And on January 20^th, 2009 he made history in becoming the first president who supports faux marriage.

Obama revealed himself in a Wednesday interview with ABC News’ Robin Roberts, saying, “At a certain point I’ve just concluded that, um, for me, personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that, uh, I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

This statement was made after Obama explained his “evolution” on the issue, a hothouse transformation that included discussions with homosexuals on his staff.  But here’s the reality: the aforementioned “certain point” he reached had more to do with the electorate’s perceived evolution than anything else.  This is because Barack Obama has always been pro-faux marriage.

How do I know?  For starters, Obama isn’t a Christian, as he claims; he isn’t a Muslim, as some critics claim, although he is a Muslim sympathizer.

He is a moral relativist and de facto atheist.

But, unlike with my first two sentences, I repeat myself.

And being a thoroughly modern Alinskyite secularist, he will always be on the cutting edge of societal devolution, which includes support for the undermining of marriage.

If that isn’t enough for you, though, consider that, writes ABC News, “[i]n 1996, as a state Senate candidate, he [Obama] indicated support for gay marriage in a questionnaire, but Obama aides later disavowed it and said it did not reflect the candidate’s position.”  Allow me to translate: “Our guy was dumb enough to reveal that he supported faux marriage when he needs votes in areas in which blacks are numerically strong.  And, as you may know, the black community doesn’t look kindly upon faux marriage.  So just ignore that man behind the curtain!  Barack is down!”

And now Obama is a bit down in the polls.  What’s his game?  Did loose-cannon Biden put him on the spot by announcing his acceptance of faux marriage earlier in the week?  Or was half-slow Joe’s remark a trial balloon?  Is Obama trying to shore up support among his demoralized base?  Whatever the case, know that the president’s problem isn’t that marriage, like the matter of when life begins, is above his pay grade.

It’s that morality and telling the truth are above his pay grade.

And now think about this: If Obama was willing to drop the marriage mask before the election, what masks will be dropped after it when, as he said to Dmitry Medvedev, he has “more flexibility”?

For sure, he will continue to evolve.  Heck, he may even announce that he’s a communist before 2016 is up – no doubt after discussing the issue with the Marxists on his staff.

It seems most anything goes now: bloated houses, bloated egos, bloated libidos, bloated bureaucracies, bloated government – except bloated bellies.  And a perusal of the news makes this clear, with a never-ending stream of stories about obesity this and obesity that.  For example, headlining Drudge the other day was a piece about how fathead officials in Massachusetts propose to ban school bake sales – even before and after school hours – to combat obesity.  This, of course, is just the next step in a progression that has seen localities purge schools of cookies and sodas along with the faith and patriotism that was deemed unhealthful long before.

We also had the San Francisco Stupidvisors, who run the city (into the ground), who banned toys in McDonald’s Happy Meals. Deliciously, the restaurant chain circumvented the law by charging an extra ten cents for those who want the toy.  I would’ve really rubbed the health Nazis’ noses in it and made it a penny.

Then there was the 2008 proposal by three legislators in Mississippi – said to be the fattest state in the nation – to prohibit portly people from dining in restaurants.  The politicians said they were just trying to make a point with their measure.  I wonder, though, given that the vast majority of gun crime (98% in New York City) is committed by blacks and Hispanics, would these bold statesmen seek to “make a point” by proposing to ban those groups from gun stores?  Oh, that would be discriminatory?  I see.

Although Mississippi Fat Burning never saw its opening day, other Orwellian measures have.  For instance, a Missouri judge was accused of delaying an adoption until the prospective father lost weight, and last year Ohio DCFS seized a boy from his parents because he was obese.  This, despite the fact that if the president ate like his wife does, the boy would look like Obama’s son.

The irony here is that the health Nazis would have had the overindulgent Ohio mother’s back if she’d ended her boy’s life in the womb.  But merely increase the chances of shortening his life by feeding him too many Twinkies?  You’re a derelict mother!

You see, when it’s the matter of a body within a body, it’s the bigger body’s “choice.”  But when it’s a matter of just a bigger body, you have no choice.  My, how the scales of justice tip when you tip the scales.

As for the busybodies – the politicians, gubmint bureaucrats and “public-interest” groups – how do we explain their interest in our health?  They really must care, right?  About you, about me, about all and sundry.  Well, I’d say so but qualify it with a paraphrased Rodney Dangerfield line: “They really care….

About what, I have no idea.”

Of course, there is the “Obesity hurts society” pretext.  The argument is that you fatties are burying our healthcare system with a knife and fork, as you cost it more money with your increased health problems.

Except that this is nonsense.

A 2011 study found that the obese and smokers actually cost the healthcare system less because they don’t live as long.  And while study leader Pieter Van Baal called the finding a “small surprise,” it’s thoroughly logical.  It’s the nonagenarian requiring frequent hospitalization and nursing-home care who rings up the bills, not the epicurean who collapses on his plate of chicken fried steak and cheese-filled French fries at age 61.  So you want to save ObamaCare?  Get all the different fat groups, copious amounts of sugar and salt and smoke one Al Gore tobacco farm a week.

So are we now left with the notion that the health Nazis really do care?  Well, they do, and about what I do have some idea.  And I’m going to delve into one little understood phenomenon that drives today’s obsession with health.

You’ll note that the people behind control-freak health measures are never Opus Dei or Southern Baptist Conference types; heck, unless it’s a prohibition against pork, they’re not even Muslims.  They are, I’d wager, secularists virtually one and all.

This is no coincidence, but a result of subordinating spiritual health to physical health.  A person of faith may believe that he’s enjoined to treat the temple of the soul well, but he will never elevate that imperative over that of caring for the soul itself.  He realizes that this life, relative to eternity, is as a drop of water in an ocean – and it is that ocean voyage for which he is mainly preparing.  Thus, recognizing the reality of God’s law (morality), he understands that of primary importance is avoiding what has traditionally been labeled sin.

But what about when you don’t believe in an afterlife?  This temporal life is then all you see.

And then staying in it for as long as possible can become the most important thing to you.

In fact, it can become obsession.

For where the believer may be mindful of Jesus’ words (I’m paraphrasing) “Do not fear that which just destroys the body; fear that which destroys the soul,” the secularist may believe the body is all there is.  This is, I believe, what has bred the Cult of the Body, with all its newly-minted “sins,” such as overeating, failure to exercise, smoking and drinking.  Why, we even call taxes on the last two “sin taxes.”

So my answer to those who warn of increasing obesity is, “So?”  “But, Duke, don’t you understand?  These people will die younger!”  Other than mentioning that they won’t die nearly as young as aborted babies, again I say, “So?”  We’re all going to die; it’s just a matter of when and how.  And when you realize that relative to the ocean, small, medium and large water drops are indistinguishable, you’ll understand my response.

Returning to a lighter note, I’ll have to now limit my keyboard intake lest this article get too fat.  Before concluding, however, I’ll say that I do have an idea for putting the health Nazis’ designs on a diet.  Since obesity is most prevalent among black women – with 48 percent having, uh, let’s say, generous proportions – cast any and all attacks upon the condition as “racist.”  If this tactic works when the matter is police tests, voter ID, immigration and school suspension, perhaps it’ll work with abdominal distension.

It was stupid.

In fact, it was childishly stupid.  Really, it reminds one of the copout Bill Clinton disgorged when addressing his marijuana use: “I tried it, but I didn’t inhale.”  And it should come as no surprise, either — leftists are childish.

As for the “racism” charge, many conservatives take that leaf out of the left’s book because, they figure, turnabout is fair play.  If a conservative had uttered Warren’s words — stereotyping minority characteristics and using a politically incorrect term — he’d be Derbyshired.

But there is an irony here: If a bona fide rightist — such as yours truly — had made Warren’s comment, it wouldn’t necessarily be a sign of sheer stupidity.  After all, I purposely don’t use PC terms such as “native American” (unless I’m simply referring to a person native-born); I don’t use inclusive language such as “he or she” or “chairperson”; I don’t use “African-American” or “gay” (unless I mean “happy”).  But I know I’m being politically incorrect; I do it purposely and accept the consequences.  You see, I consider it a matter of principle because I know that the side that defines the vocabulary of a debate wins the debate.

Yet no such thing could be said about Hokumhontas Warren.  She’s defined by political correctness yet is still so oblivious to its tenets and prohibitions that she didn’t even realize that using the term “Indian” and stereotyping a minority group’s looks, even if the generalization is valid, are verboten.  This, despite the fact that Warren had been a professor at Harvard, an institution where Political Correctness 101 figures prominently.  So methinks we’re dealing with a pretty dim bulb here.

Of course, there’s no reason to believe that Hokumhontas was actually qualified for her Harvard position in the first place.  Having listed herself as a “native American” in a directory of law professors for the decade prior to her affirmative-action hiring, it’s all but certain that she was playing upon the female-minority quota daily double — and benefitted from it.  And all this based on supposedly having had a great-great-great grandmother who was Cherokee, which would account for 1/32^nd of Warren’s heritage.

Yet Hokumhontas has an excuse: She didn’t emphasize her Indian over her “cowpeople” heritage for career advancement.  Perish the thought!

She did it to increase her prestige in social circles.

Now, the funny thing is that such status actually would give her a certain cachet among her ilk.  Again, leftists are that childish.  Race and ethnicity figure prominently in their world view (don’t forget that “progressives” were eugenicists in the early 20^th century).  So they wouldn’t necessarily exalt a person because of demonstrated virtue or ability, but ethnicity?  Hey, invite her to the cocktail party.  And give her that Ivy League professorship while you’re at it!

If Hokumhontas had been a bit smarter, she would have realized that a cover-up is usually more damaging than the scandal, and she might have issued something akin to the following response:

Look, as Bill Buckley once said, “I long ago accepted the proposition that in a democracy you accept the will of the majority — unless it becomes tyrannical.”  And the fact is that we all have to suffer because of the ways in which the system is disadvantageous to us, so there’s nothing wrong with taking advantage of the ways in which it benefits us.  Thus, we can all change the system if we see fit, but until then I have to operate within it just like everyone else.

Now, this wouldn’t have allowed Warren to emerge totally unscathed, but it would have put the issue to bed.  Sure, it’s not the virtue displayed by black economics professor Walter Williams, who as a young man turned down a professorship at an Ivy League university because, as he told the interviewer, since he wasn’t qualified on paper, it would be obvious he was a quota hire.  But at least it would have seemed honest.

It would never occur to Hokumhontas to make my suggested statement, however.  She genuinely believes in the discriminatory affirmative-action system, first of all, and, besides, even if she didn’t, liberals’ instinct is seldom to be honest.

Anyway, I guess if I’m to be thoroughly modern in an age in which even your sex can be whatever you like, I should accept Warren as an Indian.  But, then, I wonder.  Should her birth name perhaps have been Stands with Foot in Mouth?  Or maybe Thieving Donkey?  Did she have a remote ancestor named Chief Stupid Horse?  As for me, don’t think I’m going to give Hokumhontas a break anytime soon.  Me smokem’ peace pipe, but me no inhale.

What isn’t at all unusual about the story is the mainstream media’s reluctance to cover a case of black-on-white crime.  In particular, I cited the Birmingham News (BN), whose crime-beat reporter, Carol Robinson, had brusquely dismissed the incident as not newsworthy.  After my article was published in American Thinker, however, she finally treated it – no doubt as a result of pressure – but in a manner so incomplete that it reflects a grudging attitude.  More on that in a moment.

The BN’s dereliction of duty didn’t escape its readers, some of whom savaged the paper in the comments section under Robinson’s piece.  One wrote, “Wow.  Birmingham News finally prints this story.  Only after being shamed into it by the American Thinker….”  Another quipped, “Hey Birmingham news, if you don’t watch out someone is gonna start a newspaper around here.”  We can only hope.

In an effort at damage control, managing editor Chuck Clark posted a response, saying that they had not purposely ignored the story and that they reported on it “[a]s soon this was brought to our attention today.”  This is simply not true.

This isn’t synonymous with saying that Clark is lying.  I believe the paper reported on the story as soon as it was brought to his attention, but the fact is that Robinson was tipped off a full week before.  She obviously, however, disagreed with her managing editor, who also wrote under her piece, “A road rage incident that results in a stabbing is a news story.”

I confirmed this information this past Tuesday in an interview with the man who apprised Robinson of the Stokes affair, Scott Boyd of the Macon Beacon.  Boyd, owner and editor of the paper, was the first to report on the crime and told me that he approached Robinson on Tuesday, April 3^rd, only to be rebuffed.  Not only did he find her wholly uninterested, she was completely ignorant of, and unsympathetic about, the situation.  About the biker gang she said, “I have been covering crime in Birmingham for 25 years, and I’ve never heard of them.”  The icing on the cake was when Boyd said he was amazed at the police’s dereliction of duty, and she brushed him off with, “Well, what do you want me to do about it?”

It appears Robinson doesn’t want to do much, given the nature of her reportage.  Consider that while she provides the basic details of the attack on Stokes, she omits the most newsworthy part of the story: the police’s admission that they “don’t mess” with a local band of criminals.

Instead, she is one-sided.  She quotes Adamsville Police Chief Bob Carter and writes, “‘It [the crime] was never viewed lightly by the Adamsville Police Department.  All I can tell you is in any investigation, there is a search for the truth,’ the chief said. ‘We’re trying to get to the bottom of it, and prosecute whoever is guilty of wrongdoing.’”  This is fine and dandy, but it’s also damage-control boilerplate.  What is striking about the story is Stokes’ claim that a police officer told him, “We don’t mess with those Outcast guys.”  They also advised him to let the matter go because the gang could come after him.  And I tend to doubt he’s lying.

Now, how can Robinson consider herself an honest reporter when omitting the most newsworthy aspect of the story?  Stokes’ claims should have been juxtaposed with the police chief’s.  But it seems to me that the reportage just reflects the police investigation: both may be examples of going through the motions, of not wanting to “mess with” something politically incorrect and perhaps dangerous.

As to this dangerousness, Boyd tells me that the one biker who was injured and found at the scene, Laddarious Clay of Birmingham, was sporting a holster on each hip and told the police that he had given the pistols to the other bikers.  I guess that was enough to scare the Adamsville Keystone Kops.

Getting back to the BN, I’m sure Robinson didn’t tell managing editor Clark that she was ignoring a newsworthy story, so I take his claims at face value.  But it’s also clear that she was less than forthcoming with him, and I informed him about this via email.  The question is, will he do anything about it?

If the mainstream media’s history is any guide, we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting.  NBC got burned recently because it had an editor who misrepresented George Zimmerman’s 911 phone conversation so as to inflame passions.  Dan Rather got burned because he had underlings who peddled forged documents.   The New York Times got burned because it coddled affirmative-action hire and plagiarist Jayson Blair.  And now the Birmingham News is getting burned, albeit less severely, because it retains a reporter who seems to filter news through a politically correct prism.  Sure, none of these media organs prescribed this malpractice, but where does the buck stop?  When you lie down with dogs or hire liberals, you get fleas.

You also get lower circulation, dropping stock prices and lost credibility.

(Note: I want to issue two corrections on my initial article.  “We don’t mess with those Outcast guys.” is the exact police quotation as related to me by Boyd; the one I used on Tuesday was, apparently, a grapevine-altered version.  Second, I was mistaken in my first piece in reporting that Boyd had heard the police utter the comment as well; he tells me that only Stokes did.)

Whatever the perceived slight, race was a factor.  After all, imagine the reaction if he had been white.  At worst he might have thought, “Selwyn is a self-absorbed brat,” which would have been closer to the truth.  Or he might just have concluded that I was having a bad day (I was an aspiring player at the time, but, lamentably, had a lot of bad days).  Instead, he saw bad intentions where none existed.

Of course, any time someone noticeably different from us appears to slight us, it’s natural to wonder if it may be because of those differences.  But when you consider what many black Americans believe, it’s clear something else is afoot.  Just consider, for instance, that when Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright accused white people of “inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color,” he was not expressing a new belief in the black community.  After Hurricane Katrina, Louis Farrakhan claimed that the breached levees had been blown-up by the government; Spike Lee said that his theory wasn’t “far-fetched”; and even before Looney Louie had weighed in, black residents on the street stated that the flooding was part of a conspiracy to rid New Orleans of black people.  On a more frivolous but equally ridiculous note, I’ve heard black golf fans claim that the late-1990s equipment revolution that enabled players to hit the ball further, and the subsequent lengthening of golf courses, were engineered for the purposes of undermining Tiger Woods, a black man dominating a white game.  Of course, given what we now know about Woods’ extra-curricular activities, targeting him with HIV might have been easier.

To illustrate the phenomenon causing people to believe such inanity, consider a woman in a bad marriage who hates her husband.  She may see him through colored glasses, and then his trespasses are never just innocent mistakes, are they?  Instead, much that he does will displease her – and all of it is part of an effort to upset her.  “Why, that’s just the kind of thing he would do!” thinks she.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  He may be lacking or even a cad, and he may sometimes actually try to get her goat.  But that isn’t the point.  It is, rather, that whatever he is or isn’t, she won’t perceive it clearly through those colored glasses.  Hatred is like darkness: the more there is, the less you can see.

And this is precisely the issue in the black community.  Black minister and head of the Brotherhood Organization for a New Destiny Jesse Lee Peterson alluded to this when he said that the goal of racial hustlers such as Jesse Jackson is to keep black people angry so that they won’t be able to think clearly.  Yet this “Jacksonizing” of youth is now endemic in the black community.  Too many black children are weaned on ideas such as “The white man is keeping you down,” “The white man has oppressed you” and “A black man has no place in America.”  They may hear such sentiments from their parents, from Reverend Wrights in churches, from friends, from music and popular culture – and even in school (read here). The result is that they view whites through colored glasses, seeing bad intentions and Caucasian conspiracies where none exist.  Hey, that’s just the way white people are.

Of course, this phenomenon isn’t unique to black/white relations.  It’s evident in Palestinian/Jewish ones, Hutu/Tutsi ones, Turkish/Armenian ones and many others as well; it’s something that has ever plagued man.  And because it has such a long history and can be easily understood, something can be said with confidence: black grievance will never end.

Oh, “never” is a long time?

I’ll be more precise: the American republic will end before black grievance will.

To place this in further perspective, consider jihadist teaching.  Would you expect the next generation of Muslims to relinquish their grievances against Jews when anti-Semitism is taught in tens of thousands of madrassahs worldwide and presented as part of Islamic religion?  Well, consider that anti-white teaching is rife in the black community and has been molded into a religion; it’s called Black Liberation Theology (BLT) and teaches that God must assist in eradicating “the white enemy.”  Then there is Critical Race Theory (CRT) – an offshoot of Marxist critical theory – which states that “the [American] system must be made unequal in order to compensate for the innate racism of the white majority,” writes Ben Shapiro.  And don’t argue about it, either.  Many BLT and CRT adherents will aver that white people are blind to their inherent bigotry and that “white privilege” renders them oblivious to their “undeserved” benefits.  So, you see, only non-whites can grasp their dysfunction.

To make matters worse, in the way that Islam is on the march as radicalism imbues ever more mosques, black grievance only worsens, ironically, as we move further from the antebellum period.  Why?  Well, just as 18^th-century Muslims knew nothing of the Crusades (which were a response to Islamic aggression) until taught about them in 19^th-century English and French colonial schools, the teaching of black children is not what it was back when the three Rs weren’t racism, radicalism and revenge.  Note that BLT was only originated in 1966 and CRT in the late 1970s.

And this again speaks to the intractability of black grievance.  “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree,” the saying goes; it’s hard to overcome what is instilled during formative years.  And anger has its appeal.  As a black woman caller emphatically stated on a radio talk show I listened to some years ago, “My hate keeps me going!”  Yes, passion is energizing and can be born of hate as well as love.  And in keeping with Ben Franklin’s saying, “You cannot reason a man out of a position he has not reasoned himself into,” problems of misguided emotion cannot be remedied with intellectual appeals.  Whatever whites are or are not, it won’t be perceived clearly until the colored glasses come off.

And how are they removed?  Whether you’re black, white, a Palestinian or that hypothetical wife, the answer is always the same: forgiveness.  When we forgive, the blinding anger dissipates and we finally see the object of our wrath clearly.  Then we often learn that he isn’t quite the monster we once imagined.

Unless this were to happen, we shouldn’t expect anything but what we have already witnessed: Attorney General Eric Holder’s refusal to prosecute the Philadelphia Black Panthers, Barack Obama’s stoking of racial anger, blacks’ assumption that every Trayvon Martin is an innocent victim, and increasing “retaliatory” attacks on whites by the children of BLT and CRT.  And we shouldn’t be naïve enough to think that pandering helps.  You’re not going to prove your good will to Jackson, Holder, Al Sharpton and their fellow travelers by offering handouts, government programs and quotas.  You won’t prove it by voting for a (half) black president, which – especially when he is a BLT Marxist radical – is seen just as license to extract more pounds of flesh.  You won’t soothe their savage breasts by taking it on the chin and then saying, “Thank you, sir; may I have another?”  For the Jeremiah Wrights of the world are much like the Independence Day alien who was asked by the American president, “What is it you want us to do?”

His answer: “die.”

Only, because BLT babies can’t yet access the firepower of Louis Farrakhan’s earth-orbiting mother ship, “which will reign down destruction on white America,” they’re not quite so forthcoming.

As for whites, if our concessions won’t help, what should we do?  Well, while we shouldn’t respond to hate with hate or think being on its receiving end absolves us of the obligation to act morally, we could be more forthcoming ourselves and let the Truth set us free.  And we can start by following Eric Holder’s words, as opposed to his deeds, and cease being cowards on race.  This would mean telling black Americans the truth: their problems lie not in their stars – white or otherwise – but in themselves.

The tragic event that led to this shocking admission occurred on March 28, as truck driver Nick Stokes and neighbor Johnathan Cooper were heading out of Birmingham hauling a portable cabin.  While rounding a curve, one of Stokes’ tires slipped and kicked up some gravel, which angered a black motorcycle-gang member who was in close proximity.  The gangster – part of the notorious “Outcasts of Alabama” – gave chase and tried to force Stokes to pull over to the side of the road.  Here’s what happened next, as reported by the Macon Beacon’s Scott Boyd, whose piece has been published online by J. Christian Adams:

The motorcyclist then sped up and pulled in front of Stokes [sic] F-250.  He stopped in the middle of the road and forced Stokes to stop.  He then jumped off his bike and came around to the passenger side and hit the rear passenger window with his fist but it didn’t break.  Stokes then made the quick decision to get out of there and pulled out around the parked motorcycle.

Stokes said he looked back in his rear-view as he pulled away and noticed the biker rolling in the highway.  “He either tried to jump in the back of the truck or onto the trailer and somehow slipped.”

Stokes said when he noticed the injured man flailing in the roadway he stopped, worried about leaving the scene of an accident.  Stokes said he was getting out of his truck to go check on [the biker] when a woman in a red Jeep pulled alongside and shouted a warning: “You better get out of here – they’ve got guns.”  That’s when Stokes looked back down the highway and [saw] some [of] the motorcycle gang – 30 or 40 bikes strong – headed his way.  “I jumped back in the truck and took off until I could find a busy intersection and that’s where I stopped.”

Stokes said he and Cooper were immediately surrounded by a gang of black bikers, all with black bandanas covering the bottom half of their faces.

The gang forced him out of the truck and commenced their revenge attack.  “After I saw the knife and then felt the stabbings I fell to the ground and played dead – I think that may have saved my life,” he said.

Stokes heard police sirens seconds later, as his friend, Cooper, had called 911 on his cellphone.  But despite the authorities having identified the injured gangster as Ladarrious Clay of Birmingham, none of the bikers were detained or even questioned, reports Boyd.  Shocking.

And the silence is deafening.  Boyd contacted the Birmingham News, only to be told that the incident wasn’t “newsworthy.”  In fact, if J. Christian Adams hadn’t published the story at PJ Media, we probably never would have heard about it.  The Macon Beacon is so small that it doesn’t even have a website.

As for the relevant law-enforcement agency, the Adamsville Police Department, its public affairs officer had not responded to Boyd’s inquiries as of his press time.  Yet it’s not as if they had no answers at all.  They told Stokes that there was nothing they could do, as it would be impossible to identify those who actually wielded the knives.  And then there was that more shocking admission, made to both Stokes and Boyd by the Adamsville police.

We “don’t mess with the Outcasts of Alabama.”

Wow.  Just wow.  These guys sound like Barney Fife – without the guts.

We’re used to hearing stories about law enforcement being intimidated by organized crime – in places such as Colombia and Mexico.  But in the US?  This is yet another example of our descent into Third Worldism.

Stokes also reported the crime to the FBI, which has promised an investigation.  The question is, will the agency do anything more than just go through the motions?  I don’t know, but three things are for sure.  First, if this had been an attack by a white gang on a black victim, the national media would be all over the story.  Second, Eric Holder’s DOJ won’t be getting involved like it has in the Trayvon Martin case.  And, lastly, we can be sure that Barack Obama won’t get on his soapbox and accuse the Adamsville police of acting stupidly.

That judgment is in, and the time for waiting is over.

With the results of Maricopa County, AZ, sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “Cold Case Posse,” an incredible claim has become an incredible situation: a team of professional investigators, commissioned by a major law-enforcement agency, has determined that the alleged birth certificate produced by the president of the United States is a probable forgery.

Process that for a moment.  The regime of the world’s most powerful nation – a republic that prides itself on adherence to the rule of law – is likely peddling a forged document.  What say you, citizen?

Note that I didn’t claim the president isn’t natural-born.  Rather, I claim nothing, but am only stating a fact: there is now no denying that the birth-certificate matter warrants further investigation, and it is time for other law-enforcement agencies and the media to show due diligence.  And I will spell out the possibilities here:

1. The      Arizona investigators are correct.
2. They      are mistaken.
3. They      are lying.

For the record, I don’t believe the last for a moment, but I do want to cover all the bases.  And home plate is this: the answer may be number one or two, and it’s incumbent upon us to find out through further investigation.  And, for those who dislike Sheriff Arpaio, what if the answer is three?  Well, if a major law-enforcement agency is producing fraudulent evidence for the purposes of damaging a sitting president, wouldn’t that warrant investigation, too?  The undeniable, irrefutable fact here is that there is smoke.  And we need to find out who started the fire.

In response to these facts the left will sometimes mount an argument for why Obama is, in fact, natural-born.  But this issue is at the moment secondary.  And about it I will merely state that there are only two possibilities.  First, if the allegedly forged birth certificate relates to the president’s natural-born status, then it’s clear that the Obama administration is more concerned about that status than are his defenders.  And what if it doesn’t relate to whether the president is natural-born?

Then it relates to something else.

You don’t present a forged document for no reason.  The undeniable, irrefutable fact here is that there is smoke.  And we need to find out what is feeding the fire.

Remember, too, that document forgery is a crime.  If you were found benefiting yourself through it, you’d be prosecuted.  Should the president be held to a lower standard?

In point of fact, on the part of the media and citizenry, he must be held to a higher one.  We’re not talking here about some kid who forged an ID so he could drink at 18 in a bar.  This is the most powerful man in the world, who, it appears, may be passing off a forgery for some mysterious – or not so mysterious – purpose.  This mystery needs to be solved.

Having said this, I wrote “may” for a good reason.  There are those who believe, as writer Cindy Simpson put it, that “perhaps someone purposely tinkered with the birth certificate in order to make it look…suspicious.”  Harking back to my first paragraph, such an Alinskyite tactic would give the right just enough rope to hang itself, especially with our black-hooded media.  After all, the thinking goes, if this isn’t the case, why would the most powerful man in the world produce such a bush-league forgery?
Yet there is another, more mundane explanation.

Incompetence.

As I and others have noted, the slackers at the Obama White House are notorious for not even being able to issue press releases with proper spelling and grammar.  So would it be shocking that they might be more Inspector Clouseau than James Bond when trying to be the KGB?  Having said this, we should proceed with caution, being careful to not overstate our case.

But we should proceed.  After all, consider the consequences of allowing a high crime such as the one alleged here to go unanswered. If Obama is willing to fob off a forgery on the American people, what else is he capable of?  If he gets away with it, what else will he do?  Remember that in every case in history in which a leader amassed more power for himself by gradually undermining his nation’s democratic system, he had millions of enablers.  These were the crowds Cicero spoke of that cheered “ambitious scoundrel” Julius Caesar as he paved his way to dictator status.  These are the “good men” Edmund Burke referred to who do nothing in the face of evil.  Sometimes, of course, they’re simply scared.  Other times, they may not want to seem like a nutty Chicken Little saying the sky is falling.  Or they may not want to accept that it actually is, so they rationalize and dress the naked emperor with their eyes.  After all, when a problem is daunting or scary, the self-delusion that allows one to ignore it can be appealing.

Most people also don’t want conflict; they may fear a constitutional crisis.  But know that if Obama is peddling a forged document, it may simply be another example of how we already are in a constitutional crisis.  The only question now is whether we’re going to fight the fire or continue to fiddle while the Constitution burns.

This was not dialogue from a Hollywood movie.  According to a woman named Melissa Coon, it was what a teacher at East High School in Kansas City told her 13-year-old son, Allen, when he attempted to answer a question during Black History Month.  Coon identifies that teacher as Mrs. Karla Dorsey, who is black; Allen is white.

As has already been reported, Allen was a victim of a vicious racial attack last week in which two older black teens doused him with gasoline and set him alight, saying “This is what you deserve.  You get what you deserve, white boy.”  Not surprisingly, Coon has pulled her son out of East High and, concerned about further racial violence, intends to leave the K.C. area.

While this crime is making headlines, Coon states that it was merely the horrible culmination of continual racial harassment her son had to endure at East High.  Moreover, after conducting an investigation that included extensive interviews with parents and students, I’ve learned that Coon’s son is not alone.  Other white students also report a pattern of racial harassment at the high school at the hands of their peers – and, shockingly, their teachers.

Two of these victims were the twin 14-year-old daughters (first names withheld upon request) of Karin Wildeisen.  Ever since their family relocated from Texas they had endured racial animosity in the Kansas City school system and inappropriate behavior by staff, which included teachers laughing while boys humiliatingly manhandled the girls and a teacher slapping one of them on the backside.  But there was far worse to come.

The twins started coming home and talking about the goings-on in an advanced-English class taught by a teacher Wildeisen identifies as Ms. Veda Monday.  Wildeisen said that her daughters told her, “There are four white kids in the class; they are being targeted racially.”  They said that Monday, who is black, was feeding the class racial material, about which Wildeisen notes, “She’s teaching advanced English; she has no reason to be teaching civil rights.”

But then there was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  One day Monday allegedly showed an explicit film involving portrayals of whites lynching blacks and then, reports ex-Texan Wildeisen, “in front of the class attacked my daughters, telling them that ‘everybody from Texas is ignorant rednecks’” and that all white people were ‘responsible for Jasper because [their] skin is white.’”  This reference is to an atrocity in Jasper, TX, in which three white men murdered a black man in 1998.

Where would a teacher get the idea that all whites are responsible for the Jasper tragedy?  It’s not hard to figure out.  Black-liberation theology (BLT) instructs, writes the man some regard as its father, Professor James Cone, “All white men are responsible for white oppression.”  And how common is BLT?  Well, Cone’s books were required reading at Barack Obama’s long-time house of worship in Chicago, Trinity United Church of Christ.

The end result of this is that Wildeisen, like Melissa Coon, decided to pull her children out of East High.  Also like Coon, she intends to leave the area, saying that it and the school are a “powder keg.”  As for now, her daughters are studying at home via a distance-learning program.

Another white victim is 15-year-old Ashley Miller, whose family had moved to K.C., MO, from Kansas.  Subject to racial harassment, she was called names such as “white b****.”  She also actually shared a class with Allen Coon, and as the only two white students in the room they became the target of sexual comments.  Moreover, she reports the same experience with race-baiting videos as do the Wildeisens: they would be shown, and an onus would be placed on the white students.  Her mother Melissa told me that she now fears for her daughter’s safety and, you guessed it, is in the process of withdrawing Ashley from East High.  And the rest of the pattern is holding, too: the Millers are contemplating leaving the area.

Yet even putting the brutal fire attack aside, Melissa Coon’s young boy by far got the worst of it.  The tow-headed Allen looks like “the classic all-American white boy,” says his mother, and “after the first week [of school] he was nothing but racially harassed.”  She says that “he was called every racial slur you can imagine,” such as “honkey,” “cracker,” “whitey” and “guero” (a Spanish slang term for whites that can be used in a derogatory way).  He was, she reports, pushed into lockers and was jumped in the bathroom.  And, even before the recent attack, he was sometimes menaced by groups that would follow him part of the way home.

Even more damning, though, is that multiple educators were complicit in the harassment.  Mrs. Coon related an incident in which a teacher she identifies as Ms. Carla Kinder called Allen “Casper” and then “got all the students to get involved.”  Other times, the students would initiate the harassment and the teachers would pick up the baton.  “They would tease him; people would make fun of him and they’d chime in,” said Coon.

Then, as the Wildeisen girls report, as Ashley Miller reports, there were the race-baiting films.  Said Mrs. Coon, “They showed a lot of racial movies.  And people would make comments – lots of comments – especially at him [Allen], during these things.”

And this brings us to the fire attack of last week.  How is it that two teenagers would douse an innocent boy they don’t even know with gasoline and set him alight?  Karin Wildeisen has a theory.  Referring to Ms. Monday’s “English” class, she told me, “I think that the two boys who did this are going to be found in that teacher’s class – or somewhere thereabouts.”

It sure seems likely, and what should we say about East High’s “teaching” model?  Well, imagine repeatedly showing films depicting blacks committing nothing but crimes against whites.  Would there be any question about whether it was race-baiting?  Even Amos ‘n Andy is frowned upon today.

The fact is that, to paraphrase Lincoln, “If you look for the worst in a group, you’re sure to find it.”  If you display a group’s sins to the exclusion of its triumphs ad infinitum, you can make it appear a den of demons.  And, ever since the advent of video technology, propaganda films have been used the world over to cultivate racial and ethnic hostility.  It is Hate 101.

And Indifference 101seems to be a course offering at East High, too.  Melissa Coon had been complaining to the school’s administration about her son’s harassment repeatedly – only to be ignored and stonewalled – repeatedly.  At one point an administrator told her that her son could only have a transfer to another district school but said that Allen would have “more problems there” and that he should stay at more “racially diverse” East High (which has no more than 20 white students).  At another, a vice Principal Coon identifies as Ms. Jessica Bassett denied, while shaking and rubbing her hands together nervously, ever having heard about Allen’s problems even though they had been brought to her attention on at least five occasions.

And Coon’s experience with the local police hasn’t been much better.  Listening to her testimony I got the feeling that K.C. law enforcement didn’t want the arrest and prosecution of two black youths on a hate-crime charge, possibly for fear of the “powder keg.”  Perhaps this is a job for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.  Oh, yeah, Eric Holder.

As for young Allen, he had the presence of mind during the attack to pull his shirt up over his head and smother the flames.  The damage was thus limited to mostly first-degree burns, with his nose suffering second-degree and the possibility of scarring at the top of his lip.  Yet the emotional scars run far deeper, and he is in therapy.  “He has flashbacks,” says Mrs. Coon. “He was in a ball crying….  He said that no one believes him.”  And she states that her five-year-old will often ask, “Are they going to burn me today, mommy?”

On an East High staff page created by alumni, there is the Giovanni Ruffini quotation, “The teacher is like the candle, which lights others, while consuming itself.”  What a contrast between the words of the past and the deeds of the present.

And the good boys get condemned for not pretending the bad girls are good.

I am, of course, speaking about the dust up involving law student Sandra Fluke and talk-show host Rush Limbaugh. Fluke had said in front of Congress that financing rolls in the hay can be so expensive that it can be a burden on women in law school. So she wants you, dear taxpayer, to foot the bill for her contraception. In response to this, Limbaugh called her a “slut” during his commentary on the matter. And now he’s being labeled a “sexist” and misogynistic for it (he has since apologized).

Of course, in Fluke’s testimony, she didn’t literally say that she was having $1000-worth of sex a year. What she said was, “Without insurance coverage, contraception can cost a woman over $3000 during law school. For a lot of students who, like me, are on public interest scholarships, that’s practically an entire summer’s salary.” Now, I’ll leave it to you to determine her implication, but I’ll say that if a female law student is engaging in so much sexual congress that she’s spending a mint on birth-control, I wouldn’t reflexively assume she’s a slut.

Because I’d wonder how she was working her way through law school.

Really, though, if such a woman doesn’t deserve slut status, who does? Is the word now obsolete? Have we become like a Barbary-pirate nation where the term “thief” may be out of style because its use may offend the majority?

It really is a testimonial as to how we live in that prophesied time in which good is called bad and bad is called good. Undesirable behavior is kept to a minimum through stigmatization, and to this end we have always labeled such behavior and those who habitually engage in it with derogatory terms. Now, however, it is the virtuous who are stigmatized into silence.

As for Fluke, slut or not, she is certainly something else: a slick political operative and willing Democrat human prop. Contrary to earlier reports, which portrayed her as a starry-eyed 23-year-old being picked on by a big bad powerful white guy, Fluke is actually a 30-year-old former president of Georgetown Law Students for Reproductive Justice. In other words, she’s an experienced feminist activist – and I suspect she relishes the attention.

Her reasoning ability, however, makes one conclude that helping her become a lawyer may not exactly be in the “public interest.” She said that in criticizing her, Limbaugh was trying to stifle free speech, when he was just exercising his. When commenting on Georgetown’s unwillingness to pay for her contraception, she said, “[C]onservative Catholic organizations have been asking: what did we expect when we enrolled at a Catholic school? We can only answer that we expected women to be treated equally….” Interesting.

Am I to understand that Georgetown offers men free contraception?

She also said in her testimony, “Forty percent of female students at Georgetown Law report struggling financially as a result of this policy [no free birth-control]. One told us of how embarrassed and powerless she felt when she was standing at the pharmacy counter, learning for the first time that contraception wasn’t covered, and had to walk away because she couldn’t afford it. Women like her have no choice but to go without contraception.” Wow, and I thought it heart-wrenching hearing about South Americans living on garbage dumps or African child soldiers forced to shoot their mothers. But a female law student being left to finance her own decadent romps? I’ve now lost all faith in humanity.

But you did hit all the notes there, Miss Fluke. “Embarrassed,” “powerless,” “choice,” and lions and tigers and bears, oh boy! Hey, I feel embarrassed and powerless when I have to walk away from the boat show unable to buy a yacht and have no choice but to go without racing in the regatta.

This is more than just a wise-guy quip. Remember that copulation among unmarried people that requires birth control used to be called fornication; now they call it recreational sex. But it’s called “recreational” for a reason.

It’s done for recreation.

So the question is, why should taxpayers be forced to fund someone’s salacious conception of recreation? Hey, pay for my golf, too, okay? That can be expensive also.

With this added perspective, we should ask what someone’s advice to me would be if I said I couldn’t afford my golf. Would he recommend that I lobby Congress for a subsidy? Or might he mention that hitting the links isn’t exactly a survival need?

The problem is that the left has become so libertine that they treat sex as if it’s not only a survival need but a constitutional right. But their eye altering does alter all, and their askew conception of rights – and rights and wrongs – should be contracepted. In their way of thinking, calling a woman of easy virtue a slut is out of bounds, but calling a man who dares say the entitlement empress too often has no clothes a “sexist” is fine. They consider offering men and women equal benefits to be inequality if it doesn’t satisfy feminist desires. And in their way of thinking it’s not a violation of rights to force a private entity to pay for someone else’s birth-control at the end of a gun, but it is a violation of rights if someone doesn’t pay for your contraception for you.

Meanwhile, oh-so chivalrous Barack Obama placed a phone call to feminist Fluke to offer his support – and increase his among the fairer sex. I guess he’s that certain type of man who uses loose women for personal gain.

In an American Thinker piece titled, “Contraception, the New Useful Passion,” Horrocks does make some good points about how the left could turn the birth-control issue to its advantage and expand contraception to include even abortion.  Yet she also makes this claim:

“As a woman, I am qualified to state the following very clearly: there is no issue less suited to public discussion than abortion.  Like it or not, it is a personal decision.”

Actually, the above proves that, her chromosome configuration notwithstanding, Horrocks is thoroughly unqualified to comment on abortion.  And, as someone who has pondered the matter deeply and sought Truth, I am qualified to state the following very clearly: like it or not, abortion is a decision to murder another person.  Like it or not, it is for this reason a grave evil, a serious moral issue.  And, like it or not, since it is an action that directly harms another, no issue is more suited to public discussion than abortion.

Wherever one stands on the matter, however, there is more wrong with Horrocks’ statement than just the implicit misunderstanding about abortion’s nature, as bad as that is.  First, the idea that only a certain group defined by race, sex or ethnicity is qualified to comment on a moral issue has never been a conservative argument.

Rather, it is right out of the left’s playbook.

And, when taking this position, we are in league with those who state that only blacks are qualified to comment on racial discrimination in the U.S.  If we accept this position, we may as well accept that we Americans aren’t fit to comment on human-rights abuses in China because we’re not Chinese or on female genital mutilation in the Islamic world because we’re not Muslim.  We don’t understand the cultures, you see, so we should reserve judgment.  And sexual relativism is just as ridiculous as this cultural relativism, as both overlook a certain universal.

That is to say, just as there is no such thing as “personal” morality, neither is there such thing as the group variety.  To say otherwise is to wax relativistic – as the left will – and implies that morality doesn’t really exist; only personal preference does.  Morality, however, if it is anything but a confusing synonym for taste, refers to an absolute, universal and eternal standard for behavior that transcends not only individuals and groups, but man himself.

In point of fact, the only truly personal issues are those of taste.  This is because while morality originates outside of me and thus cannot truly be mine, my tastes actually are my own.  Thus, if Horrocks were to say that she loves vanilla but hates chocolate, it is a matter of preference, and it would be ridiculous for me to cast her palate as “wrong” and my love of chocolate as “right.”  There is no eternal truth stating, “Thou shalt not abide vanilla in thy midst,” and I’d be completely out of line if I mobilized for the flavor’s prohibition.

Being a universal, however, morality is far different.  To be good, to live a happy life and to derive meaning from it, morality is necessary – for everyone.  Being objective, it can be grasped by everyone.  And because man does not live on bread alone – and because the Truth does set him free – we all have a duty to search for, accept and profess morality.  It is not a flavor of the man or moment.

This is why, mind you, it’s silly when leftists (and some conservatives, it appears) dismiss unwelcome truths with the dodge, “Those are your ‘values,’” as if we’re talking about choosing a topping for a sundae.  If my “values” are correct, then they are not just values but virtues, and then, while I recognize their validity, they aren’t exclusively “mine” any more than the air God gave us to breathe.

Now, I’m not fond of throwing around the words “offensive” and “discriminatory” haphazardly as the left does.  But given that morality is needed by and meant for all of us, if anything is offensive and invidiously discriminatory, it’s the notion that I have no right to passionately express the truth on a moral issue because I’m of a certain race, ethnicity or sex.  I am a child of God, endowed by the Creator with an intellect designed to apprehend His law and with a divine mandate to do so.  Morality is a gift to which we all have a duty.  And to accept the proposition that racial, ethnic or sexual group identification disqualifies a person from professing it on a given issue is no different than claiming that this identification has a bearing on the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Of course, there can be a Machiavellian motivation for claiming that certain groups mustn’t say certain things: to grease the skids for an agenda by silencing opposition.  And while I don’t accuse Horrocks of this, it is a ploy of the left.  Note that liberals never claim that firearms owners, as the main group affected by gun-control law, are the only ones who should weigh in on it.  The left might now say that I’m ignoring here the victims of gun crime, but it seems there are some victims of abortion who are being ignored as well.  Anyway, the point is that just as many leftists seem to believe that life begins when a child can be taught liberalism, they also seem to believe that freedom of speech begins when you start peddling it.

Now I’ll for a moment discuss abortion, men and the micro.  We should note that a man is involved in procreation, and half of an unborn baby’s genes come from his father.  Moreover, many accept that the father has zero percent say on whether or not his child will be murdered; however, even more accept that, should the woman decide to have the baby, the man is 50 percent responsible for him.  But this is unjust, as with authority comes responsibility; and with responsibility, authority.

As for the macro, implicit in Horrocks’ commentary is something common today: the idea that social issues must be put on the back burner in the name of political expediency.  Now, I do accept that in the midst of a campaign and with politics being “the art of the possible,” it’s often wise to focus on what resonates with the people.  I also understand that the best way to reorient public opinion toward morality is through culture-shaping institutions in the media, entertainment arena and academia (call it a reverse Gramsci).  The problem, though, is twofold: traditionalists don’t have control over those institutions.  Second, there are many today – and some are “conservatives” – who behave as if there is never a time to talk about social issues.

These people simply don’t see the obvious connection between the ills they complain about and society’s moral state.  But there is a reason why Edmund Burke said, “It is written in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free.  Their passions forge their fetters.”  There is a reason John Adams wrote, “Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private [virtue]…,” and Ben Franklin observed, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.  As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”  And there is a reason why a multitude of other brilliant thinkers expressed the same sentiment throughout the ages.  Do you really think these men among men just needed a bunch of moderns to come along, shower their sagacity with shades of gray and set them straight?  Do you really suppose that the problems of crony “capitalism,” the most corrupt government in our history and the thoroughly immoral crypto-Marxist in the White House have nothing to do with the morality of the electorate?  Can we be one kind of people but have another kind of government?

As that apocryphal observation goes, “America is great because America is good, and if she ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”  No, it does not profit a nation to gain the world but to lose its soul.  And it won’t happen, anyway.  Because as our soul withers, along with it so does our world.

Like it or not.