700 Retired Sp OPS Want Answers : Benghazi

Government

700 Retired Spec Ops Professionals to Congress: Form a Select Committee to Investigate Benghazi

Apr. 7, 2013 11:09pm Erica Ritz 

 

It has been more than six months since the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi that cost four Americans — including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens — their lives.  Yet, the picture is not much clearer than it was in the weeks after the tragedy.  It seems the government and the media have largely moved on.

But now, a staggering 700 retired Military Special Operations professionals have submitted a letter to Congress urging all members of the U.S. House of Representatives to support H.Res. 36, which would create a House Select Committee to investigate the deadly September 11 attack.

“It appears that many of the facts and details surrounding the terrorist attack which resulted in four American deaths and an undetermined number of American casualties have not yet been ascertained by previous hearings and inquiries,” the letter states.  “Additional information is now slowly surfacing in the media, which makes a comprehensive bipartisan inquiry an imperative.”

The letter proceeds to list roughly 20 questions the retired professionals believe “at a minimum” need to be addressed.  Many are so straightforward that, reading them back-to-back, it’s stunning we still don’t have the answers.  The questions include:

• Why was there no military response to the events in Benghazi?

• Were assets deployed to any location in preparation for a rescue or recovery attempt?

• What, if any, non-military assistance was provided during the attack?

• How many US personnel were injured in Benghazi?

• Why have the survivors of the attack not been questioned?

• Who was in the White House Situation Room (WHSR) during the entire 8-hour period of the attacks, and was a senior US military officer present?

• Who gave the order to “STAND DOWN” that was heard repeatedly during the attacks?

• Why did the Commander-in Chief and Secretary of State never once check in during the night to find out the status of the crisis situation in Benghazi?

• What was the nature of Ambassador Stevens’ business in Benghazi at the time of the attack?

The letter was organized by Lieutenant General William G. “Jerry” Boykin USA (Ret.) and the not-for-profit organization Special Operations Speaks (SOS).

“As a retired Special Operations officer who spent most of my thirty-six years preparing for and executing rescue missions to save fellow Americans, I am deeply troubled by the events in Benghazi on September 11, 2012,” Boykin told Breitbart News.  “The men and women who I served with lived by an ethos that pledged to never leave a fallen comrade and to make every effort to respond when a fellow American was threatened. I have seen men take great risks to save a fellow warrior. I have even seen men die trying to do so.”

He continued:

“The lack of accountability regarding the Benghazi event disturbs me greatly and bears the earmarks of a cover up. America is entitled to a full accounting of this egregious attack on our people with some explanation as to why there was no effort to save the Americans in the US Embassy annex and the CIA station, or at least to recover their bodies before they fell into Libyan hands. Our Congress has yet to fulfill its responsibility to provide a complete analysis of the attack or to provide answers as to what exactly happened. A  bi-partisan Special Committee is needed to determine the truth about Benghazi.”

Former Navy SEAL Captain Larry Bailey, one of the signatories, went even further in a statement to Breitbart.

“As veterans from all aspects of Special Operations, we have no doubt that there’s a lot more to what happened in Benghazi than President Obama and his Administration are letting on,” he wrote.  “From the very beginning, he has attempted to mislead and outright lied to the American people about why the attack on September 11th, 2012 happened, how it happened, and what our government did or did not do to save the lives of our patriots abroad.”

You can read the entire letter at Special Operation Speaks.  There is also a link to sign a similar petition urging Congress to take action on H.Res. 36.

Cyprus - Can It Happen Here?

The decision of the government in Cyprus to simply take money out of people's bank accounts there sent shock waves around the world. People far removed from that small island nation had to wonder: "Can this happen here?"

The economic repercussions of having people feel that their money is not safe in banks can be catastrophic. Banks are not just warehouses where money can be stored. They are crucial institutions for gathering individually modest amounts of money from millions of people and transferring that money to strangers whom those people would not directly entrust it to.

Multi-billion dollar corporations, whose economies of scale can bring down the prices of goods and services -- thereby raising our standard of living -- are seldom financed by a few billionaires.

Far more often they are financed by millions of people, who have neither the specific knowledge nor the economic expertise to risk their savings by investing directly in those enterprises. Banks are crucial intermediaries, which provide the financial expertise without which these transfers of money are too risky.

There are poor nations with rich natural resources, which are not developed because they lack either the sophisticated financial institutions necessary to make these key transfers of money or because their legal or political systems are too unreliable for people to put their money into these financial intermediaries.

Whether in Cyprus or in other countries, politicians tend to think in short run terms, if only because elections are held in the short run.

Therefore, there is always a temptation to do reckless and short-sighted things to get over some current problem, even if that creates far worse problems in the long run.

Seizing money that people put in the bank would be a classic example of such short-sighted policies.

After thousands of American banks failed during the Great Depression of the 1930s, there were people who would never put their money in a bank again, even after the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was created, to have the federal government guarantee individual bank accounts when the bank itself failed.

For years after the Great Depression, stories appeared in the press from time to time about some older person who died and was found to have substantial sums of money stored under a mattress or in some other hiding place, because they never trusted banks again.

After going back and forth, the government of Cyprus ultimately decided, under international pressure, to go ahead with its plan to raid people's bank accounts. But could similar policies be imposed in other countries, including the United States?

One of the big differences between the United States and Cyprus is that the U.S. government can simply print more money to get out of a financial crisis. But Cyprus cannot print more euros, which are controlled by international institutions.

Does that mean that Americans' money is safe in banks? Yes and no.

The U.S. government is very unlikely to just seize money wholesale from people's bank accounts, as is being done in Cyprus. But does that mean that your life savings are safe?

No. There are more sophisticated ways for governments to take what you have put aside for yourself and use it for whatever the politicians feel like using it for. If they do it slowly but steadily, they can take a big chunk of what you have sacrificed for years to save, before you are even aware, much less alarmed.

That is in fact already happening. When officials of the Federal Reserve System speak in vague and lofty terms about "quantitative easing," what they are talking about is creating more money out of thin air, as the Federal Reserve is authorized to do -- and has been doing in recent years, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a month.

When the federal government spends far beyond the tax revenues it has, it gets the extra money by selling bonds. The Federal Reserve has become the biggest buyer of these bonds, since it costs them nothing to create more money.

This new money buys just as much as the money you sacrificed to save for years. More money in circulation, without a corresponding increase in output, means rising prices. Although the numbers in your bank book may remain the same, part of the purchasing power of your money is transferred to the government. Is that really different from what Cyprus has done?

Term Limits

The main thing wrong with the term limits movement is the "s" at the end of the word "limit."

What are advocates of term limits trying to accomplish? If they are trying to keep government from being run by career politicians, whose top priority is getting themselves reelected, then term limits on given jobs fail to do that.

When someone reaches the limit of how long one can spend as a county supervisor, then it is just a question of finding another political office to run for, such as a member of the state legislature. And when the limit on terms there is reached, it is time to look around for another political job -- perhaps as a mayor or a member of Congress.

Instead of always making reelection in an existing political post the top priority, in the last term in a given office the top priority will be doing things that will make it easier to get elected or appointed to the next political post. But in no term is doing what is right for the people likely to be the top priority.

Those who favor term limits are right to try to stop the same old politicians from staying in the same old offices for decades. But having the same career politicians circulating around in the same set of offices, like musical chairs, is not very different.

In either case, we can expect the same short-sighted policies, looking no further than the next election, and the same cynical arts of deception and log-rolling to get reelected at all costs.

There are undoubtedly some high-minded people who go into politics to serve their community or the nation. But, in the corrupting atmosphere of politics, there are too many who "came to do good and stayed to do well" -- especially if they stayed too long.

Recently, California's Senator Dianne Feinstein gave a graphic demonstration of what can happen when you have been in office too long.

During a discussion of Senator Feinstein's proposed legislation on gun control, Texas' freshman Senator Ted Cruz quietly and politely asked "the senior Senator from California" whether she would treat the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment the same way her gun control bill was treating the Second Amendment, which guarantees the right to bear arms.

Senator Feinstein never addressed that question. Instead, she became testy and told Senator Cruz how long she had been in Congress and how much she knew. Watching her get up on her high horse to put him in his place, recalled the words of Cromwell to Members of Parliament: "You have sat too long for any good that you have been doing lately. ... In the name of God, go!"

Those who oppose term limits express fears of having government run by amateurs, rather than by people with long experience in politics. But this country was created by people who were not career politicians, but who put aside their own private careers to serve in office during a critical time.

When President George Washington was told by one of his advisors that an action he planned to take might prevent him from being reelected, he exploded in anger, telling his advisor that he didn't come here to get reelected.

As for the loss of experience and expertise if there were no career politicians, much -- if not most -- of that is experience and expertise in the arts of evasion, effrontery, deceit and chicanery. None of that serves the interest of the people.

If we want term limits to achieve their goals, we have to make the limit one term, with a long interval prescribed before the same person can hold any government office again. In short, we need to make political careers virtually impossible.

There are many patriotic Americans who would put aside their own private careers to serve in office, if the cost to them and their families were not ruinous, and if they had some realistic hope of advancing the interests of the country and its people without being obstructed by career politicians.

Is any of this likely today? No!

But neither the Reagan revolution nor the New Deal under FDR would have seemed likely three years before it happened. The whole point of presenting new ideas is to start a process that can make their realization possible in later years.

Thomas Sowell

Syria:Assad's Revenge (Buck Sexton)

TheBlaze TV  -  Buck Sexton
Syria: Assad’s Revenge 

Syria is far past the brink. The death toll, now estimated at seventy thousand, is routinely punctuated with suicide bombings that echo
the worst days of the Iraqi insurgency. Assad has responded with surface-to-surface missiles fired into densely populated Aleppo,
 Syria’s largest city. Despite rebel gains, Bashar al-Assad remains the primary driver of events on the ground, and all indicators point toward his ability and willingness to extract an increasingly terrible price from the opposition.

It did not have to be this way. We now know that President Obama quashed lethal aid to the Syrian resistance, and has deferred to chronically ineffective U.N efforts. With Obama’s reelection safely in hand, outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has only recently told the American people that Obama overruled the advice of the intelligence community and the Pentagon on sending the Syrian rebels weaponry.

With that data point, it is now clear that President Obama’s inaction on Syria has helped lead to a number of unintended consequences.

For one, the Jihadists are stronger than ever within the resistance, with fighters flocking to Syria from Rabat to Rawalpindi. Some say the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Levantine affiliate, comprises a quarter of the overall resistance.

Now many of the best-trained, most dedicated anti-Assad insurgents are these hardline Islamists, who have their own networks for transporting weapons and fighters to the front. Al Qaeda funding may not be what it was before 9/11, but there are still plenty of wealthy Gulf Arabs willing to support their favored factions in a struggle to the death against Alawites and their Shia helpers in Syria.

On the other side of the battle lines, Assad has outlasted many predictions for his demise, and Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia remain firmly affixed in his camp. If we were worried about Syria becoming an international proxy conflict, that ship sailed long ago. The U.S. has abstained while other countries have doubled-down.

Sadly for the Syrian people, the Obama administration has managed to conflate a cautious approach with a callous one, and chosen the path not just of least resistance, but least influence as well. For an administration that has made an art form of digital era poll watching and messaging, the lack of meaningful leadership in Syria could come with a catastrophic cost.

Of course President Obama could dramatically change course and take a much more proactive role in ending the Syrian disaster. Weapon shipments to elements of the resistance, passed through third party countries such as Turkey or Jordan, would certainly arrive better late than never.

Absent such a shift in policy, Syria in a post-Assad era increasingly looks like it will be a state akin to Pakistan on the Mediterranean: riddled with Al Qaeda factions, strongly anti-American on the street, and constantly raising fears of implosion. Even this would rely on many positive assumptions, including a relatively constrained endgame from Assad, limited Sunni sectarian reprisals against Alawites and Christians, and Kurdish willingness to play along with the new Syrian state.

The worst-case scenario involves a conflict that spills across borders into Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, or Lebanon, and sees vast stockpiles of chemical weapons fall into the wrong hands. And at this juncture in Syria, it remains difficult to determine just whose hands we could trust to hold them.

Which brings us back to the current conundrum: even if Assad is doomed, he may have already caused enough damage to leave behind a failed state. And it could get worse. Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign against the Kurds, including his use of chemical weapons at Halabja, is an ominous historical precedent. Saddam, too, was doomed in the long run, but not before a ferocious campaign of slaughter against his own people that still echoes in Iraq today.

Sadly, no matter what the U.S. does now, the tyrant of Damascus will have extracted a terrible price from the Syrian people. And whether he wins or loses, Assad will face his end buoyed by an insidious final hope that the Jihadists will only make things worse for Syria once he is gone.

Buck Sexton is a former CIA Officer assigned to the Counterterrorism Center and the Office of Iraq Analysis.

Your States Public Pension Problem is WORSE Than You Think

Your State’s Public Pension Problem Is Worse Than You Think
Apr. 2, 2013 11:18am

Casey Given is a policy analyst covering education and labor issues at the Americans For Prosperity Foundation.


Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Illinois with fraud for misrepresenting the fiscal health of its public pension system.  For years, the Midwestern state had been hoodwinking municipal bond investors into believing that it had been properly funding its public servants’ retirement plans when, in reality, the state has a long history of underfunding its pension liabilities. While such blatant pension fraud may be unique to the Land of Lincoln, deception unfortunately is not.
As American Enterprise Institute scholar Andrew G. Biggs explained in a 2010 report, states have been severely underestimating their unfunded liabilities—the difference between the promises made to future retirees and the money saved for these promises–for decades. Although no two pension systems are exactly alike, states typically assume an 8% return on the investments they make towards their employees’ benefits. However, they don’t always receive such a return, as the value of stocks, bonds, and real estate fluctuates year to year.
As Bigg’s explains through an example in his report:
[I]magine a pension that owes a lump-sum liability of $10 million to be paid fifteen years from now. If we discount that liability by the 8 percent return typically projected for pension assets, it has a present value of $3.15 million. A public pension would consider that liability fully funded if it held at least $3.15 million in assets. The practical problem is that those assets are risky while the liability is certain. A simple simulation of market returns shows that, even if we assume that the average long-term return is accurately predicted at 8 percent, volatility from year to year means that $3.15 million in assets today would have only around a 40 percent chance of reaching the goal of $10 million in fifteen years. The remaining 60 percent of the time the plan’s investments would fall short.

History shows this eight percent assumed return to be overly optimistic. Indeed, Biggs calculates the probability of a state being able to cover accrued benefit liabilities with current assets at only 16 percent. There is almost always a difference between what states owe to its retirees and what their assets can cover – and taxpayers are stuck with the bill. As such, it is imperative that states estimate their liability in a manner that more accurately accounts for market risk. After doing so, they can plan a proper funding schedule that eventually eliminates their liabilities and thereby avoid repeating Illinois’ mistake.
Today, the states estimate their unfunded liabilities to be $757 billion assuming this 8% return. However, a more accurate model favored by many economists like Biggs is the Black-Scholes fair market valuation formula that better accounts for risk in returns on investment—this is closer to how corporations value their debt obligations. Using this model, the state’s unfunded liability calculates to almost $3 trillion. This massive amount is almost five times more than the explicit debt that states owe, which was $607 billion as of last year.

Obama's War on Economic Growth

Obama’s War on Growth

Fred Barnes

April 15, 2013, Vol. 18, No. 29

When Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to President Obama, spoke at a Politico event last week, he was asked what would constitute success in 2013 for the White House. One of his answers was making headway to “rebalance our economy.” The goal, he said, is an economy that’s “not top down.”

Like their boss, Obama aides often speak in euphemisms. So here’s the translation: The Obama administration will continue to pursue redistribution of wealth and income, taking from the well-to-do and giving to the poor and middle class (at least to the lower middle class).

The president has his own way of touting redistribution. Whenever he uses the word “fair,” you can bet he’s really referring to redistribution. He talks of everyone getting a “fair shake” and a “fair shot.” In his State of the Union address in February, he insisted economic growth requires “everybody doing their fair share.” In his inaugural speech in January, he said a free market “only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.”

But Obama’s emphasis on redistribution and his policies to further it create a problem that he either doesn’t recognize or, as I suspect, chooses to ignore. He insists economic growth is his “top priority.” Redistribution, however, is not the friend of growth. It impedes growth.

The most effective tool in spurring growth is private investment. Obama may not like it, but major investors tend to be well off. They have money to invest. Rather than encourage them to invest in growth and jobs, Obama does the opposite. By raising their taxes and leaving a strong impression he’d like to raise them even more, he discourages investment.

In the fiscal cliff deal, Obama not only hiked the top rate on individual income, he increased the tax rates on two incentives to invest, capital gains and dividends. In addition, in Obamacare, he imposed a new tax specifically on investment income. In effect, Obama is waging a war on investment.

“He’s not a pro-saving, pro-wealth president,” says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “So he can’t be pro-growth.”

Obama says he’s eager for bipartisan tax reform. And if he favored the traditional method of overhauling the tax code, that would put him on the side of growth. But instead of wiping out tax preferences and loopholes to broaden the base and lower tax rates, Obama wants to get rid of special breaks as a way to jack up tax revenues. Incentives for growth? Forget it.

The president has also endorsed entitlement reform. And at the Politico gathering, Pfeiffer boasted about Obama’s endorsement of “chained-CPI.” It would recalculate the rate of inflation and slightly restrain annual cost-of-living adjustments in entitlements, notably Social Security. “That is on the table and waiting for someone to come to take it,” Pfeiffer said.

There’s a reason no one has jumped at the chance. Obama’s price is sure to be high. As part of a deal on entitlements, Republicans would have to accept still-higher taxes. We don’t have to guess from whom Obama would want those revenues to come. On top of that, Pfeiffer suggested the well off would be expected to pay higher premiums for Medicare.

That deal might be worthwhile if chained-CPI would affect entitlements significantly. It wouldn’t. Social Security and Medicare are projected to spend more than $18 trillion over the next decade. According to Holtz-Eakin, chained-CPI would trim that by $280 billion, which he calls no more than a “rounding error.”

Obama’s own ideas for promoting growth indicate he’s a slow learner. He’s bent on pursuing the same policies that have produced the slowest economic recovery since World War II. The recession ended in June 2009, yet the economy has struggled with GDP growth averaging around 2 percent (only 0.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012).

The result is scary, as John Cassidy outlined in Fortune. Since the recession began in 2008, the working population​—​those employed or looking for jobs​—​has increased by 12.2 million. But in five years, the number of jobs has grown by only 1.4 million. Indeed, participation in the labor force actually shrank from 66.2 percent of the civilian population in January 2008 to 63.5 percent in February 2013.

In the face of this, Obama is proposing to pour money into roads, bridges, and other infrastructure. “There are few more important things we can do to create jobs right now and strengthen our economy over the long haul than rebuilding the infrastructure that powers our businesses and our economy,” he said in Miami in March.

Sorry, but there are many more important things. The roads and bridges panacea has never led to robust growth. It didn’t when the president and Democrats made it part of the $800 billion “stimulus” in 2009 and it’s unlikely to do so now. But it does thrill a 

Democratic interest group, organized labor.

There’s one more part to Obama’s current plan to increase growth, a punitive one. He would eliminate tax breaks for companies that send jobs overseas. The White House says Obama wants to lower the tax rate for manufacturers here to 25 percent from 35 percent. Manufacturers shouldn’t hold their breath. He’s been advocating a corporate rate cut for years, but done little to enact it.

Meanwhile, spending on food stamps and disability payments has soared. And later this year, Obamacare is to arrive in full force. It is supposed to give families earning as much as $80,000 a year a subsidy to buy health insurance.

Obama has paid practically no political price for redistribution and slow growth. He still talks about fixing the economy as if no one should have expected anything better. The public hasn’t rebelled, and Republicans have failed to make growth a salient issue. It’s time they did.

Politically Correct - "Shut Your Mouth"

Liberals Want To Control Your Words—And Opinions

By MARK STEYN

He who controls the language shapes the debate: In the same week the Associated Press announced that it would no longer describe illegal immigrants as "illegal immigrants," the star columnist of The New York Times fretted that the Supreme Court seemed to have misplaced the style book on another fashionable minority. "I am worried," wrote Maureen Dowd, "about how the justices can properly debate same-sex marriage when some don't even seem to realize that most Americans use the word 'gay' now instead of 'homosexual.'" She quoted her friend Max Mutchnick, creator of "Will & Grace":

"Scalia uses the word 'homosexual' the way George Wallace used the word 'Negro.' There's a tone to it. It's humiliating and hurtful. I don't think I'm being overly sensitive, merely vigilant."

For younger readers, George Wallace was a powerful segregationist Democrat. Whoa, don't be overly sensitive. There's no "tone" to my use of the word "Democrat"; I don't mean to be humiliating and hurtful: it's just what, in pre-sensitive times, we used to call a "fact."

Likewise, I didn't detect any "tone" in the way Justice Scalia used the word "homosexual". He may have thought this was an appropriately neutral term, judiciously poised midway between "gay" and "Godless sodomite." Who knows? He's supposed to be a judge, and a certain inscrutability used to be part of what we regarded as a judicial temperament. By comparison, back in 1986, the year

Scalia joined the Supreme Court, the Chief Justice Warren Burger declared "there is no such thing as a fundamental right to commit homosexual sodomy". I don't want to be overly sensitive, but I think even I, if I rewound the cassette often enough, might be able to detect a certain tone to that.

Nonetheless, Max Mutchnick's "vigilance" is a revealing glimpse of where we're headed. Canada, being far more enlightened than the hotbed of homophobes to its south, has had gay marriage coast to coast for a decade. Statistically speaking, one third of one per cent of all Canadian nuptials are same-sex, and, of that nought-point-three-three, many this last decade have been American gays heading north for a marriage license they're denied in their own country. So gay marriage will provide an important legal recognition for an extremely small number of persons who do not currently enjoy it. But, putting aside arguments over the nature of marital union, the legalization of gay marriage will empower a lot more "vigilance" from all the right-thinking people over everybody else.

Mr Mutchnick's comparison of the word "homosexual" with "Negro" gives the game away: just as everything any conservative says about anything is racist, so now it will also be homophobic. It will not be enough to be clinically neutral ("homosexual") on the subject — or tolerant, bored, mildly amused, utterly indifferent. The other day, Jeremy Irons found himself musing to a reporter on whether (if the issue is unequal legal treatment) a father should be allowed to marry his son for the purpose of avoiding inheritance taxes. The vigilance vigilantes swung into action:

"Oscar-winning actor Jeremy Irons has sparked outrage," reported The Independent in London, "by suggesting that same-sex marriage could lead to incest between fathers and sons."

Outrageous! That isn't exactly what he said, but, once sparked, the outrage inferno was soon blazing merrily:
"Jeremy Irons' Strange Anti-Gay rant," read the headline in Salon.

I wouldn't say he was ranting. He was languidly drawling, as is his snooty Brit wont, and fighting vainly the old ennui, as if he would rather be doing anything than another tedious media interview. Indeed, he even took the precaution of averring that he didn't "have a strong feeling either way."

You sick bigot theocrat hater! Not having a strong feeling is no longer permitted.The Diversity Celebrators have their exquisitely sensitive antennae attuned for anything less than enthusiastic approval. Very quickly, traditional religious teaching on homosexuality will be penned up within church sanctuaries, and "faith-based" ancillary institutions will be crowbarred into submission. What's that? I'm "scaremongering"? Well, it's now routine in Canada, where Catholic schools in Ontario are obligated by law to set up Gay-Straight

Alliance groups, where a Knights of Columbus hall in British Columbia was forced to pay compensation for declining a lesbian wedding reception, and where the Reverend Stephen Boisson wrote to his local paper objecting to various aspects of "the homosexual agenda" and was given a lifetime speech ban by the Alberta "Human Rights" Tribunal ordering him never to utter anything "disparaging" about homosexuals ever again, even in private. Although his conviction was eventually overturned by the Court of Queen's Bench after a mere seven-and-a-half years of costly legal battle, no Canadian newspaper would ever publish such a letter today.

The words of Chief Justice Burger would now attract a hate-crime prosecution in Canada, as the Supreme Court in Ottawa confirmed only last month.

Of course, if you belong to certain approved identity groups, none of this will make any difference. The Reverend Al Sharpton, who famously observed that Africans of the ancient world had made more contributions to philosophy and mathematics than all "them Greek homos", need not zip his lips — any more than Dr Bilal Philips, the Toronto Islamic scholar who argues that homosexuals should be put to death, need fear the attention of Canada's "human rights" commissions. But for the generality of the population this will be one more subject around which one has to tiptoe on ever thinner eggshells.

I can see why gays might dislike Scalia's tone, or be hurt by Irons' "lack of strong feelings". But the alternative — that there is only one approved tone, that one must fake strong feelings — is creepy and totalitarian and deeply threatening to any healthy society. Irons is learning, as Carrie Prejean learned a while back, that "liberals" aren't interested in your opinion, or even your sincere support, but only that you understand that there's one single, acceptable answer. We don't teach kids to memorize historic dates or great poetry any more, but we do insist they memorize correct attitudes and regurgitate them correctly when required to do so in public.

Speaking of actors from across the pond, I had the good fortune of meeting at the end of his life Hilton Edwards, the founder of Ireland's Gate Theatre. Hilton and the love of his life Michael MacLiammóir were for many years the most famously gay couple in Dublin. At MacLiammóir's funeral in 1978, the Taoiseach and half the Irish cabinet attended, and at the end they went up to Edwards, shook hands and expressed their condolences — in other words, publicly acknowledging him as "the widow". This in a state where homosexuality was illegal, and where few people suggested that it should be otherwise. The Irish officials at the funeral treated

MacLiammóir's relict humanely and decently, not because they had to but because they wished to. I miss that kind of civilized tolerance of the other, and I wish, a mere four decades on, the victors in the culture wars might consider extending it to the losers.

Instead, the relentless propagandizing grows ever more heavy-handed: The tolerance enforcers will not tolerate dissent; the diversity celebrators demand a ruthless homogeneity. Much of the progressive agenda — on marriage, immigration, and much else — involves not winning the argument but ruling any debate out of bounds. Perhaps like Jeremy Irons you don't have "strong feelings" on this or that, but, if you do, enjoy them while you can.
© Mark Steyn, 2013