Sci fi author John C. Wright talks about what happened when he decided not to go along with the sexual revolution no more...

The other day I wrote a thing for Lifesite about the cost of conversion, even conversion from sexual libertinism to sexual continence, that often involves alienation from family and friends and can end or drastically alter career paths...

I was 41 years old when I heard an argument that convinced me to no longer to support the pro-homosexual position. Logic forced me, very much against my inclinations, to adopt the pro-chastity position. I was not a Christian at the time, nor was I destined to become a Christian for quite some time. But I had mightily offended Christianity’s main rival religion in America, which is a death cult called Secular Progressivism. And Progressivism is a jealous God. A pro-chastity atheist is not welcome there.

...
I told one amateur reporter from one amateur school newspaper about my conversion, and in a moment every webpage that mentioned my name now was aflame with hatred and contumely because I was a humble, meek, and mild follower of Christ, and I had vowed no longer to hurt or hate my enemies, but to love them.

This is one of the opening-day offerings from my old bloggie buddy Steve Skojec's new project, 1 Peter 5.

Go. Read. You won't be sorry.



~

Why I don't work on the front lines

Some people have the ability to stand in front of an abortion facility and pray and talk to people in a regular, normal tone of voice.

I don't.

Years ago, when I was working in the TO office of CLC, I got a call from a guy from Honduras who was asking for legal help to rescue his girlfriend and unborn child. They had come up to Canada together and he had lost his illegal job and couldn't find another. She was offered a bed in a womyn's shelter, supposedly as a temporary thing. He was allowed to visit her until it was discovered that she was pregnant. At that point, he was refused entry and she had her "phone privileges" revoked.

He had found out that the thugs in charge had brought in a government social worker who told the girlfriend that if she didn't have an abortion she would be arrested and deported as an illegal. It was a lie, but how was she to know? He had tried several times to see her, even waiting around on the sidewalk and trying to talk to her through a window. The womyn in the place literally dragged her away from the window.

She had been effectively imprisoned, without charge or due process, by the warm and welcoming Canadian liberal/feminist social safety net.

He called us in desperation, with a few days left before the appointment, to ask what his legal recourse was. His English wasn't great and it took me about five tries to explain to him that he had absolutely no rights at all, and that if he tried to intervene, he'd find himself in jail. One of the most horrifying and painful conversations I've ever had. I had to go home after and go to bed.

The next day, as I was sitting on the subway on the way to the office, I wanted to start screaming, "Do you people know what's going on?!"

It was not long after that I started working from home for LifeSite. Being that close to the action was too much for me.

It's what's coming in Ireland when the Fine Gael bill passes. Right now, this is still possible. But when it passes, all the parents or boyfriend (or pimp) have to do is find a pro-abort social worker, or a pro-abort shrink willing to sign the pre-approved forms. And it won't be long before this little formality is also cleared out of the way.

UK abortion clinics routinely violate law, forge abortion documents: government investigation

And no one wants to know about it.

Gov. drags its feet for almost 18 months over investigating docs who pre-signed abortion forms

Mostly because it's out of sight. As long as the public is still shielded from the reality, as long as the pro-lifers are more interested in sparing people's widdle feewings, no one is ever going to know what's going on.

Man in forced abortion threat case grateful to pro-life group SPUC

~

Meet the next generation

Anti-choicers are nothing more than a bunch of bitter, angry old white guys...




oh wait.


Alissa Golob, Sharon-Rose Milan, Stephanie Gray and Lia Mills.


And my old buddy, Jojo Ruba


There! There's an old-ish white guy. He might be angry...you never know.

Here, you can go learn how to make the case, and become a cranky old white guy like us.



~

At first I looked at this video and thought, "Yeah, a bunch of guys marching for unrestricted abortion...gee, look out for your own interests much boys?"

Then I looked again and saw that actually there were women present.

It was just hard to tell at a glance...



~

Ah, it's that time of year again!

Ever wonder about the modern world's total inability to think clearly? Ever wonder why five manifestly self-contradictory slogans were effective in convincing the majority of people in western democracies that it's a good idea to legalise infanticide? Ever wonder why we now think it's the ultimate act of love to kill our closest friends and relatives?

Ever read any of my posts about the Logical Principle of Non-Contradiction?

OK, I can see we have some new people here.

A little while ago, a friend on facebook approvingly posted a link to a liberal US talking head who was saying how dreadful it is that "gays" are precluded from giving blood. It's DISCRIMINATION I tell you!!! Because in the cloudy pink-tinged intellectual netherland of Homophilia there is absolutely no problem involved in the "gay lifestyle" that is not created by homophobia.

The desire felt by a man for another man is indicative of absolutely no psycho-social distortion of any sort. And their activities have absolutely no medical consequences whatever. Pay no attention to those websites behind the curtain!

There is no such thing as the Logical Principle of Non-Contradiction either! And there are absolutely no absolutes!

Gay men are just nice artistically-inclined chaps in turtlenecks who are funny, friendly and ironic, and who are inexplicably hated and persecuted by Catholics and people who watch Fox. They are, to a man, as respectable and salt-of-the-earth as Ward and June Cleaver. Picket fence! Apple pie!

Nothing to see here...

Move along...

I see that Kathy has been using her brain in an unauthorized manner again:

As Gay Pride revs up yet again, thoughtful people are asked to swallow, as it were, the same tiresome and illogical worldview held by so many professional homosexuals.

Somehow, they manage to believe and promote the following contradictory "facts" at the same time:

* Gays are marginalized victims who live in the shadows -- with their very own corporately sponsored parades and festivals that shut down major cities once a year.

* These pride parades have been going on for twenty years -- BUT gays still claim to be as misunderstood, hated and persecuted as they were before Stonewall. Are these parades therefore ineffective? If so, what purpose do they serve?

* There is a "gay gene" -- BUT "everyone is really bisexual" and "sexuality is fluid" -- BUT despite said "fluidity", gays cannot and do not "recruit" or "groom" straight young people, ever.

* All the great people who ever lived were "secretly gay", like Shakespeare. No bad people like Hitler were "secretly gay" -- unless the pent up pain caused by their "secret gayness" was what really made them crazy murderers!

* Religious "gay to straight" treatments are considered a sinister, existential threat to gay culture -- AND can't possibly "work." Anyone who turns "straight" after therapy was never "really" gay anyhow, even though sexuality is fluid etc. The half dozen "gay people" I've known in my life who later "turned" straight (none of whom underwent treatment of any kind, but just... grew up) were also "not really gay" during the years they were having sex with same sex partners, coming out to their parents with mixed reactions, marching in the Pride Parade, taking "queer studies" and so forth. They were just "going through a phase" -- even though a perennially popular queer t-shirt proclaims "It's Not Just a Phase!"

* Gays commit suicide at high rates because everybody is persecuting them. Yet Lithuanians have the world's highest suicide rate despite total non-existence of "Lithuan-ophobia." Russians also have a high suicide rate. Can we somehow blame "residual Cold War hatred"? Discuss.

Blacks, Jews and women experience what leftists would describe as persecution, yet don't have comparable suicide rates.

Only gays practically brag about their alleged suicide rates. (Are they neurotically and pathologically prone to romanticizing self-destructive behaviors? If so, why?)

* Gay activists claim domestic violence is no more common in gay relationships than in straight ones. If self-loathing caused by "homophobia" makes gays beat each other up, then what causes straight domestic violence again...?

* Movies like All About Eve and Johnny Guitar, which feature no gay characters, are all "really" about gays. However, overwhelming evidence of actual gay behaviour in real life (such as the sexual abuse of teenaged boys by Catholic priests and Buddhist monks) is NOT gay, even a little tiny bit.

* Does a movement based upon junk science, urban legends, romanticized non-history, a few sappy Hollywood films (in which, for some disturbing and mysterious reason, the gay characters all die, sometimes horribly...) and an (un)healthy dash of narcissism and neurosis really deserve so much respect?

There's just no pleasing some people

"You pro-lifers are just a bunch of hypocrites! All you care about is imposing your evil will on women. You only care about foetuses. Well, what about the women? I don't see you helping out women who are too poor to care for another child... huh? What about them apples, hey?"

Well, actually...

"Sr Roseanne says that when pregnant women are living in poverty we should be working to get rid of the poverty, not the baby."

"All you people care about is using poor women to further your hateful conservative political agenda."

Cinzia Sasso, a feminist writer in Milan, said that the move was propaganda, and the sum set aside was risible because it would allow only just over 1,000 women to avoid abortions."

...sssso, you'd prefer we didn't offer any help to poor women then?

I'm confused.

Where did I leave that Secret Lefty Decoder Ring?


~

...then you're a racist

Oh, I love these things.

Another "If you ______, then you're a racist" list.

See:

If you're against socialized medicine, it's really because our president — who's for it — is black. If you're against the redistribution of wealth, it's because Obama is black. If you believe global warming dogma is hypothetical hooey, that belief is now racist, since Obama buys into climate change hysteria. So everything you believe in, is now proof you're a bigot.

and if I had been thinking about it more (and been cleverer) I might have said something like...

In fact, most of the racism that hits the black community comes from the left, whether it is slavery backed by Southern Democrats, lynchings by friends of Democratic Senator Robert Byrd, or the soft racism of low expectations that comes from affirmative action. Welfare is a bigger form of racism than anything that comes from the so-called racist right.

Yep.

This reminds me of something I was thinking about on Friday.

I have seen a lot of Christians, and pro-lifers and people like that often become horrified or embarrassed at the suggestion by our enemies that we are "all a bunch of rightwingers" or squirm when we are accused of being "racist!" for opposing Islam or "anti-choice" when we say abortion is bad or whatever it happens to be this week.

I have seen them desperately backpedalling away in response to these "accusations". "No no!" they squeak in a panic, "I'm really nice, just like you...really!".

More, lately they've been trying to get in on the game. They talk about "growing Christianophobia" and do a lot of blithering about "equal rights", and "freedom of religious expression" and do silly things like launch Canadian Human Rights Commission complaints. They think they can play the game too, and "use the system against them".

This, I suppose, is a result of the error of so many Christians in buying into the world's democratic tosh. They think that there is only one good system and that it is being corrupted by bad people, but that the idea of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité was a great one, if only we can get it, somehow, on the right track.

I've seen them get so flustered at the idea of being thought "nasty" or "right wing" or "racist!" that they hastily start repudiating their beliefs. Stockholm Syndrome.

And it's not new. The embarrassing thing is that now we are squeaking and skipping away from our convictions and the worst that is being threatened is getting called a nasty name on a blog. And nary a red-hot poker in sight.

The error, however, is something that few of them suspect: they have forgotten that Christianity, including its political implications, is True.

The things that oppose it are false and wicked. We're right, and they're wrong.

...Say it with me now. Come on, don't be afraid...

We don't need "equality" with falsehood or wickedness. We just need to denounce it from the perspective of simply being right.

We don't need to start with any kind of weasel-principle of "equality" or "rights" that assumes there is no right answer to that whole "Who do you say that I am" question.

The world says something patently idiotic like, "All truths are equally valid, therefore everyone has an equal right to be wrong, so you people aren't allowed to say you're right," and the poor befogged, fuzzbrained postmodern Christians seem to think that the only thing they're allowed to do is nod dumbly and pass another biscuit at the interfaith dialogue conference.

I got the following email from a nice lady in the US who is on our side, but seems not to have learned this simple lesson: we are right, and the people who oppose us are wrong.

Hello,

I am hoping you will be able to either answer this question or point me in a direction to find the answer. The other day a feminist, whom I work with, made a dismissive statement that the pro-life movement is all right wing Christians.

I told her I didn't think that was true, but was really not able to define my answer with any fact! Is there any information as to the demographics of the pro-life community? If you could give me some sources of information, I would really appreciate it.

I would like to be able to state with some conviction the diversity of this community by backing up my statement with some facts! Has there ever been a survey done?

"Diversity"? Is that really what's worrying you?

I responded, essentially, "You need to look your coworker dead in the eye and say, 'You say that like it's a bad thing'."

Steyn Funny

I mean, Canada surely doesn’t need one more delicate flower shrieking “Racism!” at every affront to the multiculti pieties. That hypersensitivity is what’s helped deliver more and more of the European vote to “fringe” parties. You want to talk about immigration? Whoa, racist! Crime? Racist! Welfare? Racist! Islam? Racistracistdoubleracist!!! Nya-nya, can’t hear you with my two anti-racist thumbs in my ears!

That's RACIST!!!

Apparently the only motive anyone could have had for objecting to Obama's appearance at Notre Dame was "racism".

The relative dearth of black Catholic leadership in the Church at the time the pastoral was issued was due to “subtle racism,” he charged.

Since that time tremendous strides have been made, and he cited the election of Barack Obama as president as an example.

“Most of us probably believed that would never happen in our lifetimes,” he said. “To say the world has not changed is to dishonor all of those who fought the battles for us.”

Some racism still exists, he said, and cited the recent furor in Catholic circles over the honorary degree awarded by Notre Dame University to Obama, who supports abortion on demand.

Other presidents have had disagreements with the positions of the Catholic Church, for example, in war policies and capital punishment, but have received honorary degrees without similar objection, he noted.

My first reaction to seeing the pic, being an evil racist myself, was "Oh, I now I get it."

Diogenes still cracks me up:

If only racism can explain public opposition to the Obama appearance at Notre Dame, then Bishop Steib has more than 80 racist colleagues. Shouldn't he denounce them? And probably he shouldn't accept invitations to speak in an archdiocese whose leader, Cardinal Justin Rigali, referred to the Obama invitation as "most unfortunate."

Now that's reasoned debate

Miss California a "dumb b**ch".

I have had the impression for some time that gallantry and good manners are generally heterosexual traits.

The Anti-Choice Project

I hope they're horrible hateful Rightwing anti-woman homophobic puppy-kickers like me.

The Anti-Choice Project (ACP) is an anti-abortion organization, which exists to expose the ugly face of "choice," primarily through the use of pictures. We believe that one picture of an aborted baby is worth 1000 pro-life arguments, as it reveals the unfiltered horror that abortion is an act of violence which kills a baby.

Just glancing at the comments on their "about us" page, I can't help but think again that it is very difficult to tell whether this:

What about rape? Incest? Women who have abused drugs during the beginning of their pregnancy? What about the risk of giving birth to the baby harming the mother?
I hope you realize that you're working this angle in a largely liberal community, and you're not going to get far.
If you're so against abortion, don't have one. BUT LEAVE THE CHOICE FOR THE REST OF US!
And get off the corner of my college. You're photos are scaring the children walking by.

is really a comment from a pro-death person, or whether it was written as a parody of the kind of chanting you hear when you're on patrol in the pro-life movement.

Slap a few bullet points onto this list and it could be used as a training exercise for pro-life 101.

When I first started taking the pro-life apologetics training, Scott told us that there are really only five abortion slogans. Five? Is that it? You've got to be exaggerating. They can't have based an entire culture of legalised murder on five pathetic slogans.

But yep. They can and did. In ten years now, I've never heard anything but the same five. It's as if they've all got a string with a plastic ring on it between their shoulder blades.

Kathy Shaidle is still a racist

It looks as if someone seriously needs to get a life.

Bro! There's a whole world waiting for you out there outside your parents' basement...Girls to kiss, jobs to get...

If you ____, then you're a racist,

and an eeeeeevil, BNP-supporting fascist too.

At a more profound and altogether more explosive level, however, is the fact that all three parties not only refuse to address the issues that concern the public most deeply and emotionally, but also demonise those who express such anxieties as racists or fascists.

In particular, they have colluded in a refusal to acknowledge that nationalism - or attachment to one's own country and its values - is a perfectly respectable, even admirable, sentiment.

Instead, anyone who maintains that British culture and identity are rooted in the history, language, literature, religion and laws of this country - and must be defended as such against erosion, undermining or outright attack - is vilified as a racist or xenophobe.

This effectively presents such people with a choice - between being demonised as racists and standing silently by as their culture evaporates.

Yep. That about summs it up.

Why Kathy is still my favourite blogger

Mostly because she saves me the trouble of doing all that tedious typing.

How many arguments have I had on the web...with idiots who -- after I've made a matter of fact, everybody-knows statement about the importance of preachers/barbershops/grandmothers/basketball/hair in Black culture, for instance -- leap at the opportunity to engage in some moral exhibitionism:

"Do you have proof to back up that racist statement? Any studies? Any statistics??"

Of course not, you dickhead.

Unlike you, I didn't waste the last good years of my life being brainwashed in academia; I lived with and worked with and talked with actual, normal human beings (professors definitely don't count) and that's how I formed my knowledge of how the world really works. Through the evidence of my senses and my own personal experiences.

I do not rely upon junk science or faux history or Marxist theory.

And also because liking her, and linking to her regularly, just seems to annoy my enemies so very, v e r y much.

What's the point of backpacking around the world if you can't admit to yourself, let alone your friends, family and strangers on the web when you finish, that different people in different countries are different? Wasn't that kind of the point? Actually no: today the point of aimless bourgeious gap year wandering is to a) try different kinds of booze, b) sleep around and c) reaffirm in spite of all evidence to the contrary everything you've already been taught your whole life: that "deep down, we're all the same..."

(How much energy do these people expel trying desperately not to notice, for example, in general, that Asians and natives can't handle their booze as well as Caucasians and Blacks? If you just accept this stuff, life is so much easier and less stressful. But then I supposed lots of useless stressing over trivial provides Leftists with the semi-satisfying sensation that they're engaged in something resembling work

Just Comuppance

Heh.

Frankly, the British police have become so corrupted by the left, they've only themselves to thank.

Falling down on the job

Haven't done any Islamophobe racist stuff in ages.

Aaages.

And we know how I hate to disappoint my fans.

Civilisation-phobia

"...No shortage of politicians, however, lining up to accuse the film of falsely equating Islam with violence. Which is a bit like falsely equating Walt Disney with Mickey Mouse...Islam without violence is like an egg-free omelette. The religion is predicated on violence and the threat of violence. It's a religion of peace in the same way that North Korea is a people's democratic republic. But we're not allowed to say that, because if we do, we'll be threatened with violence."

How to tell if you suffer from Islamism:
Symptoms iclude
eleutherophobia: fear of freedom
epistomophobia: fear of knowledge
catagelophobia: fear of being ridiculed

In general a morbid aversion to growing up, dealing with reality and a pathological need to blame others for your own faults.

It certainly does not surprise me that the Islams and the "liberal left" have become such closely intertwined symbiotes. The psychology of whiney permanently offended adolescence is identical. The need to make the world conform to their ideas and a total inability to contemplate the possibility that they are in need of moral improvement.

The sexual deviancy is the same too. Never met a bigger bunch of sexual perverts than the social and moral activists on the left, except perhaps among frustrated adolescent boys. But I've never been to a mosque.


Bombturban quote of the week:

“Your Lord inspired the angels with the message: ‘I am with you. Give firmness to the Believers. I will terrorize the unbelievers. Therefore smite them on their necks and every joint and incapacitate them. Strike off their heads and cut off each of their fingers and toes.’“ (Koran 8:12)

Now there's a god I'd be keen to worship.

(Don't worry Anastasia, when the time comes, I'm sure your new overlords will be happy to let you shoot me.)

Thoughtcrime of the Day: Culturally speaking, "Asians" are whiney, spoiled, manipulative, perpetual teenagers

with chip on their shoulders the size of Surrey.

Ten years ago, on Feb. 9. 1998, Chopra was in the audience when his incoming boss, one André Lachance, introduced himself to colleagues with the declaration that — horror of horrors — “he liked visible minorities.”

Chopra declared this to be “a racist remark,” and used it as Exhibit A in his ongoing human-rights nuisance suits.

So, saying you're not a racist means you're a racist. And I suppose pointing out the logical contradictions of the HRCs and their Complestants also makes you a racist. Does having the capacity for rational thought make you a racist, I wonder? Maybe wondering if the capacity for rational thought makes you a racist, makes you a racist.

I wonder: does the HRC think that if a woman says no, she really means yes too?

Apparently John Ralston Saul, Canuckistan's Philosopher King, thinks that thinking too much about racism makes you a racist:

John Ralston Saul argues that Canada is “a Métis civilization” that owes all it has (except for the nasty racist bits, of course) to “Aboriginal inspiration.”

The question of how, exactly, a bunch of warring, pre-literate aboriginal hunter-gatherer societies can claim credit for the creation of a modern, democratic, capitalist, industrial powerhouse built entirely in a European image is one that, alas, I must leave for others. That’s because I could not get past Saul’s ridiculous introduction, in which he claims, Deschamps-style, that white, liberal sympathy and guilt regarding the plight of Canada’s natives are merely manifestations of — you guessed it — racism.

Does thinking about people thinking too much about racism make John Raulston Saul a racist? Maybe wondering if John Raulston Saul is a racist makes me a racist. Oh right, I forgot. I'm already officially a racist.

My head hurts.

...

The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (HRT) adjudicator became the first jurist in recorded human history to convict someone of racial discrimination for praising visible minorities.

Let's give 'em a big hand.

Chopra was frustrated by a career stalled in middle management. He was particularly incensed when he was passed over for acting Division Chief — even though he went on to flunk a test that was a prerequisite for the post.

A Punjabi Hindu who’d emigrated to Canada in the 1960s, Chopra decided there was a racist conspiracy against him.

Yeah, "visible minorities" ("Asians" in BBCspeak) are like that. It's pretty much the reason no one likes them in the soap-loving countries where people are supposed to know how to behave and don't usually rely on the mutaween to help them prove how manly they are by bullying women and Christians.

I worked with a guy once who'd come over from some godforsakenhellhole and obviously thought it was a big come-down in life to work with his hands in a bakery...and with a bunch of women to boot. Particularly women who refused to do his work for him and thank him for the privilege.

I think what really got under his skin was the contempt we held him in. He insisted it was racism. We just thought he was a jackass who, at 50-odd, seemed to be stuck in a permanent state of whiney adolescence.

From his early years as a drug evaluator at Health Canada, he rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Colleagues complained he was authoritarian and confrontational — not the sort of scientist you wanted running a department.

Oh, how well I remember.

Everyone applauded the day he stomped off the job in a huff shouting about how no one respected him.

During 37 days of HRT hearings over the last two years, he let loose with a slew of theories about why he’d been denied the job — some so unhinged that even the otherwise sympathetic Deschamps chastised Chopra for undermining his own credibility.

Yeah, that's the guy.

Well, it looks like that Mutaween is finally coming through for them in Canada:

But in the end, Deschamps still came down on Chopra’s side — awarding him $4,000 in damages, plus a few thousand extra in interest and extra wages.

Mr. Kay concludes:

Aside from being another advertisement for why we should be closing down Canada’s human-rights commissions, the episode nicely illustrates the absurd lengths to which our society’s elites will now go to demonize Whitey. Used to be that us white males had to actually say or do something racist to get put on the human-rights dock. That criterion has now been downgraded to “preferred, but negotiable.”

Found another one

This guy's probably evil. Probably an anti-choice, homophobic, racist and misogynist bigot.

Political Correctness Watch

Postmodernism is fundamentally frivolous. Postmodernists routinely condemn racism and intolerance as wrong but then say that there is no such thing as right and wrong. They are clearly not being serious. Either they do not really believe in moral nihilism or they believe that racism cannot be condemned!["Nnngggg! someone's thinking at me!! Make him stop!"]

Postmodernism is in fact just a tantrum. Post-Soviet reality in particular suits Leftists so badly that their response is to deny that reality exists. That they can be so dishonest, however, simply shows how psychopathic they are.

Juergen Habermas, a veteran leftist German philosopher stunned his admirers not long ago by proclaiming, "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."

Consider two "jokes" below:

Q. "Why are Leftists always standing up for blacks and homosexuals?

A. Because for all three groups their only God is their penis"

Pretty offensive, right? So consider this one:

Q. "Why are evangelical Christians like the Taliban?

A. They are both religious fundamentalists"

The latter "joke" is not a joke at all, of course. It is a comparison routinely touted by Leftists. Both "jokes" are greatly offensive and unfair to the parties targeted but one gets a pass without question while the other would bring great wrath on the head of anyone uttering it. Why? Because political correctness is in fact just Leftist bigotry. Bigotry is unfairly favouring one or more groups of people over others -- usually justified as "truth".

One of my more amusing memories is from the time when the Soviet Union still existed and I was teaching sociology in a major Australian university. On one memorable occasion, we had a representative of the Soviet Womens' organization visit us -- a stout and heavily made-up lady of mature years. When she was ushered into our conference room, she was greeted with something like adulation by the local Marxists. In question time after her talk, however, someone asked her how homosexuals were treated in the USSR. She replied: "We don't have any. That was before the revolution". The consternation and confusion that produced among my Leftist colleagues was hilarious to behold and still lives vividly in my memory. The more things change, the more they remain the same, however. In Sept. 2007 President Ahmadinejad told Columbia university that there are no homosexuals in Iran.