Saturday, July 16, 2005

Zach in the Times

Zach’s story is in the New York Times today.

The story is a good one. It reviews the history of Love In Action and includes this from the Rev. John J. Smid, the executive director of Love in Action:

For Mr. Smid and his supporters, offering Love in Action to teenagers is vital to combat what they see as a growing tolerance of homosexuality among young people. “We just really believe that the resounding message for teenagers in our culture is, practice whatever you want, have sex however, whenever and with whoever you want,” he said. “I very deeply believe that is harmful. I think exploring sexuality can lay a teenager up for numerous lifelong issues.”

Yes, there is growing tolerance of gay and lesbian people, because we have learned and discredited the out-dated notion that to be lesbian or gay is to be diseased. (Andrew Sullivan gets it right when he notes the similarity of this rhetoric to “the most vicious anti-Semites against Jews.")

Can’t anyone see the irony of how they define a homosexual inclination as having sex “however, whenever and with whoever,” even as they stand in the way of same-sex marriage? It’s only the biggest lesbian and gay civil right movement struggle ever: achieving legal recognition and support for our committed relationships.

Stopping same-sex marriage is apparently even higher on their agenda than abortion. Back in February Andrew asked, why no anti-abortion constitutional amendment?

RELATED: Zach’s dad, on the Christian Broadcasting Network:

“We felt very good about Zach coming here because… to let him see for himself the destructive lifestyle, what he has to face in the future, and to give him some options that society doesn’t give him today,” Stark told CBN. “Knowing that your son… statistics say that by the age of 30 he could either have AIDS or be dead.”

Another reason we don’t like Virginia

They burn churches and this is what they call a dog walk! Note, no fence between the busy highway and the narrow strip of grass. This place is not fit for man nor beast!

Meanwhile, I-95 is closed so our preferred I-81 is packed. If only we had automated driving.

Doug says, “Virginia’s so beautiful, it’s such a shame...”

London lessons

On the Sunday chat shows last weekend, I heard a lot of things from the pundits I just don’t buy about the London bombing.

Most significantly, we seem to believe that we have hobbled Al Qaeda’s ability to pull off large scale attacks.

Hello? Doesn’t anyone remember how long it was between World Trade Center attacks?

We’ve also concluded that London’s openness is at fault and our Patriot Act keeps us from suffering the same fate.

I don’t think so.

Yesterday on This American Life, we heard the story of The Arms Trader:

The U.S. government spent two years on a sting operation, trapping an Indian man named Hemant Lakhani whom they suspected of being an illegal arms dealer. It’s one of the few cases that has gone to trial in the War on Terror, and one the Justice Department has pointed to as one of their big successes. In the end, they got Lakhani, red-handed, delivering a missile to a terrorist in New Jersey. The only problem was, nothing in the sting was what it appeared to be. Including the missile.

In the end we learn that they got Lakhani. But what Lakhani did was buy a fake missile from a fake arms dealer for a fake terrorist.

My problem is this: The guy may have been a bad guy who did a bad thing. But this fake deal soaked up a lot of time, money and manpower. All of which might have been better spent on the real terrorist threat.