In fact, he’s almost convinced me, which, if I may be so bold, is saying something. I’m not sure I’m completely on board – not all of his points are equally good – but he made me consider this.

The link is in the show notes, in case you want to find his arguments, but I want to highlight the first one here, just to give you an idea of his power of persuasion.

1). Although I am personally opposed to the practice, I do not want to impose my moral values upon others. So if someone else wants to hunt lions, then who am I to judge? My motto is: If you don’t like lion killing, then don’t kill one.

OK, you can exhale now. You really do want to check out the link to this in the show notes. The other 9 “reasons” do basically the same thing; turn abortion pro-choice arguments on their head and expose the inverted priorities of a society that values the life of a lion in a country they probably couldn’t pick out on a map, over the millions of babies killed since Roe v Wade. I call them “babies” because that’s what Planned Parenthood calls them when referring to their organs, harvested for profiteering. Also, because that’s what they are.

Oh, and in the 3 weeks from the beginning of the release of those videos exposing Planned Parenthood, the media have reflected, and some might say “supported” or “egged on”, those inverted priorities. During that time, the 3 broadcast networks spent 92 minutes on Cecil the Lion, and 20 minutes on the videos and subsequent political fallout. Yup, that liberal media.

• We’re living longer, which can lead to boredom.
• Young people are used to “varied and transient love affairs.”
• Girls can be more independent now than they could 50 years ago.
• And basically, after a while, we just can’t help ourselves over our urges to wander, so to speak.

The only lip service Helen Croydon, the author, pays to the major responsibility of child rearing is to note that, hey, women can get artificially inseminated. Never mind that she’s encouraging the difficulty of single motherhood, reducing men to sperm donors, and ignoring the huge task of actually raising a child. No, it’s all just a technological hurdle to overcome.

As I’ve said before, cross one line, and there’s always another line to cross, another cultural norm to overturn. Remember, it’s conservatives that look to tradition and experience to determine the best course of action, while liberals are, by their own definition, “progressive”; trying out new things and throwing off old ideas, because, in their mind, this new thing ought to work, based on whatever arguments they can come up with. Hey, we’re bored, we can’t help ourselves, so let’s chuck these ideas that have worked in the past and try some social experimenting that may or may not actually work better, but at least we’ll feel better about ourselves after we indulge ourselves.

That is a recipe for a slippery slope, one that has been, rather easily, predicted by conservatives.

That’s what I want to stress here. In every other way, he was qualified for the job, but he had opinions that some disagreed with, and they created an atmosphere where Eich could not function in that job. That, ladies and gentlemen, is precisely what the word “intolerance” means. The irony is that those who created that atmosphere would very likely consider themselves the tolerant ones. The sad part is, they are unable to see intolerance in themselves because of the way they have redefined the word “intolerance” to mean “disagreeing with me”.

That was exhibit A. Exhibit B showed up a couple weeks ago when twin brothers Jason and David Benham were green-lit to host a new show on Home and Garden TV – HGTV – about fixing up dilapidated houses for families in need. Who in the world could be against that?

Well, in a radio interview, David Benham said this, and made some people mad.

We don’t realize that, okay, if 87 percent of Americans are Christians and yet we have abortion on demand, we have no-fault divorce, we have pornography and perversion, we have a homosexuality and its agenda that is attacking the nation, we have adultery. We even have allowed demonic ideologies to take our universities and our public school systems while the church sits silent and just builds big churches.

So this is a rant against an apathetic church that doesn’t stand up for what it believes in. And he lists off several issues that the Christian church, in general, does find wrong. Not all of them agree on all of the issues, true, but the larger point he is making is that all this is happening while the churches build bigger buildings but too many don’t actually do anything about the issues they do agree are problems. A fair point.

But did you catch the problem? The blog Right Wing Watch did. These ideas expressed by the Benhams were simply not politically correct and did not line up with their opinions, so they “tolerantly” screamed loud and long over it, and HGTV rolled over, cancelling the show before it even aired.

The real problem here, aside from more instances of being judged guilty of Thought Crimes by the “tolerant” Left, is that this was no fan outcry (the show hadn’t even aired yet), nor a huge outcry. One blog with, I guess in the eyes of HGTV, enough influence, was enough to get them to cave in to the bullying and drop the show. A few folks, who can muster the required offense and indignation, are enough to shut down people who are, again, qualified for their job, but whose thoughts on unrelated issues are not orthodox enough for the Left.

Are you seeing a pattern here?

Matt Walsh summed up this issue succinctly on his blog entry on the subject with this sentence, “[I]f you mention the ‘gay agenda,’ the gay agenda will prove there is no gay agenda by having you fired for mentioning the gay agenda.” Indeed, the Benham’s point out in the CNN interview video you can find in the show notes, that their issue is with the agenda; not specifically homosexual persons, but the agenda that is being pushed on our culture, by those who are straight as well as gay.

But a commenter on the Google+ page for my "Consider This" podcast made a good point in regard to this. He said, “Liberals don’t hate christians .. they just hate their ‘agenda’.” Aside from his suggestion that a real Christian can’t be liberal (a suggestion he reinforced in our conversation, and which I’m sure a few of my liberal Christian friends, or even I, could easily take apart), it’s a fair question; can you be against an agenda without being against the individuals covered by said agenda?

I would say “Yes”, and here’s why. When you are against an agenda, you seek to influence the culture and/or government. When you are against individuals, you seek to punish individuals. Eich and the Benhams sought to influence government, in Eich’s Prop 8 donation case, or influence the culture, in the Benham’s case where they would just be who they are on their show. Conversely, those who disagreed with them sought to take out their pound of flesh on those men personally.

Yes, I’m sure that, somewhere, there are contrary examples, but on the whole, this is how the fight has been. And I’m sure that those who are for same-sex marriage would like to paint Prop 8 as a case of going after individuals. It is not. It’s a question of whether it’s good for our culture to redefine an institution that has served us well for as far back as you care to look. And in spite of how you want to frame it, Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A, as a couple of examples I pulled out of my head at random, do not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, both in serving and in hiring.

The difference between the two sides is clarifying.

I really have to wonder how many people are really represented by those who are doing this bullying. Would most gays have really cared that the Benhams were Christians? How many would have looked past their differences and enjoyed watching the charitable work they were doing? I guess HGTV thought, not enough. But I guess we’ll never know.

Another day, another witch hunt — this time in duplicate. “Twin brothers David and Jason Benham,” CNN reports, “have lost their opportunity to host their own HGTV show.” On Tuesday, the pair was gearing up for their new role; by sundown the next day, the network had announced tersely that it had “decided not to move forward with the Benham Brothers’ series.” And that, as they say, was that.

HGTV’s mind was allegedly changed by a post on the blog Right Wing Watch, where the duo was described as being “anti-gay” and “anti-choice.” That post, David Benham told Erin Burnett yesterday, “was too much for them to bear — they had to make a business decision.” How sad. Certainly, the Benhams hold some heterodox views. They are not merely opposed to abortion and gay marriage, but critical of divorce, adultery, Islam, pornography, “perversion,” the “demonic ideologies” that have crept into the nation’s “universities and . . . public school systems,” and the general culture of “activist” homosexuality, which, David contends, is inextricably tied up with a wider “agenda that is attacking the nation.” But so bloody what? They were tapped to host a home-improvement show, not rewrite the Constitution.

It matters not, however, to the "tolerant" Left, for whom that word now means "agrees with me". Redefining long-understood definitions seems to be their stock in trade, along with the word "marriage".

Future students of language will wonder at the period in our history in which it was said with a straight face that diversity required uniformity, tolerance necessitated intolerance, and liberalism called for dogma. Of late, we have been told that Brandeis University is simply too open-minded to hear from a critic of Islam, that Mozilla believes too vehemently in “freedom of speech” to refrain from punishing a man for his private views, and that a respect for the audience of a show about duck hunting demands that we suspend a man for expressing his religious views in an unrelated interview. “Never,” David Benham confirmed in an interview with CNN, “have I spoken against homosexuals, as individuals, and gone against them. I speak about an agenda.” Later, he added that “that’s really what the point of this is — that there is an agenda that is seeking to silence the voices of men and women of faith.” Say, now where might he have got hold of that idea?

What is it that they say about conservatives? They’re haters, they’re whatever-phobes, they’re intolerant of people who are different than they are. Then what to make of this story.

Over 5 years ago, some guy – we’ll call him Bubba – gave $1000 to a political cause. He gave his personal money, not on behalf of anyone else. A bit of free political speech in action.

Fast forward to today, and Bubba was the target of a campaign to push him out of his job because someone found out about this contribution. Bubba gave in to the pressure, and resigned.

If Bubba had given money to the Sierra Club to save the whales, or to Planned Parenthood to provide free abortions, and this had happened to him, the Left in this country would be outraged. But because Bubba, whose real name is Brendan Eich, former CEO of Mozilla, gave to California’s Proposition 8, the effort to keep marriage between one man and one woman, the otherwise First-Amendment-loving Left are mum, as well as being the ones who did the pushing.

I have said it a number of times before, and I need to say it again. The Progressive element in this country is all about Constitutional rights, right up to the point when those rights are used against their pet political causes. Then the hate, intolerance, and phobias that they accuse others of come quickly to the surface. A clearer case of projection – accusing others of what you yourself harbor – is not easily found.

And consider this. At the time of his donation, Brendan felt the same way about the issue as President Obama, Vice President Biden, and, as it turned out, 60% of California voters. Five short years later, he’s being punished for it by the real Thought Police. There are no allegations that he mistreated, maligned, or otherwise caused harm to any homosexuals in his company. One’s views on this topic have no connection whatsoever with the business of Mozilla; most notably the Firefox web browser. This is completely, 100% a “thought crime”.

It’s the progressive Left that likes to proclaim that it is more tolerant, that is more free-thinking, right up to the point where you disagree with them. Beyond that point, they want to dictate what you can and can’t think, culturally if not legally, and sometimes even legally; just ask Hobby Lobby, or proprietors that don’t wish to participate in same-sex weddings. No, you must toe the line of the tolerant, free-thinkers. Is anyone noticing the irony here, where “mutual respect” only works one way?

“If you like your beliefs, you can keep your beliefs. To yourself. If you don’t, you can’t keep your job.”

No, says Russel D. Moore. The two questions are completely different issues. The former defies the Biblical definition of marriage. He discusses the difference, complete with citations from the apostle Paul, in "On Weddings and Conscience: Are Christians Hypocrites?"

But now, things are looking much worse.

The congressional number-crunchers, perhaps the capital’s closest thing to a neutral referee, came out with a new report Tuesday, and it wasn’t pretty for Obamacare. The CBO predicted the law would have a “substantially larger” impact on the labor market than it had previously expected: The law would reduce the workforce in 2021 by the equivalent of 2.3 million full-time workers, well more than the 800,000 originally anticipated. This will inevitably be a drag on economic growth, as more people decide government handouts are more attractive than working more and paying higher taxes.

This is grim news for the White House and for Democrats on the ballot in November. This independent arbiter, long embraced by the White House, has validated a core complaint of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) critics: that it will discourage work and become an ungainly entitlement. Disputing Republicans’ charges is much easier than refuting the federal government’s official scorekeepers.

The President’s spokesman, Jay Carney, tried to spin it as people who would "spend more time with their family", or perhaps become entrepreneurs. The latter guess is just that; a guess trying to make it sound wonderful. The former is a euphemism for living off the dole because the benefits are better.

Carney noted that these were "personal choices", but he conveniently neglects to mention that they are personal choices spurred on by the government. People respond to incentives; that’s why things like tax deductions work the way they do. ObamaCare is pushing people to dependency.

The CBO numbers prove it.

So ABC News decided to present a generally positive quote-unquote “news” piece about those for whom commitment is something only for mentally disturbed people. The most critical thing said in the whole segment was that reporter Nick Watt thought it just wasn’t his thing, and that his wife wouldn’t like it. But the rest of the segment, including questions to a psychologist, was generally positive. Not a hint of an opposing viewpoint.

This is what passes for “news” in the 21^st century; one-sided advocacy journalism. Even if Watt isn’t personally in favor of it, showing one side only, on a controversial topic, on a news show, is advocacy.

Do other news organizations do it? Yes, on both sides of the aisle. But while Fox News and the Wall Street Journal get lambasted anytime they don’t play it down the middle, so many liberal news watchers have such a blind spot when something like this airs. Conservative media bias is outrageous. Liberal media bias is…hey look, a unicorn!

The other issue, of course, is that those who said that same-sex marriage would lead to a slippery slope have been, yet again, proved absolutely on target. We aren’t falling for it, but the news media is pushing.

The Boy Scouts of America will get no reprieve from controversy after a contentious vote to accept alcoholic boys as Scouts.

Dismayed conservatives are already looking at alternative youth groups as they predict a mass exodus from the BSA. Alcoholics-rights supporters vowed Friday to maintain pressure on the Scouts to end the still-in-place ban on alcoholic adults serving as leaders.

"They’re not on our good list yet," said Paul Guequierre of the Human Rights Campaign, a national alcoholic -rights group. He said the HRC, in its annual rankings of corporate policies on workplace fairness, would deduct points from companies that donate to the Boy Scouts until the ban on alcoholic adults is lifted.

Now, you may be wondering why you didn’t hear about this particular scandal, and the reason is it hasn’t happened. I just took a news article and replaced every mention of the word “gay” with the word “alcoholic”. All of a sudden, it sounds absolutely nuts, doesn’t it? Should the Scouts be allowed to discriminate against alcoholics? Set aside for the moment that the drinking age is such that it would exclude boys in the Scouts age range, would the Scouts come under fire for not allowing boys who are what you might call “practicing alcoholics” into its ranks? Would any human rights group fault them for having a ban on alcoholic adults as Scout leaders?

The plain fact is, no, they wouldn’t. The official policy of the Boy Scouts of America is that alcohol is not permitted “at encampments or activities on property owned and/or operated by the Boy Scouts of America, or at any activity involving participation of youth members.” Certainly a troop leader showing up drunk wouldn’t be tolerated. They’ve made that rule, and no one (that I know of) is coming down on them for it.

And yet the Human Rights Campaign and others have been pressuring the Scouts to set aside their ban on homosexual boys in Scouting. Why? Well, because they’re born that way, as our culture keeps reminding us, so to discriminate against them is unfair and bigoted, right? And yet, there is research that shows conclusively that alcoholism is, in part, genetic as well. In fact, there is more evidence of that than there is evidence of homosexuality having a genetic component. It’s being studied, but right now, nothing is at all conclusive, unlike the way the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism describe the genetic link.

If they’re born that way, and if being born that way means no one can discriminate against that trait for any reason, well, is that a Pandora’s box you really want to open?

At its core, the ban on gay Scouts was partly a moral stance, with the Scout Oath including a phrase about being morally straight. It was also partly an issue of general sexuality. Would you want your boy sharing tent with a girl? Or, more generally, with someone who may be sexually attracted to him? Consider this.

And while the Scouts have lifted the ban on gay Scouts, they’ve kept it for Scout leaders. The HRC doesn’t like that, either. Let’s think about this. Those priests that got accused of molesting boys can now trade out their collar for a khaki shirt and become a Scoutmaster. What would the HRC think about that?

In a scene from Jurassic Park, Ian Malcolm, the mathematician skeptical about whether the park is a good idea, watches the T-Rex burst out of its enclosure and says, "I hate being right all the time."

Princeton Professor Robert George and other defenders of traditional marriage understand these sentiments. For years, they’ve warned that redefining marriage beyond the union of one man and one woman wouldn’t-indeed couldn’t-stop with same-sex unions. The same reasoning that extends marriage to same-sex couples would easily be applied to polygamy and polyamory also.

The standard response to these concerns was scoffing and accusations of fear mongering.

Well, the fences are down and the beast is loose.

He provides 3 examples of recent attempts to argue for them just within the past few months. But these arguments are not new. It’s just who is presenting them that is.

As Dr. George pointed out in "First Things," when Christians pointed out the logical link between same-sex marriage and polygamy, proponents of same-sex marriage rejected the connection. They insisted that "no one is arguing for the legal recognition of polygamous or polyamorous relationships as marriages!"

George writes in response, "That was then; this is now." The "then" he referred to was last week; the now is today.

George predicts that Keenan’s article "will not produce a single serious critique by a major scholar or activist from the same-sex marriage movement."

Now he would love to be wrong. But defenders of traditional marriage know that the enclosures that kept marriage a "monogamous and exclusive union" are being dismantled. And no one should be surprised by what emerges, least of all those doing the dismantling.

If George was right about what would happen, would critics also be right about the predicted results of this breakdown?  Marriage is more "for the children" than any other institution or government program that has had that label slapped on it. The best arrangement for children is to be raised by their loving and committed biological parents.

And yet, we are tinkering and tearing down the one thing that can best protect the next generation. The results have been predicted to be calamitous. If we were right about predicting the slippery slope this far, wouldn’t it be prudent to consider whether we’re right about the rest of the ride?