The Patriots

by Cillian Zeal

The Paul Manafort case is now in the hands of the jury — and, if the people at CNN and other leftist news outlets have anything to do with it, that jury could be facing some serious intimidation.

According to Breitbart, CNN and six other news outlets have sued to obtain the personal details of the individuals who will judge the merits of the government’s case against the former Trump campaign manager.

Along with CNN, BuzzFeed, Politico, The New York Times, NBC and The Associated Press have filed a suit requesting the details of the jurors, including their names and home addresses.

Breitbart described the suit as “a move that is both disturbing and almost unprecedented.”

Writing at The Federalist, Bre Payton noted that the request by CNN and other left-leaning outfits suggested there was more going on that simple journalistic pursuit of information.

“Publicly outing the names and home addresses of jurors is considered ethically questionable, as outlined in this guidance sheet on the topic from the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press,” Bre Payton noted at The Federalist.

This is doubly troubling when you take into account the fact that the judge in the case says he’s received threats due to his role in adjudicating the matter.

In rejecting the motion put forth by the news organizations, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III said that he’s currently being trailed by U.S. Marshals because of the threats made against him, according to Fox News.

“I can tell you there have been (threats), Ellis said, adding that “The Marshals go where I go.”

“I don’t feel right if I release (the jurors) names,” he concluded. That would be bad enough, but CNN in particular has a long history of intimidating people that cross them. Last year, they threatened to dox an individual who created an anti-CNN .gif meme.  According to Breitbart, the network also doxxed an elderly Trump supporter who had promoted a pro-Trump event that may have been set up by Russians, leading to harassment and threatening.  And then there’s the time, as RealClear Politics reported, that the network gave out George Zimmerman’s Social Security number. We could go on and on.

With that kind of history in mind, CNN’s request to the court looks less like an act of journalists seeking information than it does the groundwork of a plan to attack the Manafort jury if it comes back with a verdict the media doesn’t like.

And then there’s the time, as RealClear Politics reported, that the network gave out George Zimmerman’s Social Security number. We could go on and on.

With that kind of history in mind, CNN’s request to the court looks less like an act of journalists seeking information than it does the groundwork of a plan to attack the Manafort jury if it comes back with a verdict the media doesn’t like.

This is an absolutely farcical request that serves no legitimate journalistic purposes. It’s doxxing, plain and simple.

These jurors don’t deserve this. CNN shouldn’t be putting their thumbs on the scales of justice.,

by Jack Davis

After an Ohio parent blew the whistle on a morality test given to a high school class, the Hilliard City School District sent the teacher who gave the test to time out.

Students were given a 36-question test about various ethical situations in which they were asked to choose what actions were OK and which were not.

But the questions, given to a 10th-grade language arts class at Hilliard Bradley High School, crossed a line as far as parent Todd Sandberg was concerned, The Columbus Dispatch reported.

Sandberg said the test was graded in a way that it would tell students their “moral foundation” and their political leanings.

“What does the teacher need to know that information for?” he asked. “The questions are so out of line for high school language arts.”

Some questions asked about typical conflicts and dilemmas, but some were more disturbing and involved sex and violence.

One question talked about a scenario in which “A man kills a baby rabbit with a knife” on a live TV show. As with all the questions, students had to grade the comment on a scale from “Not OK” to “OK.”

In another instance, according to Fox News, students were asked to respond to this statement: “Using both a condom and a pill, a brother and a sister decide that they want to sleep with each other — just once, to see what it would be like.”

“Sarah’s dog has four puppies,” another scenario read, according to Fox News. “She can only find a home for two of them, so she kills the other two with a stone to the head.”

Sandberg pointed out the questions on a Facebook site for parents.

“My job was to point it out,” Sandberg said. “It is clearly evident that it’s out there in the public. The public eye is aware of it. I knew it was going to cause a firestorm.”

The teacher was placed on administrative leave while the district sorts out what to do next, WTTE reported.

The school district then issued a public apology, according to WTTE.

“Last night, we were made aware of a classroom activity that should never have taken place,” the district stated. “We absolutely share the outrage of our parents and community.”

The statement called the test “an isolated incident, and an activity of this nature would never be considered acceptable.”

Sandberg said the underlying issue is that parents need to talk with their children about what’s going on in school.

“Hey, parents, be on the lookout,” he said. “I love the district. This is an isolated case.”

According to the Canton Repository, documents released by the district said the teacher who gave the test is named Sarah Gillam and she has taught at the school since 2007.

by Robert Oscar Lopez

{An excellent 2014 article that exposes the insipidness of gay adoption:  Lopez considers himself a “children’s advocate” in rejecting gay marriage and gay adoption.  In the process he is also addressing one of the greatest threats to the survival of the family in recent history, especially with the global explosion of gay surrogacy and gay adoption.  Some of the dark “underworld” agendas he hints at need more attention -- publicly.  Read his own story at:  http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/08/6065. -- DNI]

S.E. Cupp is one of the latest media figures to make a pitch on gay marriage and adoption.  As is often the case, she throws out so many canards in this cocktail of insipidness, one scarcely knows where to begin. 

I will say conservatives have got to move on gay marriage....[and] on gay adoption. If abortion is the abhorrent option – and I believe it is – then adoption by any two loving people has got to be the better option. 

First of all, the latest estimates indicate that somewhere between 12-15% of heterosexual couples struggle with infertility.  Currently many of these viable homes, rather than adopting, are being steered to the artificial reproduction market and contributing to the 1.5% (and rising) of live American births tied to in vitro technology.  The alternative to abortion is obviously to get more of these viable straight couples to avoid sperm-banking or surrogacy, and to consider adopting instead.

Anyone who’s lost a birth parent to death, divorce, or a tragedy knows that a kid feels the absence of a father or mother.  This is square one for adoptees, orphans, children of divorce, or children of same-sex couples – someone was there when you were born, and now he or she is not there.  That person is a very real human being, tied to you by flesh and blood.  A kid mourns the missing person, thinks about him, longs to reconnect with him.  It hurts to be cut off from a mother or father.  I was cut off from my dad because he divorced my lesbian mother; I was reared by two women.

It’s not a small thing to make a kid grow up without a father because a bunch of self-centered adults can’t get their acts together.  I’ve had enough of pundits like S.E. Cupp being so glib about things that are incredibly painful for people who are actually in these situations, and powerless about it to boot.  If you haven’t been raised by a gay couple and you haven’t been adopted, it might be hard to understand how offensive it is to hear people on TV talk about fraught transactions like adoption and same-sex parenting with such confident nonchalance.

One of the unnoticed ironies in the debate on gay adoption has to do with David Brock, the chieftain at Media Matters, whose subdivision Equality Matters has gone after me more than once for my views on a child’s right to his mother and father.  Brock spent much of his 2002 memoirs, Blinded by the Right, on the pain he felt about being adopted.  In fact, his adoption weighed on him and complicated his relationship with his father much more than did his gayness. You would think that Brock would understand why it’s not such a simple thing to yank kids from a birth family and toss him into a home with one or two adults unrelated to him.  Ironic self-awareness is apparently lacking on the left.  {And with Child Protective Services who often remove children from their true parents with out sufficient justification. - ED}

The truth is that adoption in the United States is too expensive, and many heterosexual couples find the costs prohibitive, so they are priced out of the market by gay couples, who have much higher incomes and are, 100% of the time, forced to take babies from other people since they cannot conceive them on their own.  In fact, gay adopters have such an insatiable desire to parlay their high incomes into cash-for-kids that they waged a war against Catholic Charities adoption centers, going as far as forcing many such agencies to shut down as punishment for not giving gay couples other people’s abandoned children.

The dirty secret about gay adoption is that most often when homosexual couples adopt, one of their pair is the biological parent.  Usually the child comes from a former heterosexual relationship that broke down.  So when they “adopt,” they typically have to put a bunch of people through the mud fight that my dear friend Janna endured: they have to drag the opposite-sex parent to family court, strip him or her of custody, and then force the poor little kid to submit to the parental authority of a new, sometimes creepy, person who’s sleeping with a biological parent and very likely caused the breakup of that child's original family.

That’s the real-life adoption story that doesn’t make for great gay headlines.  Gay adoption has unfortunate but ineluctable ties to divorce.  In fact, by encouraging gay adoption so much, we are encouraging a whole new generation of homewreckers – gays who want to be parents and figure out that the cheapest way to do it is to seduce someone of the same sex who is currently in a rocky marriage with children.

You will hear, from time to time, about hundreds of thousands of children in foster care who can’t find families to adopt them.  This is a favorite statistic for gay marriage gurus to throw out as a kind of emotional Shock and Awe, a debate-stopper of the first order, especially if you can cough up an example of special-needs children being raised by adorable lesbians in Michigan.  There has never been a backlog of infants, so these holdouts are typically older children who landed in the child protective services system because of a crisis.  Many of them are kids who don’t want to placed with gay couples, or kids whom gay couples don’t want, either.  What people don’t tell you – because they don’t want to and don’t have to, until you push them on it – is that most of those children have living parents, or living kin networks, and the foster care system has to work on reuniting them with their struggling birth families.  Otherwise, the government would merely be an oppressive police state taking people’s kids away and signing them over to rich folks in exchange for cash, as happened in dictatorships like the kind that governed Argentina in the 1970s.

Most people don’t have the time to work through the nuances of foster care versus adoption.  Fewer still are aware of how many people in “Adoption Land” – the community of adoptees and adoptive families – are calling for massive reform in both foster care and adoption.  What gay activists are asking for, on both fronts, would actually be moving in the precisely wrong direction; gay lobbyists want agencies to speed up the process by which foster kids are cut off from their birth mothers and fathers and subordinated permanently to same-sex couples eager to acquire them.  On the international adoption front, even gay adoptive father Frank Ligtvoet has faced the painful reality that adoption systems are overemphasizing the desire of wealthy childless families rather than the needs of impoverished communities that are struggling to provide for their children (in the Huffington Post, no less).

It took a while for brave activists like Claudia Corrigan D’Arcy to apply the same critiques on the domestic fronts, but now, too, people are scrutinizing domestic adoptions and finding much to improve.  (The film Philomena, ironically, humanizes the pain of a birth mother who is pressured to give up her infant who turns out to be gay; despite the film’s sympathy for homosexuals, the gay movement is pushing to create more Philomenas nowadays so they can build their rainbow families.)

Foster care costs the public money, whereas adoption is a huge moneymaker for certain attorneys and even, in the United Kingdom and here, for social service agencies (see this article on the blowback that resulted from rewarding people too handsomely for placing foster kids in adoptive homes).  So the mentality that it’s always best to get kids out of foster care and into adoption is a mixed bag.  On the one hand, we have ample evidence that life in foster care is hard, and we know that many adoptive homes are great places to save suffering children from such instability.

(I should confess: when I was fifteen, there were problems in my home, and my father did not want to take me in, so he drove me to a “boarding school” in Maine, where I stayed while my home situation might improve.  It was very hard to feel abandoned, essentially, at the moment that my dad dropped me off at the main office with a check, but would it have made sense for some couple to adopt me at that point?  In the end I returned to my mothers’ home and finished high school early, going to college as a de facto emancipated minor.)

On the other hand, we have much to worry about when we envision rushing kids out of foster care into gay adoption.  Gay adoptive parents have proved just as capable as straight foster parents of kidnapping, murder, abuse, rape, child pornography, and neglect involving the children they acquire.  So everything that’s painful about foster care with straight people is also painful about gay adoption; the difference is that in a gay adoption, the child loses forever his chance at having a mom and dad.  Whether adopters are gay or straight, it’s not a good idea to incentivize social services agencies’ power to remove children from troubled homes and transfer all parental equivalence to a new home without making a good-faith effort to repair problems with the birth family.

It sounds ominous to be in the position of “aging out” of foster care without having been adopted.  But it’s not necessarily as bad as it sounds.  You can still maintain contact with foster parents, but once you are emancipated, it is your choice to do that (not something forced on you by law), and you also have the choice to rebuild your relationship with your birth kin network, the way I rebuilt a relationship with my father as an adult.  My mother’s lesbian partner never adopted me, and that was probably the right decision.

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Robert Oscar Lopez edits English Manif.  [See also his own “bio”: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/08/6065/ The article first appeared here.