I am used to surprises from the New York Times —a newspaper so far from me culturally and politically it might as well be a daily bulletin about life in a parallel universe—but last August I read a personal essay in the “Modern Love” space of the “Styles” section that really brought me up short. “My Husband is Now My Wife” (quite a tabloidy title for this genteel newspaper) was about the deeply ambivalent day the author escorted her husband to a hospital for surgery in which he would “take his first surgical step into womanhood.” I’m a jaded ex-Manhattanite, awright? “Sexual reassignment surgery,” as it is called, is not news. I know about the clinics in Colorado where they slice up existing organs and then do Play-Doh sculpturing with the tissue that’s left. The surgery thing has been going on since the sixties. And I know from cross-dressing. On my Upper West Side block it was not uncommon to encounter a neighbor—skinny, middle-aged, bald pate surrounded by a cap of stringy graying locks—taking his daily constitutional…on roller skates, wearing a tiara and a pink tutu, blessing passersby with a Tinkerbell wand. So it wasn’t the soo-last-century, Dude-Looks-Like-a-Lady part that startled, it was the part near the end where the author lets slip that all her fussing about losing a husband and gaining a wife was actually over a hospital stay in which her husband would have “facial feminization surgery, a not uncommon procedure in male-to-female transitions, in which a surgeon carves out a more femininely proportioned version of a male face.” “In my husband’s case,” she wrote, “this meant higher eyebrows, a smaller nose and a more pronounced chin. A few months later, his Adam’s apple would be shaved down and he would receive breast implants.” Almost as if it was an afterthought, she added “genital surgery would follow” on some unspecified date. OK, he hadn’t had the genital surgery yet. It was unclear if he ever would. Certainly, for the average woman, the breast part could be hard to take. But the point is, at the moment, “Husband” had just messed around with his face. So what entitled him to claim membership in the sorority of majestic, complex, mysterious creatures called Women? It was actually a bit presumptuous. (If I were a feminist I would say, “How very male.”) But here we had our author, one Diane Daniel of North Carolina, telling herself sternly that she must remember to stop referring to Husband with “him,” “his,” and “he.” We meet the couple’s therapist who has been “suggesting for months” that Daniel “use female pronouns at home” when addressing Husband, even before he went into the hospital: “I will when I need to,” I’d told her on our last visit. “But for now he’s still a man to me.” I’d turned to my husband, dressed in jeans and a black button-down shirt. “When I look at you, hon, I see a man.” “But she’s a woman,” our therapist countered, her words slicing through my denial. By the end of the essay, Daniel has re-educated herself. Now she gently corrects nurses when they use the “incorrect” pronoun: “After he eats a little something, we’ll give him pain pills,” a nurse said. “Could you say ‘she’?” I asked gently. Once I looked in to it, I found more “Modern Love” columns where it was just assumed the reader has already accepted that “gender identity” (what you decide you are) trumps “gender assigned at birth” (what your body says you are). There was, for instance, the woman who started her essay by writing, “Before we met, my partner had changed names from a female-sounding one to a male one…” …and by the time we were together, everyone we knew either called him by this new name or spoke of him with male pronouns. He identified himself as a transgender man, woman to man. It wasn’t until two years after we began dating that he decided to have his breasts removed. For him, chest surgery was the next step in transitioning genders, a symbolic and physical gesture of leaving womanhood behind. This essay, written by a younger woman than Daniel, was much more philosophically evolved. Apparently this boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever, hadn’t had any medical interventions at all. She merely “identified himself as a transgender man” and began dressing as a man (what does that mean nowadays anyway?) and that was enough, the author says, for everyone they knew to either call him by this new name or speak of him with male pronouns. WELCOME TO THE Brave New World of “gender identity” versus stick-in-the-mud old “gender.” This subjective aspect—the demand that the world recognize you as what you think you are, simply because you’ve decided you are—is new. It turns out law and theory to support this new definition have been proliferating quietly for quite some time as well. In other words, when we stodgy old conservatives, not attuned to the latest reverberations of the “progressive” world, think of a “transsexual” or (this is much more correct) a “transgendered person,” we’re probably imagining, say, Christine Jorgensen (if we’re really old) or Jan Morris, i.e., someone who made a good old Protestant Work Ethic effort to “transition” to the other sex. We are thinking of people who have at least put a considerable amount of effort and in most cases, a lot of money, like their life savings, into this illusory project of “becoming the other sex.” The various stodgy old state laws (it is the states that control issuance of the all-important birth certificate) reflect this attachment to physical reality versus subjectivity. Most state laws are still like those in New York City, which, since 1971, has been willing to issue a “corrected” birth certificate to a transgender person provided he or she is able to prove, via a detailed medical record, that “the applicant has undergone ‘convertive’ surgery, which has generally but not exclusively been interpreted by the Department [of Health and Mental Hygiene] to mean genital surgery.” This onerous surgery requirement has been excised in a several states but that’s hardly enough, say the gender activists. As lawyer Christopher Daley of the very activist Transgender Law Center explains, a transgender person is one “whose internal understanding of their own gender is different from the sex they were assigned at birth.…Transgender persons seek to live in accordance with the sex that takes proper account of the sex of their brain…” (The Transgender Law Center is apparently even so uncomfortable with the designations like “men’s room” or “women’s toilet” that they refer to “gendered” public bathrooms as “bathrooms intended for people who identify with a particular gender.”) In the future, as Kristina Wertz of the Transgender Law Center puts it, all of official America will recognize “that gender identity is not dependent upon anatomy or the ability to access expensive medical treatment.” Wertz applauded the State Department for its June 2010 policy change, a small but important one, stating that applicants wishing to change the gender markers on their passports will only need to present certification that they have “undergone appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition.” The State of Vermont has amended its law to say that “hormonal or other treatments” are sufficient for a sex change on a birth certificate. Chaz Bono, one of America’s most famous female-to-male transgendered people, was a beneficiary of California’s liberalized law. On May 2, 2010, Bono was able to leave a Santa Monica courthouse officially a man, after the court’s acceptance of a vaguely worded letter from a doctor stipulating that he had “performed an irreversible surgical procedure for the purpose of altering Chaz Bono’s sexual characteristics from female to male.” (At the time Bono had had a mastectomy and lots of testosterone.) Meanwhile the press had never questioned that Chaz Bono was anything other than all man, from the moment the Chaz persona appeared on the scene and throughout “his” turn on “Dancing With the Stars.” When Hollywood Reporter reviewed the documentary Becoming Chaz , it obediently informed us that Chaz Bono “was a male trapped in a female body since birth.” Outside of the Mainstream Media, there are, of course, still some dinosaurs skulking around who are not comfortable with the notion that you can change your sex by whacking something off and soldering something else on. There is the matter of chromosomes, and wombs, and the fact that the newly constructed genitals aren’t good for much of anything except just kind of sitting there—like a trophy, a symbol. They are useless for procreation. Both kinds of sex reassignment surgeries, female-to-male and male-to-female, render the recipient irreversibly sterile. And they are not too good for other uses either. As Chaz Bono explained on the David Letterman show, she has not been rushing the decision to get what the trans community calls “bottom surgery” because “you can end up with something functional but very small or something that’s more normal sized but without much erotic sensation.” (Chaz did admit that “There’s different ways to do the surgery, from real basic to more and more options. It’s like a car.”) In short, the long-standing “surgery requirement” laws may have seemed silly when they first appeared, but they now stir up something like nostalgia. At least they are a nod to the idea that gender is rooted in anatomy, and that maybe human beings are defined by their role in the procreative project. SO IS THERE SUCH A THING as “the sex of one’s brain”? Questions like this raged back and forth in 1966 when Johns Hopkins Hospital opened its Gender Identity Clinic and became the first hospital in America to do sex change operations. The doctors had a variety of opinions about why these operations were worth doing. Some, bolstered by a new genre of psychological theory, were downright messianic about “correcting the body to match the real gender.” Some seemed to feel that the surgeries were like a nose job or any other cosmetic surgery, a chance to make a body-part-obsessed person feel better. Some, like psychiatrist Paul McHugh, who did psychological screenings for the program, eventually became fiercely opposed. He saw other doctors’ relatively easy acceptance of the project as a kind of abdication of the professional’s role and a symptom of a social climate in which “all standards by which behaviours are judged are simply matters of opinion—and emotional opinions at that.” The new relativism was even reflected in new attitudes toward schizophrenics—who, increasingly, were deinstitutionalized as a matter of course and treated as if they were just expressing “a different lifestyle choice.” With a similar reluctance to “be judgmental” about someone else’s life choice, McHugh felt that patients were too often approved for surgery without much probing, out of “the spirit of doing your thing, following your bliss, an aesthetic that sees diversity as everything and can accept any idea, including that of permanent sex change, as interesting and that views resistance to such ideas as uptight if not oppressive,” he wrote in a scathing article for the American Scholar titled “Psychiatric Misadventures.” “Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should,” wrote McHugh. In his intake interviews, the typical applicant claimed it was “torture for him to live as a man, especially now that he has read in the newspapers about the possibility of switching surgically to womanhood.” But “[u]pon examination it is not difficult to identify other mental and personality difficulties…” which McHugh believed, unless resolved, would follow the patient into his new body and torment him again after attaching to a new external target. “It is not obvious,” he note, “how this patient’s feeling that he is a woman trapped in a man’s body differs from the feeling of a patient with anorexia nervosa that she is obese despite her emaciated, cachectic state.” “We don’t do liposuction on anorexics,” he wrote. “Why amputate the genitals of these poor men? Surely, the fault is in the mind not the member.” BUT THE STANDARDS McHugh complained about in the late sixties have become so entrenched, I may as well be quoting cuneiform off a stone tablet. Allowing some patriarchal white male Ob/Gyn to have the power to take a cursory glance at your baby genitalia and “assign a gender” doesn’t seem to fit in a world where “self-definition” has become a mantra. And this may explain why, according to the New York Times , “a growing number of high school and college students…are pushing for the right to change their pronoun whenever they feel like it.” Katy Butler, one of those high school students, identifies herself as part of the “nonconforming gender community” and is one of those enthusiastic about “Preferred Gender Pronouns” (PGPs). “You have to understand, this has nothing to do with your sexuality and everything to do with who you feel like inside,” Katy said, explaining that at the start of every Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning Association meeting, participants are first asked if they would like to share their PGPs. A PGP can change as often as one likes. If the pronouns in the dictionary don’t suffice, there are numerous made-up ones now in use, including “ze,” “hir,” and “hirs,” words that connote both genders because, as Katy explained, “Maybe one day you wake up and feel more like a boy.” Butler is lucky enough to live in the anything-goes enclave of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Out in the hinterlands the idea that a newly chosen “gender identity and expression” must be tolerated at all times does not always go down so well. Men who have recently decided they are women, for example, and show up at work wearing a dress have been fired or been harassed until they quit. There have been a number of savage attacks on trans people who attempted to use the public restroom corresponding to their gender identity. Enter what the New Republic last year called “America’s Next Great Civil Rights Struggle,” the struggle to end discrimination against transsexuals in housing, the workplace—and eventually any other place a trial lawyer can discover it. Sixteen states (plus D.C.) and 143 cities or counties have added “gender identity or expression” to their protected categories lists—alongside the usual race, religion, gender (the other kind of gender), age, and disability. A more subtle but telling sign that more states will probably add the new category is the news that 207 major corporations (places like Coca-Cola, Apple, Chevron, Kellogg, and Best Buy) now offer insurance covering the cost of full-scale “transitions.” According to 2011 numbers collected by the Human Rights Campaign’s annual Corporate Equity Index, this is an increase “from just 85 a year earlier.” When HRC began following the issue a decade ago, no corporations covered the surgery. A number of recent gender identity discrimination cases have been settled in the plaintiffs’ favor. If Johnny is hired as a paper pusher, and then starts to come to work as Jane, and then is fired, his lawsuit for workplace discrimination and wrongful termination is relatively straightforward, because the defendants cannot usually prove the sex change affected the job of paper pusher. Things get murkier when a workplace has established a “Bona Fide Occupational Qualification” to justify hiring only males or only females. Yes, there are jobs where one can still discriminate. Take “urine monitors”—the people who would watch you pee into a cup if you went for a drug test. El’Jai Devoureau is currently embroiled in a gender discrimination lawsuit against her former employer, Urban Treatment Centers of Camden, New Jersey. Devoureau, a fortysomething who claims to have been dressing as a man for years, to have had years of hormone therapy and some kind of surgery which she/he has so far been very opaque about, and who even has a “male” driver’s license, applied for the male-only job but was fired after two days because Devoureau’s supervisor said rumors were going around that she/he was not a man. Devoureau, who wears long corn rows, sports a wispy beard, and looks a bit like the ’80s singer Terence Trent D’Arby, said, “But I am a man.” The supervisor said something to the effect of, “Um, we don’t think so.” And the standoff began. The case has thus begun its crawl through the New Jersey court system. More evidence to support Devoureau’s claim may have to be…er, unveiled to support Devoureau’s claim—but maybe not. As the New York Times says, the outcome could turn on “the question of what is a man.” It could certainly be precedent-setting. WHAT I FIND REALLY ODD about this “new Civil Rights movement” is that it’s happening now—after decades of struggle over the boundaries of sex roles and a great expansion of norms. As one of the online commenters to the New Republic ’s “Great New Civil Rights Struggle” article put it, “Isn’t the trans-sexual phenomenon at heart conservative? Instead of enlarging the range of human behavior, it narrows the options down to ‘girls act one way and boys another so if you act one way, you have to be trapped in the wrong gender’s body.’ ” But exactly . As a sign of how far we have come, there is a film, Alfred Nobbs , currently in theaters. It’s about a 19th century woman “living as a man” apparently because she seeks the love of women. But in 2012 no woman has to dress as a man in order to openly partner with another woman. (Well, in most parts of the country!) No woman has to attempt to “pass” as a man to take a job on a highway crew, or to enter a training program for fighter jet pilots. Another curiously retrograde part: Once they “transition” many transgenders become the most devout standard-bearers for sex stereotypes. “When you discuss what the patient means by ‘feeling like a woman’ you often get a sex stereotype in return—something that woman physicians note immediately is a male caricature of women’s attitudes and interests,” Paul McHugh wrote. “One of our patients, for example, said that, as a woman, he would be more ‘invested with being than with doing.’” “Ever since I became a woman, I just can’t do math anymore,” trills the main source in the New Republic ’s “Civil Rights” article. Chaz Bono is now infamous for having become a walking sexist-comment-machine. (“I can be a a-hole; I can be insensitive.…There is something in testosterone that makes talking and gossiping really grating.…I’ve stopped talking as much. I’ve noticed that [my girlfriend] can talk endlessly.…I got way more gadget-oriented.…Definitely since transitioning I’ve wanted to be up on the latest, coolest toy.”) Accordingly, Warren Beatty’s oldest child (who started life as Kathlyn but is known, after hormone treatments, as “Stephen Ira Beatty”) has taken to excoriating Bono from her blog, with flamers like: “I don’t want any rich white trans guy…telling the media that testosterone made him a misogynist…he has some deep-seated misogyny to work through.” If your head is spinning with all this gender-bending, join the club. But keep in mind that there is one reference point that will hold steady like the North Star: With this new category of victim slouching toward Bethlehem to be born, the trial lawyers are girding happily. I await the day a male-to-female trans applies for a job at Hooters.
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America in Transition
Late last evening came word that House Republicans intend to keep parts of Obamacare. Even if the United States Supreme Court throws the whole law out, House Republicans intend to resurrect portions of Obamacare. House Republicans publicly say the story is wrong. I’ve talked to several House Republicans who tell me the story is actually on the money and the Republicans now denying it are really playing at semantics. These House Republicans tell me these denials about the accuracy of the story are equivalent to the House GOP semantically arguing it was living up to its Pledge to Nowhere requirement for $100 billion in cuts that actually amounted to something like $34 billion. Conservatives in the House of Representatives tell me explicitly to go with Politico on this and be very wary of the House GOP Leadership when it comes to repeal. It is a sad time for the Republican Party. The base must treat its leaders as if they are Soviets — trust but verify their statements. And lately, it is harder and harder to verify their statements. The work of the Tea Party must continue or within a decade I honestly do not believe the GOP will be one political party. In both Indiana and Nebraska, the Tea Party has continued to make gains. People have flat out rejected the establishment favorites for U.S. Senate – Dick Lugar and Jon Bruning, respectively – in favor of candidates who offer a challenge to the status quo. Will Texans prove what they’re made of and do the same? I love Texas. But let’s face it – the Texas congressional delegation is mediocre at best and leaves much to be desired. Now, Texas has the chance to get it right – by sending Ted Cruz to the U.S. Senate. But will they? Maybe. But we have a lot to do and the Republican Primary in Texas is only 2 weeks from today. But the payoff would be worth it – this is Texas for crying out loud. We’ve been given the opportunity to replace long time thorn in our side, Kay Bailey Hutchison, with an actual honest-to-goodness conservative. Ted Cruz is that conservative. David Dewhurst is not. The first step is to prevent Dewhurst from getting to 50% on May 29th so that there is a head-to-head run-off between Dewhurst and Cruz in July. The good news is that last week, Sarah Palin endorsed Cruz – adding to an already impressive list of solid conservatives like Jim DeMint, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Ed Meese, Mark Levin, the Club for Growth, the Madison Project, Gun Owners of America, RedState, and numerous others. These are not “DC insiders” as Dewhurst would have you believe, but strong conservatives who are fighting hard against the status quo and who know that Ted will join with them rather than the establishment. Given Dewhurst’s rather paltry and almost embarrassing list of endorsements, it was not surprising that his response was to up the ante on spending – increasing his own ad buys, while his SuperPac launched another $1 million ad buy in Houston targeting Ted directly. In fact, while Dewhurst has spent just over $5 million on positive ads about himself – he or his SuperPacs have spent over $4 million on ads specifically going after Ted. Why? It’s pretty simple – Dewhurst has been polling below 50% consistently despite having statewide name ID for over almost 15 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to throw around. And, he simply has no conservative record to run on. In fact, he would like people to ignore his record of proposed tax increases, higher spending and general incompetence as Lt. Governor. So, they are focusing on lies and distortions about Ted’s record. The lies are extraordinary and should be ignored. The biggest lie – and one that sadly gained some traction – is that Ted is a “trial lawyer” who represented a Chinese company against an American company, and thus harmed American manufacturing jobs. This is facially absurd. Ted is an appellate lawyer – as Dewhurst well knows because Ted was the Solicitor General for the State of Texas, often fighting for the people of Texas in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. But even more, Ted represented one side of a dispute between two businesses – and the guy Dewhurst claims is an American manufacturer moved his business to China years ago. The truth is simple. Everyone – and I mean absolutely everyone – in Austin who follows politics knows that David Dewhurst is a squishy moderate. They know he has been a major impediment – along with Joe Straus – to moving conservative reforms. They know he is boring and entirely unpersuasive. They know he is hiding behind the overall record of Governor Perry, who sadly is the lone conservative of any note who has supported Dewhurst… entirely out of loyalty to the man who has served as his Lt. Governor for some 12 years (in other words, don’t make anything of that support). Meanwhile, Ted has a track record of fighting for conservatism. He has fought against ceding U.S. sovereignty to some unaccountable, leftist World Court… he has fought for religious freedom by successfully defending the placement of the 10 Commandments on the Texas Capitol grounds… and countless other efforts as a lawyer and a fighter for conservative principles. Most importantly – Ted has sent a clear signal that he will work with conservatives in Washington to fight the establishment. Dewhurst not only will join the establishment – he is the establishment personified. Texans have a chance to actually do something to change the direction of this country. They should do it, or perhaps we should stop looking to Texas as a leader of conservatism…
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Cleaning Up the GOP Moves to Texas
“ If the tea party is not much more successful in primarying Republican candidates and then having those guys practice what they preach , the GOP is within a decade of going the way of the Whigs. ” There have been many studies out on the “tea party congress” and just how tea party it actually is. One study last year noted that 70% of candidates who went to Congress under the tea party banner were voting just like the Republican Leaders they ran against. Probably one of the best places to get a sense of this is the Club for Growth. Why? The Club ignores social votes and focuses only on fiscal votes — spending issues more than anything else. The tea party candidates went to Congress not just to repeal Obamacare, but were really motivated by out of control government spending, bailouts, etc. Remember, it was Rick Santelli of CNBC on February 19, 2009, who predicted this grassroots army of activists would rise up and say enough to out of control government spending and bailouts. Santelli said, in part, The government is promoting bad behavior. Because we certainly don’t want to put stimulus forth and give people a whopping $8 or $10 in their check, and think that they ought to save it, and in terms of modifications… I’ll tell you what, I have an idea. You know, the new administration’s big on computers and technology– How about this, President and new administration? Why don’t you put up a website to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages; or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road, and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water? … We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing. Things sort of spiraled from there sending a wave of candidates to Washington embracing the concerns of the activists who showed up to the tea party. They wanted to cut spending because of out of control debt, stop Barack Obama, end Obamacare, and they were willing to primary Republicans to do it. A number of Republicans lost. In some open primaries, the candidates who were supported by the GOP out of Washington went down in flames. But what of the candidates who actually went to DC on a wave of tea party support. Turns out some of them were liars and a lot of them behaved like the pigs in Animal Farm with some of them deciding they were more equal than others. The Club for Growth’s new study of this Tea Party Congress paints a rather depressing picture. You can see how the freshman of the Tea Party Class of 2010 preformed by clicking right here. If you want a more in depth look at the Congress as a whole, one of the best places to go is Heritage Action for America’s comprehensive score card . What you’ll find is not much better there. I’m afraid if the tea party is not much more successful in primarying Republican candidates and then having those guys practice what they preach , the GOP is within a decade of going the way of the Whigs.
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The Club For Growth’s Depressing Study: Failure and Lies of the Tea Party Congresscritters
Sunday–Mother’s Day Alex and I are at our house in Rancho Mirage. The temperature as we left for the Mother’s Day Brunch at Morningside Club was 112. That’s hot. The brunch was delicious but there were not many people there. Lots of men and women have gone home because The Season for parties and socials has ended. Plus, it’s hot as blazes. Still, Alex and I had a fine meal mostly of chicken, then came home, packed up, and got on the Freeway. It was fantastically hot. Just sheets of wavy heat coming off the asphalt. It was terrifying to think what would happen if the a/c broke. Luckily, it didn’t, and soon we were in Calimesa, where the temperature was a mild 85 with a lovely breeze. I had a snack at the Burger King. I met a lovely couple from Phoenix who had been visiting in Marina del Rey. The girlfriend is a medical biller for a huge chain of hospitals. She argues with insurers to get the hospitals paid. She said she was hiring like mad and still could not keep up. The demand for capable men and women in this field is bottomless and growing. She had learned about it, if I recall correctly, at a nonprofit partly on-line, partly campus-based school called National University in San Diego. This is some amazing coincidence, because I am addressing their commencement tomorrow in San Diego. We ran into maddening traffic in Rosemead, then got to near home. We pulled into a Taco Bell to get a Diet Coke. Two LAPD officers were questioning two young men. No one was in cuffs. When the young men saw me, they asked me to sign some bottle of Clear Eyes, then the police wanted autographs, too, and soon everyone was laughing and the cops let the young men go. We got home, and I washed up, and then jumped into a Town Car to be driven down to San Diego. I slept the whole way except for a stop at a Sonic where the waiters were all on roller skates. The owner of the franchise came screaming up to the store in his truck to tell me how much he loves The American Spectator , so that was nice. I slept the whole rest of the way, checked into my room with its life-or-death tea maker, then went to sleep next to a window overlooking the San Diego Marina. I had a long dream about my pal Wendy yelling at me because I eat too much fast food. Then, more sleep, then dressed and out to the commencement preliminaries. The main one was visiting with Patricia Potter, a brilliant, lovely, friendly woman. Like my mother, she had spent some time at Goucher College in Maryland. My mother had transferred to Barnard but always had a fond spot for Goucher and for Maryland, where my sister and I “grew up.” (I still know every word of “Maryland, My Maryland.”) Ms. Potter and I had a great talk, then off to get robed, meet super friendly officers, trustees, and faculty. I also met the long-time soul of the school, Dr. Jerry C. Lee. He’s retiring after a spectacular career at National and elsewhere. We went into an immense room at the San Diego Convention Center. I was told there were 7,800 people there — students and families, primarily. The room was kept at a perfect temperature. I spoke mostly about National. It is a great place in that it educates people for the world as it is. The students are taught engineering, nursing, teaching, medical billing, many other subjects that will get the grads jobs when they get out. They will get jobs and they will make a living and they will have the self-esteem that only making a living and being self-supporting through their own contributions can confer. Yes, it’s true that many schools teach discontent, whining, moaning, bitching, navel gazing, and disloyalty. Yes, it’s true that some of them are famous schools. But at National University, they teach what America needs its students to know: the skills we need to keep America running. Again, these are not whiners and moaners at National University. These are the people who will keep us competitive and will keep themselves alive without a handout. Many of these students were single parents and worked at a job (maybe two jobs) while they studied. This is motivation indeed and motivation is everything . I looked out at the men and women in the room — white, black, Asian, Hispanic, men, women, old and young, all learning how to keep the engine of America and the engine of their personalities running. I kept thinking, “I have seen the future of education and it works.” Governor Brown should put the trustees of National University in charge of the University of California. Fewer courses in subversion. More classes in subjects that really matter and get graduates jobs. Many of the people in room had a military background and cheered as I lauded our military. I just loved these people. Then the speech was over and we pooh-bahs went back to the robing room. I was sad to say good-bye to President Potter and Chancellor-Emeritus Lee. I was sad to say good-bye to all of them. The salt of the earth. This has been an encouraging day and I don’t have a lot of them. On the way home, I met my pal Joe for dinner in Del Mar. He is as hard-working a man as I know of. And he has the success to prove it. The absolutely best anti-poverty program there is: work. They know it at National University. If we are smart about it, the future will be what schools like National make it.
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Jobs for Graduates
We’ve been hearing a great deal lately about Barack Obama and his courage; or what passes for courage when a lapdog media is in control of its definition. Although I generally pass up most of what comes from the pens of liberal pundits, one couldn’t hide this week from the deluge of presidential paeans. First up were adoring tributes to the bravery of a man who merely gave the okay to a mission that was years in the making but was actually carried out by truly heroic men who are not usually beloved by the media. Men who, in just a few years, will return home to be treated as possible terror suspects by an Obama Administration who gleaned the benefits of their valor without any commensurate risks. In covering this story, a real show of courage would have been one in which the media expressed just a sliver of curiosity about the details of the bin Laden rubout and disposal at sea. No sooner did we catch our breath from the giddy bin Laden death celebrations, when, thanks to Joe Biden’s latest case of oral diarrhea, President Obama was able to summon his vast stores of courage to thrill leftists everywhere by coming out of the closet on gay marriage. Now, being a bitter, Christian clinger, I subscribe to the idea that a man will be known by his fruits; and if ever a man’s actions demonstrated overt support for the homosexual agenda, that man is indeed Barack Obama. His historic snubbing of Congress by refusing to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, his demoralizing politicization of our military by ending “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” and probably his most radical and underpublicized act of all, making homosexual “rights” a priority in determining American foreign policy, have spoken for him. And yet, bowing to the cravings of a truly slobbering media, he declared his outright affirmation of homosexual marriage. Was this announcement historic and unexpected? Yes and maybe. But was it courageous? That would be a resounding no. It was, as are most election-year revelations, simply a case of pandering to his base; as the Washington Post reports , one in six of his campaign “bundlers” are openly homosexual. Even the New York Times admits that “Most Americans suspect that President Obama was motivated by politics.” Yet it is claimed that he is courageous because blacks, like most of America, are opposed to gay marriage. But in truth, where else would they go? Would Obama’s “courage” on this issue drive them suddenly into the arms of the lily-white Mitt Romney? One would like to think so, but they, like most Americans who allow themselves to be bullied into groupthink, will probably stay with their enablers, just like unfaithful Catholics and Jews who ignore their faith teaching in favor of the allures of liberal popular culture. And the pressure from our arbiters of culture is growing in desperation. Employing the liberal tactic of using polls to influence opinion rather than track it, they are fond of citing their findings in favor of gay marriage. But polling on the subject is far different from the polling that counts: in the ballot box. How many Americans would actually tell a pollster that they are repulsed by homosexual marriage and shudder to think of their children choosing that “lifestyle”? Yet, voters in 30 states have virtually decided that very thing by amending their constitutions to define marriage as solely between a man and a woman. And so it might seem that a president’s advocating such an electorally unpopular position would indeed be an act of courage, were it not for one thing: he said he believes that it is an issue to be decided by the states. Funny he doesn’t feel that way about immigration, healthcare or abortion though, but it’s only window-dressing after all. Because it has allowed him to continue to associate himself with the oppressed, and as we all know, those who speak out against Obama now will not only be branded as racists, but hateful homophobes as well. So no, the president showed no courage here; only cold, political calculation. The only courage on this issue will be demonstrated by those who break free from politically correct thinking and vote on what’s best for America; an America that is hopefully getting sick and tired of this browbeating on the subject of their intolerance of whichever victim of majority oppression is on the menu today. I think they’ve had quite enough of our first “black/woman/gay president,” and simply desire another “American president.”
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No Profile in Courage
