The University of North Carolina at Wilmington has put out a list of “gay friendly” churches in the area to assist students and faculty in choosing a politically correct place of worship. According to FOX News, the list is part of a “broader guide to gay-friendly businesses, nonprofits, health centers and other services in the area.” But one professor has questioned why the university should be making recommendations to anyone about where they should go to church. “It’s just amazing,” criminology professor Mike Adams told FOX. “It appears to me to be the height of not just silliness, but government waste.” The university’s LGBTQIA (that’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, intersex and allied) Office described the list as a “local resource guide [for] lgbt staff and faculty.”  

As law enforcement agencies around the world continue to round up adults who prey on children, a small group of mental health professionals appears to be trying to facilitate a change in how pedophilia is defined and diagnosed. In fact, as reported by the Daily Caller, just such a group used an August 17 conference in Baltimore to discuss how “pedophiles themselves could play a role in removing pedophilia from the American Psychiatric Association’s bible of mental illnesses — the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), set to undergo a significant revision by 2013.” The conference was sponsored by B4U-ACT, which the Daily Caller described as “a group of pro-pedophile mental health professionals and sympathetic activists.” According to information provided on the group’s website, the focus of the conference was to bring together researchers and mental health professionals — as well as “minor-attracted persons” — in order to discuss, among other issues, ways in which pedophiles “can be involved in the DSM 5 revision process.”

Further evidence that the unions have resorted to thuggery can be found in Ohio, where business owner John King was shot and almost killed for being non-union. While unions have been found to engage in shakedowns and bullying tactics, this most recent incident represents a new chapter in union thuggery. Reports indicate that King had been harassed repeatedly prior to the shooting. Union thugs often threatened King with violence. According to The Blaze: John King owns one of Toledo’s largest non-union electrical contracting businesses. With 25 employees and an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau, King’s business reportedly often thrives while other unionized electrical contracting businesses fail due to their higher rates.

Rick Perry’s self-propelled entry into the contest for the Republican presidential nomination is creating a bit of a stir among conservatives. He missed the debates and straw polls in Iowa and yet immediately emerged as one of the front runners before even facing a Tea Party audience. The fact that Michele Bachmann won the straw poll (barely squeaking by runner-up Ron Paul) and that Pawlenty pulled out of the race, means that there is plenty of time for all sorts of things to happen in the months ahead. According to the latest poll, Perry has come out ahead of Romney and Bachmann and Paul. But it is unlikely that Mitt Romney will play dead and not do some research into Perry’s record and find a way to demolish this new threat to his candidacy. Romney’s strategy is to get as many delegates at the Republican convention as possible to vote for him. After all, it’s the delegates who will pick the next President of the United States. But already, conservative Republicans in Texas are sending out email messages warning us about Rick Perry.

I’ll be the first to agree that politicians and bureaucrats have no principles. But government itself does; like other entities, it operates according to certain precepts. We who loathe the State do well to understand these laws the better to combat its wickedness. Perhaps first among them is Jefferson’s famous dictum, "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground” — an unanswerable argument for anarchy, and one whose proof this country’s history amply supplies. Even the most strictly, constitutionally limited government will explode into a totalitarian nightmare; those yearning for a permanently small State crave the impossible. They are as foolish as parents who expect their child to remain three years old for the rest of his life. We owe a second axiom to Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Voters who believe “good” politicians can save the country ignore the fact that every elected sociopath gained office precisely because enough people mistook him for our rescuer (presuming American polls are as open and honest as Our Rulers pretend).  

Beginning in 2000, with the election to the presidency of George W. Bush, the Republican Party enjoyed control over both the legislative and executive branches of government. Election Day, 2006, however, marked the beginning of the end of this era, and by November of 2008, voters had long since resolved to bring the Republicans’ reign to a decisive close. While watching the Iowa Republican presidential primary debate, one could be forgiven for thinking that none of this had happened. With the sole exception of Ron Paul, there wasn’t a single other candidate on the stage who so much as signaled regret over, much less repudiate (as Paul did), the very Republican Party agenda with which Americans became thoroughly disenchanted three years ago — an agenda to which, judging from the candidates’ utterances, Republicans remain committed today. To put it in terms of our contemporary political vernacular, President Bush’s “Compassionate Conservatism” is apparently alive and well in the Republican Party of 2011.

By his first executive order, Governor Sam Brownback appointed Dennis Taylor to the new office of Repealer, to cut the size of government and reduce its intrusion on the people and economy of the Sunflower State. The website for the Kansas state government now includes a tab for the Repealer, which, when clicked, states: If you believe that an unreasonable, unduly burdensome, duplicative, onerous or conflicting law, regulation or other governing instrument, detrimental to the economic well-being of Kansas, exists, please provide us with information in the fields below. Please enter your information and the law, regulation, or rule that you would like to have reviewed. During a luncheon at the Wichita Pachyderm Club, Taylor explained what has already been done to improve the efficiency of the Kansas Department of Administration, adding that he expects approximately 300 repeal recommendations to be delivered soon.

On March 2, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church’s right to freedom of speech. The court said that despite the Topeka, Kansas, church’s contentious behavior — extreme demonstrations against homosexuality, including anti-gay protests at military funerals — such actions are subject to constitutional protections. State legislatures, however, have attempted to pass laws that would undermine the Supreme Court ruling. The latest endeavor can be found in Illinois. On Sunday, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed into law the “Let Them Rest in Peace Act,” which would force anti-gay protests at military funerals to be at least 300 feet — the length of a football field — from military funerals. Additionally, the bill bans protests from taking place 30 minutes before and 30 minutes after funerals. At the time he signed the law, Governor Quinn declared:

Both incumbent Democrats facing recall elections on August 16 managed to hold their Wisconsin state Senate seats, leaving Republicans with a narrow 17-to-16 majority following the largest string of recall campaigns in American history. Democratic state Sen. Jim Holperin survived the election with about 55 percent of the vote against first-time Republican candidate Kim Simac, a Tea Party activist and mother of nine. GOP contender Jonathan Steitz, an attorney, garnered about 42 percent against incumbent Democrat Bob Wirch. Last week, six Republican state Senators were also forced to defend their seats. Democrats needed to win at least three of those races to gain control of the state Senate, but succeeded in taking only two from vulnerable incumbents — one of whom was facing a scandal. In July, another Democrat held on to his office as well.  

Warren Buffett, better known as the Oracle of Omaha, earned $40 million last year and paid $7 million of it in taxes. But in his editorial in the New York Times on Sunday, he claimed that he doesn’t think he’s paying enough, and neither are his friends. So he’s asking the SuperCommittee to stop “coddling” him and his friends, and raise their taxes as part of the deficit reduction scheme they are hatching. He began by suggesting that government leaders have called for “shared sacrifice” but that he didn’t get the call. “I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.” Unfortunately, facts are not only stubborn, they are different. In his editorial, Buffet notes that incomes of the top 400 taxpayers (many of them his friends) had grown from $16.9 billion in 1992 to $90.9 billion in 2008, but that their actual tax rate over that period had declined.