I can relate to Melanie Phillips' awakening to the reality of the ideological left. The first paragraph describing her time at The Guardian reminds me a bit of my early days at the CBC.  She writes:

Those of us who worked there had a fixed belief in our own superiority and righteousness. We saw ourselves as clever and civilised champions of liberal thought. 
I felt loved and cherished, the favoured child of a wonderful and impressive family.
To my colleagues, there was virtually no question that the poor were the victims of circumstances rather than being accountable for their own behaviour and that the state was a wholly benign actor in the lives of individuals.It never occurred to us that there could be another way of looking at the world. 
Above all, we knew we were on the side of the angels, while across the barricades hatchet-faced Right-wingers represented the dark forces of human nature and society that we were all so proud to be against. But then Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979; and although at The Guardian it was a given that she was a heartless, narrow-minded, suburban nightmare, I found myself listening, despite myself, to a point of view I had not heard before. 
Iconic: Although Melanie Phillips generally toed the standard Leftist line, when Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, she found herself listening, despite herself, to a point of view she had not heard before
These Thatcherites were not the usual upper-class squires, but people whose backgrounds were similar to my own. 

They were promoting the values with which I had been brought up in my Labour-supporting family — all about opportunities for social betterment, hard work, taking responsibility for oneself. 

I always believed a good journalist should uphold truth over lies and follow the evidence where it led.

Trudging round godforsaken estates as the paper’s special reporter on social affairs, I could see the stark reality of what our supposedly enlightened liberal society was becoming.

The scales began to fall from my eyes. I came to realise that the Left was not on the side of truth, reason and justice. 

Instead, it promoted ideology, malice and oppression. Rather than fighting abuse of power, it embodied it.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2319192/Why-Left-hates-families-MELANIE-PHIILLIPS-reveals-selfish-sneers-Guardianistas-Left-actively-fosters--revels--family-breakdown-.html#ixzz2SQ2x7uIL
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Read the whole thing. It is most interesting.  H/t FFoF

Rod Drehrer on the impact of gay marriage on the culture

This is a sobering essay.  An excerpt:

In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time—exploitive especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly in their ability to produce children and provide sexual pleasure. Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriage—and marital sexuality—with love.

Christian marriage, Ruden writes, was “as different from anything before or since as the command to turn the other cheek.” The point is not that Christianity was only, or primarily, about redefining and revaluing sexuality, but that within a Christian anthropology sex takes on a new and different meaning, one that mandated a radical change of behavior and cultural norms. In Christianity, what people do with their sexuality cannot be separated from what the human person is.

-snip-

Rather, in the modern era, we have inverted the role of culture. Instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a society that tells us we find meaning and purpose in releasing ourselves from the old prohibitions.

Wise words on the Boston Marathon bombers from Victor Davis Hanson

He writes:

Like it or not, two  half-educated and young killers, at the expense of a few hundred dollars and one dead, with very little capital, shut down an entire city, committed mass mayhem, ruined the lives of hundreds, destroyed the Boston Marathon, and cost the city billions of dollars. But for the chance scans of video cameras, the Tsarnaevs might well have let off more bombs and turned their terror of a day into far greater mayhem of a week. That lesson is not lost on jihadists. To the degree they can enthuse another Tamerlan Tsarnaev in Chechnya or reach a Major Hasan at a mosque or on the Internet, they will continue. I expect more al-Qaedism.

Drones, fairly or not, are now branded as a convenient way to kill a few hundred terrorist suspects without bothering the American people, but they also put us to sleep about radical Islam by making it out of sight, out of mind. The next phases of the war will probably be fought on American soil, waged by al-Qaedists rather than al-Qaeda. Video cameras and good police work may prevent some terrorism. But ultimately we need to change the landscape of the American mind, and try honesty instead of therapy about the nature of the danger.

I would also look very carefully at immigration policy. Is America so short of manpower that we need a Tamerlan Tsarnaev, his brother, his mother, or his father in the United States?
Would not more frequent denial into the U.S. prompt more respect for America than does near pro forma entry? Would not the free use of words like “terrorism” and “Islamist” again convey better the image of a confident society that cares not what jihadists or their supporters think than does worry over offending those who hate us?

Aha! so this is what I am, a fusionist!

A few years ago, I gave a talk to a small group of libertarians about what socially conservative Christians need to learn from libertarians and what libertarians need to learn from Christian socons.

Sadly, my "viral" YouTube video (it had more than 400 hits!) got taken down for some reason, but here's a post at National Review that gives a name for the kind of mixture of social conservatism and libertarianism: fusionism.

Here's an excerpt of Jonah Goldberg's post:

An ex-Communist Christian libertarian, Meyer argued that freedom was a prerequisite for virtue and therefore a virtuous society must be a free society. (If I force you to do the right thing against your will, you cannot claim to have acted virtuously.)

Philosophically, the idea took fire from all sides. But as a uniting principle, fusionism worked well. It provided a rationale for most libertarians and most social conservatives to fight side by side against Communism abroad and big government at home.

What often gets left out in discussions of the American Right is that fusionism isn’t merely an alliance, it is an alloy. Fusionism runs through the conservative heart. William F. Buckley, the founder of the conservative movement, often called himself a “libertarian journalist.” Asked about that in a 1993 interview, he told C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb that the question “Does this augment or diminish human liberty?” informed most of what he wrote.

Most pure libertarians and the tiny number of truly statist social conservatives live along the outer edge of the Venn diagram that is the American Right. Most self-identified conservatives reside in the vast overlapping terrain between the two sides.

Just look at where libertarianism has had its greatest impact: economics. There simply isn’t a conservative economics that is distinct from a libertarian one. Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Henry Hazlitt, Ludwig von Mises, James M. Buchanan & Co. are gods of the libertarian and conservative pantheons alike. 

The future Pope Francis smiled at me back in 2008

I had no idea I had this on my laptop. This is from the 2008 International Eucharistic Congress in Quebec City. And of course, there's my favorite Cardinal Marc Ouellet.

Victor Davis Hanson on ways to destroy the American economy

Perceptive column, as usual for VDH:

It is not easy to ruin the American economy; doing nothing usually means it repairs itself and soon is healthier than before a recession.
But don’t despair: there are plenty of ways to slow down even an inherently strong economy. History offers plenty of examples. But as more contemporary models, take your pick of successfully ruined economies — the Venezuelan, the Cuban, the North Korean, the Greek, the Italian, the Portuguese, or pretty much any from Mediterranean Africa to the Cape of Good Hope. There are certain commonalities about why and how they fail. Let’s review some of them.

GovernmentThe state can never be too big. Ensure that it is unaccountable and intrusive, in constant need of more money and more targets to regulate. The more government, the more people are shielded from the capital-creating, free-market system. Think the DMV or TSA, not Apple. The point is for an employee to spend each labor hour with less oversight, while regulating or hampering profit-making, rather than competing with like kind to create material wealth. Regulatory bodies are a two-fer: the more federal, union employees, the more regulations to hamper the private sector.  

Lots more at the link. 

More on the Whatcott decision and the fact that truth is no defense

Truth, freedom of speech go hand in hand says The Sun's Alan Shanoff:

Civil defamation laws, which protect harm to reputation, allow a defence of truth. Criminal charges involving publication also allow truth as a defence. Truth is a defence to a criminal charge of willfully promoting hatred against any group distinguished by colour, race, religion, ethnic origin or sexual orientation. An essential element of the criminal charge of defamatory libel requires an accused to publish a statement “he knows to be false”.

But in the recent William Whatcott decision, the Supreme Court of Canada has declared that truth is not a viable defence to a hate speech charge under human rights legislation. It’s a ruling that has many puzzled. After all, freedom of expression is a constitutionally protected right in Canada and should only be restricted as minimally as possible to meet a pressing and substantial concern.

So how can we justify prohibiting a defence of truth?

Why does the court fear the truth?

The Supreme Court’s justification for allowing this remarkable bit of state censorship is simply put that “even truthful statements may be expressed in language or context that exposes a vulnerable group to hatred.” Thus we have elevated the right of a vulnerable group to be free from expressions of hatred to be paramount to the ability to speak the truth.
Our highest court has affirmed Canada as a country where accurate statements of fact may result in human rights complaints, expensive and lengthy hearings and imposition of significant financial penalties whenever a vulnerable group has been or is likely to have been exposed to hatred. All this, with no legal or financial exposure to the person or persons filing the human rights complaint.

Mark Steyn on those pesky drones

Another prophetic column from Mark Steyn:

For all its advantages to this administration – no awkward prisoners to be housed at Gitmo, no military casualties for the evening news – the unheard, unseen, unmanned drone raining down death from the skies confirms for those on the receiving end al-Qaida's critique of its enemies: as they see it, we have the best technology and the worst will; we choose aerial assassination and its attendant collateral damage because we are risk-averse, and so remote, antiseptic, long-distance, computer-programmed warfare is all that we can bear. Our technological strength betrays our psychological weakness.

-snip-

The guys with drones are losing to the guys with fertilizer – because they mean it, and we don't. The drone thus has come to symbolize the central defect of America's "war on terror," which is that it's all means and no end: We're fighting the symptoms rather than the cause.
-snip-

Do you remember the way it was before the "war on terror"? Back in the Nineties, everyone was worried about militias and survivalists, who lived in what were invariably described as "compounds," and not in the Kennedys-at-Hyannis sense. And, every so often, one of these compound-dwellers would find himself besieged by a great tide of federal alphabet soup, agents from the DEA, ATF, FBI and maybe even RRB. There was a guy named Randy Weaver, who lost his wife, son and dog to the guns of federal agents, was charged and acquitted in the murder of a deputy marshal and wound up getting a multimillion dollar settlement from the Department of Justice. Before he zipped his lips on grounds of self-incrimination, the man who wounded Weaver and killed his wife, an FBI agent named Lon Horiuchi, testified that he opened fire because he thought the Weavers were about to fire on a surveillance helicopter. When you consider the resources brought to bear against a nobody like Randy Weaver for no rational purpose, is it really so "far-fetched" to foresee the Department of Justice deploying drones to the Ruby Ridges and Wacos of the 2020s?

Of course, as the state becomes more and more rabidly secularist---though with a strange bye for the radical Islamists with whom lefttists share an antipathy to the Judeo-Christian foundations of Western Civilization--it will be those Christian believers who insist on obeying God rather than kowtowing to the statist gods who will have these drones hovering over their homes and churches.  It is sobering to realize that pro-life groups, for example, are listed among dangers to national security, and many seem to think Christian "fundamentalists" are as much a threat to America as radical Islam.  Mark Steyn has been right all along that our real problem is civilizational suicide not any external threat.  

H/t  Kathy Shaidle