Most loving couples have friction

The San Fran sheriff story continues. A letter to the editor says:

Come to conclusion on Mirkarimi case

I sure feel sorry for San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi. His wife, Iliana Lopez, returning from her hometown where she was caring for her sick father, is now back in the States, supposedly to defend her husband. Actually she seems to be tightening the noose around his neck by showing the bruise on her arm, over and over again.

How many wives have had their husbands lovingly grab their arms and leave fingerprint bruises? The most loving couples have friction now and then but they manage to kiss and make up. Once it goes public, it is blown so out of proportion, a reconciliation seems impossible.

Such a pity that a moment of lost temper could cause him to lose his job and she has to leave the country with their child.

The media and lawyers are not being any help. They seem to enjoy keeping this story in the limelight. Is there nothing better to do? Come to some conclusion.

Doris Rilling, Martinez

The leftists justify pursuing this case because they say that domestic violence is never a private matter.

The San Fran Examiner reports:

Eventually, the board will have to decide whether to uphold Lee’s suspension of Mirkarimi or allow him to resume his post as sheriff. It would take at least nine votes from the 11 supervisors to oust him.

Lee suspended Mirkarimi without pay on March 21 after Mirkarimi pleaded guilty to domestic violence against his wife, Eliana Lopez.

Mirkarimi actually pleaded guilty to "misdemeanor false imprisonment", and not guilty to the domestic violence charge.

San Francisco is dominated by leftist kooks who are ideologically committed to using govt to intervene in peoples' lives and bust up families. But I will be surprised if they get 9 out of 11 votes to destroy the sheriff for a trivial incident that is nobody's business.

Update: While taking a shower this morning, I noticed a bruise on my leg about the size of that on Mirkarimi's wife's arm. I don't know how I got it. It does hurt if I put pressure on it, so I must have injured it somehow. If I were married to a San Fran politician, this might occupy the govt for about 6 months. That is, if busybody neighbors, cops, prosecutors, judges, politicians, and feminist voters all conspired to over-dramatize a trivial and inconsequential bruise, as they did with Mirkarimi.

Welfare women making bad choices

The leftist Democrat news media has been running stories on why we need to re-elect Pres. Obama in order to maintain the social safety net. NPR radio reports:

Single mothers have an especially hard time getting out of poverty. Households headed by single mothers are four times as likely to be poor as are families headed by married couples.

Still, many of these women are trying to get ahead. Some know instinctively what the studies show: Children who grow up in poor families are far more likely to become poor adults.

These mothers often rely on a network of support — not just from food stamps, housing subsidies, welfare, or other government programs people usually think of. They also depend on charities, churches, family, friends, personal drive, ambition and even luck to stay afloat.

Take the case of 29-year-old Jennifer Stepp, who lives in Reading, Pa. Like 14 million other people in the U.S. who live in families headed by single mothers, she's poor. And she faces incredible odds.

Stepp has three children by three different fathers. The father of her eldest child, 10-year-old Isaiah, is serving 30 years in federal prison for armed robbery.

And the NY Times has a long story about a white woman who chose to have three kids with a black man who never married or supported her:

Ms. Schairer’s life offers a vivid example of how rapidly norms have changed. She grew up in a small town outside Ann Arbor, where her life revolved around church and school and everyone she knew was married.

“I thought, ‘I’ll meet someone, and we’ll marry and have kids and the house and the white picket fence,’ ” she said. “That’s what I wanted. That’s what I still want.”

She got pregnant during her first year of college, left school and stayed in a troubled relationship that left her with three children when it finally collapsed six years ago. She has had little contact with the children’s father and receives no child support. With an annual income of just under $25,000, Ms. Schairer barely lifts her children out of poverty, but she is not one to complain. “I’m in this position because of decisions I made,” she said.

She buys generic cereal at about half the brand-name price, takes the children to church every week and posts their happy moments on her Facebook page. Inequality is a word she rarely uses, though her family life is a showcase of its broadening reach.

“Two incomes would certainly help with the bills,” she said. “But it’s parenting, too. I wish I could say, ‘Call your dad.’ ”

The safety net is just enabling bad behavior. We would be much better off if the welfare benefits were cut off and the single moms were shamed into giving up their kids for adoption.

The leftist NPR and NY Times are too liberal to draw the obvious conclusions from these stories. They push for social polities that are breaking down the family and destroying America.

Sick to the teeth of bogus DV complaints

The dirty little secret about domestic violence cases is that women make exaggerated accusations and then recant them. The Irish Times reports:

WOMEN’S SUPPORT groups have called on Judge Seán Martin MacBride to apologise after remarks he made at Monaghan District Court this week.

The judge made the remarks after he heard a number of cases in which women, having alleged that they had been assaulted by their partners, withdrew the charges in court.

The judge told the court he was “getting tired of these cases”.

“I am sick to the teeth of this. I must have heard 50 of these cases this year alone,” he said.

He ought to be tired of those cases. Usually people are prosecuted for filing false charges. Somehow women are treated like children, and the law does not hold them accountable for their recklessness.

Two women’s support groups in the area yesterday spoke on local radio station Northern Sound criticising the judge’s comments.

“I think ‘flabbergasted’ was one word that was used a lot for this,” said Paula McGovern, spokeswoman for Sonas Housing.

“I think that there is a lack of understanding [of] what a woman might be going through, the pressure she could be under, the threats to drop the charges,” she added.

“These women are not saying the assault did not happen, they just dropped the charges. We know there is a lot of victim blaming going on.

“In this case the victim has withdrawn the charges and there is a lot of pressure on the woman to stay in the situation. There is a lot of stigma involved in domestic violence. It is not really talked about in the open and I think it would be nice if he did apologise but we need greater accountability from judges.”

Siobhán McKenna of Tearmann Domestic Violence Services in Monaghan said: “I understand where the judge is coming from, and sometimes it can be frustrating, but he has to understand the reasons why the women do this.

They want “greater accountability from judges”?!

I think that the judge understands all to well why women do this. Many women are emotionally unstable, and have bad motives for filing charges.

Update: Here is a story about a woman who has not quite mastered the art of making a report against her husband:

A Port Orange police officer asked a woman to show him how her husband tried to strangle her and when the woman put two fingers on the policeman's neck, she got arrested, records show.

JC Penney update

I criticized a JC Penney fathers day ad (with followup here). A Catholic site reports:

Simply put, people are not shopping at J.C. Penney. AFA and OneMillionMoms are showing success in the effort to educate people to Penney's aggressive national campaign to promote "gay" marriage.

The company is going downhill fast. Since February, the company stock has lost more than half its value, and Standard & Poor's Ratings Services lowered its credit rating on J.C. Penney Co. further into "junk" status.

First-year CEO Ron Johnson's decisions have led to disastrous results for the company. Rather than build on the faith-based traditions of founder James Cash Penney, Johnson has abandoned family values and taken the company into a financial tailspin by embracing social activism.

Families are the backbone of Penney's existence. As long as it pushes homosexual marriage, families will go elsewhere.

Ron Johnson was an Apple Computer hotshot who is apparently seeking an LGBT niche for JC Penney.

I am not advocating a boycott. I just don't like media messages that devalue fathers.

No one is attacking JC Penney's free speech rights, but there are legal attacks on the free speech rights of those on the other side. UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh comments on a Chicago Tribune story about fast food fried chicken:

[Chicago Alderman] Proco “Joe” Moreno announced this week that he will block Chick-fil-A’s effort to build its second Chicago store … following company President Dan Cathy’s remarks last week that he was “guilty as charged” for supporting the biblical definition of marriage as between a man and woman….

The alderman has the ideological support of Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

“Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values,” the mayor said in a statement when asked about Moreno’s decision. “They disrespect our fellow neighbors and residents. This would be a bad investment, since it would be empty.”

But denying a private business permits because of such speech by its owner is a blatant First Amendment violation.

Mayor Emanuel is wrong. Those are Chicago values, and he has no authority to impose his leftist views. Same-sex marriage isn't even legal in Chicago. As Volokh adds, this is appalling. Also on the attack:

Boston mayor Thomas M. Menino has vowed to prevent the Georgia-based chicken chain from opening locations in his city. He said that Chick-fil-A doesn't belong in Boston, an "open city" that is at "the forefront of inclusion." ...

In response to the uproar, Chick-fil-A issued a statement Thursday saying that going forward, they would stay out of the dialogue over gay marriage. "Our intent is to leave the policy debate over same-sex marriage to the government and political arena," spokesman Don Perry wrote in an email to the LA Times.

Not even the Catholics are saying that JC Penney should be blocked from opening stores. But the narrow-minded leftist LGBT advocates don't want people to make up their own minds about eating fried chicken.

Opposing same-sex is a mainstream view shared by nearly all major Democrat leaders. Much of the world is much more anti-homosexual than that. A Boston Herald columnist writes:

Given his stance on Chick-fil-A, would Mayor Tom Menino grant permits to a group that has counted among its leaders a man who has repeatedly called homosexuality a “crime that must be punished” by death?

Actually, he has done that ... and more! Menino effectively gave away city land valued at $1.8 million to the organization, and he gave a speech at its ribbon-cutting ceremony.

It’s the Islamic Society of Boston’s mosque, and when it comes to anti-gay sentiment, one of its early supporters makes Chick-fil-A look like the Provincetown Men’s Chorus.

So why would American liberals be so tolerant of anti-homosexual Moslems, and so intolerant of traditional Christian support for marriage?

The simple explanation is that they hate the Christian values that underlie American culture, and so they do what they can to undermine those values. They would hate the Moslems too if the Moslems were in power, but they are not.

There is plenty of support for pro-LGBT politics. Especially among the super-rich who tend to be liberals, and who have the luxury of being insulated from what is happening to the middle class. Yahoo News reports:

Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos has made a high-profile endorsement of same-sex marriage, pledging $2.5 million to support a referendum that would make such marriages legal in Washington state.

I think that he should be more worried about how the Kindle Fire has lost sales and is being passed up by the competition. At least he does not try to censor books based on political viewpoint.

Impossible to identify threats

AP reports:

CENTENNIAL, Colo. - James Holmes spent a year in a small neuroscience doctoral program, surrounded by scientists and roughly three dozen classmates delving into the inner workings of the brain. ...

"He had, as is now common knowledge, excellent academic credentials," said Barry Shur, dean of the university's graduate program.

Shur said the graduate program is "like a family" in which faculty carefully monitor students' progress.

"It would be a logical step to assume there were people in that program who worked closely with him and would have the expertise to assess his behaviour," said Mary Ellen O'Toole, a former FBI profiler and the author of the book "Dangerous Instincts: How Gut Feelings Betray Us."

"But being able to recognize concerning, troubling behaviour does not mean you can prevent a mass homicide," O'Toole said. "There are many people at a university level who act quirky and strange and don't go out and commit mass murder."

So top university experts in neuroscience worked closely with Holmes, and they could not detect that he was going nuts. On the other hand, a local gun enthusiast claimed to see something that the neuroscience professors could not:

Glenn Rotkovich, owner of a private Colorado gun range outside Denver, quickly concluded there was something wrong with Holmes.

Holmes applied to join the range in late June. But Rotkovich said that after calling Holmes back and hearing a "bizarre" voice mail message — spoken in a strange, low-pitched voice with heavy breathing — he concluded he didn't want Holmes as a member.

"I flagged him to people and said, if he shows up, I don't trust him," Rotkovich said.

This reasoning is dubious, as a lot of kids have wacky answering machine messages, and others do not necessarily see the humor.

I am not sure why Penn State U. is liable for failing to predict the Sandusky scandal, while no one is blaming U. of Colorado for their neuroscientists failing to identify this year's biggest lunatic.

Holmes even sent his plans:

The flame-haired accused killer mailed the notebook to a University of Colorado psychiatrist long before the bloody rampage that left 12 dead and 58 wounded last Friday, FoxNews.com reported.

“Inside the package was a notebook full of details about how he was going to kill people,” a law enforcement source told FoxNews. “There were drawings of what he was going to do in it — drawings and illustrations of the massacre.”

The package, now in the hands of the FBI, listed Holmes’ name in the return address and included drawings of armed stick figures gunning down stick figure victims.

The psychiatrist claims that he never opened the package. He would be in a lot of trouble if he did not claim that.

I post this because the family court often assumes that experts somehow have the ability to predict domestic violence or other bad behavior, based on reading spouse gripes, or doing an interview, or conducting a psychological test. Dan Brewington is going to prison because some incompetent psychologist profiled him as a violent threat. Dan just wanted to see his kid and hold authorities legally accountable.

Unfortunately, the science does not exist for identifying violent threats.

Charles Whitman killed 14 people at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966, and asked for an autopsy on his death. Sure enough, he had a brain tumor that seemed to be the root cause of his mental instability. That was a case where neuroscientists might have identified him as a threat, and cured him. But most of the time, it cannot be done.

In the custody of the wrong parent

A big story in the local paper had this picture with this caption:

Karen Rosewood and her infant daughter, Sequoia Rosewood, go for a stroll at Fall Creek in Felton in 1991, months after Sequoia's birth through artificial insemination.

The print edition of the Santa Cruz Sentinel has this headline:

‘Sense of closure’

Woman to adopt 21-year-old daughter who was ‘placed in the custody of the wrong parent’

Did you jump to the conclusion that Karen Rosewood is the mother, but the father got custody of the girl in a divorce?

Not even close. Rosewood was not the mom. The dad was a sperm donor, and is not in the picture. The daughter is now 21, and complains:

“I grew up in such a fragmented way that in some way, it does feel like I don’t have parents,” she said Tuesday.

That's what happens when a girl is raised by lesbians. She never sees her dad, and always feels as if something is missing.

The article goes on to say that the girl is "being adopted by her mother" so that she can get an Obamacare health insurance policy. No, she is not being adopted by her mother. Her mother is already her mother and no adoption is needed. She is being adopted by a lesbian who never had any legal or biological connection.

The liberal news media is determined to normalize lesbianism. Astronaut Sally Ride's obituary had this hidden teaser:

Dr. Ride married a fellow astronaut, Steven Hawley, in 1982. They decorated their master bedroom with a large photograph of astronauts on the moon. They divorced in 1987. Dr. Ride is survived by her partner of 27 years, Tam O’Shaughnessy; her mother, Joyce; and her sister, Ms. Scott, who is known as Bear. (Dr. O’Shaughnessy is chief operating officer of Dr. Ride’s company.)

That could mean that the women were just business partners, but Ride is now being hailed as the first lesbian in space. That logic is dubious, as she was married to a man during her two space flights in 1983 and 1984. (She wasn't the first woman in space, as a couple of Russians preceded her.) I don't think that we have any confirmation that Ride actually had sexual relations with O’Shaughnessy. Maybe the cosmic rays in outer space sapped her sex drive.

I don't care about Ride's private life, but it is wrong for newspapers to marginalize parents in this way. Obviously they are trying to promote lesbianism but that is no excuse to try to redefine common English words like "mother" and to ignore fathers.

Psychologists ignore the facts

Yesterday I quoted Paul R. Amato from the academic journal Social Science Research:

Second, the legality of same-sex marriage is a constitutional issue and not one that should be decided on the basis of social science research.

Based on the comments, I guess I did not make clear my disagreement with Amato.

Amato is trying to argue that the courts should declare a constitutional right to ssme-sex marriage, while ignoring the social science research about the harm that may result.

There is no constitutional right to ssme-sex marriage, according to the California Supreme Court, the US Supreme Court, and the constitutions of most other states.

It would be nice if psychologists understood that they ought to stay out of political issues before the court, but they are the opposite. The APA has filed dozens of amicus briefs in court cases, including those on same-sex marriage and related subjects. As Amato concedes, these briefs misrepresent the social science research.

If psychologists want to be taken seriously as experts, then they ought to be able to state the facts without the political editorializing. Obviously this journal was very embarrassed to be publishing research that is contrary to APA-LGBT propaganda. So it had to include a lame essay affirming the editors' commitment to leftist LGBT politics, and to ignore the evidence.

My interest in this is that academic psychologists are overwhelmingly anti-family leftists who use their influence to push for law, policies, and court decisions that separate fathers from their kids. And they do it by being completely dishonest, as they often tell the court tha the research is the opposite that it really is.

Psychologists twist research results

A reader asked for more info about academic research that leftists try to censor. Here is the Mark Regnerus study showing that kids of LGBT parents do worse on the available meansures.

The Loren Marks study shows that American Psychological Association (APA) has misrepresented the research in legal briefs and arguments supporting same-sex marriage.

The APA is dominated by quacks who are ideologically committed to destroying the American family.

The same issue of Elsevier's Social Science Research has a Paul R. Amato essay try to keep readers from drawing the obvious conclusions from the above two studies. Amato is an advocate of same-sex marriage.

Amato writes:

It would be unfortunate if the findings from the Regnerus study were used to undermine the social progress that has been made in recent decades in protecting the rights of gays, lesbians, and their children. ...

To understand the implications of being raised from birth by two same-sex parents, researchers need to study children born through sperm donation or surrogacy. Yet we know relatively little about the newest generation of planned children with same-sex parents. ...

Second, the legality of same-sex marriage is a constitutional issue and not one that should be decided on the basis of social science research.

In other words, he wants to ignore the facts unless they promote the LGBT agenda.

Too much attention has been given to this evidence. Social science has produced a long list of parental characteristics that are statistically associated with children’s development and well-being, including personality traits, cognitive ability, education, earnings, mental health, child-rearing philosophies, and parenting skills. But we do not restrict the right to marry and raise children on the basis of any of these characteristics. When a particular parental behavior poses a clear danger to children’s health or well-being, the state will not hesitate to remove children from the parental home to prevent abuse or neglect. Unless a clear and imminent danger exists, however, the state does not regulate family life on the basis of parental characteristics that correlate — usually quite modestly — with child outcomes.

That last statement is false. The APA psychologists are in the business of writing recommendations for regulating family life, even when there is no clear danger to children’s health or well-being. The APA even has guidelines for it on its web site.

From a civil rights perspective, one could argue that all children should have the right to be raised by married parents.

As noted last week, we have a culture war in America. The liberals and Democrats are overwhelmingly dedicated to laws, policies, and propaganda to destroy the right of a child to be raised by his married parents. They openly mock the Ozzie-and-Harriet family model as antiquated.

This is not a debate that can be adjudicated on the basis of social science research. The Regnerus study makes an important contribution to our understanding of how a variety of childhood family environments are related to outcomes among young adult offspring. But these findings — and for that matter, any social research findings — should not be used to restrict the civil rights of any group of individuals.

I agree that we do not need social science research to know that kids have a right to be reared by their parents. It has been the belief of civilized society for millennia. The Regnerus study just adds a small amount of confirmation.

But it is the liberal social scientists who are attempting to inject bogus social science into a political debate.

A Scientific American Mind article said:

The guidelines judges and psychologists use to decide child custody cases have little basis in science.

Other scholars say the same:

"Psychologists don't have the knowledge to do what they attempt to do when they do custody evaluations," he said.

Many custody decisions, he said, involve not scientific findings, but competing values, like a father's wish that his child excel in sports versus the mother's emphasis on studying.

And yet the APA supports a whole industry doing this bogus anti-family work.

Girl is charged for naming attackers

Yahoo News reports:

A Kentucky girl who was sexually assaulted could face contempt of court charges after she tweeted the names of her juvenile attackers.

Savannah Dietrich, the 17-year-old victim, was frustrated by a plea deal reached late last month by the two boys who assaulted her, and took to Twitter to expose them--violating a court order to keep their names confidential.

"There you go, lock me up," Dietrich tweeted after naming the perpetrators. "I'm not protecting anyone that made my life a living Hell." Her Twitter account has since been closed.

A law professor adds:

Dietrich’s problem, I think, is that she seems to have violated the court order, rather than challenging it when it was entered. (All this is based on what I read in the newspaper story, which I realize may not be fully accurate.) Under Walker v. City of Birmingham (1967), a person generally is not allowed to violate even an unconstitutional court order; he must challenge it on appeal (or via a similar procedure, such as mandamus), or abide by it. But even that “collateral bar” rule has an exception for “transparently invalid” court orders, and it seems to me this exception applies here. And in any event, the collateral bar rule can’t justify the judge’s decision in issuing this order.

It seems to me that she can certainly describe her experience, and whatever else she knew before the court hearing. The problem would be in describing the juvenile court outcome, when she only learned that from some closed and confidential hearing that she was privileged to attend.

The boys could argue that they only agreed to the plea bargain because they were promised the confidentiality of the juvenile court, and that they are being unfairly maligned. Nevertheless, I think that the girl has a clear-cut free speech right to tell her story.

Now the motion for contempt has been withdrawn, but the gag order stands.

In my experience with the family court, confidentiality orders were only used to cover up corruption and incompetence. I was forbidden to quote from the Sally Mitchell and Ken Perlmutter reports. In other cases, there might be some privacy interest, such as the kid being on ritalin or the wife being on prozac, but there was nothing like that in these reports. Just a lot of nonsensical allegations about an alarm clock, dogs, cooking, and a math contest. Anyone who could read Perlmutter's report could see that he was an incompetent crook with an anti-family value system.

I hope Dietrich's case gets a lot of publicity. Judges should not be issuing orders against free speech rights.

Lesbian cannot be Boy Scout leader

MSNBC reports:

A woman who was ousted as the head of her son’s Tiger Cubs pack because she is a lesbian on Wednesday delivered a petition with more than 300,000 signatures to the Boy Scouts urging them to end their longstanding policy banning gay Scouts and leaders, saying the organization’s recent decision to stick with the controversial membership standards will not end her campaign.

Jennifer Tyrrell, a 32-year-old, stay-at-home mother of four, was removed from her post as den master in April because she is a lesbian. She has been fighting since then to get the Boy Scouts to change its longstanding policy, starting an online petition calling for the change.

But on Tuesday, the private organization said it was keeping the ban on open or avowed homosexuals.

Laura Wood asks:

Never once, as far as I can ascertain, are the most basic facts about Tyrrell provided.

Is the little boy she calls her son truly her son? Where is his father? What does his father think about all this? Does she even know who he is? How long has she been with her lesbian girlfriend? Are the other children in the household the boy’s siblings?

No journalist has asked Tyrrell, ”Isn’t the purpose of the Boy Scouts to promote male bonding? Wouldn’t a boy being raised by lesbians benefit from male leadership? Or at least leadership by women who don’t have an aversion to men?”

A lesbian by definition is repelled by men. The purpose of the Boy Scouts is to form men.

Organizations still have some freedom of association. If Tyrrell wants a more lesbian-friendly group, she might try Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. They accept closeted LGBTs as big brothers and sisters, and they do not tell the families of the little brothers and sisters that they are turning their children over to LGBT role models.

After the media hysteria over Jerry Sandusky and Penn State, it is a wonder that any man volunteers to help young boys. If there is one lesson from that scandal, it is that any such person is automatically suspected of being a homosexual child molester. Penn State will probably have to pay $50M to lawyers because it did not proactively try to determine whether Sandusky was a homosexual.

Maybe soon the Boy Scouts will have to take asexual lesbian scout leaders because it will not be able to find men who are willing to be under homosexual suspicion all the time.

The liberal NY Times editorial said:

It is impossible to square the Boy Scouts of America’s values of openness, strong moral character and leadership with its announcement this week that reaffirmed a retrograde policy of barring gay boys from membership and gay or lesbian adults from serving as leaders.

No, it is impossible to square this opinion with last week's editorial that "Penn State’s leaders bear most of the blame" because they "failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect the children". This is backwards. The Boy Scouts have kids directly under their care, and they want the right to use their judgment in choosing suitable role models. Penn State had no kids under its care, and no knowledge of any crimes. If McQueary had witnessed a crime, then he should have stopped it and reported it to the police. But the jury did not believe McQueary, and I don't either. The only common thread in the NY Times editorials is that they want to destroy American culture like college football and Boy Scouts.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that LGBTs should be suspected child molesters. Just the opposite. I believe in innocence until proven guilty. However, the Penn State story shows that the liberal news media disagree with me. Nearly all of them say that Penn State should have treated Sandusky as a suspected child molester even before any such allegation had been made.

I post this because it is further evidence of the decline in public respect for the role of fathers today. 300,000 petition signers act as if it is some sort tragedy that the Boy Scouts prefer fathers as role models for boys doing scouting activities.

Leftist academics try to censor

Academic social science departments are overwhelmingly leftist and anti-family. They vote Democrat about 10 to 1. It is really worse than that, because the minority is intimidated. Here is a recent example.

Scientific studies have consistently shown that kids do best with traditional families, aka intact biological families. That is no surprise, as that has been the conventional wisdom for centuries. But for the last ten years, leftist pro-LGBT professors have been saying otherwise, without evidence.

As mentioned below, a new study showed again that kids do better with natural parents. The leftists are not trying to censor the authors.

200 PhDs and MDs have signed a letter to complain about the truth being published without pro-LGBT spin:

We urge you to publicly disclose the reasons for both the expedited peer review process of this clearly controversial paper and the choice of commentators invited to submit critiques. We further request that you invite scholars with specific expertise in LGBT parenting issues to submit a detailed critique of the paper and accompanying commentaries for publication in the next issue of the journal.

Most of the signers are just sociologists with an interest in LGBT issues. If they were real scientists who had a legitimate disagreement, they would explain why the paper is wrong or do a better study.

I am sure that they would like to make the point that, under ideal conditions, lesbians and gays can make satisfactory adoptive parents. I am sure that is true. But if we are to adopt laws and policies that promote LGBT parenting, then we should look at data on how well it works in practice, and stop pretending that LGBT parents do as well as natural parents. All of the evidence favors natural parents.

The Culture War

When I started this blog, I did not think of family court problems as political. Neither Republicans nor Democrats were willing to stick up for dads as far as I could see. All politicians seemed to favor the BIOTCh (best interests of the child), as if that were some sort of indisputable truism.

I have changed my mind in the last year. A reader commented:

It's starting to appear as though you're using your issues with the family court to advance your political positions.

There is now a culture war in the USA. Barack Obama and G.W. Bush have had essentially the same foreign policy and many other policies. Where the parties differ is on cultural issues.

Democrats get their support from blacks, Jews, the super-rich, single moms, unions, and the welfare class. Republicans get theirs from middle and upper-middle class married families, and white church goers. See this Zogby poll in the marriage gap. As I have argued, American politics has degenerated into the Mommy Party and the Daddy Party.

This blog is concerned with the family court, and related policies that affect parents and kids. These issues now involve partisan politics. Look at last week's post, How lesbians cheat dads. This crazy multiple-mommy law will do a lot of damage to father-child relationships. So far, the vote has been along party lines, with Democrats favoring using multiple lesbians to crowd out fathers rights, and Republicans opposing it.

There was a 1950s TV show called Ozzie and Harriet. It was a scripted sitcom reallity show about a traditional American family. Today we have the Jersey Shore show instead, with Snooki and others that you would not want living in your neighborhood. The culture has turned from pro-family to anti-family.

When leftist Democrats like Mark Leno propose anti-family laws and policies, they often express their hatred for Ozzie and Harriet. They are taking sides in the culture war. If they get their way, American will have a civilized cultural elite, and a middle class that looks like the Jersey Shore.

Psychologists have also taken sides in the culture war against the family, and they are nearly all liberal Democrats. At a recent academic psychology conference, 80% of the 1000 attendees identified themselves as liberals, and only 3 identified as conservatives. Psychology is famous for having a very high proportion of Jews, gays, and mental disorders, but they are dominated even more by liberal Democrats. And they are on a mission to destroy the family.

A reader sends this quote:

"In the end, does it really matter if my motivation at this point is less than pristine?" he asks in all apparent sincerity. "Isn't the only question whether I am right?"

I do not usually address motivations. If Pres. Obama is promoting a bad policy, it is enough to say what the policy is, why is will have bad effects. It seems superfluous to say that he is trying to get re-elected, or appealing to his base, or acting out of ideological conviction, or doing a secret deal.

But the anti-family motives are so obvious that it is just foolish to pretend that psychologists and other court officials are sincerely looking out for the welfare of kids. If they were, then maybe the problem could be corrected by sending the officials to some educational seminars, or hiring more competent officials. No, I am afraid that if these officials were more competent, then they would do more damage.

So more and more I am offering motives. When San Francisco politicians push laws for kids to have several mommies, or try to destroy a happy marriage, I ask why. Maybe they have some sort of gay-Jewish-commie-psycho agenda.

I could be wrong about the motives of some of these folks. No doubt some of them are just stooges who are doing what they are told, or doing what is politcally correct, or doing what seems easy or profitable. But they are also taking sides in the culture war, and they are responsible for what they say and do.

Meanwhile, I am not deterred by name-calling from the SPLC. The SPLC seems like a racist hate group to me. It raises money for the purpose of provoking racial animosity and intimidating its enemies into silence. Check out this SPLC fund-raising letter, this (pdf) report, and this video explanation from one of their leaders, Mark Potok. Potok would probably say that this video is out of context, but he sure seems like a hatemonger to me.

Update: Here is a pdf report on how American Jews have voted consistently Democrat for 40 years.

The new DNA social order

The most popular NY Times article this summer was this from a month ago:

It is an uncomfortable question that, in today’s world, is often asked by expectant mothers who had more than one male partner at the time they became pregnant. Who is the father?

With more than half of births to women under 30 now out of wedlock, it is a question that may arise more often.

Now blood tests are becoming available that can determine paternity as early as the eighth or ninth week of pregnancy, without an invasive procedure that could cause a miscarriage.

Besides relieving anxiety, the test results might allow women to terminate a pregnancy if the preferred man is not the father — or to continue it if he is.

Men who clearly know they are the father might be more willing to support the woman financially and emotionally during the pregnancy, which some studies suggest might lead to healthier babies.

And if the tests gain legal acceptance, some lawyers say, women and state governments might one day pursue child support payments without having to wait until the birth. Under current law, “until and unless the pregnancy produces a child, any costs associated with it are regarded as the woman’s personal problem,” said Shari Motro, a law professor at the University of Richmond.

The testing itself, however, can be awkward because it requires a blood sample from at least one of the possible fathers. ...

In some cases DNA is not destiny. Ms. Herndon’s test showed that the baby was not her ex-boyfriend’s. But they got back together and married, and he accepted the child, who is now 16 months old.

“We view our daughter as ours, mine and my husband’s,” Ms. Herndon said. The biological father sends gifts and pays child support.

So the women of the future will eschew marriage, have promiscuous sex lives, get pregnant, get a DNA test to determine the father, get a court order for income statements and prenatal child support, and get an abortion if the money is not good enough.

Imprisoned for his blog

Fellow angry dad Dan Brewington was convicted and sentenced to several years in prison, largely for what he wrote on his blog. He complains:

Following my criminal trial last October, I wrote a blog post explaining how Dearborn County Prosecutor F. Aaron Negangard proclaimed that Dearborn County Circuit Judge James D. Humphrey was a “son-of-a-bitch.” Prosecutor Negangard argued it was illegal for me to lie and call Judge Humphrey a child abuser. The prosecutor argued one could call Judge Humphrey a “son-of-a-bitch” but not a child abuser.

The judge could sue for libel if he is falsely called a child abuser. However such a suit would surely lose as the context of Dan's comments was clearly that he considers it child abuse to forcibly separate a father from his child. The judge clearly is a child abuser in that sense, as children are nearly always worse off when a judge does that.

Of course, Dan could be understating the case against him. To get the worst accusations, download the govt brief against him here. The main points are:

Dan posted the home address of the judge.

Dan got the address from public real estate tax records. It is not a crime to post info that the county govt makes public.

Dan committed perjury by testifying that he did not know that Heidi Humphrey was Judge Humphrey's wife. Dan got Heidi's name from a web page that also had Judge Humphrey's name.

This is no evidence. Even if the web page said that they lived at the same address, Heidi could have been the sister, mother, or daughter. Dan is unlikely to have known that Heidi is the wife from the web page.

After psychologist Edward Connor recommended sole legal child custody to Dan's wife, Dan demanded a copy of the evidence that Connor relied on. Besides letters and faxes, Dan filed court motions that inconvenienced Connor and Dan's wife.

Dan should have had a right to see that evidence. Apparently the main issue was that Dan's wife submitted evidence of her being treated for various mental illnesses, including depression and OCD. Since that evidence went against Connor's recommendation, he feared that Dan would use it to support his legal argument for joint custody. As he should. He certainly ought to know if his child is being left in the care of a mentally ill women, and court parties should always see the evidence anyway.

Dan once called his wife a "crazy psycho bitch". Dan's wife would lock herself in the bathroom so she would not have to listen to him.

She should like a crazy psycho bitch to me.

Dan accused Connor of "dishonest, malicious, and criminal behavior", and said to "please put your malpractice liability insurance carrier on notice". Connor felt intimidated. Dan sent an anonymous letter to Connor (that Connor recognized as being from Dan), and Dan threatened to hold Connor accountable for his sloppy work. Connor feared for his professional reputation, and found Dan's letters unsettling and disturbing.

If Connor were being harassed or libeled, he could have sued Dan or applied for a TRO to stop the harassment. Connor did neither.

Dan showed up unexpectedly in a court hearing for another case, and listed to Connor's testimony.

Nothing wrong with that. In real court cases, it is standard for the parties to demand that experts detail their testimony in other cases. It is normal to hear testimony in another case in order to get a handle on his biases.

Dan also identified and criticized Connor's wife. He also threatened that Connor's colleagues would be roped into litigation.

Connor's wife is also a psychologist who participated in the court evaluation. She is also accountable for the evaluation. Besides, her name is Sarah Connor. I would be worried that she might send Terminator robots back from the future to kill me! (Just joking.)

Dan said on his blog that the evaluation made him so mad that he felt like punching Connor in the nose.

This appears to be the only actual reference to a violent act. However the US Supreme Court has repeated ruled that this sort of comment is free speech, protected by the First Amendment, unless there is much more specific linkage to some criminal act being carried out.

Dan called Judge Humphrey dishonest and unethical. He mentioned the appeals court judges by name. Dan said he wanted to hold them accountable for doing mean things. Judge Humphrey got his personal gun repaired, and took various other precautions.

I am not sure how this is any different from Republican congressmen saying that they want to hold the Attorney General account for lying about Operation Fast and Furious. All public officials ought to held accountable.

Dan said that he would not take down his blog, even if ordered by the court.

Such an order would almost certainly be unconstitutional. In California, no one is obliged to obey an unconstitutional order. In most other states, you have to obey a court order until you get it declared unconstitutional. I don't know about Indiana, Dan's state.

The brief says, "The judge noted that Brewington's writings are similar to those of individuals who have committed horrendous crimes against their families."

This is conviction by profiling. It is another way of saying that if you are unhappy with the court, then you better shut up about it, or you will be lumped in with criminals.

Dan was mainly convicted of "intimidation". I can see where the judge and shrink would not like the web criticism, but that is life in the 21st century. These are truly evil men doing horrible things in an official govt capacity.

I hate to say it, but the fix is in. Dan is going to prison for speaking out about his rights. He is a modern-day political prisoner. Judges close ranks to protect their own, even when they are making bad decisions. The prosecution brief convinces me that they are just as dishonest and corrupt as Dan says they are.

Update: For an example of when you might have to obey an unconstitutional order until it is reversed, see Walker v. Birmingham, 388 US 307 - Supreme Court 1967. But there is an exception for “transparently invalid” court orders.

Freudian attachment theory

I have been tryihg to understand how the field of psychology got into such a morally depraved state. The 20th century history is explained partly by the vast influence and idolization of Sigmund Freud.

Brian Boyd writes this essay about Vladimir Nabokov:

Famously, Nabokov could not resist deriding Freud. And for good reason: Freud’s ideas were enormously influential, especially in Nabokov’s American years, but his claims were hollow. Nobel laureate Peter Medawar, perhaps the greatest of science essayists, declared in his book Pluto’s Republic, in terms akin to Nabokov’s, that Freudianism was “the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century.” Nabokov saw the intellectual vacuity of Freudian theory and its pervasiveness in the popular and the professional imagination. He thought it corrupted intellectual standards, infringed on personal freedom, undermined the ethics of personal responsibility, destroyed literary sensitivity, and distorted the real nature of childhood attachment to parents –- the last of which has been amply confirmed by modern developmental psychology.

Freud was indeed a quack and nearly everything he said was bogus. His meager alleged successes were faked. He was exposed as a scientific fraud in his lifetime, and no educated person could take him seriously.

My concern here is with Jewish and other psychologists and judges who use bogus attachment theory and other prejudices to take kids away from good parents.

Freud is described as a "secular Jew". That means that he was not religious in the usual sense of the word, but his Jewish identity was very important to him, and his Jewishness and his personal neuroses informed his teachings more than any scientific considerations did. Furthermore, Freud's fame and high reputation were almost entirely due to promotion from other Jews. The whole development of Freudian psychoanalysis was based on Jewish beliefs of superiority over non-Jews. See Chapter 4: Jewish Involvement in the Psychoanalytic Movement for details.

A psychology professor explains:

The central importance of child-parent attach-ment in Freud's theory of personality is perhaps best captured in his characterization of the infant-mother relationship as ~ without parallel, established unal-terably for a lifetime as the first and strongest love object and as the prototype of all later love relation-ships" (Freud, 1940/1949, p.188). This prototype not only forms the matrix on which subsequent personal-ity development builds, according to Freud, but also provides the motivational core of a great deal of be-havior throughout the lifespan. Moreover, the con-flicts and defenses rooted in early attachment rela-tionships continue to assert themselves throughout life in the form of various prosocial and antisocial behavior patterns. ...

The success of Freud's model in the empirical arena, however, was extremely limited. Not only was child-parent attachment poorly understood at the time, but the mechanisms of identification proposed by Freud to explain its influence on development proved inherently resistant to empirical scrutiny.

The phrase "resistant to empirical scrutiny" is an academic euphemism for pseudo-scientific nonsense.

Jewish Ideas Daily writes that Freud's psychoanalysis was a Jewish science:

Sigmund Freud, Anna's father, was unmistakably a fin-de-siècle Viennese Jew —- an ironic intellectual outsider in love with wit and literary interpretation, committed both to the liberating power of science and to the social norms of the bourgeoisie. But as for Judaism, he famously regarded it, like all organized religions, as one of the problems his insights were meant to neutralize and dissolve. At first, he saw religion as a neurosis-like expression of unresolved conflicts between instinctual drives and society-ordained values. His later view, famously expressed in Moses and Monotheism (1939), was that religion is an illusion, the projection onto the universe of an omnipotent and guilt-inducing father.

When Palo Alto psychologist Ken Perlmutter testified in family court in my case, he claimed to have some expertise in attachment theory. He was unable to explain what it had to do with my case, so I did not pay much attention to it. In retrospect, it was about like saying that he has expertise in the Jewish Talmud.

Jailed for approving marriage

ABC News reports:

Ordered by a family court judge to enroll his 16-year-old son in a Utah board school, a Florida millionaire instead took a detour to Las Vegas where he signed papers that allowed the child to marry his housekeeper's daughter. That act legally emancipated the son but landed the dad in a Florida jail, where he's started serving a 180-day jail sentence for contempt of court. ...

The marriage legally emancipated Peter Rotta. As a result, the court's mandate to Dan Rotta, which required him to enroll his son in Logan Academy, was rendered irrelevant, since Peter was now considered an adult.

"The consent by the father Dan Rotta to Peter Rotta's marriage was intended to thwart the jurisdiction of the court," court documents said.

But Lewis said that following the Vegas marriage, Dan Rotta and his son did visit Logan River Academy but the school had already decided they were not going to continue to consider Peter for admission.

"He was on his way to the school when he received a notice by email that [Logan River] wasn't accepting him," said Lewis.

This is an example of the evils of family court judge interference. No judge should be ordering a parent to ship a kid off to boarding school. That is a decision for the parents. The law also gives the parents authority to give permission for marriage. Age 16 seems young to me, but opinions differ about this. If you think 16 is too young, then lobby to change the law.

But 180 days in jail? These judges have way too much power.

Telling me to see a shrink

From F-minus.

Meanwhile, a goofy new book tries to cash in on the new Batman movie:

He wears a caped bat costume in public and funds an alter ego out of his personal fortune. As a child he witnessed his parents' murders; as an adult, he puts his own life on the line, practicing a personal brand of vigilante justice.

He may be a comic book character, but Batman provides fertile ground for a psychologist, and California clinical psychologist Robin Rosenberg has taken up the challenge.

But rather than a confidential assessment in her office, Batman’s evaluation takes place in the pages of her new book: "What's the Matter With Batman?: An Unauthorized Clinical Look Under the Mask of the Caped Crusader" ...

In her analysis, Rosenberg said she focuses on the things that seem strange about Batman, characteristics that might be read as signs of a psychological disorder. Right off the bat, no pun intended, she must address the caped bat costume. It is actually a uniform, intended to frighten and grab attention, and like a police uniform, to send a particular message to crime victims and criminals, she said.

Batman's serious temperament and his sense of guilt over the death of his parents and one of his sidekicks could be construed as signs of depression, and his detachment could be taken as a sign of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

"Emotional numbing is a symptom of PTSD, and it involves a sense of detachment from others, and limited expression of emotion," she told LiveScience. ...

Rosenberg said she hopes the book will prompt people to think about the boundary between mental health and illness.

A nationally representative survey conducted between 2001 and 2003 estimated that 46.4 percent of Americans would experience a psychological disorder in their lifetimes.

You can read her comic superhero analyses for free here. I am tempted to write my own book, titled, "What's the Matter with Jewish Psychologists?"

Update: I should note that American Jews created the comic book industry, including Batman and many other characters. Currently they are all partying in San Diego at Comic-Con. I've read that Jews DO control the media, but hardly anyone ever mentions how they control comic books.

Update: This silly Batman book was on NPR radio.

Treating behavior disorders

The UK BBC just broadcast a radio program on Joseph Wolpe. (Listening requires Flash.) He was a 20th century South-African-American Jewish psychologist famous for reciprocal inhibition,
systematic desensitization, and other behavior therapies. In plain English, he cured phobias. But most of all, he is recognized for advocating that psycho therapies be based on scientific evidence. The show ends by saying that Wolpe elevated the entire field of clinical psychology by insisting that science inform the work that is done.

His ideas were resisted by the Freudians who dominated the field, and who advocated long, tedious, expensive couch-therapy psychoanalysis that never worked. He had to do public demonstrations of therapies, both live and videotaped, in order to convince other shrinks that they work. Relying on evidence was considered heresy in the 1960s, according to the show.

I have posted many times on the sorry state of the field of psychology. I don't mean to imply that the field is inherently unscientific or crooked. There are psychologists who base their opinions on evidence, and who are honest about it. I sometimes cite published research when I think that is useful. But the field is also overrun with quacks and crooks.

Psychology professor Timothy D. Wilson complains in a LA Times op-ed:

Once, during a meeting at my university, a biologist mentioned that he was the only faculty member present from a science department. When I corrected him, noting that I was from the Department of Psychology, he waved his hand dismissively, as if I were a Little Leaguer telling a member of the New York Yankees that I too played baseball.

How lesbians cheat dads

I posted below about a proposed California law to give judges discretion to declare 3 or more parents for a child.

A reader who supports this crazy idea cites this quote from Ed Howard:

Supporters of the measure say it stems from a 2011 appellate court decision involving a young girl and her two mothers. When one of the women was sent to prison and the other hospitalized, the girl's biological father was unable to act as her legal guardian under current California law, which only recognizes two legal parents per child.

"Right now, under California law, a judge is being forced to rule in a way that he knows will hurt the child in front of him by denying the child a relationship with a real parent that would otherwise meet the stringent test for being a parent," said Ed Howard, of the Children's Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego School of Law.

"This has nothing at all to do with the broader culture wars," Howard told FoxNews.com. "It has to do with recognizing on the ground who should make the call as to whether or not the evidence and the facts show that it's in the best interest of the child."

Howard's argument is nonsense. There is no "stringent test for being a parent". The girl's biological father is a real parent. Always was and always will be. The problem was a bunch of crazy laws that favor unstable lesbians over the real dad.

Yes, this is a shot in the culture wars. The LGBT advocates are doing everything they can to destroy the traditional 2-parent family. It is not some quirk of California law, as similar movements are elsewhere. A divorce lawyer claims:

Delaware, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia all permit a child to have more than two parents.

Mark Leno, the gay Jewish Russian Israeli rabbinical student whose life partner died of AIDS and who is sponsoring this terrible bill, is promoting the bill as helping a real dad. But that is not the situation at all. Here is 2011 California case:

This dependency action involves the question of whether a child, born during the marriage of two women but conceived as the result of a premarital relationship between one of the women and a man, may have three presumed parents, one of whom is the child's biological mother, one of whom is the child's presumed mother because she and the child's biological mother were married when the child was born, and one of whom is the child's presumed father because he promptly came forward and demonstrated his commitment to his parental responsibilities, to the extent the biological mother and circumstances allowed. The juvenile court found the child has three presumed parents. The biological and presumptive mothers appeal, arguing the juvenile court erred when it found the father to be a presumed father.

So the real dad tried to be a father all along, but was cut out of the picture by a pair of unstable drug-addict lesbians, one of whom ended up in prison, and other in the hospital after being stabbed by a jealous boyfriend. And the dad still had trouble getting his daughter.

The lesbians were not married, but were "registered domestic partners". That is like marriage in California law. They were not exactly a happy couple, as their partnership was interrupted by domestic violence, drug abuse, restraining orders, and affairs with boyfriends. They managed to cut the real dad out of life of his daughter by this law:

Family Code 7540. Except as provided in Section 7541, the child of a wife cohabiting with her husband, who is not impotent or sterile, is conclusively presumed to be a child of the marriage.

That is, the lesbian was presumed to be the father to an unrelated child because she was cohabiting with the mom. I am not sure how she qualifies as a "husband, who is not impotent or sterile", but that is what happened.

Because of this, Leno wants to give a judge the discretion to make all three of them parents.

Actually, the dad won that 2011 appeal. The (lower) juvenile court did declare all 3 to be parents, but refused to let the dad have his daughter because that might jeopardize the relationship with the unrelated lesbian who was presumed to be legal father. The appeals court said that the dad could get the child under the BIOTCh (best interest of the child), and should have under existing law.

Lesbian marriage is all about forcing kids to grow up without their fathers. Gay activists like Leno are all about destroying the American family. They talk about equality and rights, but they are dead-set against equalizing moms and dads in family law, and dead-set against the rights of kids to have fathers. Leno's proposal takes us further down the rabbit hole.

The law pertaining to that 2011 case is easily fixed. The girl has one mom and one dad who wanted to take care of her. The mom became a drug addict and went to prison. The dad should have immediately gotten custody, no questions asked. And that is what would have happened, except for laws from anti-American sickos like Leno.

As a comment yesterday pointed out, this is not about the liberty to engage in perverted sex acts. Leno and his allies are anti-liberty and anti-equality. The proof of that is in the way that his proposal gives the judge such extremely broad discretion to disrupt the most fundamental family relationships based on his own personal prejudices. Nothing could be more contrary to the concepts of liberty and equality.

By analogy, suppose a new law said that a local judge could censor blogs based on the best interest of the readers. Would that be liberty and equality? No, it would be the opposite. It would be rule by arbitrary whim. And it would not be equal either, because the judge would have his biases and favorites. With liberty, people would have rights that judges would have to respect, and with equality, judges would have to treat everyone the same.

Update: A reader suggests that I identify Mark Leno more fully. Besides what I wrote today and yesterday, he led a communist front group:

Far left California State Senator Mark Leno is promoting a bill to mandate the teaching of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered history and contributions to society in the state’s public schools.

Leno, who in 2008, served on the advisory board of the Revolutionary Communist Party‘s World Cant Wait, anti war front group, with jailed attorney Lynne Stewart, and R.C.P. leader Sunsara Taylor, is co-sponsoring the Bill with Equality California and the Gay-Straight Alliance Network.

He defends teaching LGBT propaganda in California K-12 schools on NPR radio. I do not know whether or not he is a citizen of Israel.

Update: This has reached NY Times coverage:

A bill moving through the California Legislature would allow judges to recognize more than two legal parents for a given child, opening the door for alternative families to seek legal recognition of their relationships.

“There are literally scores of different families and circumstances,” Mark Leno, the state senator who sponsored the bill, said.

“This is about putting the welfare of the child above all else,” he said.

As fewer children are raised in traditional two-parent households, Mr. Leno’s bill has moved California to the center of a growing debate over how — and whether — such alternative family arrangements should be legally recognized. ...

Instead, Mr. Leno said he hoped that allowing the court to recognize a third or fourth parent could help keep children out of foster care in a small number of cases.

Mr. Leno’s bill follows a court case here last year in which a young girl being raised by two lesbian mothers was sent to foster care after a fight landed one mother in the hospital and the other in jail. The girl’s father, who had maintained a relationship with his daughter, asked the court to release her to his custody.

The trial court ruled that both mothers and the father were all parents. But a California appeals court reversed the decision, ruling that the child could have only two parents.

Still, parents hoping to keep their children out of foster care are hardly the only ones who hope to benefit if the bill becomes law.

The article repeats the phony Leno argument about this being about foster care, but at least it explains that it is the LGBT and anti-family lobbies that really want the law.

Heather will soon have 5 mommies

Calif. State Senator Mark Leno is on a mission to destroy the family. So you don't think that I am making some unwarranted inferences about his personal background, I will just quote from his biography:

Leno is the grandson of Jewish Russian immigrants. He is a native of Wisconsin and attended the University of Colorado at Boulder, then went on to become valedictorian of his graduating class at the American College in Jerusalem, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree. Leno also spent two years in rabbinical studies at Hebrew Union College in New York. Afterward, he moved to San Francisco on the invitation of his sister. He lived his first four years in the Tenderloin before moving to the Noe Valley neighborhood. In 1978, Leno started Budget Signs as owner and operator. The business incorporated in 1982. Working with his life partner, Douglas Jackson, the business continued to grow and their involvement in community affairs steadily expanded. Jackson died from complications related to AIDS in 1990. Despite this loss, Leno continued his efforts in community service.

By "community service", Leno and his allies seek to destroy American culture. What they hate the most is the happy American nuclear family, as symbolized by the 1950s TV show, Ozzie and Harriet.

Leno's latest plan is to legalize a wacky form of polygamy in California. The Sacramento Bee reports:

Beaver had June and Ward.

Ricky had Ozzie and Harriet.

Mom and Dad, same-sex couples or blended families, California law is clear: No more than two legal parents per child.

When adults fight over parenthood, a judge must decide which two have that right and responsibility – but that could end soon.

State Sen. Mark Leno is pushing legislation to allow a child to have multiple parents.

"The bill brings California into the 21st century, recognizing that there are more than Ozzie and Harriet families today," the San Francisco Democrat said.

Forget Heather Has Two Mommies. Heather could have 5 moms and 2 dads. Here are details from the law:

This bill would authorize a court to find that a child has 2 presumed parents notwithstanding the statutory presumption of parentage of the child by another man. The bill would authorize the court to make this finding if doing so would serve the best interest of the child based on the nature, duration, and quality of the presumed or claimed parents? relationships with the child and the benefit or detriment to the child of continuing those relationships. ...

This bill would provide that a child may have a parent and child relationship with more than 2 parents. ...

This bill would, in the case of a child with more than 2 legal parents, require the court to allocate custody and visitation among the parents based on the best interest of the child, including stability for the child.

I sometimes get readers who naively say that he gay rights lobby just wants the same rights that others enjoy. But this is not about the liberty to engage in perverted sex acts, or the right to express their love without govt interference, or anything like that. It is an attempt to give the family court judges broad new powers to intervene in people's lives. The Bee continues:

The key factor is a child's best interest: SB 1476 does not force judges to do anything, it only provides them with discretion to recognize multiple parents if doing so not only is beneficial, but is required for a child's well-being, Leno said.

Californians give judges great power to split families with the stroke of a pen, so there is a duty to do it right, said Ed Howard, senior counsel for the Children's Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego School of Law. "And we can't get it right if we're forcing judges to rule against their judgment." ...

SB 1476 states that concerns about child stability "may mean that not all parents share legal or physical custody." ...

Ellen Pontac, a Davis gay-rights activist, said she and her wife, ...

"I just think that people should be able to create their own lives," she said.

Create their own lives? Is she kidding? No, the purpose is to give lesbians new ways to cut the dad out of the lives of his kids. A divorced mom could get a couple of lesbian lovers, and soon the dad is just one of 4 or 5 parents under the law. And all completely under the discretion of some family court judge who is allowed to apply his personal prejudices.

Traditional Jewish Ethics

Psychology professor Kevin MacDonald writes:

A recurrent theme here is the contrast between the moral universalism of the West versus Jewish moral particularism. Moral universalism is a corrollary of individualism: Groups have no moral standing. Stealing doesn’t become right depending on what group the victim belongs to.

But Jewish ethics is based fundamentally on the group status of perpetrator and victim. It’s okay if the victim is from a different group. And within the group, ethics is structured so that the group as a whole benefits: What’s good for the Jews.

Dennis Praeger has a nice column on traditional Jewish moral particularism (“Can Halachah ever be wrong?“).

Suppose you ordered an electric shaver from a store owned by non-Jews, and by accident the store sent you two shavers. Would you return the second shaver?

Nine said they would not. One said he would.

What is critical to understand is why they answered the way they did. The nine who would not return the second shaver were not crooks. They explained that halachah (Jewish law) forbade them from returning the other shaver. According to halachah, as they had been taught it, a Jew is forbidden to return a lost item to a non-Jew. The only exception is if the non-Jew knows a Jew found the item and not returning it would cause anti-Semitism or a Khilul Hashem (desecration of God’s name). The one who said he would return it gave that very reason — that it would be a Khilul Hashem if he didn’t return it and could be a Kiddush Hashem (sanctification of God’s name) if he did. But he, too, did not believe he was halachically bound to return the shaver.

The nine were not wrong, and they were not taught wrong. That is the halachah. Rambam (Maimonides) ruled that a Jew is permitted to profit from a non-Jew’s business error.

In fairness, the Jewish ADL has written an essay calling people anti-Semites if they quote the Talmud for the purpose of criticizing Jewish law:

The Talmud - the classic text of Jewish law and lore, history and philosophy - increasingly is being used by extremists to promote their anti-Semitism. In a new report, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) exposes the lies of anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers and others who cite Talmudic texts as evidence that Judaism is "perverted" or "immoral."

"It has become a common refrain among the anti-Semites that the Talmud is the 'smoking gun' that confirms their belief about Jews being stingy, malevolent and intent on world domination," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. "They create this myth about Jewish practices and tradition, which helps to further justify and promote their anti-Semitism."

Well, you can read the Talmud quotes for yourself. If the ADL were right about this, then it could just explain the facts, and not go around calling everyone anti-Semites.

This helps explain the ethics of psychologist Ken Perlmutter of Palo Alto. He got a $28,000 windfall from me as a result of being appointed by Jewish Commissioner Irwin H. Joseph, and he adamantly insisted that he had no obligations to me, a non-Jew, or to my kids. He admitted straight to my face that I had been falsely accused of abuse, that I was just as good a parent as my ex-wife, and that there was no psychological or legal reason to deny me access to my kids. And yet he would not lift a finger to help us or to do what he was paid to do. He was punishing me and my kids out of pure personal animosity and profit.

According to Jewish Talmudic ethical law, a Jew must always side with the false accusation of a Jew against a non-Jew. If there is money available from a non-Jew, a Jew pockets the money and has no responsibility to provide honest services. The ADL denies this, but traditional "Judaism views non-Jews as a subhuman species deserving only hatred and contempt from its Jewish superiors."

Most American Jews do not subscribe to this, as far as I know. They probably have never read the Talmud. I am just describing traditional Jewish ethics, and the ethics of unscrupulous quacks like Perlmutter.

Sunday's CBS 60 Minutes show on Jack Abramoff said:

Jack Abramoff may be the most notorious and crooked lobbyist of our time. He was at the center of a massive scandal of brazen corruption and influence peddling. ... He was so good at it, he took home $20 million a year. ...

Jack Abramoff: I was so far into it that I couldn't figure out where right and wrong was. I believed that I was among the top moral people in the business. I was totally blinded by what was going on. ...

Abramoff prided himself on being a man who did good. He was devoutly religious and exorbitantly charitable and he says he gave away 80 percent of his earnings. When he fell from grace, his reputation was in tatters because it was not just that he had corrupted Congress - it was found he had cheated his clients, like the Indian tribes.

Abramoff: Most of the money I made I gave away, to either communal or charitable causes. So I thought frankly I was one of the most moral lobbyists out there. ...

Abramoff: My first response was, "What's the big deal? I don't understand what this is about. This is what lobbyists do.

The show said that Abramoff was "devoutly religious", but never mentioned his religion. He was an orthodox Jew. He thought that cheating Indian tribes out of money was the moral thing to do.

I have detailed my ethical complaint against Perlmutter. I did not know anything about traditional Jewish ethics, but it describes Perlmutter perfectly. I have never met anyone else with such a premeditated disregard for human life, such greedy money collection for incompetent work, and such immoral maliciousness. No Christian would do what Perlmutter did.

Again, I want to make it clear that I am not criticizing all Jews. I am criticizing Ken Perlmutter, the corrupt profession he belongs to, and the ethical tradition that he subscribes to.

Innately Jewish advice

A Jewish women's site said a few days ago:

Abigail van Buren and Ann Landers

On Independence Day we celebrate the birthdates of two Fiercely Independent Jewish Women who helped raise just about every baby boomer I know.

Growing up in the ‘50s in a working-class suburb of Columbus, Ohio, as soon as I could read, I was instructed by Abby (Abigail van Buren) and Ann Landers on what to say to the grocer who cheated you, how to handle a friend who’s bad-mouthed you or whether or not to leave your husband (heretical in that pre-Feminine Mystique era). Their mantra: “Are you better off with him or without him?”

Even then I knew the issues in their columns were more real than the ‘news” that packed the rest of the paper. And, as millions of fans around the globe looked on, as often as they held letter-writers’ feet to the fire, they also sent solace and an innately Jewish ethical sensibility into the world.

One memorable response, even a half-century later: When a woman wrote that her boyfriend was perfect except for one small flaw –– he was extraordinarily cheap –– Abby warned her to break up with the guy, and pronto. A man who can not give of material resources, she wrote with a heat that radiated off the page, will not be able to give time or tenderness either. Now aint that the truth.

Only Jews could possibly think that they are sending "an innately Jewish ethical sensibility into the world." How crazy is that? There aren't Italians giving innately Italian advice, or Baptists giving innately Baptist advice. Just Jews giving innately Jewish advice.

Their mantra is profoundly anti-marriage and anti-Christian. Typical Christian marriage vows are "for better for worse, ..., till death us do part". Their advice is to decide on a divorce as if no marriage commitment had ever been made. Jews do not even say wedding vows.

Apparently Jewish women decide to marry a man based mainly on how much money he spends on her. Abby is unconcerned with love, integrity, and all the other qualities that other women look for in a man. Just giving material resources.

All of this would not be my concern, except that a Jewish judge appointed a Jewish psychologist to apply that innately Jewish advice to take my kids away. They did not apply the law, or the facts, or psychology, or any social science about what is good for kids. They just applied their own bigoted anti-Christian hatred.

Scientology divorce

I mentioned below that Katie divorces Tom Cruise, and the NY Times explains the procedures of their wacky religion:

Couples like Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise who are looking to end their marriages are expected to find — through the Scientology organization — ways of working things out. So divorce for Scientologists can often be a long and difficult process, according to several former members of the church. ...

Ms. Llywelyn and Mr. Lee, a member of the Church of Scientology, married in 1995, and she joined the church, too. Five years later the marriage was falling apart, she said.

Before deciding to divorce, the couple agreed to pay for a form of counseling that Ms. Llywelyn said entails sitting in a room answering questions while hooked up to a device known as an E-meter, which Scientologists believe can detect unexpressed thoughts.

She said a chaplain, also known as an auditor, questioned them for hours. “You do it until the needle is flat, until the sign on the machine doesn’t read any more thoughts,” she said. “They think that once you unload all these bad things, you’re going to fall madly back in love with each other.” And when they didn’t, Ms. Llywelyn said, she was assigned an in-house lawyer. “Scientologists aren’t allowed to sue each other,” she said, because of a policy to contain any public disputes. ...

Yet sometimes, according to Claire Headley, another former member, the church encourages divorce. Ms. Headley said she was told that she must divorce her husband of 12 years, Marc Headley, or be kicked out of the Religious Technology Center, a Scientology compound near Hemet, Calif., that is known as Gold Base. Ms. Headley said that she had grown up in the church and it was all she knew, but that she and her husband began having trouble after expressing doubts about church authorities.

Weird as this is, the new Obama-support Muslim Brotherhood govt of Egypt now has se slave marriage.

Bad as all these procedures are, American family courts are worse. Katie and Tom being hooked up to an E-meter will probably do more good than a court-ordered psychological evaluation from some anti-family blood-sucker.

Do whatever she tells you

Yahoo News reports:

President Barack Obama, marriage counselor?

The president stopped at the Kozy Corners diner in Oak Harbor, Ohio, on Thursday for what political campaigns dub an "OTR" —- an "off the record" event that isn't on the formal schedule —- and doled out a bit of marriage advice.

"Just do whatever she tells you to," Obama told a man sitting with his wife at a table during a brief chat about what makes a good marriage. The president's words were collected by The New York Times reporter Mark Landler, the print "pool reporter."

American politics has degenerated into the Mommy Party and the Daddy Party. The Democrats appeal to bleeding hearts, economic dependency, and matriarchy while the Republicans stand for self-reliance, responsibility, and patriarchy.

Obama is a spineless effeminate appeaser. His campaign is symbolized by his slideshow, The Life of Julia. There he explains that the purpose of his presidency is to get women dependent on govt agencies, and to cut men out of their lives.

The Democrats would be dead without the support of certain emasculated groups. They appeal to blacks, Jews, LGBTs, single moms, and the welfare class. Obama has radically expanded food stamps and other dependency programs.

A Latvian women’s/entertainment magazine says:

My advice to all women who want to pursue their dreams across the ocean. America is a woman’s paradise, especially for mature women. Here all the laws revolve around the women. The woman will almost always leave the courthouse as a winner — even when it seems incredible that she could win.

A black woman writes:

Your happiness is not the bailiwick of any judge ANYWHERE. As the mother of two let me let you in in a little secret: YOUR HAPPINESS BECAME IRRLEVANT THE DAY YOUR CHILD WAS BORN. Now do you know what your sole purpose of existing is? To perpetuate the species by caring for said offspring. You are an offspring support system. PERIOD. That’s all biology cares about and that’s all the state cares about. The state has a vested interest in ensuring you feed your goddamned child. It doesn’t care if you’re happy about it!

She is a typical Obama voters. Obama's policies have been a disaster, and the economy is going to get worse with his Obamacare, amnesty for illegal aliens, excessive borrowing, and paying people to be unproductive.

Obama's advice is even lousy marriage advice. Men do not keep their wives happy by doing whatever they say. Not how it works. How can he run the country when he cannot even run his own household?