SelwynDuke.com

American Arrested for Anti-homosexual Statements

By Selwyn Duke

What does the Islamic world and Europe have in common? There are actually many similarities, but one is this: in neither place are Christians allowed to fully express their beliefs without fear of persecution.

As for Eurasia, its Ministry of Truth’s latest handiwork is the arrest and punishment of an American street preacher who dared speak of sin in that land once known as Scotland. The victim is 47-year-old New Yorker Shawn Holes, who was on a UK tour when he was arrested in Glasgow after running afoul of UK hate-speech laws. Writes Pink News:

White and Wrong in Philly

By Selwyn Duke

When your article inspires a big-city mayor to refer your case to a "human-relations commission," you know you've hit a nerve. And when that article is the recent "Being White in Philly" piece by liberal Robert Huber, you know it doesn't take much truth to hit that nerve.

That's the scary part. Huber's article contains mostly tepid examples of whites' negative experiences with blacks and primarily black neighborhoods, such as a Philadelphia resident whose grill was stolen from her backyard but "blames herself" for not fencing it in. Its tone is basically apologetic, absolving a drug dealer of responsibility because he was just "trying to get by" and describing the US' racial history as "horrible and daunting." Yet this wasn't good enough for Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter and his comrades. They still want Huber silenced.

Why the NRA is Right about Hollywood

By Selwyn Duke

Upstate New York’s Catskill Mountain Range is a bucolic place near and dear to my heart. It’s where storybook character Rip Van Winkle enjoyed his legendary slumber, and its scenery hasn’t changed much since he was born of Washington Irving’s fertile imagination. Yet, like Van Winkle, if I’d fallen asleep for 20 years when first arriving in that verdant heaven, I, too, would have noticed some profound changes upon awakening.

About two decades ago, many rural Catskill teens — sons of farmers and hunters and fishermen — suddenly started donning baggy pants and reflecting “gangsta’” counter-culture despite living nowhere near any large urban center. The following generation of teens experienced today’s recent cultural evolution and often sport multiple tattoos and body piercings despite living nowhere near NYC’s grungy East Village. Yet I’m wrong in a sense: those places were actually very close — a television set away.

The Great Gun Debate: Duke Strikes Back

By Selwyn Duke

It’s easy to fall into the trap that ensnares liberals, that of thinking we can legislate ourselves to utopia. This occurs to me when pondering Mr. Brett Joshpe’s response to my last debate piece. In his response he very graciously states that my article contains many reasonable points, yet he also claims it has a deficiency: “[I]t never actually proposes measures — whether specific new regulations or repeal of specific existing ones — that would improve the current system,” he writes.

Now, I did address remedial measures in an earlier piece, ones that would reduce the chances of school shootings without any Second Amendment infringement. I’d also suggest having armed guards — or trained, armed teachers — on school premises; if we do this to safeguard jewelry stores, pawn shops, and armored cars, it’s the least we can do for our children. In the same vein, we must eliminate the suicidal and quite moronic “Gun Free Zone” signs at schools, which are nothing but an invitation to criminals. Yet all this misses the point. For Mr. Joshpe is correct: I didn’t propose specific remedial measures in my debate piece. There is, however, an even larger point.

I didn’t have to.

Unmasking the Grim Reaper’s Foot Soldiers

By Selwyn Duke

One day back in high school, a very interesting English teacher asked our class a moral question: if you could press a button and get a million dollars, but a little old man — with no family, friends, or ties of any kind — in the backwoods of China would die, would you push that button?

Approximately a third of the class raised their hands in the affirmative.

This story always comes to mind when I ponder the abortion question. The old line of the pro-abortion lobby was that they wanted abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare,” implying it’s some sort of necessary evil. Their reasoning always was, “Well, we don’t know when human life begins, so whether or not to end a pregnancy should be the woman’s choice.” Of course, this position was never morally or philosophically sound. After all, if what lies within the womb is just an “unviable tissue mass,” why worry about abortion being “rare”? Oh, yes, the pro-aborts aren’t sure about the intrauterine being’s status. All right, then what they’re essentially saying is that they’ll err on the side of recklessness. It may be murder, you know — so we’ll just do it a little bit.

Liberal CNN Panelists Defend Murderer Dorner

By Selwyn Duke

“Modern liberalism is moral dysfunction.” When I recently made that statement after citing leftist social-media support for murderer Christopher Dorner, some readers thought I’d gone overboard. Surely, the twisted rooting for a paranoid killer on Facebook and elsewhere is just the rambling of an odd minority; there are radicals “on both sides” and one in every bunch, right? But now more evidence has surfaced vindicating my statement that such feelings aren’t at all unusual among the passionate left — evidence provided courtesy of the “professionals” at CNN.

Killer Dorner’s Supporters are Par for the Left’s Course

By Selwyn Duke

While I was a conservative by age 12, for some time thereafter I viewed liberalism as most do, as just another ideology. Sure, it was an irritating ideology, but an ideology nonetheless. But then something happened. I don’t quite remember if I was 20, 21, or 22, but some experiences in my life and much pondering of the issues and the human condition led to an insight. It hit me like a bolt of lightning:

Liberalism is what evil is masquerading as in our time.

The Great Gun Debate: Joshpe Responds

By Brett Joshpe

I greatly appreciate the opportunity to debate and respond to Selwyn Duke's piece, which makes many very reasonable points. Its biggest deficiency is that it never actually proposes measures --whether specific new regulations or repeal of specific existing ones -- that would improve the current system. Instead, Mr. Duke says he would scale back gun laws from 22,000 to 5,000, two arbitrary numbers, neither of which bear any correlation to smart policy.

Before discussing potential policy responses, let me say that Mr. Duke is quite right that thousands of gun laws, unsurprisingly, did not eliminate crime (I am unaware of anybody who ever suggested that they would, or of any law that ever has). I find wholly unpersuasive the suggestion that laws -- particularly new laws -- are unnecessary because "bad guys" will not follow them or because they will fail to eliminate a problem completely.

Read the rest here.

The Great Gun Debate: Selwyn Duke vs. Brett Joshpe

The following is my first entry in a gun debate with Politico writer Brett Joshpe. I will post a link to his response when it is published.

By Selwyn Duke

A few weeks ago, author and Manhattan-based lawyer Brett Joshpe penned a pro-gun-control piece whose thrust was that conservatives need to be sensible with respect to firearms legislation. It’s not sensible, said he, to oppose any and all further restrictions on Second Amendment rights. Well, let’s discuss what’s “sensible.”

Joe Biden: No Reason to Ban AR-15s

By Selwyn Duke

Okay, half-slow laughin’ Joe didn’t actually say that, but he might as well have. While defending his position a week ago that banning the rifles incorrectly called “assault weapons” won’t negatively impact upon Americans’ safety, he pointed out that you shouldn’t trouble yourself: shotguns would still be available — and they’re more effective, anyway. He said, reports the Daily Caller:

A shotgun will keep you a lot safer — a double-barreled shotgun — than an assault weapon in somebody’s hand who doesn’t know how to use it, even one who does know how to use it. You know, it’s harder to use an assault weapon to hit something than it is a shotgun.

[…]You want to keep people away in an earthquake? Buy some shotgun shells.

Alright, Joe; if you’re talking about close-quarters self-defense, you’ll get no argument from me. Now, would you again explain why you want to ban AR-15s?