Today, an individual

I no longer call myself a progressive. I once saw injustices and gladly threw myself into good battles. And my beliefs have not changed.

But I came to realize that progressivism doesn't stop, even when it's reached the announced destination. Progressivism keeps moving. No sooner has it achieved victory than it calls for the goalposts to be moved still further, declaring new struggles to wage and new vistas to be conquered.

Several examples leap to mind:

Smoking was once ubiquitous, an individual's own choice. Then ad hoc health groups sailed into unwanted action, reordering others' lives. First came restaurant smoking sections. Then followed entire smoke-free buildings. Soon after, smoking near those buildings was prohibited. Laws forbidding smoking in city parks were crafted, Next came landlords who rented only to non-smoking tenants. Not to be left out of the business, municipalities enacted restrictive bans of their own.

Smokers rights advocates warned that food police would one day rise. And they were roundly ridiculed. But today we have activists pressuring for restaurant menu restrictions, New York is regulating soda cup size, and the First Lady forces inadequate, tasteless detritus on public schoolchildren. (Of course, her privately-schooled daughters dine sumptuously, not held to the Dickensian gruel standards pressed on public schools.)

Free speech rights were championed by classical liberals. Historically, people fighting for justice from outside the political and social mainstream were able to promulgate their crucial messages and attract support thanks to First Amendment protections.

Examples of the powerful potential of expressed ideas include not only civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr but can be traced back to Paine's Common Sense. Artists and writers thought by polite society to be eccentric or even indecent benefited from constitutional speech safeguards, some influencing cultural attitudes far beyond themselves and their times.

But contemporary progressives (particularly those of the campus variety) view free speech as dangerous and detrimental to cultural integrity. Now, silencing "offensive" speakers is the rule. How many cities have Hate Speech laws on the books? How many colleges maintain narrow speech codes? And how often are visiting university speakers shouted down and air-horned deafeningly?

Confederate flags have largely disappeared from statehouse grounds. So professional activists have turned their blustery ire on private flag-hoisting targets. The threat to wreak economic avengement on Kid Rock's corporate sponsors is blackmail intended to stifle speech and regulate behavior by appealing to corporate heads' dollar consciousness.

The same "it'll cost you" tactic is engineered by those seeking to banish voices from talk radio airwaves by pressuring advertisers. Reprogramming the medium in their ideological image is the totalistic ambition.

The phenomenon of top-floor moneyed suits wielding veto authority over speech was once scorned by progressives. Now, they themselves encourage it.

The constitutional right of the accused to due process and a presumption of innocence is too often dismissed as an impediment to justice. It has been trod over in the fevered scramble to eradicate the supposed "campus rape epidemic,"  an hysteria without statistical support but which echoes nonetheless from ivy-covered halls to the U.S. capitol.

Blackstone once reformulated Maimonides's caution as: "It is better that ten guilty men escape than that one innocent suffer." Turn that good rule on its head and you'll see current zealots' faith.

No, I no longer call myself a progressive. That movement has marched into extreme, coercive territories, and I'm staying put.
.

end

Maher vs Maher

During Wednesday's White House press conference, CBS reporter Major Garrett asked President Obama a tough question. Which is what a journalist is supposed to do. (That so many do not is to be lamented.)

Virtually wagging a professorial finger, Obama lectured Garrett that his query was "nonsense" and that the reporter "should know better."  And go to the principal's office.

Comedian Bill Maher tweeted his support of the unseemly presidential condescension and waxed venomous about Garrett:

#MajorGarrett is a huge asshole. If U wanna “strike a nerve” with POTUS, why not just scream the N word? That shld get his attention.

But Maher has not always grabbed for the race card and attacked journalists who "Speak truth to power," even where Obama is concerned:

"I don't know why he [Obama] is perhaps the worst president we've had on clamping down on the press," he observed to his HBO Real Time guest, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. "He's used the espionage act more than any other president, right?" (The Hill, 1/21)

To Maher, apparently, whether reporters should be defended or derided turns on ideology. During that Real Time interview, he and Poitras agreed that Edward Snowden deserved credit for exposing governmental secrets and effectively pushing it to live up to the transparency ideal. (Snowden had indeed performed an estimable service.)

But whereas Poitras had herself helped publicize Snowden's revelations, CBS reporter Garrett had previously worked at Fox News. And Maher seemingly never tires of lambasting that network. It's sort of his non-celestial crusade.

To hear Maher tell it FNC, the Tea Party - anyone who thinks to his right - is an inbred and dastardly hate-bumpkin spouting foul rhetoric of the sort probably heard regularly when the stench of burning cross hangs in the night air.

Maher's slurring of Garret was nonsense. He should know better.

It's a natural fact                                                                                    

Ooh! Look-a there ain't she pretty! 
Ooh! Look at her ain't that chick a beauty!
I like-a the dress, I like-a the hose,
I like-a the hat, get a load-a that pose!

"Ooh! Look-a there! Ain't she pretty!"
- Clarence Todd, Carmen Lombardo


Frequently quoted is Emma Goldman's clever admonition: "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution!"

In the same spirit of hefting high the banner of fun-in-the-midst-of-seriousness, I would tweak Goldman's phrase: If I can't girl-watch, I don't want to be part of your 'progress.'

Some today are of the bent that any reference to attractiveness or sexuality, regardless of complimentary intent, is demeaning. An act of hostility. 

The advocacy site StopSexualHarassment.org endorses a definition of harassment that groups mere "looks" with obvious potential offenses: “By looks, words, and gestures, the man asserts his right to intrude on the woman’s attention, defining her as a sexual object, and forcing her to interact with him.”- Micaela di Leonardo, author of “Political Economy of Street Harassment” (1981).

(All that, by merely looking?)

To the cause-fraught minds advocating such twaddle, each innocent and benign compliment equals 'hate-speech.' A wink is tantamount to a ravishing. (Think I'm exaggerating? 'Stare rape' is a phrase in present vogue among the grimly self-righteous.)

Two purported examples of girl-admiring men as victimizers turned up online not long ago. 

The viral video "10 hours walking in New York City as a woman" captured street harassment. Producers betrayed their bias and undid the endeavor's soundness by packing innocent salutations under the harassment umbrella. 

(Business Insider, the Daily Mail, and others now report that the video's starring stroller has filed suit against both the producer and "anti-harassment" group Hollaback! Shoshana Roberts is seeking "at least 500, 000," according to Business Insider, for unauthorized use of her image.) 

A second viral video, "Drunk girl in public," portrayed calculating men seeking to take advantage of a sloshed damsel in distress on LA's Hollywood Boulevard.

Each apparently damning video was soon exposed as misrepresentative-by-design. Media sources as diverse as Slate and the Huffington Post were critical. And at least some actors who'd participated admitted the falseness.

That harassment abounds is a reality whose end cannot come quickly enough. (It hardly needs to be contrived.) But respectful regard has never been the fellow of predation. The two entertain distinct ambitions. 

All facets of a woman should be esteemed -- no one to the slighting of another. Natural abilities, studied and honed qualities such as intellect, integrity, philosophical character, and professional accomplishment are to be acknowledged and respected. 

And so, too, is beauty. It's a natural fact.

Do as Bernie Sanders says, not as he does

During his recent speech before the annual La Raza convention in Las Vegas, Democratic presidential nomination hopeful Bernie Sanders made a claim that without analysis sounded good. But in analysis lies education.

"Not Donald Trump, not anyone else will be successful dividing us by race or our country of origin," Sanders assured.

A fine notion. Such American unity - "E Pluribus Unum," - is the fundamental idea that charges opposition to the necessarily divisive identity politics endorsed by Democrats.

That party's current platform isolates Americans in no fewer than 20 categories. (The GOP is only somewhat superior, listing seven sub-classes.)

Of course, it's legitimate to address particular concerns more specifically outside the general body - but as temporary practicality, not enduring philosophical
precept.

And did Bernie Sanders really think it was appropriate to deliver an anti-divisiveness, pro-commonality message before La Raza, a group whose raison d'etre is ethnic exclusivity?

Iowa's largest paper silent on Steinle murder
Despite Dem pres. candidates' "Sanctuary City" backing

On July 1, San Francisco woman Kathryn Steinle was murdered by illegal immigrant Francisco Sanchez. Sanchez was a seven-time felon and five-time deportee, but he was free and on the street thanks to San Francisco's "Sanctuary City" law.

Iowa's Des Moines Register - the state's largest paper, owned by the Gannett corporation - has numerous compelling reasons to cover that murder: The paper often highlights abuse of women issues. It also loudly touts the supposed American rights of illegal immigrants.

And, of course,  Iowa holds the nation's first 2016 presidential race nomination caucus. Every single Democrat aspirant - Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Martin O'Malley, and Jim Webb - has a record of supporting Sanctuary-type policies, and they are these days frequent habitues of the Hawkeye State.

But despite those solid journalistic recommendations, the notoriously liberal, donkey-solicitous Des Moines Register has carried a whopping zero mentions of Sanchez's murder of Steinle. It can reasonably be guessed that the paper would not ask frontrunner Hillary about the Steinle murder/Sanctuary City matter, even were the "women's rights" handshaker deigning to answer reporters' queries.

I emailed Kathie Obradovich, the Des Moines Register's chief political columnist. I advised her I might write on this and asked whether she and the Register would be covering the murder, the larger issue of Sanctuary City laws, and how all this might affect the presidential nomination contest presently underway in Iowa.

It certainly cannot be said that Obradovich lacks interest in writing about immigration matters. Only last June 28, she devoted an entire column to a pro-immigration group's poll claiming majorities of Iowa Republicans supported "path to citizenship" or residency goals. That column reflected the paper's bent.

Though some 48 hours have passed, I have not received any response from Obradovich. And according to the Des Moines Register's own search engine, it still has not so much as briefly mentioned the Kathryn Steinle murder.


end

Crusaders In Conflict

Ridiculing and vilifying everything traditional is the default attitude of adolescents and ungrounded progressives. And they elevate favored identity groups to hallowed status.

But what is a smiley-face totalitarian to do when identity interests conflict?

The recent southern church burnings demanded condemnation by all good persons, regardless of ideological peculiarity. But some progressives, inadvertently revealing that their outrage was studied and turned on political considerations, used the burnings as a vehicle for partisan bannering:

 "In the wake of six black churches burning down, the Christians on my timeline seem more disturbed by how the Confederate flag is treated."
- Twitter poster

For white progressives to take up racial minorities' causes (save for political diversification) is a doctrinal given. And no one of sound mind would deny that they helped achieve needed, significant changes in earlier decades.

But in this case, impulses collided.

In progressives' faulty lexicon, "Christian" is exclusively negative, a synonym for intolerant, oppressive, and bigoted. (Oddly, Islam receives their gushing approval, though it actually is all of those things.)

Never mind that more than a few current anti-Christian progressives have acquaintances and relatives who are Christian - those progressives' own realities illustrate the invalidity of their prejudice. Also disregard that American Christianity has a long and rich history of working in the interests of the very people progressives pretend to care about.

Many American Christians have long been active in efforts against hunger, homelessness, and execution, for example. And they were and are fundamentally involved in anti-war endeavoring.

But progressives do not acknowledge that noble history. They effectively take up Pat Robertson's deceitful cause, defining Christianity solely as a phenomenon of the right and wrongly ceding it to the political opposition.

And what of those terrible attacks on black churches? They were Christian churches, of course. But that inconvenient fact can't be mentioned by progressives sworn to advocate anti-Christian bigotry.

So the Christian faith bedrock of the horribly attacked black churches is ignored, that "black churches" and "Christian" can be misrepresented as inherently adversarial.

Too bad these 2015 progressives can't time-travel back to 1965 Selma, to educate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

FIRST THEY TRAMPLED SMOKERS' RIGHTS

And I did not speak out - because I was not a smoker

THEN THEY SPOILED SCHOOL LUNCHES

And I did not speak out - because I was not a school kid  

THEN THEY SHOUTED DOWN/CENSORED COLLEGE CAMPUS SPEAKERS

And I did not speak out - because I was not a public speaker

THEN THEY EXPELLED A COLLEGE GUY ACCUSED OF RAPE, THOUGH THE COLLEGE ITSELF DEEMED HIM 'NOT GUILTY' AND POLICE FOUND NO EVIDENCE

And I did not speak out - because I was not in college

THEN THEY INDOCTRINATED KINDERGARTNERS TO ACCEPT TRANSEXUALISM

And I did not speak out - because I was not a parent

THEN NEWSPAPERS AND TV NEWS REFUSED TO SHOW A MOHAMMED CARTOON

And I did not speak out - because I was not a cartoonist

THEN THEY BANNED THE CONFEDERATE FLAG

And I did not speak out - because I was not a southerner

 THEN WAL MART BANNED THE GENERAL LEE, AND TV LAND DROPPED DUKES OF HAZZARD

And I did not speak out - because I neither shop at Wal Mart nor watch TV Land

THEN THEY BANNED FREE SPEECH ENTIRELY

And no one could speak out - under penalty of 'Hate Speech' laws

(In fact, it may be illegal for you to read this.)