A Liberal I Can Respect

The political debate continues. The gap between both sides widens. However, every now and then someone accidentally bridges the gap and says something that most of us can agree on.

On Thursday, Newsbusters posted a portion of an interview of Camille Paglia by Salon.

The article reports:

Liberals think of themselves as very open-minded, but that’s simply not true!” she said. “Liberalism has sadly become a knee-jerk ideology, with people barricaded in their comfortable little cells. They think that their views are the only rational ones, and everyone else is not only evil but financed by the Koch brothers. It’s so simplistic!” Bring it, Camille!

Then, Paglia really got going. “Now let me give you a recent example of the persisting insularity of liberal thought in the media,” she said. “When the first secret Planned Parenthood video was released in mid-July, anyone who looks only at liberal media was kept totally in the dark about it, even after the second video was released.” 

“It was a huge and disturbing story,” she continued, “but there was total silence in the liberal media. That kind of censorship was shockingly unprofessional. The liberal major media were trying to bury the story by ignoring it.” 

“Now I am a former member of Planned Parenthood and a strong supporter of unconstrained reproductive rights. But I was horrified and disgusted by those videos and immediately felt there were serious breaches of medical ethics in the conduct of Planned Parenthood officials.”

“But here’s my point,” she concluded. “It is everyone’s obligation, whatever your political views, to look at both liberal and conservative news sources every single day. You need a full range of viewpoints to understand what is going on in the world. 

The videotapes about Planned Parenthood are disturbing. I attempted to bring them up in a discussion with a liberal friend on Facebook and got called a lot of things I won’t repeat. A discussion of the issue was not possible. The video tapes were false and men were trying to control women’s bodies. I don’t know if our culture has reached the point of no return, but if we haven’t, we are definitely close. Selling aborted baby body parts is evil. We should at least be able to agree on that.

 

Giving Our Children Information They Don’t Need While Not Telling Them What They Need To Know

Camille Paglia posted an article at Time Magazine yesterday entitled, “Put the Sex Back in Sex Ed.” It’s a rather odd concept, but she makes some very worthwhile points.

The article states:

Fertility is the missing chapter in sex education. Sobering facts about women’s declining fertility after their 20s are being withheld from ambitious young women, who are propelled along a career track devised for men.

The refusal by public schools’ sex-education programs to acknowledge gender differences is betraying both boys and girls. The genders should be separated for sex counseling. It is absurd to avoid the harsh reality that boys have less to lose from casual serial sex than do girls, who risk pregnancy and whose future fertility can be compromised by disease. Boys need lessons in basic ethics and moral reasoning about sex (for example, not taking advantage of intoxicated dates), while girls must learn to distinguish sexual compliance from popularity.

The first paragraph is something that was not an issue thirty years ago, the second paragraph involves issues that parents used to handle thirty years ago. Ms. Paglia is looking for a scientific approach to sex education in biology classes and a practical non-agenda driven approach to life issues in single-sex classes. This makes sense. Many parents are not telling their children the truth about the emotional and physical cost of abortion or the emotional differences between men and women.

Please follow the link and read the entire article. This is a very common-sense approach to an issue that has our society needs to deal with in a way that helps our young people grow up to be healthy and productive adults.

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A Gay Feminist Speaks Out About Duck Dynasty

Yesterday the Daily Caller posted an article about some comments made by Camille Paglia, a social critic and openly gay, dissident feminist, about the recent dust-up about the statements made by the Duck Dynasty patriarch, Phil. What she said is the most cogent statement I have heard from the left side of the political spectrum.

The article reports her comments:

“I speak with authority here, because I was openly gay before the ‘Stonewall rebellion,’ when it cost you something to be so. And I personally feel as a libertarian that people have the right to free thought and free speech,” Paglia, a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, said on Laura Ingraham’s radio show Thursday.

“In a democratic country, people have the right to be homophobic as well as they have the right to support homosexuality — as I one hundred percent do. If people are basing their views against gays on the Bible, again they have a right of religious freedom there,” she added.

…“To express yourself in a magazine in an interview — this is the level of punitive PC, utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist, OK, that my liberal colleagues in the Democratic Party and on college campuses have supported and promoted over the last several decades,” Paglia said. “This is the whole legacy of free speech 1960’s that have been lost by my own party.”

…“I think that this intolerance by gay activists toward the full spectrum of human beliefs is a sign of immaturity, juvenility,” Paglia said. “This is not the mark of a true intellectual life. This is why there is no cultural life now in the U.S. Why nothing is of interest coming from the major media in terms of cultural criticism. Why the graduates of the Ivy League with their A, A, A+ grades are complete cultural illiterates, etc. is because they are not being educated in any way to give respect to opposing view points.”

“There is a dialogue going on human civilization, for heaven sakes. It’s not just this monologue coming from fanatics who have displaced the religious beliefs of their parents into a political movement,” she added. “And that is what happened to feminism, and that is what happened to gay activism, a fanaticism.”

The lady obviously understands the need for two sides of a discussion. We need more people who are intellectually honest on both sides of the political spectrum.

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