Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

JUDICIAL MANDATING OF SAME-SEX MARRIAGE WOULD PUT THE U.S. AT ODDS WITH THE WESTERN WORLD

The Witherspoon Institute produces an online publication Public Discourse edited by Ryan T. Anderson.   An article published April 21st contains important information not well known:

Fewer than 9 percent of the countries belonging to the United Nations have redefined marriage to include same-sex relationships—and only one of those did so via its judiciary. A judicial redefinition of marriage would make the United States an extreme outlier on the global stage.

More - 

There is no “emerging global consensus” for same-sex marriage. In fact, same-sex marriage in any form has been adopted by only 17 of the 193 member states of the United Nations—a mere 8.8 percent. . . .  All of the rest—176 sovereign nations— retain the understanding of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. That is, taking the 193 member states of the United Nations as the reference point, over ten times as many countries disallow same-sex marriage as allow it. Additionally, more nations have constitutional provisions defining marriage as the union of a husband and a wife—47, as of last month—than have recognized any form of same-sex union. Many other countries have adopted legal protections of same-sex unions that stop short of changing the definition of marriage.

Still more - 

The list of the twelve tribunals in two foreign organizations and nine nations that have upheld male-female marriage against claims of discrimination reads like a Who’s Who of progressive, liberty-loving democracies: the European Court of Human Rights, the UN’s Human Rights Committee, and national courts in Germany, Austria, France, Spain, Finland, Italy (both the Constitutional Court and the Court of Cassation),Ireland, Chile, and Colombia. Even though these bodies and countries have strong and deep support for LGBT rights (and a few have legislatures that have gone on to legalize same-sex marriage), the courts have rejected claims that same-sex marriage should be judicially established as a fundamental or constitutional right. 

Read the whole article.

Heather MacDonald on Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Afrocentric Charlatans

Heather MacDonald surveys the weird field of Afrocentric charlatans from whose views Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, took his cues.  Weirdness indeed.  And as MacDonald notes, this is another reason to be suspicious of the creepy-crawly stuff that happens on university campuses.  MacDonald's article follows:

The list of Afrocentric “educators” whom Reverend Jeremiah Wright has invoked in his media escapades since this Sunday is a disturbing reminder that academia’s follies can enter the public world in harmful ways. Now the pressing question is whether they have entered presidential candidate Barack Obama’s worldview as well.

Some in Wright’s crew of charlatans have already had their moments in the spotlight; others are less well known. They form part of the tragic academic project of justifying self-defeating underclass behavior as “authentically black.” That their ideas have ended up in the pulpit of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ and in Detroit’s Cobo Hall, where Wright spoke at the NAACP’s Freedom Fund dinner on Sunday, reminds us that bad ideas must be fought at their origins—and at every moment thereafter. . .

John Leo - "The Hazards of Telling the Truth" - on Mary Lefkowitz's Demolishing of Afrocentric Baloney

Update 5/7/08 - John J. Miller posts an audio interview with Mary Lefkowitz.

- At a local college some years ago, I heard a guest lecture by Mary Lefkowitz, classicist at Wellesley College (now retired).  I recognized that she grounded her lecture in established fact and that she was a woman of uncommon courage in her willingness to confront Afrocentric nonsense.  What is Afrocentrism?  John Leo's column explains and at the same time spotlights Lefkowitz's most recent book, History Lesson: A Race Odyssey, "a personal account of what she experienced as a result of questioning the veracity of Afrocentrism and the motives of its advocates. She has advanced the intellectual case against Afrocentrism before, in "Not Out of Africa:How Afrocentrism Became An Excuse to Teach Myth as History (1997); here she takes a more personal approach..."

I am so glad I came across John Leo's article, published today in the Wall Street Journal.  Read it for background into the controversy and weep over the "kind of affirmative action program for the re-writing of history" that is Afrocentrism.  (continued on page 2)