Ruth Institute Blog

Some of my Friends With Wrong Ideas (FrieWIs) keep a very close watch on me.  I don’t feel a need to respond to every post.  Every once in a while, however, they do me a favor.  Take this audio clip posted over at Equality Matters, for instance.   Posted with a breathless headline, “NOM’s Morse: Hate Crimes Laws are Anti-American, Limit Free Speech.”  This headline is designed to brand me, before you, the reader/listener, even hear what I have to say. This is from an hour long interview I did with a blog radio host called Stacy Swimp. Equality Matters went to the trouble of pulling out this 5 minutes and making it into its own little post. Read more…

Honestly, you really ought to stretch and warm up a bit before jumping to conclusions. You guys jumped so far and so hard, I’m worried you might hurt yourselves!

I am referring of course, to my now notorious anal sex post. You will recall I made a simple statement: Read more…

Tomorrow on my regular Issues Etc segment, I will talk about David Cameron’s recent speech on the importance of the family.

Some of the worst aspects of human nature tolerated, indulged – sometimes even incentivised – by a state and its agencies that in parts have become literally de-moralised. So do we have the determination to confront all this and turn it around?  I have the very strong sense that the responsible majority of people in this country not only have that determination; they are crying out for their government to act upon it.

I will be drawing on these sources:

My book review of Patricia Morgan’s book, The War Between the State and the Family.  This is still a good and timely book, which you can purchase through the IEA in the UK.

A 2011 Report detailing the taxpayer cost of out of wedlock childbearing in the UK.

Tune in, and listen live!

The response to my post, A Word on Terminology has confirmed my intuition that I am correct to abstain from using the term “same sex marriage.”  Three things have led me to conclude that my instincts are correct about this:

1. The wailing, weeping and general indignation meeting being held all around the Left side of the Blogosphere.

2. My friend, Bill May, of Catholics for the Common Good, confirms my opinion. (I always listen when Bill talks.) He pointed me to a tract that his organization has written on the subject, a tract which I highly recommend to all Regular Ruth Readers, Friends with Wrong or Right Ideas.

3. Finally, and most importantly, in the aforesaid wailing and indignation, advocates of the redefinition of marriage have, perhaps inadvertently, revealed just how radical they really are.  See for instance, comment #12, which states  in part: Read more…

Red diaper baby David Horowitz is an expert on the mentality of the Radical Left. In his pamplet Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution, (which I highly recommend, by the way) David makes the following point:

An SDS radical once wrote, “the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”  In other words, the cause-whether inner city blacks or women–is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause, which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution.

I would add, whether the cause is the redefinition of marriage or the expansion of entitlements for homosexuals, the issue is never the issue: the revolution is the issue.

Exhibit A: This April 2011 story, from Radio Netherlands, Read more…

The Life Style Left exploits the poor

Back in the day, when the Left used to go through the motions of standing up for the poor and downtrodden, they used words like, “alienation,” “exploitation,” “oppression of the weak by the rich” and “atomistic individualism.” Capitalism promoted all these Bad Things, you see, and the Left was going to do something to stop them.
Well now, the commercialization of human reproduction (reported on here, by the Wall Street Journal) has gone global and creates every one of these Bad Things at a deeper and more profound level than ordinary market capitalism ever did. And the Left is cheering this all on, in the name of individual freedom of choice, I guess.

“Alienation:” selling your sperm or egg amounts to alienating your own body and your own child. You will have children, and maybe grandchildren out in the world, whom you will never know.
“Exploitation:” see the film “Eggsploitation” by my colleague Jennifer Lahl at the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network to see how damaging egg “donation” can be to young women, and how they receive nowhere near enough information to give “informed consent.”
“Oppression of the weak by the rich:” poor women in poor countries are favored as surrogate mothers. They deliver a child to a rich person or couple, and they will never see that child again.
“Atomistic individualism:” this was the term the Left used to use as a smear against the market economy for being too competitive and not sufficiently cooperative. But conceiving and raising a child is the most basic cooperative venture in all of the human experience. A man and a woman come together, at least once, to conceive the child in the first place, and hopefully, cooperate with each other for a lifetime to raise the child. In the Life Style Left’s brave new world, an individual can have a child without ever having a single personal encounter with another human being. It doesn’t get any more atomized than that!

I encourage all Regular Ruth Readers to go and comment on this WSJ story. You will see that Mr. Rupak is essentially using the pages of the Journal as a glorified infomercial. Tell your friends to comment on this story. You will be revolted by the comments already there.

I have been reading the new book, Never Enough, by William Voegeli at Claremont McKenna College, with great interest. His theme is that the advocates of the welfare state have never been able to give a coherent account of the proper size and scope of their ambitions. How much assistance to the poor is enough?

I think he is correct about the “Progressive” economic agenda. But I believe there is an even more insidious and destructive part of their agenda: their revision of what we might call the “sexual constitution.” The radical forms of feminism, as well as the destruction and redefinition of marriage, are part of restructuring the fundamental rules of engagement between women and men, and between adults and children. I have come to the conclusion that the Left’s inability to define limits is no accident.

My thesis is that the impossibility of achieving the agenda is precisely its appeal to the Left. In economics, it is impossible to eliminate all income differences in even a partially free market, since the huge variation in personality, abilities and behaviors that are normal among human beings are precisely the basis for differences in income. Yet, if the Radicals are able to create a moral urgency around “equality,” they will have justified an unlimited amount governmental power.

The feminists have insisted that any difference between men and women are the results of unjust discrimination and hence must be eradicated. The government must “do something,” to eliminate these differences. However, since men and women really are different, Read more…

I want to thank Ari Mendelson for finding and posting this very important 22 minute video on the history of political correctness. And I want to thanks the Free Congress Foundation for making this.

This video is important to the Ruth Institute because it shows the connection between Marxism and the Sexual Revolution. Marxism has failed as an economic ideology, but it’s adherents have not given up. In fact, this video shows that some Marxists realized as early as the 1920’s that capitalism was a successful economic system. Therefore, the working class was not likely to rise up against the capitalist class. (Listen especially around the 6 minute mark.) These Marxist theorists began looking for another class to play the revolutionary role that traditional Marxism had assigned to the working class.

They found the answer to that dilemma in what we would now call the Sexual Revolution. Read more…

It’s not a tinfoil hat conspiracy if the conspirators wrote down their conspiracy, published those writings and spent a hundred years in pursuit of the goals of that conspiracy.

Witness this video on the history of Political Correctness.

So, when we say that some elements of the Left are obsessed with their goal of abolishing the family in favor of total state control of citizen’s lives, you need not take our word for it.  You need not take the word of the speakers in this video.  You need only read the writings of Marcuse, Gramsci, and their ilk.

I am flattered by the attention from Daily Kos blogger, Dante Atkins. Sadly, this post is short on substance, and long on ad hominem attacks and innuendo. I will leave aside for now, his silly attack on our logo, of all things. I will ignore his mangling of the Biblical story of Ruth, except to note one thing: I chose Ruth because she is a unifying figure, loved by all the major faith groups. Catholics love her; Jews love her; Evangelicals love her; Mormons love her. Everybody loves Ruth, it seems, except for leftist bloggers. I’ll leave it to the reader to imagine how leftists like Dante expect to build a coalition when they alienate every major faith tradition in America. Read more…