Debating the "Undebatable"

Well, as Gomer Pyle (a fitting symbol for today's liberalism) would put it, "Surprise, surprise!" Scott Walker has (again) disappointed a member of the liberal media. Rest assured, it won't be the last time, especially if he runs for the GOP nomination for U.S. President. The trouble for liberals with Walker however, is that he has already taken many of their best punches. Democrats desperately dug deep on him in their vain attempts to unseat him as governor of Wisconsin.

Thus, we now have to hear about how important it is that the President of the United States needs to be a college graduate. It seems this is especially so the U.S. President can be well versed in Darwinian evolution.

In spite of Walker's lack of a college pedigree, the Washington Post's Richard Cohen thinks, hypothetically, he could have supported Walker for president, until last week that is. "If I were a Republican," Cohen declared yesterday, "I think I might have supported Scott Walker for president." Cohen goes on to compliment Walker's smile, tenacity, and his "adherence to principle." 

What did a Walker do last week that made Cohen's "faux conservative heart" sink? Mr. Walker balked when asked about evolution. According to Cohen, this makes the Wisconsin governor "either an ignoramus or a coward." (And only an "ignoramus or a coward" could defeat liberals 3 times in 4 years in the deep purple state of Wisconsin, right Mr. Cohen?) Because, of course, being.asked if one believes in evolution, "is precisely no different than asking whether one believes in the theory of gravity or general relativity."

Because, you see, "It is simply not possible to contest evolution, since it is the basis of all the biological sciences. The issue is closed, not-debatable...," adds Cohen. Ah yes, you know you've struck a nerve with liberals when you've tread upon that which is "not debatable." So we've gone beyond "the science is settled" to, "No matter what you or anyone else has to say, we're just not going to talk about that anymore."

Be it the "right" of a women to kill her unborn child, the new-found "right" to "marry" whomever one desires, the "right" to live as whatever gender one desires (no matter the plumbing God gave you), the notion that the earth is on a "slow boil" (Cohen's words--he must not live in the eastern U.S.), or Darwinian evolution, there seems to be an ever-increasing number of things liberals don't want to discuss, much less debate.

Yes, in liberal-land, the (supposed) billions of years of biology that describes the "how" (and I suppose the "why") of all living things is settled, but the biology of human anatomy and physiology, that we can see with our own eyes, is a mystery that we are still figuring out. In other words, though an individual might be born fully male, with all of the proper attachments, and lived as such for decades--even competing in the Olympics as such--if he suddenly decides he is a woman, and wants to mutilate his God-given body (and even have the taxpayers foot the bill!), this is not disease or madness, but bravery, and worthy of legal protection and every accommodation imaginable.

And as I must constantly remind those who think Darwinian evolution is "the basis (or "foundation") of all the biological sciences," just how is it that Louis Pasteur, a strong opponent of Darwin and his theory, operating from a strict biblical worldview, was able to become "the father of microbiology?" As I noted last year, "Pasteur, a microbiologist and chemist, who, along with giving us the process of pasteurization, disproved the theory of spontaneous generation (which put him at odds with Darwin and his work) and was a pioneer in the battle against infectious diseases (leading us to the process of vaccination).

"At times it seems that the (ridiculous) implication is that nothing in science can get done unless it is done from an evolutionary worldview. This is certainly the case in fields related to biology, but many Darwinian evolutionists would have us believe that everything from anesthesiology to zoology rests upon Darwinian evolution. Given that Darwin proposed his theory just over 150 years ago, it's a wonder anything at all was accomplished in science prior to 1850.

"Of course, much was. Generally considered the greatest scientist who ever lived, Isaac Newton--inventor of calculus, and famous for his laws of motion and universal gravitation--was a devout Chrostian and performed his work from a biblical worldview. On gravitation he noted, that 'Gravity explains the motion of the planets, it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done.'"

Additionally, Newton calculated the earth to be only a few thousand years old, and declared that, "For an educated man...any suggestion that the human past extended back further than 6,000 years was a vain and foolish speculation." But of course, this is much better than being an "ignoramus or a coward."

Copyright 2015, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of: Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com

Liberal Cohen Critics’ Disdain Misdirected

It seems that liberals have finally had their fill of Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. As fun as it might be to watch the left cannibalize one of their own, they’re doing it for all the wrong reasons.

Writing about Chris Christie’s TEA Party problem, Cohen followed much of the liberal playbook. Heck, along with attacking the TEA Party (Cohen admitted, “Why can’t intelligent liberals see I’m only mirroring their loathing of the Tea Party?”), he even insulted Sarah Palin. What got him in trouble with his pals is the last sentence of this paragraph:

“Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children.”

Cohen was summarily deemed a racist across the spectrum of the liberal media. Many calls for his firing ensued. The Huffington Post pleaded “Dear Washington Post: Please Fire This Man.” Salon.com tweeted, “His horrifying new column reminds us why old racists like Richard Cohen need to be fired.” ThinkProgress declared, “Even if Richard Cohen Isn’t Racist, He’s Incompetent.”

Following the outrage, Cohen insisted (as his quote above indicates) that he is a good liberal and that he has been grossly misinterpreted. That is probably the case. However, in all of their caterwauling over Cohen’s supposed racist comment, liberals have missed a more blatant, albeit subtle, betrayal of left-wing doctrine.

Immediately following the sentence that got him in so much trouble, Cohen asked “Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?”

“Used to be a lesbian?” Given the worldview of modern liberalism, how is that possible? Isn’t homosexuality supposedly innate (genetic) and unchangeable? And if it is possible to turn from homosexuality (which it is), why would today’s liberals want such as that bandied about in the pages of the Washington Post?

In fact, even Chris Christie himself, the focus of Cohen’s column, in August of this year signed a bill into law that banned licensed therapists from performing homosexual conversion therapy. New Jersey became the second state (after California) to ban this practice.

After signing the law, Christie parroted typical liberal speak (joining such esteemed company as Lady Gaga), saying that he believed that people are born gay and that homosexuality is not a sin. I wonder if Ms. McCray’s conversion was as a result of therapy.

McCray has addressed this issue and said that she once “identified” as a lesbian, but, according to Out.com, “renounced her lesbian lifestyle after meeting her husband.” So, after meeting Mr. Right (or course, given de Blasio’s politics, “Mr. Left” is more appropriate) Ms. Mcray decides that she’s no longer a lesbian.

There is nothing at all surprising about this. As renowned psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. Jeffrey Satinover noted over a decade ago, the idea of “sexual orientation” is pure fiction. He refers to a 1994 University of Chicago study which states, “…it is patently false that homosexuality is a uniform attribute across individuals, that it is stable over time, and that it can be easily measured.”

Dr. Satinover adds that, “Studies across the globe that have now sampled over 100,000 individuals have found the same. We now know that in the majority of both men and women, ‘homosexuality,’ as defined by any scientifically rigorous criteria, spontaneously tends to ‘mutate’ into heterosexuality over the course of a lifetime.”

In 2003, testifying before the Massachusetts Senate Judicial Committee, as they were considering the legalization of gay marriage, Dr. Satinover stated that the belief that homosexuality is a genetic and unchangeable condition is not “even remotely true.”  He continued, “however widely believed (these claims) may have become; the evidence of the kind that ‘everyone knows’ simply does not exist; even a cursory examination of the actual sources behind these claims will reveal a very strong preponderance of evidence to precisely the contrary; the claims are simply fiction.”

C.S. Lewis wrote in the mid 1940s that “…you and I, for the last twenty years, have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex. We have been told, till one is sick of hearing it, that sexual desire is in the same state as any of our other natural desires…Our warped natures, the devils who tempt us, and all the contemporary propaganda for lust, combine to make us feel that the desires we are resisting are so ‘natural,’ so ‘healthy,’ and so reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them.”

Seven decades later, the lies persist. So much so that pornography, prostitution, same-sex marriage, “transgenderism,” and the like enjoy not only widespread support among the populace, but also legal protection. Laws banning such behavior have been virtually wiped from our legal system. As recently as the early 1960s, every state in the U.S. had laws against homosexual behavior (sodomy). (Thomas Jefferson himself authored an anti-sodomy law for the state of Virginia.)

Also, as recently as 1986, upholding Georgia’s anti-sodomy law, the U.S. Supreme Court declared, “Proscriptions against [homosexual] conduct have ancient roots. Sodomy was a criminal offense at common law and was forbidden by the laws of the original 13 States when they ratified the Bill of Rights. . . . In fact, until 1961, all 50 States outlawed sodomy, and today, 24 States and the District of Columbia continue to provide criminal penalties for sodomy performed in private and between consenting adults. Against this background, to claim that a right to engage in such conduct is ‘deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition,’ or ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty’ is, at best, facetious [silly].”

Of course, the Court reversed itself in Lawrence vs. Texas in 2003, which nicely coincides with when the first state in the U.S. (Massachusetts) legalized same-sex marriage. So in a matter of about four decades, the U.S. went from laws against homosexual behavior to laws encouraging it. With 15 states joining Massachusetts—Hawaii’s governor just signed a law legalizing same-sex marriage that takes effect December 2, and the governor of Illinois is poised to sign a similar law this week that will take effect in 2014—and in spite of any real science to support such a position, the idea that homosexual behavior is normal, innate, and unchangeable is pervasive.

What’s more, as noted above, such a position now also has legal protection in two states. Just as with pornography, same-sex marriage, and “transgenderism,” how long until other states follow? Never mind that there are countless individuals like Ms. McCray (thanks for the publicity Mr. Cohen!) who have left the homosexual/transgender lifestyle behind, and many others who wish to do so.

In mathematics and philosophy, Ms. McCray is what is called a “counterexample.” And to prove a conjecture (“homosexuality is genetic and unchangeable”) false, only a single counterexample is necessary. Again, thank you Mr. Cohen.

Copyright 2013, Trevor Grant Thomas

At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason

Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of: Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World

tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com