Army base in Lancashire and had never been in Iraq. He said the QLR's reputation had been damaged by the Mirror and asked the newspaper to apologise because the evidence they were staged was "overwhelming".

"Piers Morgan was sacked as the editor of the Daily Mirror last night as the newspaper's board made an unreserved apology for publishing fake pictures of British troops torturing Iraqi prisoners. Morgan's departure came only hours after a devastating rebuttal of his defence of the pictures by Brig Geoff Sheldon, colonel of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment, whose soldiers were accused of torture and abuse in the Mirror under the headline "Vile".

Piers Morgan Fired and Escorted from Building:

For most of yesterday Morgan was his customary bullish self, "laughing and joking" with colleagues as they prepared the paper.

He told a television interviewer yesterday morning: "All I want to say is we published the truth." But the end of his eight-year editorship came suddenly. At 6.30pm he was called to the executive floor to be told by Sly Bailey, the chief executive, that the board had "lost confidence in him". Morgan, who had made it clear that he would not resign, was not given the option of apologising and keeping his job. According to staff, he was not allowed to bid farewell to his newsroom before being ushered out of the building by security staff. His personal assistant was said to be in tears.

Morgan's jacket was still on the chair where he had been sitting before being summoned by Miss Bailey.

Piers Morgan Phone Hacking Scandal (2012):

Piers Morgan Media Misinformation:

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Wild Bill for America - High Gas Prices

When Obama was elected we were paying $1.82 a gallon for gasoline. How high will it go if he is re-elected

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Wild Bill for America - Vote Busters

The liberal left is working to discourage conservative voters, don't fall for it!"

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PJTV Trifecta - Terrorists Winning? Ivy League Professor Calls for Censorship of YouTube

Law professor Tim Wu thinks YouTube should censor videos that could offend people in the Middle East. Is the liberal establishment raising the white flag to Islamic extremists? Are academics willing to sacrifice free speech and the First Amendment to satisfy the demands of radical Muslim terrorists? Find out.

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Star Parker - Can it be un-American to be a Christian?

The current hate campaign being waged by homosexual activists against fast food chain Chick-fil-A, because of the firm’s Christian values, may well turn out to be a bridge too far. The effort may prove to be a setback for homosexual activism.

The vile attacks on the firm and its owners, the Cathy family, should make clear, finally, that the “gay rights” movement is not about refining and advancing American freedom, but about rewriting American values and advancing, not freedom, but the homosexual political agenda.

Recently Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke at a flag raising ceremony in Alexandria, Egypt, noting the re-opening of the American consulate there. Given the current political climate in Egypt, the Secretary of State felt behooved in her remarks to highlight principles of freedom as understood by Americans.

“….to us, real democracy means that every citizen has the right to live, work, and worship as they choose, whether they are man or woman, Muslim or Christian, or from any other background.”

Perhaps Secretary Clinton should be lecturing Americans instead of Egyptians.

Can it really be that in America today a businessman can be labeled a bigot, boycotted, and cut off by suppliers because of the crime of being a Christian?

When Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy made his now famous incendiary admission that “We are very much supportive of the family – the biblical definition of the family unit,” he was not pontificating. He was responding to a question in an interview done in a paper I expect not read by many homosexuals – the Baptist Press.

Never mind. It was sufficient provocation that Cathy publicly admitted that the Bible defines his understanding of marriage – the unique bond of man and woman – which also happens to be the standard definition in dictionaries on the shelves of every American home and library.

“Chick-fil-A’s values are not Chicago’s values,” said Chicago Mayor, and former chief of staff to President Barack Obama, Rahm Emmanuel. Emmanuel defended Chicago Alderman Joe Moreno’s threat to deny Chick-fil-A permitting in Chicago because its owner supports traditional marriage and family.

But UCLA law professor and constitutional scholar Eugene Volokh points out in his blog that “denying a private business permits because of such speech by its owner is a blatant First Amendment violation.”

The Constitution? The First Amendment? Religious liberty? Do these apply to Christians?

Volokh goes on to point out that a permit might be denied, “…if Chick-fil-A actually discriminated in their serving or hiring decisions in Chicago in a way forbidden by Chicago or Illinois law….But the stories give no evidence of such actions…”

The fact that there is no evidence that Chick-fil-A discriminates in its business practices did not deter Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank from writing that Dan Cathy’s support of traditional marriage “…implied that gay people (not to mention divorced people) had no business eating at Chick-fil-A.”

One court decision after another over the last fifty years has, step by step, purged any hint of religion and traditional values from our schools and public spaces.

Has it made this a fairer, better, freer nation? If you think breakdown of family, forty percent out-of-wedlock births, a million abortions a year, $16 trillion in national debt, and government dependence is better and freer, yes.

Of course society must embrace civility, respect and tolerance. But this doesn’t mean that the sexual proclivities of some should provide license to rewrite our language and the traditions that define our faith and virtue.

Hopefully many will respond to Mike Huckabee’s appeal to patronize Chick-fil-A on August 1 as a display of support for traditional Christian values and as a reminder that our Constitution protects religious freedom.

Have we really gotten to the point where being a Christian is considered un-American?

Star Parker

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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