Arrested for Preaching About Homosexuality

This, of course, is a fundraising video, but the reality it talks about (no free speech for people critical of homosexuality) is endemic. The situation in the U.S., with our First Amendment, is better in strict legal terms, but bullying, harassment and intimidation from the gay lobby can achieve the same thing here that arrests can in the U.K.

[Update]

The Huffington Post ran a reasonably unbiased article on this incident, but note the level of vitriol directed against not only the street preacher, but also Christianity in general, in the comments.

Liberal Brown Deer School Board Candidate: Have Legal Counsel Find Way to “Restrain” Criticism

Local school board politics can get very interesting, and Brown Deer is no exception.

Conservative former school board member Mike Christopolus has been a bit of a thorn in the side of liberal board members, engaging in the nefarious activity of writing to the local paper BrownDeerNOW criticizing the policies and performance of the school district.

Some people are more thin skinned than others, but liberal school board member Leslie Galloway Sherard wanted to explore legal avenues to shut Christopolus up.

In an e-mail to board members in late 2010, she complained:

I am tired of seeing a letter in the NOW paper from Mike C. that continues to attack our District, its’ [sic] employees and our efforts to help students be successful. I would like to craft a response to the paper from the school board.

OK, she is blowing off steam, and wants to respond. No harm, no foul.

But then she escalates:

I would also like to ask our legal council [sic] about these continued attacks many of which contain information that is not true. These letters do nothing but defame the District’s character and reputation. They also negatively impact the work we are trying to accomplish.

Heaven help us if free speech “negatively impacts” somebody’s idea of what they are trying to accomplish.

We owe it to our children and our community to respond and identify a strategy to get these kinds of letters restrained.

Sherard, who signed the Walker recall petition, is up for reelection on Tuesday.

Neither Christopolus nor Sherard was immediately available for comment.

Andrew Breitbart: Message to Libertarians on Campus

John Kerry: Give Equal Time? Depends on Whether I Agree With the Viewpoint

In the first clip, of course, he is referring to Tea Party people who didn’t want to increase the debt ceiling. But in the second, the context is a bit different.

What Books Would People Like to Ban?

No Free Speech in Canada

Liberal Democrat Senator Rockefeller: Ban Fox News, MSNBC

[Update]

It seems that Rockefeller has told Keith Olbermann that he likes his show.

So who is it that he really wants to ban?

Intolerance at National Public Radio, and in the NPR Audience

It’s not that surprising that National Public Radio fired Juan Williams. The organization, and it’s listeners, have a long history of bigotry toward Fox News. Actually, they have a history of intolerance toward virtually all those who disagree with them.

Two examples.

From the Huffington Post, March 2009:

NPR has asked Fox News not to identify its news analyst, Juan Williams, with NPR branding when he appears on Fox News because of outrage among its largely liberal listener-base. And Fox News has happily agreed to do so.

NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard wrote Wednesday that in 2008 she received 378 “complaints and frustrations about things Williams said on Fox,” including claims that Williams “dishonors NPR” and is an “embarrassment to NPR” and that “NPR should severe [sic] their relationship with him.”

Recent listener complaints have centered around Williams’ comment that Michelle Obama could be a liability to her husband. . . . [emphasis added]

That’s right. The liberal listeners of NPR were “outraged” that Williams had the temerity to appear on a network that they hate. And say some things they disagreed with.

Of course, on Fox Williams is pretty much the liberal. But he’s not a dogmatic liberal whose opinions are always predictable.

Of course, Williams is not the only NPR person who has come under fire. Also from the Huffington Post:

NPR asked its leading political correspondent, Mara Liasson, to reconsider her regular appearances on Fox News, where she is a paid contributor, Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports.

Gerstein reports that “Liasson was summoned in early October by NPR’s executive editor for news, Dick Meyer, and the network’s supervising senior Washington editor, Ron Elving” about concerns they had over Fox News’ programming and its changes since President Obama had taken office. They asked her to spend 30 days watching the network; she obliged, and “reported that she’d seen no significant change in Fox’s programming,” Gerstein reports.

The timing of NPR’s request coincided with the White House’s battle against the network.

An NPR spokesperson refused to comment specifically about Liasson, telling Politico, “As part of our ongoing work we have internal conversations about talent appearances all the time that are part of our regular editorial evaluation.” The spokesperson added, “There’s no relationship between the White House’s criticism of Fox and any discussions about Fox that we’re having.”

A Fox News spokesperson said, “With the ratings we have, NPR should be paying us to even be mentioned on our air.”

It’s a reality of contemporary liberalism: liberals simply can’t stand that people are allowed to say things they disagree with.

While not every liberal is intolerant, intolerance is now very much mainstream among liberals. We see it in attempts to shut up people who want to participate in political campaigns, attempts to shut up conservative talk radio, and speech codes on college campuses.

The reasons are various, but the fundamental problem is that liberals are simply much more able than conservatives to isolate themselves from the mainstream. They had college professors who were virtually uniformly liberal or leftist. They enter occupations (like academia or journalism) where pretty much everybody thinks the same way. They segregate themselves in neighborhoods (like Milwaukee’s East Side) where most of their neighbors think the same way. They get their news from the mainstream media, from NPR and from a highly selected bunch of leftist web sites (Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo).

Isolation breeds narrow parochialism, and that breeds intolerance of dissenting opinions.

Modern liberals aren’t the first nor the only people this has happened to, but the combination of intolerance and political power among today’s liberals is particularly dangerous.

A Word to the Liberals on Tolerance

An article in the September number of The Warrior by Ethan Hollenberger deals with two attacks on the Catholic mission of Marquette and other Catholic institutions: the requirement by a Democratically controlled state legislature that all health plans must pay for birth control, and the recent activism favoring hiring Jodi O’Brien, who is both openly lesbian and scornful of Catholic teaching on homosexuality.

The issue for Marquette is whether or not it will follow its moral leader Pope Benedict XVI, a theologian who shares the opinion of Wisconsin’s Bishops. Marquette is a Jesuit University being forced to abandon Catholic teachers to appease non-Catholic employees who have willingly chosen to work at the University.

It seems to me . . . the Left isn’t happy with allowing Marquette keep its Catholic identity. Marquette is always being lobbied to disregard the Church’s moral leaders for a more “progressive” worldview. We see Christian values being attacked in New York City with the building of the Mosque near ground zero. If a person does not want that Mosque built, he is “Islamophopic.” If a person doesn’t want a dean who writes contrary to Catholic values, he is “homophobic.” And, if a person believes the Catholic teaching of abstinence before marriage, not preventing conception, or taking life, he is living in an older time. Folks, the tolerance goes both ways. Progessives, your worldview differs greatly from Catholic teaching, deal with it. Stop forcing Marquette to abandon its Catholic tradition. Finally, walk the talk and tolerate diversity!

Indeed, for way too many liberals, “tolerance” means accepting things they think are OK, like abortion and homosexuality. They can’t conceive of it requiring tolerance of opinions that they disagree with.

Yet Another Liberal Attack on Free Speech

From the Radio Business Report:

Claiming that precious metal peddler Goldline uses conservative broadcast talkers to whip audiences into a frenzy about upcoming financial catastrophe and then sells them gold as a hedge, at inflated prices, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) is calling for investigations by the SEC and the FTC. Although several personalities are named, TV/radio talker Glenn Beck is Weiner’s prime target.

Naming names: According to a report released by Weiner, “Fred Thompson, Dennis Miller, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, Lars Larson, Michael Smerconish, Monica Crowley and Mike Huckabee are all paid spokespeople for Goldline.” Beck was a spokesperson too, but had to relinquish that role to conform to Fox News policy, but Goldline remains a major advertiser on his FNC program. [emphasis added]

According to the report, “On numerous occasions, Glenn Beck has dedicated entire segments of his program to explaining why the U.S. money supply is destined for hyperinflation with Barack Obama as president. He will often promote the purchase of gold as the only safe investment alternative for consumers who want to safeguard their livelihoods. When the show cuts to commercial break, viewers are treated to an advertisement from Goldline.”

Weiner commented, “Goldline rips off consumers, uses misleading and possibly illegal sales tactics, and deliberately manipulates public fears of an impending government takeover – this is a trifecta of terrible business practices. It’s unacceptable that this company is preying on public fears to sell its products.”

An odd statement, coming from a politician. Those are the people who make a business of “preying on public fears” to get themselves reelected.

The misleading tactics boil down mainly to two, according to Weiner. First, he says that the gold the company sells is marked up 90% above melt value on average, meaning the value of the gold would almost have to double for the buyer to break even. Further, he says salespersons represent themselves as financial advisors, but they are not licensed as such. Weiner believes that is a misrepresentation.

Beck discussed Weiner’s attack on his Premiere Networks radio show, calling it part of a smear campaign engineered against himself and Goldline by the Obama administration. He wondered if other organizations besides those airing conservative talkers, and running Goldline ads, would also be targeted.

Beck also said that his money is where his mouth is on this one. “If my people that do financial advising — because I’m worth — you don’t listen to me for financial advice and that’s why I’ve said don’t — I buy it not as an investment. I buy it as insurance policy. If my people, my advisors would allow me to buy 50%, I’d have 50% of my savings in gold. But they all say that’s nuts. 10%, no more than 10%, no more than 10%. I think I have 15? 15, maybe 20% of mine in gold. From Goldline. Now, you tell me. If I’m such a scam artist, why would I be scamming myself?”

According to Politico, Goldline also responded. Goldline president and CEO Mark Albarian said, “It feels like it’s politically motivated in that neither the Congressman nor anybody from his office ever contacted executives from the company to really ask the important questions that they need to ask to understand this business.” He claimed that Weiner “doesn’t get” the gold business and suggested that the company’s relationship with Beck was the true motivation for the attack.

Goldline, by the way, has an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau.

We don’t think gold is a particularly good investment. Indeed, we would not buy bullion at the melt value (even if we actually had the money to do so). But it’s not government’s job to second guess what investors want to do. If there were actual fraud -- if the company didn’t deliver the product it promised -- government would have a right to intervene.

But just disagreeing about where investors should put their money is a different matter.

It can’t possibly be an accident that Weiner has picked on a company that advertises on conservative outlets. This is simply another case of liberals in government using their power to try to shut up voices they don’t like.

That’s just not consistent with free republican government. Indeed, as government power increases, free speech necessarily becomes more precarious.

Ed Schultz: Use Government to “Equal Out” Talk Radio Audience

Another Example of How Liberals Don’t Believe in Free Speech

The Real Agenda Behind “Hate Crime” Laws

From the Washington Examiner:

This story comes to us from Broward County, Fla. Teah Wimberly, 16, is charged with murdering Amanda Coll, a friend and classmate at Dillard High School in Fort Lauderdale. Both girls were 15 at the time of the shooting.

According to police, Ms. Wimberly wanted more than just a friendship with Collette, whom she’d known since childhood. Wimberly wanted a lesbian relationship with Collette, who rebuffed the idea, news reports indicate. On Nov. 12 of last year, police say, Wimberly took a .22-caliber handgun to school and fatally shot Collette.

Wimberly’s trial started last week and is expected to continue this week. This may be the first time you’ve read about the case, unlike when Matthew Shepard was murdered in Wyoming or when James Byrd was dragged to death in Jasper, Texas.

My guess is you know plenty about those latter two incidents. Shepard was gay; two men beat him to death because he was gay. Byrd was a black man whom three white supremacists chained to a truck, dragged through the streets of Jasper and beheaded.

Both grisly crimes, to be sure. And when President Obama signed a new federal “hate crimes” law recently, it was called the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

That’s a misnomer, because the law prevents nothing of the sort. And it creates classes of victims and perpetrators, as if some victims of violent crime are better than others, or the perpetrators of the same are worse.

And therein lies the answer about why Wimberly wasn’t charged with a hate crime. She’s the wrong sexual orientation: lesbian. Had she been a heterosexual teen who shot a lesbian, you’d have been able to repeat the details of this story verbatim, because that’s how many times you’d have heard it.

Wimberly is also the wrong race: She’s black, or, as the current PC term goes, African American. Her victim, Colette, was also a “person of color,” to use yet another annoying PC term.

I’ll repeat what I’ve said about “hate crimes” laws for some time: They should be more correctly called “bust whitey’s hump” laws. These laws target whites who commit crimes against “people of color.” You’ll rarely see them used against “people of color” who commit crimes against whites. And it’s even rarer to see them used against “people of color” who commit crimes against other “people of color.”

Ever heard of Cheryl Greene? She was a black girl killed by members of a Mexican-American gang in Los Angeles. There have been some very nasty brown-on-black crimes committed in Los Angeles recently, but like the Amanda Collette murder, most media outlets give them little to no coverage.

The victims are the right color, but, dang it, the perps just aren’t. Nothing makes for the perfect hate crime like a white perp and a victim who’s a “person of color.”

Or, if you’re like the Obamas of the world, a victim who’s gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or transsexual. The purpose of the Shepard-Byrd Act was to add them to the list of approved “hate crimes” victims. At least that’s what the law’s supporters would try to con us into believing.

The truth is this: Supporters of “hate crimes” laws don’t want to criminalize the conduct of those who commit crimes based on race, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation. Wyoming and Texas both had murder statutes on the books that allowed the killers of Shepard and Byrd to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. It’s not like the murderers escaped punishment.

No, supporters of “hate crimes” laws want to criminalize certain thoughts and ideas. That makes them far more dangerous than those who commit nonviolent “hate crimes.”

The yokels who’d burn a cross on a lawn, paint a swastika on a synagogue or yell the dreaded “F” bomb at a gay couple are, at worst, insufferable bigots. At best they’re simply royal pains in our collective neck.

But those who want to criminalize thoughts and ideas will soon lead us down the path to totalitarianism. Given my druthers, I’d gladly suffer the annoyance of the silly, nonviolent acts of a few idiotic bigots than trust an advocate of “hate crimes” laws to govern this nation.

Unhinged Left Talks About Obama Assassination

From the left-wing Media Matters:

A President was killed the last time right-wing hatred ran wild like this

That being John F. Kennedy, who was gunned down in Dallas, of course.

I’ve been thinking a lot of Kennedy and Dallas as I’ve watched the increasingly violent rhetorical attacks on Obama be unfurled. As Americans yank their kids of class in order to save them from being exposed to the President of the United States who only wanted to urge them to excel in the classroom. And as unvarnished hate and name-calling passed for health care “debate” this summer.

The radical right, aided by a GOP Noise Machine that positively dwarfs what existed in 1963, has turned demonizing Obama — making him into a vile object of disgust —into a crusade. It’s a demented national jihad, the likes of which this country has not seen in modern times.

But I’ve been thinking about Dallas in 1963 because I’ve been recalling the history and how that city stood as an outpost for the radical right, which never tried to hide its contempt for the New England Democrat.

Now, in this this month’s Vanity Fair, Sam Kashner offers up in rich detail the hatred that ran wild in Dallas in 1963. To me, the similarity between Dallas in 1963 and today’s unhinged Obama hate is downright chilling.

Of course, this entirely overlooks the fact that Kennedy was killed by a left-winger: Lee Harvey Oswald.

It also overlooks the way assassination chic prevailed during the Bush Administration.

It’s an expression of how demented the left really is. When they see conservative dissenters, they see assassins.

It’s one of the worst forms of bigotry: they can’t accept that anybody who is not evil can disagree with them.

It’s only one small step to shutting up conservative dissent as “hate speech.” A lot of people on the left would happily do that.

And it’s worth noting that a fair number of people on the left would probably welcome — in their hearts of hearts — the assassination of Obama by somebody on the political right. That would make him a martyr, and erase the memories of his now-floundering presidency. That’s what happened with JFK, except for one inconvenient fact: he was murdered by a leftist.

But that’s a fact other leftists are fully capable of denying or overlooking.

Actually, Liberals Don’t Believe in Freedom to Dissent Either

From Andrew Breitbart on Real Clear Politics:

John Mackey - the founder, CEO and marketing genius behind Whole Foods - finds himself in an organic, unsustainable mess with his carefully cultivated affluent, liberal customer base after penning an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal titled, “The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare.”

For starters, Mr. Mackey opens with a line from known-liberal-allergen Margaret Thatcher that features the dreaded “S” word: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” Then he goes on to provide eight sensible free-market solutions gleaned from his company’s well-regarded employee health care program.

Mr. Mackey, a free-market libertarian, is now at the mercy of an unforgiving grass-roots mob intent on destroying his company. More than 25,000 people have signed on to a Whole Foods boycott on Facebook.

“Whole Foods has built its brand with the dollars of deceived progressives,” the online petition reads. “Let them know your money will no longer go to support Whole Foods’ anti-union, anti-health insurance reform, right-wing activities.”

A complementary Web site, WholeBoycott.com, features unintentionally comical video testimonials from aggrieved former customers. The mainstream media have picked up on the story and fanned the flames.

And here is the most perceptive part of the piece.

The success of Whole Foods is largely built on Mr. Mackey’s understanding of the liberal mind. It wants the good life - but with instant absolution for the sin of conspicuous consumption. Whole Foods is marketing at its best. Iconography and slogans throughout the store - not unlike those Barack Obama used to win the presidency - tell the shopper they are saving the planet in large and small ways.

The product is so good even conservatives and skeptics are willing to play along.

But Mr. Mackey missed the key ingredient of modern liberalism: intolerance to the ideas of nonliberals. And this miscalculation may prove to be devastating to his multibillion-dollar business.

Everywhere one looks these days, the intolerance of self-avowed liberals is on display. Especially since Mr. Obama came to power.

The purportedly open-minded and empathic among us who now run everything - save for NASCAR and Nashville - openly wage war against those who dare disagree.

Witness Steny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi’s joint-penned editorial in USA Today in which the House’s two top Democrats describe those publicly questioning Mr. Obama’s proposed health care system overhaul as “un-American.”

One need not go back too far in the political time machine to recall a time when the same people were claiming that the term “un-American” was being tossed at liberals for opposing the Iraq war, and that Republicans were stifling free speech.

Examples were rarely, if ever, given. It just was. And we were told this was a very, very bad thing.

The Dixie Chicks brilliantly used this sob line to become a Rolling Stone magazine cover staple, a blue-state crossover and an international cause celebre. A chorus line of would-be liberal celebrity martyrs took a similar marketing tack proclaiming McCarthyism was again afoot - as conservative Hollywood kept its collective mouth shut knowing that support for President Bush or the war was an instant career-killer.

Yet amid the cries of “dissent is patriotic” - a phrase seen on the bumper stickers of cars in the Whole Foods parking lot - the antiwar movement grew and grew, unfettered by the war’s supporters or by the party in power.

As the Hollywood Left churned out antiwar film screeds, it was creating a narrative of its victimhood as it victimized Mr. Bush and his administration with the false accusation that dissenters were being persecuted. But now that they are in power, Democrats are brazenly wielding punitive weaponry against dissenting Americans and are using the power of the state to shut up citizens.

The Democratic leadership - and its friends in the mainstream media - seem determined to brand opposition to the president’s legislative agenda as illegitimate, even racist in origin. Individuals and grass-roots organizations are helping the statists’ cause by advocating boycotts and other means of stifling dissent.

The strategy is clear: Intimidate people from speaking up or from attending public protests by telegraphing that anyone can be made a demon for standing up and exercising basic, constitutional rights.

Of course, we need to be clear on one thing: people do have the right to boycott anybody they want to boycott. Any conservative who thinks the public statements of (say) the Dixie Chicks are obnoxious is free, in a capitalist economy, not to buy their CDs.

But people have the right to do all sorts of things that are, in effect, fascist.

All John Mackey did was express an opinion on Obama’s health care proposals. That was “offensive” only to people who get “offended” at hearing opinions they disagree with expressed — even in perfectly civil terms.

Leftists Don’t Believe in Academic Freedom

From the Associated Press:

BERKELEY, Calif. — Anti-war activists protested Monday at the University of California, Berkeley to call for the firing of a law professor who co-wrote legal memos that critics say were used to justify the torture of suspected terrorists.

Campus police arrested at least four people who refused to leave the university’s law school building.

The demonstrators said John Yoo should be dismissed, disbarred and prosecuted for war crimes for his work as a Bush administration attorney from 2001 to 2003, when he helped craft legal theories for waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques.

Shouting “war criminal,” the protesters confronted Yoo as he entered a lecture hall on the first day of class at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, where the tenured professor is teaching a civil law course this semester.

Yoo mostly ignored the demonstrators and waited for police to remove them from the classroom before he began teaching. Several officers then stood outside the lecture hall to prevent protesters and journalists from entering.

Demonstrators also staged a mock arrest of Yoo. Some dressed in black hoods and orange prisoner suits similar to ones seen in infamous photos of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, which was closed in 2006 following reports of detainee abuse.

“There is little doubt that John Yoo is a war criminal,” said civil rights attorney Dan Siegel, speaking outside Boalt Hall. “John Yoo went to Washington and created the ideological, political and legal basis for the torture of innocent people.”

Yoo, who returned to UC Berkeley after spending the spring semester at Chapman University School of Law in Orange County, did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday.

Yoo, 42, has defended the controversial interrogation techniques, saying they were needed to protect the country from terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

“To limit the president’s constitutional power to protect the nation from foreign threats is simply foolhardy,” Yoo wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece last month.

He has come under intense criticism since the interrogation memos became public in 2004. The Berkeley City Council has passed a measure calling for the federal government to prosecute him for war crimes, and convicted terrorist Jose Padilla has filed a lawsuit alleging that Yoo’s legal opinions led to his alleged torture.

Christopher Edley Jr., Berkeley’s law school dean, has rejected calls to dismiss Yoo, saying the university doesn’t have the resources to investigate his Justice Department work, which involved classified intelligence.

Berkeley law students are divided over Yoo, whose classes are among the law school’s most popular.

Liz Jackson, a second-year law student, said the university should determine if he violated UC’s faculty code of conduct. “I personally believe he has blood on his hands,” said Jackson, 30.

But Nathan Salha, 24, who took one of Yoo’s classes last year and is enrolled in his course this semester, said he’s a good teacher. “I don’t think it’s the university’s place to fire him for political opinions,” he said.

Note that even if the CIA did things to terrorists that were in fact illegal, Yoo merely expressed a legal opinion about what liberals now call “torture.”

Further, the people who want him fired are not merely expressing their opinions, they are actually harrassing Yoo. What we have here, quite simply, is fascism.

[Update]

The New York Times solicited opinions on this, and you can see both the ones they solicited and the volunteered comments here.

A shockingly large proportion want Yoo fired. This is not some lefty “alternative” weekly, this is the New York Times.

The arguments used are bizarre, and would never be used against leftist professors. Several posters claim, for example that Yoo’s legal opinions had bad consequences. But how many leftist professors have (for example) indoctrinated foreign students about the glories of socialism, with massive damage to third-world peoples when they went home and took over power.

Others argue that his legal opinions are simply wrong, saying there is an objective legal truth, and Yoo deviated from it. That’s a bizarre argument indeed coming from people who think the Constitution can mean whatever you want it to.

Fascist intolerance by liberals against people with whom they disagree has become mainstream. It’s terribly close to becoming the norm.

White House Enemies List

This has gotten a lot of play in the media.

It’s the now-famous White House web page asking that Americans report any e-mail that says anything “fishy” about Obama’s attempt to impose government-run health.

We just sent them an e-mail, to flag@whitehouse.gov, as follows:

Please add me to your enemies list.

I’m a blogger who has blogged about how Obama wants government run health care.

You can’t make the video clips that show Obama saying he favors “single payer” go away.

John

I would suggest that an excellent form of protest would be for everybody who doesn’t like this Nixonian tactic to send a similar e-mail.

Of course, what one tells the White House would be different for each person, such as “I attended a town hall meeting and booed when the Congressman said that nobody wants government-run health care,” or “I sent a link to a video about how bad health care in Canada is to a friend.”

The Truth About the Town Hall Meetings

Some thoughts from Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal:

What has been most unsettling is not the congressmen’s surprise but a hard new tone that emerged this week. The leftosphere and the liberal commentariat charged that the town hall meetings weren’t authentic, the crowds were ginned up by insurance companies, lobbyists and the Republican National Committee. But you can’t get people to leave their homes and go to a meeting with a congressman (of all people) unless they are engaged to the point of passion. And what tends to agitate people most is the idea of loss—loss of money hard earned, loss of autonomy, loss of the few things that work in a great sweeping away of those that don’t.

People are not automatons. They show up only if they care.

What the town-hall meetings represent is a feeling of rebellion, an uprising against change they do not believe in. And the Democratic response has been stunningly crude and aggressive. It has been to attack. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, accused the people at the meetings of “carrying swastikas and symbols like that.” (Apparently one protester held a hand-lettered sign with a “no” slash over a swastika.) But they are not Nazis, they’re Americans. Some of them looked like they’d actually spent some time fighting Nazis.

Obama to Dissenters: Shut Up

Most liberals know better than to overtly say, “we don’t like free speech,” and “free speech has to end.”

Admittedly, in some liberal enclaves (English and Philosophy departments, Education schools) liberals will say that. But they are so far out of the mainstream that they say fascist things without even realizing it.

But deep down, liberals can’t help thinking “the world would be so much better if all those evil people who oppose us were shut up.”

And sometimes, they let it slip out.

Homosexuality: It’s a Crime in England to State Christian Views

From CCFON:

An open-air preacher from Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, was told by the police that he was committing a criminal offence by saying that homosexuality was a sin.

Andy Robertson, an evangelist with Open Air Mission, had never mentioned homosexuality in his open air preaching. Despite this, the local council sent a letter to him saying that they wanted him to stop preaching because they had received ‘complaints’. The council asserted that Mr Robertson was breaking the law by his preaching and that the Police would be called if he didn’t stop preaching. In the letter, the council did not specify which law was broken.

When the police arrived where Mr Robertson was preaching they told him they had received complaints that he was making ‘homophobic’ comments and that it was a crime to say that homosexuality was a sin. See a video of what happened at YouTube.

At CCFON we have become increasingly aware of how difficult it is to speak publicly on sexual ethics from a biblical standpoint particularly regarding the practice of homosexuality. At the Christian Legal Centre we are dealing with many cases where Christians are discriminated against because they hold biblical views on sexual ethics.

In the current Coroners and Justice Bill, the Government wants to remove the existing free speech clause that allows for discussion and criticism of sexual practices. The case of Mr Robertson and others is a clear indication that the society needs to keep a free speech protection.

The article cited at the end has a chilling list of cases where free speech incongenial to the gay lobby was published.

Last month, Kwabena Peat, a Christian teacher, was suspended from a senior post for complaining that a staff training day was used to promote homosexual rights.

Likewise, David Booker, an employee at a ‘homeless’ charity in Southampton, has been suspended for answering questions about his faith and sexual ethics to a colleague at work.

In 2003, the Rt Revd Dr Peter Forster, the Bishop of Chester, was investigated by the Cheshire police as committing a ‘hate crime’ after he told his local newspaper that some homosexuals re-orientated to heterosexuality with the help of therapy. The Crown Prosecution Service decided to drop the charges because the Bishop had ‘not broken any current laws’.

In 2005, the Metropolitan Police issued a warning to author Lynette Burrows that she was responsible for a ‘homophobic incident’ after she suggested on a BBC Radio Five Live programme that homosexual couples did not make ideal adoptive parents.

In 2006, an evangelical Christian campaigner, Stephen Green, was arrested and charged with ‘using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour’ for trying peacefully to hand out leaflets at a homosexual rally in Cardiff. A spokesman for the South Wales police said the campaigner had not behaved in a violent or aggressive manner, but that officers arrested him because ‘the leaflet contained Biblical quotes about homosexuality’.

In the same year, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the then Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Britain, was investigated by police for saying on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that homosexual practice was unacceptable in terms of health and moral issues.

The gay lobby is about as close to a fascist movement as one gets in modern democracies. Of course, not all gays (and not even a majority) are part of the gay lobby. In Presidential election exit polls, about 25% of gays and lesbians report that they have voted for the Republican for President. And a similar number say they oppose gay marriage.

But unfortunately, a core of gay militants is always joined by a sizable group of politically correct straight people.

Supposedly, free speech has better Constitutional protections in the U.S. than in the U.K. But a sizable group of people in the U.S. -- your average gay activist, your average English or Philosophy professor, a large proportion of liberal activists -- would like to see Christian views on sexuality shut up.

And this applies to issues like abortion and abstinence too.