Category: Societal Decay

Carly Fiorina Wrong on Kim Davis

Kim Davis, the defiant Kentucky county clerk that refuses to issue marriage licenses, is helping to separate the Presidential wannabees into sheep and goats.

Davis is exactly the type of person that we should rally around. Why, exactly because she is an elected official.

Carly Fiorina revealed her lack of understanding of Western (Christian) Culture when she uttered this non-sense yesterday.

“And, while I disagree with this court’s decision, their actions are clear. And so I think in this particular case, this woman now needs to make a decision that’s conscious — is she prepared to continue to work for the government, be paid for by the government, in which case she needs to execute the government’s will, or does she feel so strongly about this that she wants to sever her employment with the government and go seek employment elsewhere where her religious liberties would be paramount over her duties as a government employee,” Fiorina declared.
carly-fiorina-says-kentucky-clerk-should-issue-gay-marriage-licenses-or-resign

I have met Carly before and have a great deal of respect for her but she is just plain wrong on this issue. The two main reasons are: Federalism and “the doctrine of the lesser magistrate.”

Federalism means that both the States and the national government have their proper roles. Since the national government is a creature of the States, states retain their sovereignty.

Point number one is that this is a state issue. Under Kentucky law, Kim Davis is right. Kentucky law (as is California’s) is that marriage is between one man and one woman. This provision is in accord with thousands of years of human history. Kentucky’s law is valid because it agrees with Scripture; any law contrary to Scripture is illegitimate.

Point two is that religious values have an integral role to play in the public square. Modern humanists have tried to redefine freedom of religion into freedom from religion. They contend that religion has no place in the establishment of public policy. However, this is an ignorant position to claim when all law is inherently religious.

Point three, the US Supreme Court is only a legitimate body when it abides by the boundaries of the Constitution. The biggest problem with the Court is that its function is poorly defined by the Constitution and they often will not confine themselves to matters properly within their jurisdiction.

All power that the Court has was given to it by the Court. This is the problem with the Court. Together the President and Congress have the power to limit the Court to matters specifically given to it by the Constitution but they rarely ever act to limit the judiciary. The Constitution doesn’t even give the Court the power to declare a law “unconstitutional”, the Court took this power upon themselves very early in the Republic.

Congress is intended to have the most say in the National government. Co-equal branches and checks and balances don’t work quite like the Founders envisioned. The concept that the Court is the final word in all its decisions is just political laziness. Only in cases and controversies where they have original jurisdiction is the Court the final word. Congress can strip the court of jurisdiction of any other matters with a simple majority vote. Yep, they can strip the Court of the power to decide marriage, abortion, and lots of other issues any time they want too.

The issues of federalism and limited government have been written about extensively by many others so nothing I’ve said should be news to my readers. However, it appears to be news to folks like Carly Fiorina and Michael Reagan. Yeah, Reagan is reportedly sounding the same call as Carly. michael-reagan-jailed-christian-clerk-should-quit-her-job

 

The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate

The doctrine of the lesser magistrate is a concept in Protestant thought. A lesser magistrate is a ruler such as a prince who is under a greater ruler such as an emperor. According to many figures of the Reformation and Post-Reformation eras, the lesser magistrate has the authority to rebel against the tyranny of a supreme ruler.

The doctrine of the lesser magistrate finds its origin in John Calvin, who wrote that whereas private Christians must submit to the ruling authorities, there are “popular magistrates” who have “been appointed to curb the tyranny of kings”. When these magistrates “connive at kings when they tyrannise and insult over the humbler of the people” they “fraudulently betray the liberty of the people” when God has appointed them guardians of that liberty.

The lesser magistrate is prominent in the Lutheran Magdeburg Confession of 1550, which argued that the “subordinate powers” in a state, faced with the situation where the “supreme power” is working to destroy true religion, may go further than non-cooperation with the supreme power and assist the faithful to resist.

The doctrine of the lesser magistrate became important for the justification of the Dutch Revolt. According to Johannes Althusius in 1603 work, Politica, resistance to a supreme magistrate by lesser magistrates is justified in the case of tyranny. Althusius argued that the provincial authorities of the United Provinces were in this situation.
Description Lesser Magistrate

Kim Davis is not issuing marriage licenses to anyone—gay or straight—but few media reports will tell you that. Some folks disagree with this position. Lesser Magistrate Blog

Let’s go back to Carly’s quote.
“…this woman now needs to make a decision that’s conscious — is she prepared to continue to work for the government, be paid for by the government, in which case she needs to execute the government’s will…”

Carly talks of the government as a monolithic structure that must be obeyed because the Court has spoken.

Where is the federalism?

More importantly, where is the stand against tyranny?

Kim Davis is trying to do the right thing and the fact that so many weak-kneed politicians are hiding behind five un-elected people in black robes is really sad. Kim won’t be the last Christian sent to jail for her beliefs, she is among the first of many.

This case is a challenge to all of us to decide where to draw the line where we say “this far and no further”.  As a California resident, I know my turn is coming soon.

Ashley Madison Hack Includes State Agency

Although not mentioned in the email quoted below, clearly some state employees got caught in the hack of the Ashley Madison website. The odd thing is that the email sent out statewide is entitled “Phishing Scams.” The Ashley Madison hack was just that, a hack. It had nothing to do with phishing scams. I don’t know which is more troublesome, state employees using a website like Ashley—which by the way is blocked for 99% of network users—or that the head security guy is wrongly calling this a phishing scam.

Anyway, here is the email. Please note that links to state intranet sites were removed for this copy. Also, I added emphasis to portion on “data dump”.

Attention CDCR Email Account User,

The CDCR Information Security Office was recently made aware that several CDCR email accounts were published to a public Internet site in a data dump that was hacked by a third-party organization.  The compromised email accounts were used as logons by the users for non-CDCR related activities.  Although corresponding passwords or other personal information were not believe to have been exposed, we ask all users to:

• Do not use the same password for your CDCR account for any non-CDCR purposes such as personal email – this will reduce the risk of having your CDCR account compromised (best practice)
• Do not use the CDCR work email address for personal use such as use your email account to sign up for non-CDCR business related purposes.

Because of this data dump is available to the public, please also take the time to review regarding how to prevent against phishing attacks.

Additionally please:
• Do not enter sensitive or confidential information into any internet website unless it can be verified that the site is authentic,
• Do not reply to emails requesting any sensitive or confidential that originate from an unknown source, and
• Do not provide any sensitive or confidential information over the telephone during conversations that were not initiate by yourself.

If you have any further questions or concerns regarding this email please contact the CDCR Agency Information Security Office.

Summary of Ashley Madison Hack

Tina Turner had a hit many years before her trip to Thunderdome when she asked, “What’s love got to do with it?” After being married to Ike, maybe she really felt that way.

Supposedly other women do too. If you believe their marketing, a vast number of unhappy and promiscuous women are available on the Ashley Madison website for any man married wanting a fling. This website whose motto is: “Life is short, have an affair” was recently hacked.

Some readers many ask why I am spending time on this data breech of a sleazy website. Why? Because thus far, this is the biggest known data breech in the world…ever. Besides, how many websites do you know that dedicate themselves to violating one of the Ten Commandments.

These guys are dirtbags. They are marketing adultery with a money back guarantee.

Affair Guarantee Program Rules

•Under the AshleyMadison.com Affair Guarantee Program, (the “Affair Guarantee Program” or the “Program”) if you don’t find someone within the initial 3 months after purchasing the “Affair Guarantee” Membership Package, we’ll refund you the amount you paid AshleyMadison.com for participating in the Program (the “Refund”).

• The Guarantee Program is available for a limited time only, and open to anyone.

Of course, a certain amount of fine print applies.
Ashley Madison Guarantee

The cost of sin is high. In this case $249 CDN/$199 USD
Source Article

A year ago, the website was claiming 13 million active users. Oh, no cost for women to join. Prices above are the rates men are willing to pay.
Source Article

Distribution of Ashley Madison users by city.

Graph Source

Those with memberships were promised that for a fee of $19, their account would be deleted.

Ashley Madison sold the delete feature for $19, The Guardian reports, promising users it would remove their profiles from the site, including search results. BuzzFeed discovered that the site made close to $2 million for the service in 2014 alone when 90,000 requested such profile deletions.

However, it turns out that Ashley Madison kept a treasure trove of information for each user that’s good enough to identify that person. The company did remove the real name, username, email and profile information as promised but it retained sensitive data that can be used to find out whether a person may have had an account on the extra-marital affairs site.

The company “retained the date of birth, city, state, post- or zip code, country, gender, ethnicity, weight, height, body type and whether the user smokes or drinks,” The Guardian writes.
BGR Article

The hackers of this website call themselves The Impact Team. This manifesto—including locations of the data—can be viewed here. Impact Team Manifesto

According to Toronto Police, employees of Canadian based Avid Life Media—the owners of Ashley Madison and some similar websites—first became aware of the hack on July 12.

In the news conference, the police detailed how users were targeted in an attack that began July 12, when employees of Avid Life Media arrived at work. When the employees opened their laptops, they were met with the song “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC, and an accompanying message demanding that Avid Life shutter both websites.
New York Times

The hackers then provided samples of the hacked data to prove their claims of hacking the website were genuine. Avid Life refused to take down two of their websites so on August 20th, the hacked data was posted.

Impact Team released a 9.7GB data dump that contains over 30 million Ashley Madison user records. This includes names, addresses and emails, but it is thought that credit card details have not been compromised. Not all the email addresses are real, but up to 24 million are said to be active.

The data was posted to a Tor website meaning that it is not accessible to the general public, as well as to peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent. However, details are starting to leak onto the open web via screenshots on social media.

Analysis of the cache has also uncovered a number of government and military email domains. For example one researcher said that over 6,000 of the email addresses were registered as us.army.mil.

“The website has found 1,716 email addresses from universities and further education colleges using the .ac.uk suffix; 124 using .gov.uk; 92 using .mod.uk; 65 local education authorities and schools using .sch.uk; 56 National Heath Service emails and less than 50 police emails,” reported The Telegraph.

Meanwhile, security blogger Robert Graham searched the database to determine the gender balance.

“I count 28 million men to five million women, according to the ‘gender’ field in the database (with two million undetermined). However, glancing through the credit card transactions, I find only male names,” he said.

The Ashley Madison hack is bigger in scale than the recent breach at the US Office of Personnel Management that resulted in the loss of 21 million federal records.
V3-UK

A few days later, the hackers posted a second data dump of 20 gigabytes. These were all internal records of Avid Life Media. This data breech was code of the websites, Google drives of managers, emails, and other internal documents. The Sony data breech was larger in terms of size of the data files but in terms of names this is the biggest in the world.

As a result of the data breech, two people listed on the website have reportedly committed suicide. This from the police news conference mentioned earlier. Their spokesman is Mr. Bryce Evans.

Mr. Evans also said that the police have received two unconfirmed reports of suicides related to the data breach. Security experts had warned the revelations contained in the breach could lead to suicide and violence.

“Others might find the thought that their membership of the site — even if they never met anyone in real life, and never had an affair — too much to bear,” Graham Cluley wrote on his security blog last week, “and there could be genuine casualties as a result. And yes, I mean suicide.”
New York Times

Hack Touches Virtually All of the United States

Gawker’s Gabrielle Bluestone has uncovered that there are precisely three ZIP codes across the country that have no record of Ashley Madison users. That’s ZIP codes, not area codes. And what do they have in common? They’re partially lacking two things: the internet and a large number of people.
Yahoo Finance

Doriana Silva
Thus far we have learned that there are roughly six men for each woman listed on the website. However, the number of women is a matter of some dispute. Many of the female profiles on the website are reportedly fake. Some of the male profiles are also fraudulent.
In 2012, Doriana Silva filed a lawsuit that was later thrown out. Her claim of fraudulent profiles is receiving renewed media interest in the wake of this hack. Below are portions of a news article from New Zealand.

Doriana Silva

A former employee of the Ashley Madison adultery website has claimed she was told to create hundreds of fake profiles of female “members” to entice men to join up.

Doriana Silva, who worked at the company’s headquarters in Toronto, Canada, tried to sue the firm after claiming she suffered repetitive strain injury (RSI) after being given a month to input 1,000 bogus memberships.

Ms Silva, who is Brazilian, was recruited by Ashley Madison’s parent company Avid Life Media to help launch a Portuguese language website in her home country.

According to court documents in Toronto: “Her allegation is that her job entailed concocting phony profiles of alluring females and inputting these profiles into the appellants’ online dating service in order to attract male subscribers.”

She claimed she was given three weeks to create 1,000 fake profiles.

Her claim stated: “The purpose of these profiles is to entice paying heterosexual male members to join and spend money on the website.

“They do not belong to any genuine members of Ashley Madison – or any real human beings at all.”

She said she was led to believe “that doing so was some sort of a normal business practice in the industry” but found her workplace “oppressive and unethical”.

Ms Silva launched the case in 2012, claiming £10 million in damages. Avid Life counter-sued her, denying her claims, and the two sides eventually agreed to drop their cases earlier this year.

New Zealand Herald

Other Fraudulent Names

Ashley Madison claims to have 1.2 million users in the UK, which would equate to almost one in 20 of all adults between the ages of 18 and 50. Increasing numbers of supposed members whose details have been published online by hackers say they had never even heard of Ashley Madison.

Online security experts have suggested the company could have bought bulk email addresses from marketing companies to make it appear that their membership – and their choice of possible partners – was far larger than the reality.

A source close to the FBI investigation into the leak has told The Daily Telegraph that examinations of the database suggest many of the female profiles on the site were created by a relatively small number of individuals.

Ashley Madison says on its website that it cannot “guarantee the authenticity of any profile”. It relies wholly on men for its profits; women can join for free, but men pay a minimum of £39 to be able to contact other members, though there is no guarantee that they will get a response from people they message.

Peter Sommer, a visiting professor at the De Montfort University Cyber Security Centre, said: “A number of internet dating agencies are known to artificially boost the number of profiles they have in order to make them more attractive.

“They take publicly available information from other databases and added it to their own. People then pay to be able to contact other ‘members’ and it’s not until they get to that stage that they realise a lot of them are duds.”

Bulk email addresses can be bought from marketing companies for as little as 10p each.
New Zealand Herald

Identity Theft

Another possible explanation is that people using the site have simply stolen other people’s email addresses so they do not have to give their own name. People can even browse the site using entirely fake email addresses, because no verification emails are sent out by Ashley Madison to check the email is genuine.

Among those who believe they may have been the victims of identity theft is Oliver Coppard, who stood as Labour’s parliamentary candidate in Sheffield Hallam against Nick Clegg earlier this year.

He said an email address for him that appears in the leaked data is one he has not used for three years.

“It’s a bit of a mystery to me,” he said. “I have never been on the site and I’m not even married so I would have no need to use it. It doesn’t really matter to me, but I don’t know how it has happened.”

New Zealand Herald

If you want to see if you know anybody involved in the hack, you can check at these two links. Use at your own risk.

http://www.trustify.info/check

http://www.trustify.info/check

Please be aware that this hack is creating a secondary market in scammers and malware sites.

Remember that email addresses are not verified by Ashley Madison so tread lightly before accusing folks of being actual clients. There is a chance they are innocent.

For a business that is predicated on secrecy and then is hacked with the outpouring of personal details then it no longer becomes a viable business.
New Zealand Herald

Career Opportunity for The Just Us Brothers?

In the wake of the Ashley Madison data breech, a new career opportunity has presented itself for The Just Us Brothers.

The Just Us Brothers know all about data breeches. They have done it themselves so they know what information is harmful to have released on the Internet. In addition, they also have successfully purged all electronic records of CRA including information on current and former members, chapter bylaws and other records. The Just Us Brothers know how to make this information unrecoverable.

On the other hand, Ashley Madison has been charging subscribers a flat fee of $19 to have their accounts deleted from their website. In 2014, they collected almost two million dollars in such fees from a subscriber base of 37 million. Unfortunately, the website folks at Ashley clearly don’t know how to scrub such information. They still retained names, address, credit card numbers and other user preferences after they were supposedly deleted. (Frankly, Ashley Madison sounds almost as insidious as Facebook.)

The hacker group called “The Impact Team” claimed responsibility for this data breech. If you need an impact team to counter “The Impact Team” clearly the folks from “Impact Republicans” have to be on your short list of counter measures. The Just Us Brothers have a proven track record and would be an asset to Avid Life Media—owners of Ashley Madison.

Lest you doubt me, think about this, if the security folks at Ashley Madison had been the administrators of CRA’s membership records, we would still have all names and addresses of current and former members, their payment information, chapter bylaws, backups of all CRA related websites and all emails within the organization; in short, everything since 2002.

Having the right people makes all the difference. 37 million times $19 per account deleted means a potential of over 700 million in termination fees are on the table. Boys it’s time to move on from politics, other more lucrative markets are waiting for your talents.

Complete Capitulation of the Boy Scouts

The Sith Lord was once an Eagle Scout before turning to the Dark Side
He mourns the passing of BSA

At its recent business meeting in Atlanta, BSA President Robert Gates advocates lifting the ban on gay adult scout leaders and states their current position is unsustainable given a changing cultural and legal environment.  Ironically, it is the BSA’s abandonment in 2013 of its historical membership standard which it successfully defended before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2004 that made their current compromise unsustainable.  Quite frankly, I believe this was the goal of the BSA leadership all along.  They always intended to lift the ban on gay adult leaders but knew they could only achieve it in stages, not all at once, lest they see a mass exodus from Scouting.  The Boy Scouts as we knew it is gone, another casualty of the progressive agenda.
boy-scouts-leadership-asked-to-end-ban-on-gay-adult-leaders

Federal Government Recognizes Gay Marriage Despite State Laws to Contrary

Crippled though it may be, I thought the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) signed by President Clinton was still in effect; so I was surprised to read in the 2014 tax instructions that the Federal government recognizes gay marriage even if your state does not.

Same-sex marriage. For federal tax purposes, individuals of the same sex are considered married if they were lawfully married in a state (or foreign country) whose laws authorize the marriage of two individuals of the same sex, even if the state (or foreign country) in which they now live does not recognize same-sex marriage. Form 1040 Instructions pages 12 – 13

The US Supreme Court has not issued such a ruling. Is this another Executive Order from Obama? I’m surprised there is no pushback from defenders of traditional marriage. Also, where is Congress on this issue?

Bathroom Bill Challenge

Once again the challenge to the “bathroom bill” is in the news. The failed effort was handed a pyrrhic victory earlier this week as some petitions that were disallowed by some smaller counties where ordered by a judge to be included for verification. Judge orders Count of Disputed Signatures

Per the World Net Daily article, (Judge bashes California for ignoring election rules) supporters consider this a victory. This fundraising propaganda piece—disguised as a news story—implies that this small number of signatures will be enough to qualify the referendum. Per this article, supporters claim they gathered 620,000 signatures and need 500,000 valid ones to qualify this effort. They actually need more than 500K but do the math using their numbers. This means that supporters are banking that they have an eighty percent verification rate for petitions largely gathered by volunteers at various churches. Such a high validity rate is impossible.

Per the WND article, signatures must be verified by January 8th. When the referendum effort is declared dead by the California Secretary of State what will supporters do then? Probably send out another fundraising letter declaring that the evil Liberals have thwarted the will of the people again. The blame should be affixed to CRI but somehow we know they will avoid fixing any blame on themselves.

CRI Track Record of Failure Continues

As many of you will note in the news today, the transgender bathroom law is about to take effect in California. As burdensome, ridiculous, and unworkable as this law may be, many readers will ask about the supposed referendum effort to block this law.

Bad news, there never was a serious effort to block or repeal this law. Some financial backers of Prop 8 were interested in funding such an effort until it got hijacked by CRI (Capital Resource Institute). Once CRI interjected itself into the issue, the potential funders sat on the sidelines; only if CRI succeeded with the qualification of the referendum would they jump into the fray. CRI—the Karen England led conservative lobbying group—took this issue and turned it into another half-baked fund raising campaign for her organization.

This is at least the fourth such effort that CRI has made in recent years. They have a zero track record of success in anything they have tried to put on the ballot. In fact their efforts are so feeble that you can’t even find any trace of them on the California Secretary of State website for campaign finance reporting. The little money they have raised has gone to their staff payroll and CRI overhead and not to any signature gathering or other legitimate efforts to get anything on the ballot.

In a recent Sacramento Bee article, it was revealed that CRI got cross-wise with the IRS last summer and was in danger of losing their tax exempt status. I asked a politically connected friend about this article and his unsolicited response was, “I guess that explains why they were running the referendum campaign; to maintain cash flow.”

CRI is not only failing in their mission, they are actively hurting the few remaining conservatives left in California by emboldening our ideological opponents. By purporting to speak for all conservatives and failing miserably at every turn, CRI is creating the perception that nothing stands in the way of the looney Left agenda.

In recent years, CRI has lost their way. They spent much of their time fighting with conservatives and trying to take over the CRA and after that failed, they then expended effort trying to create an identical organization under their control (currently they have about two active chapters statewide).

Their fundraising often involves pretending to be part of someone else’s efforts to get something on the ballot or creating a parallel effort instead of supporting folks that are like minded on an issue. Prop 8 is the poster child for this behavior. CRI raised money from people that thought they were giving to Prop 8 when in fact they were giving to a CRI shadow organization that funneled money into CRI for the purpose of helping them make payroll. As is often the case with CRI, the money did not go to the purpose that donors were promised.

This referendum drill by CRI was a dismal failure. I knew it would be before they ever collected a signature. They never had a chance of success. The reality of politics in California is that such an effort typically requires about three million dollars just to get it on the ballot and an additional fifteen million or more to run a legitimate campaign. CRI ended up getting about half of the valid signatures required for qualification. Only paid gatherers could make up the needed shortfall. Why they would undertake such an effort when defeat was certain is mind boggling.

The reality is that we need CRI or a group like them at the Capitol but we also need an effective group. CRI has lost their way. The fact that Karen England is now residing in Nevada and commutes to Sacramento to work two days a week is not a harbinger that things are looking up for them.

Lest you think I am alone in this belief take a look at these articles:
http://www.rightondaily.com/2013/12/retrospective-why-the-ab1266-referendum-effort-looks-dubious-part-1/
http://www.rightondaily.com/2013/12/why-the-ab1266-referendum-looks-dubious-part-2-view-from-the-ground/

Redefined Soon: Dog is Man’s Best Friend

A few years ago, Paul Shanklin did a parody of a man taking wedding vows with his dog. What was a whitty jab at judges changing the definition of marriage a few years ago has taken several large steps toward reality during the first half of this month.

On Monday, a Federal Judge struck down parts of the anti-polygamy laws in Utah.

A federal judge in Utah has struck down part of that state’s law banning polygamy, after a lawsuit was brought by the stars of the television reality series “Sister Wives.” The ruling late Friday by U.S. District Court Judge Clark Waddoups threw out the law’s section prohibiting “cohabitation,” saying it violates constitutional guarantees of due process and religious freedom.
Utah polygamy law

Elsewhere, the decision was explained as striking down the polygamy law because the law limited freedom of association in violation of the First Amendment. Kody Brown and his four wives, who gained notoriety in the reality TV show “Sister Wives,” are challenging Utah’s bigamy statute, claiming it is unconstitutional because it violates their constitutional rights to due process, equal protection, free exercise of religion, free speech and freedom of association.
Judge in Sister Wives case asks for definition of polygamy

OK, so polygamy is now allowed under the First Amendment as a freedom. However, this decision says that a man can still only have one marriage license.

Those of us who support marriage as being between one man and one woman have been saying that the next domino to fall would be prohibitions on polygamy. Clearly, those floodgates are about to burst if they have not already. To decriminalize polygamy is a de facto judicial approval of the behavior.

Next to follow is why limit such loving arrangements to one man and several women. This clearly is discriminatory. What if a women wants multiple men simultaneously? While it might strike at the financial empires of Hugh Hefner and Larry Flint, clearly this is a reasonable corollary once polygamy is allowed. Soon any random assortment of consenting adults will be allowed to play house however they would like.

While this exponential decay of traditional marriage is underway, a second movement is also in the works. When combined to the above discussion, this get really weird because it opens up the possibility of legalizing bestiality.

I would like to introduce the other cutting edge movement that is gaining momentum on the fringe Left; personhood. No sadly, this has nothing to do with recognizing that all the unborn children aborted each year are baby humans. This also has nothing to do with the ethics of euthanasia. Instead the enlightened members of the Ivy League Left are pushing the recognition of the personhood of sentient animals.

Enter Yale University and the “Personhood Beyond the Human Conference” This event held December 6-8, 2013 was described by organizers as:

This historic event will focus on personhood for nonhuman animals, including great apes, cetaceans, and elephants, and will explore evolving notions of personhood by analyzing them through the frameworks of neuroscience, behavioral science, philosophy, ethics, and law. nonhumanrights.net

The event featured the crazy bioethicist, Peter Singer. Singer is the guy who advocates that children that are born should not be declared “human” until they pass rigorous testing. Those children that fail to measure-up as human should be destroyed. “Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person…” Peter Singer  In short, Singer is the poster child for the eugenics movement of the 21st Century.

Here is another quote from the abstract page of the non-human rights web site. “Legal personhood for animals would symbolize and institutionalize the intrinsic value of animals and, furthermore, offer significant procedural advantages.” – Saskia L. Stucki

Once whales, dolphins, elephants, and apes are made legally equivalent to humans—which is one of the chief goals of the conference—then it won’t be long before Fido is added to the list. Every movement needs a face people can love to sell the idea to the masses, what better poster being for this movement than the family dog. Yes, Lassie and Snoopy will be the gateway pets to proving the personhood of canines to the public.

Once the ideas of the Personhood conference gain traction and are combined with the definitions of marriage (and family) being developed by the courts then it is reasonable that an animal could be included into the definition of a family. To exclude such sentient beings from being equal partners in our families is “Speciesist”. If things continue as they are, the day is coming soon when a dog will truly be man’s best friend.

Here are a few passages from the “Good Book” that come to mind on this topic.

And God said , Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.  So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.  And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful , and multiply , and replenish the earth, and subdue it : and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Genesis 1: 26-28

Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.  Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.  They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
Romans 1:22-25

Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion.  Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you:  And the land is defiled : therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants .
Leviticus 18: 23-25.