I went to a book store earlier today and couldn't help but notice the number 1 seller Ann Coulter's book
The Church of Liberalism: Godless. I sat down and began reading the book until I was asked to leave because the store was about to close. Against my better judgement, I bought the book.
After having read the first chapter, I have decided to pick at and disect Ann's outrageous claims. I think she is as ignorant as a six year old child attempting to grasp fields that take people lifetimes to study. I also think she has an ego as big as an elephant's erect penis. While it is within her right to blow as much hot air out of her butt as she just did with this book, I'm beginning to think that perhaps we should legislate free speech, especially when concerning academic fields where just about every regular Joe out there thinks he can speak authoritively on a subject after memorizing two words out of a text book on that subject.
Critique on "On the Seventh Day, God Rested and Liberals Schemed".
Right away, I noticed that Coulter decides to use Romans 1:25-26 as an introduction and description for this chapter. I will comment on this when the appropriate subject comes up.
Ann starts out exclaiming that liberals love to boast about their nonreligious commitment and declaring liberalism to be a religion. While I would personally like this to be the case, reality is far from this sensational nonsense. The liberal community is made up of people of all faiths and beliefs, all shapes and sizes, all ages and eras, and all ethnicity and nationalities. Instead, Ann assumes that liberals are comprised entirely of atheists and heathens.
But directly to the point, many liberals are christians who value the christian ideals and teachings. The primarily identify themselves as liberals because they look to the future rather than the past, they want to address the dangers of manmade impacts on the biosphere, they value universal human rights over traditional bigotry, they respect ALL religions and philosophies rather than just christianity, they would like their children and their children's children to be able to take a deep breath without having overreations to pollen dominated air or smog dominated atmospher, ..... you get the idea.
Coulter's rants include some rather outright strawmen and ad hominems. She claims that liberals believe through faith the following: "Darwinism is a fact, people are born gay, child molesters can be rehabilitated, recycling is a virtue, and chastity is not." (page 2, paragraph 1) Ann goes on to ask the question "If people are born gay, why hasn't Darwinism weeded out people who don't reproduce?" This question, or rather more of an assertion, assumes that when a person is born something, genetics has to be the reason. While it is true that genetics can be the contributing factor, others may include environmental impact on the mother, hormonal changes during pregnancy, etc. She also assumes that all liberals believe people are born gay. Again, this is simply not true. Noone knows for sure if people are born gay or not. What we do know is that almost all gay people believe they never had a choice.
The third thing that's severely wrong with Coulter's assumption is that if it is indeed genetics then natural selection would move against such a trait. As a matter of fact, there is a hypothesis that suggests the homosexual trait(s) helps the family gene to be passed onto future generations. Survival of the fittest does not only include pumping out as many children as you can, damn it! Some species do take that approach while others prefer to have only a few but healthy children. The "gay uncle", instead of worrying about his own children, would help to raise his nephews and neices. Such characteristics have been observed in ape populations where infants in families with gay relatives have better rate and chance of survival and growing up healthy. This hypothesis closely resembles the Grandmother Hypothesis.
But the most important flaw in Ann's logic is her presumption that if being gay is by choice then it is somehow bad. So what if a person chose to be gay? If he/she chose to be gay, then it is his/her right to do so. The constitution guarantees a person's right to "pursuit of happiness", and by golly if being gay makes a person happy and doesn't hurt anyone then why the hell would it be bad?
Coulter's next strawman is "If gays can't change then why do liberals think child-molesters can?" First of all, not all liberals think child molesters can change. Hell, even some child molesters admit they cannot change. What liberals believe in is that we should try to help them all so that the ones that CAN be changed change.
Some liberals such as myself believe that kid-loving is a sexuality, just like heterosexuality and homosexuality. And since it is a sexulaity, or so we believe, the mentality of the kid-lover cannot be changed. We, however, make a big distinction between kid-loving and pedophilia. Kid-loving is adoration and admiration from a distance. Unless you are Charles Xavier, you can't do anything about it. Pedophilia is when the kid-lover crosses the boundery and decides to violate another person's rights. In other words, some of us believe that pedophilia is another form of rape. To bunch kid-lovers and pedophiles together is like bunching heterosexuals together with rapists.
Ann's goes on to ask "Why must children be taught that recycling is the only answer? Why aren't we teaching children 'safe littering?'"
Repeat after me, we do not teach children that recycling is the only answer. There are many possible answers to our future environmental problems. We can start shipping our garbages to outer space. We can start dumping in people's backyards. We can start dumping them into the ocean. Hell, we can even start dumping them into Third World Countries. The fact of the matter is the garbage takes up space, just like everything that has mass. We can either ignore them and let our children solve the problem or we can reuse the reusable stuff. It's simple logic, people!
And why aren't we teaching children "safe littering"? For crying out loud, we are teaching our children "safe littering" everytime we tell them to throw their garbage into the trash cans rather than on the street or on the lawn.
I will continue to critique the writings of this anorexic hypocrite at a later time.
Admins, I sincerely hope that this goes into a forum other than the book nook so people can discuss and debate. I'll leave it to you to decide where this will go.
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