Marist Poll: Religious Freedom vs Gay Wedding Services

A recent poll suggests gay activists may be winning legal and media battles while losing the broader public opinion war.

"The Democratic Party has launched a furious assault on Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act, but it appears most Americans support what the Indiana law intends to do, according to a Marist poll that predates the recent outrage," writes Blake Neff at the Daily Caller.

The poll, conducted from Feb. 25 through March 1, found that 54 percent of American adults believe in providing religious exemptions to individuals and organizations "even when it conflicts with government law," and 65 percent specifically oppose penalties or fines for businesses that refuse to provide services for gay weddings.

Support for religious liberty cuts across all age groups:

Ying Ma Inspires Students at Cornell, Women at CWN

"As an accomplished author and policy analyst, [Ying] Ma is today a thought leader whose conservative commentary reaches not just the nation but the world," writes Casey Breznick in The Cornell Review.

It is for this reason The Cornell Review brought Ma, an alum of the Review, for a special speakers event on the topic of 'Prevailing Over the Welfare State: A Story of Getting Out of the Ghetto'. The event was graciously sponsored by and organized in part by the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, an organization that promotes women through conservative thought and ideas...

Ying Ma's family legally immigrated from Communist China when she was 10 years old, settling into an Oakland CA slum where they were taunted as "Chinamen" by their neighbors. The real injustice of urban life wasn't poverty, Ma's family concluded; it was failing to work to put food on the table.  Rejecting the welfare state lifestyle, the family forged a new life through hard work, determination, and educational achievement. Ma recounts her family's difficult journey in her book, Chinese Girl in the Ghetto, a book that deals equally candidly with race relations, immigration, and welfare.

Ma earned degrees from Cornell University, where she became president of The Cornell Review, and Stanford Law, after which she became a successful lawyer. She is a powerful voice on Asian policy, as well as the opportunity America still offers to those willing to work for it. Fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese, Ying's expertise on China is on display regularly in her column for the Wall Street Journal's China Blog.

On March 20, Ma shared her inspiring story with the Conservative Women's Network in Washington DC as well (video below), drawing distinct contrasts in her experiences between the "welfare state" approach to addressing poverty versus the far more successful "opportunity" approach.

Survey: Record Low Confidence in Government

"Americans' confidence in all three branches of government is at or near record lows, according to a major survey that has measured attitudes on the subject for 40 years," reports the Associated Press.

The 2014 General Social Survey finds only 23 percent of Americans have a great deal of confidence in the Supreme Court, 11 percent in the executive branch and 5 percent in Congress. By contrast, half have a great deal of confidence in the military.

The survey is conducted by the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago. Because of its long-running and comprehensive set of questions about the public, it is a highly regarded source of data about social trends. 

The 11% figure for the presidency "approaches a record low measured by the same survey in 1996, when just 10 percent said they had a great deal of confidence in the executive branch," and the 23% figure for the Supreme Court represents a 40-year low.

Media fared almost as badly as Congress, earning a record-low 7% confidence rating. "Only 1 in 10 has a lot of confidence in television, which is also near a record low," reports the AP.

Pity the Millennials!

Millennials were already hurting from the 2008 economic crash, which brought the U.S. economy to a standstill, and by the 2010 Obamacare law, which incentivised the creation of part-time jobs over full-time jobs. Now it appears Millennials will bear the economic consequences of dysfunctional immigration policies, too.

“Young Adults: Then and Now,” a recent Census Bureau report on how today’s 18 to 34-year-olds compare with their 1980 peers, is a discouraging set of statistics for Millennials today.
 
Despite rising educational achievement (Bachelor's degrees +6.6%), young people have lost ground economically and in terms of independence, as AEI economist Mark Perry’s summary chart (right) reveals. Compared with their 1980 cohorts, more Millennials are living under their parents' wings (+7.4%), slightly fewer live on their own (-0.4%), and substantially fewer are creating their own families (i.e., marrying -24.4%). Economically, fewer are employed (-4.3%), more live below the poverty line (+5.6%), and their median income is down (-$1,962/year).

The bigger news in the Census Bureau report, however, is in the stunning growth in the percentages of young adults who are foreign-born (6.3% in 1980 vs. 15.4% today), speak a language other than English at home (10.9% in 1980 vs. 24.6% today), and minority (21.6% in 1980 vs. 42.8% today).

The growth in "minority" percentages seems to be entirely due to the Hispanic population. The Census Bureau defines "minority" as all people classified as "Hispanic" and "all people who are races other than White."  Based on Census Bureau data (charted below), non-Hispanic "racial minorities" actually declined from 31.6 million in 1980 to 29.1 million in 2013, while "Hispanic minorities" grew substantially, from 14.6 million in 1980 to 53.9 million in 2013. (Census Bureau data doesn't tell us what percentage of the Hispanic minority is here legally vs. illegally. Perhaps it should.)

In 1986, Congress passed a law giving amnesty to those who had entered the nation illegally before 1982, and the beneficiaries of that law were mostly Hispanic. The law ushered in preferential go-to-the-head-of-the-line treatment to foreign relatives to legally migrate to the U.S. to join those who had received amnesty.

Prospective illegals read the immigration rule changes for what they were – a huge reward for lawless behavior – and the flow of illegals into the country continued unabated. Now President Obama is attempting another mass amnesty of illegals by executive order, although a federal court has blocked his attempt for the moment. [See update below.]

A new report by the business analysis firm IHS, headlined Hispanics Will Account for More than 40 Percent of the Increase in U.S. Employment in the Next Five Years, offers these predictions:

• Hispanic employment growth will average 2.6 percent per year over the next 20 years. 
• The Hispanic share of total U.S. employment will rise from 16% in 2014 to 23% in 2034. 
• By 2020, labor force growth is expected to slow to the point that the annual change in the labor force is roughly equal to the amount of net migration. 
• The number of foreign born Hispanics will grow from 22 million in 2014 to over 29 million in 2034. 

Now we learn from a Congressional Research Service memo obtained by Breitbart that illegal immigrants allowed to get Social Security Numbers as a result of Obama's executive amnesty actions could be eligible to file back tax returns and obtain up to four years of federal welfare benefits amounting to thousands of dollars: for a family with three children, the four-year federal welfare back payment would amount to $35,521.

Pity the Millennials, who were already facing stiff economic headwinds from poor public policy choices of the current and past administrations. If Obama's executive amnesty isn't stopped, they will be paying back their student loans, struggling to get their own careers going, AND paying for very generous new welfare payments to thousands of new amnestied illegals.

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UPDATE:  For more on what's at stake in this court case, see Immigration and the End of the Rule of Law, in which Jonathan Tobin writes, "The stakes in this argument don't merely revolve around the status of illegals. If liberal federal judges and the president are determined to trash the rule of law in this manner, we are on the verge of a full-blown constitutional crisis."

Kudos to Millennials

Millennials have gotten their share of bad press, so it's good to see them receive a bit of praise in an article by the sage of American politics, Michael Barone. Citing statistics to buttress his case, Barone writes that "the most crime-prone age and gender cohort — 15-to-25-year-old males — are committing far fewer crimes than that cohort did in 1990."

• In the past two decades, the murder rate fell 49%, forcible rape fell 33%, robbery rate fell 48%, and aggravated assault fell 39%.
• Sexual assaults against 12-to-17-year-olds fell by more than half.
• Violent victimization of teenagers at school declined 60%.
• Binge-drinking in high school is lower than at any time since 1976, and sexual intercourse among 9th graders has declined.
• A recent Justice Department report showed the rape rate on college campuses was 0.6%.
• While unmarried parenthood has risen, teen births have been in sharp decline. The latest statistics tell us that birth rates are, unusually, up among married women and down among unmarried women.

 Barone theorizes why this trend might be happening:

I think what we are seeing is a mass changing of minds, something like the movement in Victorian England toward what historian Gertrude Himmelfarb described as “the morality that dignifies and civilizes human beings.”

My theory is that young people do what is expected of them, in two senses of the word “expected.” One is statistical expectation. Americans in 1990 expected young people, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds, to commit lots of crimes. They had been doing so, after all, for 25 years. But Rudy Giuliani and others adapting his methods reduced crime dramatically, and statistical expectations rapidly changed.

The other sense of the word “expected” is moral expectation. A parent tells a boy he is expected not to shoplift, bully, rob, rape or kill. She tells a girl she is expected not to sleep around or get pregnant. The parents of the last 25 years grew up in years of high crime, high divorce and high unmarried births. Evidently they wanted — expected — something better from their own children.

From American Exceptionalism to American Deceptionalism

Largely misunderstood or misused today, American Exceptionalism refers to the unique and exceptional form of governance created by the American Constitution with respect to individual power, liberty and freedom.

Prior to the creation of this nation, all forms of governance had been tyrannical, that is, total power and liberty were held by a monarch — or a czar, a dictator, a military conqueror, or a tribal leader — who in turn gave limited power, freedom and liberty to the individual.  Under the framers' historically new and "exceptionally" American form of constitutional governance, power, liberty, and freedom flowed from the Creator directly to each individual, who in turn gave limited power and liberty to the state (i.e., government).

In an interesting essay, Professor Ben Voth argues that today "[w]e are besieged by an intellectual elite intensely committed to a grand design of American Deceptionalism," whose four characteristics he defines as follows (below are excerpts only):

1. American is not exceptional. For our epistemic elite composed of Hollywood storytellers, jaded journalists, professional activists, and reactionary academics it is a cardinal rule that America is exceptional in only one respect: guilt. America is exceptionally guilty of any moral violation that the mind can conjure up — whether selfishness, bigotry, hatred, imperialism, greed, murder, genocide, sexism and on it goes — no nation has committed greater sins than this one.
2. The general American public is incredibly stupid and ignorant. The stupidity of Americans necessitates and justifies all kinds of rhetorical manipulations aimed at raising them up out of their failure to follow the example set by the higher beings inhabiting the East and West Coast and select urban centers. The deception spoken of by [MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan] Gruber was not unusual and is in fact normative for American elite. There is consequentially a voracious paternalism among the armies of Grubers that care for the American public through elite institutions.
3. Christianity, Judaism and religiosity contribute to the stubborn bad character traits of Americans. If Americans would stop clinging to religion, the nation could progress and lean forward. ... A breed of secular Pharisees takes us on a new shining path ... Religious people need to 'coexist' and cooperate with the secular Pharisees provided to them by American deceptionalists. 
4. American deceptionalism is a bipartisan movement. The elite of the Republican and Democratic Parties have a shared contempt for the general public. ... Ethics are a vulgar notion held among populists. They have no place in deceptionalist governance.

The author concludes:

Because American deceptionalists abhor individual rights, they attack individuals to isolate them and force broader adherence to group identity politics and politically correct thinking designed by the elite.  They seek to manipulate, control and limit notions of individual heroism.  The individual is inherently construed as a threat to social order.  Americans can and should challenge argumentatively, the assumptions noted above -- whether in classrooms, national cathedrals, boardrooms, council meetings, or rallies. Aspects of an American renaissance are already in the making, but the convictions of American deceptionalists are stubborn and persistent. They will require heroic resistance to fully defeat and return the nation to an appreciation of individual liberty.

Source: American Deceptionalism, Ben Voth, American Thinker

Hats Off to Kirsten Powers!

"The truth hurts," writes liberal Kirsten Powers in her second article condemning the professional left for its selective—she calls it 'fake'—war against media misogyny following the Sandra Fluke-Rush Limbaugh kerfuffle.

Members of the professional left reacted with outrage to my column this week calling them out for their fake war against media misogyny. Instead of addressing the encyclopedia of left-wing misogyny I raised, many liberals chose instead to start a ferocious battle with all manner of straw men.

In her articles, Powers names liberal names—Bill Maher, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Matt Taibbi, Ed Schultz—and documents specific incidents, asking,

...if Limbaugh's actions demand a boycott—and they do—then what about the army of swine on the left?

Powers has no patience with fellow liberals who operate by such a blatant double-standard.

If the left reacted with the same furor to liberal misogyny as they have reacted to Limbaugh, misogynist cracks would go the way of racist and anti-gay “jokes.” Let’s just call a spade a spade: the uproar over Limbaugh is only because it fits into the Democratic narrative that the GOP is “anti-woman.” It’s Democratic Party activism dressed up as feminism.

In an painful-to-watch video posted to YouTube today, Democratic congresswomen Sheila Jackson Lee and Jan Schakowsky—who both blasted Limbaugh for his behavior—repeatedly refuse to condemn Bill Maher calling Gov. Sara Palin a "c--t" and a "dumb twat." Why is this so difficult?

She doesn't let President Obama off the hook either.

President Obama has seen fit to wade into the Limbaugh kerfuffle, even telling reporters Tuesday that Limbaugh’s behavior was an attack on everyone’s daughter and “I do not want them attacked or called horrible names.” Speaking of daughters, do you remember when Bill Maher said that the real name of then-20-year-old Bristol Palin’s book should be “Whoops, There’s a Dick in Me?”

Liberals have demanded that GOP leaders denounce Limbaugh, but President Obama, who has opined repeatedly on the Limbaugh controversy, refuses to denounce Maher. This despite the fact that Maher has made a high-profile $1 million donation to Obama's super PAC, which is run by longtime Obama aide Bill Burton.

Hats off to Powers for her honesty and fortitude!

No Compromise with Progressives

Who are progressives? What is their vision, and how have they changed our American democratic republic? In a three-part series of articles, Thomas Sowell offers insight into the Progressive Legacy, while Senator Jim DeMint explains why there can be conservative compromise with them.

Sowell highlights the following:

• Progressives can be found in both political parties.
• Progressives hold a "vision of an expanded role of the federal government in the economu and a reduced roles for the Constitution of the United States."
• Progressives are determined critics and foes of big business and often demonize business people with labels such as "robber barons" (early 20th century) and "1 percenters" (today).
• The Progressive movement rose and flourished a hundred years ago in the U.S.
• Progressives were subsequently so discredited by the problems the policies of their vision created "that they started calling themselves 'liberals'" during the mid 20th century, "and after they discredited themselves again, they went back to calling themselves 'progressives', now that people no longer remembered how progressives had discredited themselves before."

Then ... and now:

• "'Often wrong but never in doubt' is a phrase that summarizes much of what was done by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt [Republican] and Woodrow Wilson [Democrat], the two giants of the Progressive Era, a century ago."
• Theodore Roosevelt "stood the 10th Amendment on its head," interpreting "the Constitution to mean that the President of the United States could exercise powers not explicitly forbidden to him."
• "Wilson attacked the Constitution in his writings as an academic," and "once in power, his administration so restricted freedom on speech that this lead to landmark Supreme Court decisions restoring that fundamental right."
• "Theodore Roosevelt was also morally offended by the fact that Standard Oil created 'enormous fortunes' for its owners 'at the expense of business rivals'. How a business can offer consumers lower prices without taking custormers away from businesses that charge higher prices is a mystery still unsolved [by progressives] to the present day, when the very same arguments are used against Wal-Mart."
• Woodrow Wilson's Progressivism was very much in the same mindset. Government intervention in the economy was justified on grounds that 'society is the senior partner in all business'."
• "Barack Obama's rhetoric of 'change' is in fact a restoration of discredited ideas that originated a hundred years ago."

Senator Jim DeMint believes America is at a tipping point—the same tipping point Sowell writes of in the early 20th century Progressive Era.

Against the backdrop of American public opinion calling on Congress to just "get along," Senator Jim DeMint argues in his new book, Now or Never: Saving America from Economic Collapse, that there can be no compromise between two such polar opposite visions for the nation.  Progressive/liberals seek dominance of the federal government in all economic and social aspects of citizens' lives, while conservatives seek individual freedom and limited federal power over citizens' social and economic pursuits.

How can I compromise and work with someone whose vision is so different from mine? It would be like a football coach telling his team, 'I want you to go out on the field and work with the opposing team. Try to help them out. Cooperate with them. Compromise with them.' He can't. The other team has a goal that is the opposite direction from ours, and they are there to beat you. As bad as it sounds, that's where we are in America.

The clash in Washington DC today is once again between progressive/liberals and conservatives over the vision and future course of this nation. It's a battle that conservative must fight to win.

Sources:
Sowell: Progressive Legacy Part I
Sowell: Progressive Legacy Part II
Sowell: Progressive Legacy Part III
DeMint: Speech to Conservative Women's Network (pdf)
DeMint: book review

Dressing for Success ... or Not

"Women will be future leaders, too," writes Dr. Melissa Clouthier, "and I was dismayed to see how many of them either looked frumpish or like two-bit whores" at the recent CPAC conference in DC. In a blog post entitled CPAC: The Jersey Shore-ification of Our Young People, she continues:

Women, if you’re at a conference where you’re learning to be a future politician or wish to succeed in the business of politics, dress the part. No, you don’t have to be in a business suit with pearls. However, modesty is a minimum. So:
1. No cleavage. That’s right. Cover that up. I say “no” in absolutist terms because women will show a tiny bit and that’s okay, but really, in a business environment where ideas are the priority, a dude thinking about your ta-tas is counter-productive.
2. Skirts no more than three finger-widths above the knee. Why do I even have to write this? Well, because someone is allowing these girls out of the house with mini-skirts that reveal too much.
3. Save the stilettos for Saturday night on a date with your boyfriend.
4. Bend at the knee. No, I don’t want to see your butt.

It is disheartening that these ideas even need to be written about, but clearly they do. If, at the number one conservative conference of the year, young men and women are looking and acting like the cast of Jersey Shore, it’s time to reset the compass.

UPDATE: Laura Donovan defends female CPACers here.

Putting Sex into Perspective

World magazine reviews 2 new books about sex that conservatives may enjoy: Bringing Sex into Focus: the Quest for Sexual Integrity by Caroline J. Simon, and The Good Girl's Guide to Great Sex: (and You Thought Bad Girls Have All the Fun) by Sheila Wray Gregoire.

The first "uses a helpful metaphor, optics, as a way to talk about six different lenses through which people view sex: covenantal, procreative, romantic, plain sex, power, and expressive," writes World's Susan Olasky, and "will be particularly useful for young adults searching for a way to think through sexual issues and discern perspectives that shape media and culture."

the second "answers questions about the nuts and bolts ... Like a funny big sister, [the author] takes on intimate topics in a frank and reassuring way ... for those who are engaged, for newlyweds, and for those who are sexually experienced and want to gain a biblical understanding."

22-Year-Old 'Flip-Flop Cop'

"It's incredible how much stuff is out there," says 22-year-old Andrew Kaczynski, a student at St. John's University who is making a name for himself as this year's "flip-flop cop for the digital age," according to the Washington Times. His research—from "John McCain's entire 200-page 2008 opposition research file on Mr. Romney" to Ron Paul's video bragging "about putting out political newsletters, the same newsletters he recently disavowed because they contain controversial statements about race, AIDS and international conspiracy theories"—feeds his "political nerd" passion, launched his career, and keeps people honest.

Gardasil Mandate Blesses Sexual Freedom...for 9-Year-Olds!

"Let's not miss the point on why the Gardasil mandate is so outrageous," write Alyssa Cordova, the Luce Institute's Lecture Director. "HPV is not something caught from a casual encounter like the flue, measles, mumps or rubella. It's a sexually transmitted disease!"

Read the rest.