An atheist's step too far, Sex Au Naturel

Andrew Klavan's opening monolog is as witty as usual. It includes many comments on the national news of the day.

A Berkeley radio or t.v station has canceled an interview with atheist Richard Dawkins, because he said something that offended Muslims. Dawkins has been saying offensive things about Christians for years, but that wasn't a reason for the Berkley station to avoid setting up an interview with him.

Andrew says, "What could be more tolerant than to be tolerant of complete intolerance?"

Andrew interviews the author of Sex Au Naturel, Patrick Coffin. Patrick is a Catholic who has a talk show.

Intolerant thugs block DeVos from visiting a DC school

You probably have seen the videos of thugs blocking Education Secretary Betsy DeVos from visiting a DC school today. The DC schools have the poorest results in America. DeVos wants to offer the parents of DC school children options. Union thugs want to block poor and minority children from having choices of where they go to school. They also want to block a woman from doing her job.

Are the young adults today intolerant?

April Kelly-Woessner writes about tolerance in mindingthecampus.org. Do you believe we

have a social responsibility to be intolerant towards those who would promote racism, sexism and homophobia?

...For example, in an op-ed in the Harvard Crimson last year, a student argues for “academic justice” to replace academic freedom.

...Yes, the kids are intolerant. That is, they are intolerant if we define tolerance as researchers have for the past six decades, as a measure of willingness to extend basic democratic rights to those one finds most objectionable.

Read more here.

This is a subject I often think about. For example, I regularly read (and excerpt here) a blog called Chateau Heartiste. It is racist to the core. It also is provocatively well written. Most of all, CH seems to have a real insight into the sexes. Since that is something I need, I read the blog, ignoring the stupid racism that regularly pops up.

Personifying liberal smugness

Gerard Alexander makes some good points in The New York Times about The Patron Saint of Liberal Smugness, Jon Stewart.

His prodigious talents — he was smart and funny, and even more of both when he was mad — perfectly positioned him to purge a particular smugness from our discourse. Instead, he embodied it.

Many liberals, but not conservatives, believe there is an important asymmetry in American politics. These liberals believe that people on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum are fundamentally different. Specifically, they believe that liberals are much more open to change than conservatives, more tolerant of differences, more motivated by the public good and, maybe most of all, smarter and better informed.

The evidence for these beliefs is not good. Liberals turn out to be just as prone to their own forms of intolerance, ignorance and bias. But the beliefs are comforting to many. They give their bearers a sense of intellectual and even moral superiority. And they affect behavior. They inform the condescension and self-righteousness with which liberals often treat conservatives. They explain why many liberals have greeted Tea Partiers and other grass-roots conservatives with outsize alarm.

And Mr. Stewart, who signed off from “The Daily Show” on Thursday, was more qualified than anybody to puncture this particular pretension. He trained his liberal-leaning audience to mock hypocrisy, incoherence and stupidity, and could have nudged them to see the planks in their own eyes, too. Instead, he cultivated their intellectual smugness by personifying it.

...He could have made the liberals in his audience more open to dialogue across the great left/right divide by asking them to examine themselves more carefully and to admit that both ideological camps contain fools. Instead, he was a cultural entrepreneur who provided those viewers with the validation they wanted.

...After all those years, the comedian turned liberal standard-bearer still didn’t really comprehend the conservatives on the other side of the divide. Worse, he didn’t help his liberal viewers better understand themselves.

Read more here.

Intolerance

I got a bit sidetracked tonight. I have been curious about why the brilliant writer Mark Steyn's columns are no longer carried by National Review. I learned that it all goes back to December 20, 2013. At 6 p.m. On that date Steyn published this column about the left's rampant intolerance. On 9:19 p.m. on the same date, his editor published this article, criticizing Steyn for being "puerile" and "derogatory," which was followed by 828 comments, all strongly favoring Steyn.

Defending the root of our freedom

Dr. Ben Carson posted this Easter message on his Facebook page:

As Easter approaches, let us remember the role that Jesus Christ and God play in our lives. Let us also remember that Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe in God, and while there are ideological differences in who Jesus was, we should find peace in the fact that we are all God’s children. Jesus is my role model, and he preached love, he preached acceptance. He also was a man of values and principles, and he ended up being crucified for it. But, he rose again to advocate godly principles of loving our fellow man, caring about our neighbors, developing our God-given talents to the utmost so that we become valuable to the people around us, and maintaining high ideals that govern our lives. We must make certain that people of all types of faith are respected by one another. Let us remember that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution is one of the basic pillars of our system of governance and a founding principle of our nation, as it protects religious freedom. It is critical that we allow Americans to practice their religious ways, while also ensuring that no one’s beliefs infringe upon those of others.

Throughout the globe we must serve as champions of freedom of religion. As people across the world are persecuted by religious fanatics who perform hateful acts of ignorance, we Americans have a duty to denounce these acts of persecution. By standing up to such intolerance, we are defending the root of our freedom. I enjoy the following quote from the second Chronicles 7:14, “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves and pray, and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sins and will heal their land.”

A publication called the Iowa Statesman had this to say about Carson's message:

Rather than the feel-good statement he likely envisioned he was sending out, Dr. Carson has instead stepped on a political landmine. The comment received thousands of likes and shares, but also received thousands of comments. In Iowa, grassroots Christian conservatives — a key caucus demographic he has attempted to attract — rebuked the statement in droves.

Carson has already had to “clarify” comments deemed critical of the Second Amendment. Expect another “clarification” soon.

I don't see a thing wrong with Carson's statement. Do you?