Culture Warrior (16 page)

Kristof wrote: “So I have a challenge for Mr. O'Reilly: If you really want to defend traditional values, then come with me on a trip to Darfur. I'll introduce you to mothers who have had their babies clubbed to death in front of them, to teenage girls who have been gang-raped…”

Now, I do three hours of daily news analysis on TV and radio; there's no way I can go to Africa in light of those commitments. However, I'm glad Kristof can go because somebody needs to spotlight that terrible situation.

But an interesting thing happened shortly after that Kristof column: the 60-day sentence for the child rapist came to light. Because Kristof had referenced teenage rape in his criticism of me, I fully expected to see him and
The New York Times
all over the Vermont situation. After all, this human rights violation happened just a few hundred miles north of New York City.

But the
Times
didn't cover the Vermont story—didn't even mention it. And there was not a word from my pal Nicholas Kristof, the human rights guy.

So what's going on here? Aren't liberal press advocates champions of the downtrodden? Maybe Kristof can write another column explaining to me why the Vermont child doesn't matter to him or his newspaper.

I hope this doesn't sound bitter, because I don't mean it to be. I am genuinely perplexed by the sanctimonious left-wing press, which doesn't consider a 60-day jail term for a child rapist an outrage.

While the
Times
rails against alleged human-rights violations in Guantanamo Bay and other far-off places, it apparently has no interest in protecting poor American children from predators and irresponsible judges.

Something isn't right here. What say you on the left?

         

Now, that column was written with the intention of embarrassing Kristof and the
New York Times.
I admit it. Remember, that newspaper is the secular-progressive Bible. My feeling is that the
Times
ignored the Vermont story because I was so involved in it and because the
Times
is definitely on board with the “restorative justice” movement. But I could be wrong.

For the record, about a week after I wrote that column calling the
Times
out for ignoring the little girl in Vermont, Nicholas Kristof wrote another column asking his readers to send money so a ticket could be purchased in order to send me to Africa. It was a dopey article, the point of which escaped just about everyone I know. But Kristof did comment on my crusading for justice in Vermont. He called it “good stuff.”

Well, thanks, Nick, but I'm still waiting for your employers to assign someone to expose the myriad of human rights violations going on inside the United States. It would be great for the powerful
New York Times
to get behind Jessica's Law, a tough anti–sexual predator law being adopted by states across the country, wouldn't it?

Never gonna happen.

And the atrocities keep on coming in the USA. Soon after the Vermont debacle, an Ohio judge named John Connor pronounced sentence on a man who forced a five-year-old boy and an eleven-year-old boy to have sex with him. The man admitted committing the felonies and to doing a number of other horrendous things to these children. Connor could have sentenced the predator to ten years in prison. But he did not. He gave the degenerate
probation.
No prison time at all. Connor pronounced that the man had a “disease.”

I let Judge Connor have it on
The Factor,
arguing that the state had to impeach him. Even after the Vermont experience, I thought the Ohio press would be on my side. The
Toledo Blade
was. But most of the other media condemned me. Newspapers in Cincinnati, Akron, and Dayton actually supported Connor. It was another shocking display of media irresponsibility. The
Dayton Daily News
was the worst. It leveled personal attacks on me, the governor of Ohio, and the attorney general of the state for demanding Connor's removal. It was, perhaps, the most despicable thing I have ever seen in an American newspaper. And, no surprise, the Dayton paper is a bastion of secular-progressive opinion.

Taking the evidence presented, I believe it is fair to say that not only does the S-P movement sympathize with child predators because of their “disease”; they are also making it easier for these criminals to operate. To prove this, we must travel to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a reliable stronghold of secular-progressive thought.

Earlier in this book, I mentioned that the ACLU is representing the North American Man-Boy Love Association in a civil lawsuit. That case, I argued, proves that the ACLU is not only misguided, it is dangerous. Here are some more details that, I hope, prove this point once and for all. We begin with the fact that the ACLU believes NAMBLA's “rights” are being violated. So please consider that the starting point of this terrible situation.

On October 1, 1997, ten-year-old Jeffrey Curley was playing in the front yard of his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home. A few yards away, two men, Salvatore Sicari and Charles Jaynes, were watching Jeffrey from their parked car.

Sicari and Jaynes talked it over—could they kidnap the boy and get away unseen? It was risky in broad daylight, but the men, losers both, decided to try. Leaping out of the car, they grabbed the boy, threw him inside, and sped off. But Jeffrey fought back hard. Finally, the men suffocated the boy with a gasoline-soaked rag and drove to Jaynes's apartment, where they sexually abused Jeffrey's body. Afterward, they drove to Maine, where they dumped the young boy's corpse into a river. It does not get worse than this.

Massachusetts detectives did a great job on the case, and both Sicari and Jaynes received life in prison. During court testimony, Jaynes's diary was introduced. In said diary was a description of the NAMBLA Web site and Jaynes's writing that it encouraged him to act out his violent fantasies on young boys. As I told you earlier, Jaynes accessed the NAMBLA Web site at the Boston Public Library. Remember, the ACLU and S-P movement want no restrictions on library Internet access.

Not surprisingly, Jeffrey Curley's family was so appalled by the NAMBLA connection that they filed a $200 million federal lawsuit against the group, seeking to put it out of business once and for all. It fell to the Curley family to attempt to do what the U.S. justice system has been unable to do—crush NAMBLA.

By the way, it is worth noting that one of the most popular NAMBLA publications is titled “The Survival Manual: The Man's Guide to Staying Alive in Man-Boy Sexual Relationships.” This revolting “manual” explains how to insinuate yourself into a child's life and get away with molesting the boy. Sick doesn't even begin to cover it.

After the Curley family filed its suit, it was answered—by the ACLU. The S-P shock troops took the case to “protect” the free-speech rights of NAMBLA. ACLU Massachusetts legal director John Reinstein said in a press release: “Regardless to whether people agree with or abhor NAMBLA's views, holding the organization responsible for crimes committed by others who read their material would gravely endanger important first amendment freedoms.”

Once again, a theoretical argument is put forth to defend active evil. As with the war on terror, the S-P vanguard cannot come to grips with the fact that NAMBLA has no place in any civilized society, is an organization that appears to be criminal, encouraging child rape, and should be put out of business any legal way possible. But in the “anything goes” world of the secular-progressives, theory is much more important than protecting the kids.

One more item to bolster my argument: the ACLU's war against the Boy Scouts has received a lot of attention. Very simply, the Scouts decline to approve openly gay Scoutmasters and require that the boys acknowledge a “higher power.” The ACLU sees this as a violation of gay and atheist rights, even though the Supreme Court has ruled that the Scouts and all other private organizations have the right to make their own charters and rules.

So, all over the country, the ACLU has sued the Boy Scouts, seeking to have them denied public assistance and access, such as having a jamboree on city property. It is a jihad against the Scouts, no question. Once again doing the math, I have come up with this equation: NAMBLA gets ACLU support. The Boy Scouts get ACLU attacks. Am I wrong here?

                  

                  

Finally, let's go back to school, where the S-P assault on American children is being intensely waged under the guise of looking out for the kids. Besides abortion, the one issue that will drive any secular-progressive crazy is school “vouchers” for disadvantaged children.

Because so many public schools are ineptly run and even dangerous to attend, states like Florida have provided assistance to poor families who wish to send their children to private schools. In the high school where I taught in the 1970s—Monsignor Edward Pace in Opa Locka, Florida—forty low-income students were receiving tuition assistance from the state. But the S-P Florida Supreme Court—you remember, the one that ruled in favor of Al Gore in the 2000 election and was overturned by the Supreme Court—decided that Florida violated its constitution by directing fees to private schools. Predictably, the court rationalized its ruling by invoking the separation of church and state theory. But in the real world, where most of us have to live, many of the poor children involved were forced to return to violent, chaotic public schools.

The secular-progressives will tell you they are looking out for your “rights” and the overall welfare of children in the school voucher debate. But that's an impossible argument to win when you realize that a poor kid doesn't have the same “rights” as a rich kid to attend a school their parents choose. This is flat-out classism and a stark denial of equal opportunity.

But, as we've learned, the true S-P agenda wants nothing to do with the traditional Judeo-Christian values that are taught in most private schools. That is really the issue here. The separation of church and state argument is just a ruse, and there's proof. After World War II, more than 2 million veterans were given educational “vouchers” paid for by the government in order to afford to attend the college of their choice. Many of those vets chose religious colleges. Back then, the S-P movement was in its infancy and little was said.

But over the years, as the S-P forces in America grew in strength, the opposition to all government assistance involving any religious affiliation intensified. It came to a head in a 1999 lawsuit involving educational assistance to the poor in Cleveland. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that as long as the government didn't
force
an American student to attend a religious school, there was nothing un-Constitutional about supplying poor American families with money to attend any school of their “choice.”

This entire issue, of course, is about free choice and the Constitutional right to pursue happiness on an equal basis. Using a variety of studies, ABC newsman John Stossel has documented that poor kids who use vouchers to attend private schools dramatically improve their academic performance. So the intense S-P opposition to school vouchers isn't exactly “nurturing” poor children, now is it?

Want more evidence that S-P opposition to school vouchers damages kids? Try this: In Washington, D.C., according to the National Center for Education Statistics, public school spending on each pupil is now over $10,000 per child per year, an astounding amount and about double what it was thirty years ago. D.C. Catholic schools spend far less per pupil than the public schools do. And—you guessed it—test scores for the Catholic school kids are far higher than those for the public school students. In fact, 98 percent of kids graduating from D.C. Catholic schools go on to college, while almost 40 percent of D.C. public school students never graduate from high school; they drop out. Once again, the math tells the story. Too bad so many public school kids will never learn how to do math.

The sad truth is there are few public schools in the United States that can compete with private schools because of the discipline factor. Private schools work intensely with parents and demand that strict academic and behavioral guidelines be followed. In many public schools, “self-esteem” is the lesson of the day, and social promotion the school fight song.

And once a kid gets to college, well, forget about hearing the traditional point of view very much. Most American universities have become secular-progressive theme parks. Even once-traditional schools like Georgetown and Villanova have suffered a large infusion of S-P influence.

In fact, a study by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA surveyed more than fifty-five thousand college professors about their political beliefs. Asked to describe themselves ideologically, 48 percent said they were “liberal” or “far left,” 18 percent said “conservative” or “far right,” and 34 percent described themselves as “middle of the road.”