Cancel Culture Targets Civil Rights and Biblical Values Activist

Arthur Goldberg has spent a lifetime fighting for the rights of others and promoting biblical morality.

Now, at the age of 81, Goldberg, a devout Orthodox Jew and president of his local synagogue, is engaged in the moral and legal fight of his life.

His offense: insisting that Jewish men and others have the right to obtain counseling and therapy to overcome unwanted same-sex attraction (SSA) and founding a nonprofit organization to refer them to places of help.

“For promoting those rights, providing seekers with that information, and referring them for gender affirmation therapy, I have been canceled,” Goldberg told The Epoch Times.

“Where is the person’s right to determine his or her own therapeutic goals? Where is the freedom to choose? What happened to a person’s right to voluntarily choose to change his or her sexual orientation?

“Men and women desiring help with SSA are being denied the right to information about the availability and effectiveness of gender-affirming methods and therapies.”

According to Goldberg, gender affirmation therapy is the empowerment of willing individuals combating unwanted same-sex attraction to affirm the gender of their birth.

When Goldberg, a retired investment banker, saw the painful struggles of some acquaintances dealing with SSA, he was moved to co-found a nonprofit organization called Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH) to offer them hope and assistance.

JONAH’s mission was to refer primarily Jewish men struggling with SSA to professional and religious counseling.

The goal was to help them fulfill their desire to live a life consistent with the tenets of their Jewish religion as declared in the Torah (the five books of Moses), which holds to heterosexuality, the marriage of a man to a woman, and the bringing forth of children within its confines.

“I saw many Jewish men, as well as people of other faiths, who wanted to be free from same-sex attraction and who desperately wanted to start a traditional family,” he said.

“They needed to know that there is available to them a guided process involving professional counseling, self-discovery, and a combination of spiritual and behavioral self-adjustments characteristic of the Jewish concept of teshuvah, meaning ‘returning to the path,’ or repentance.

“We are not about curtailing the hard-won civil rights of gay people. In fact, we acknowledge what the gay rights movement has done to improve the social status and the economic and political integration for both male and female homosexuals.

“The counseling and therapy we recommend are based on love. We only deal with people who come to us wanting to change.”

Deep Religious Convictions and Compassion

While Goldberg is a published author of a book and many articles on homosexuality and has much to say about the debate over its clinical and political aspects, he’s especially passionate about the spiritual side of the subject.

He views with joy and optimism the Creator’s stark declaration in the Bible’s Book of Leviticus, chapter 18, verse 22, which reads, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” (King James Bible)

Goldberg points out that to’eivah, the Hebrew word for “abomination,” is referring to the action and not the person—the sin and not the sinner.

Citing the teaching of several prominent rabbis and linguists, Goldberg believes that to’eivah has in it more than the idea of abhorrence, which is the common English definition.

“The Hebrew word has in its meaning the idea of ‘a straying or to be led astray.’

“To’eivah contains in it the possibility of teshuvah.

“If you can stray off the path, it is implied you can return to the path,” he said. “This offers so much hope, humaneness, compassion, and relief for those crushed between unwanted powerful personal inclinations and their strong dedication to their religion.

“The Torah teaches us that the Creator is not cruel. He is just and loving, much more willing to demonstrate mercy than to punish or destroy.

“Primarily in the West, nations have lost their traditional bearings. This has resulted in an unprecedented confusion of values.

“Once we threw away the compass of right and wrong passed down to us from ancient wisdom, self-indulgence has become the rule, supported by a good deal of creative rationalization.

“We live in a time of moral relativism, which has led to an intolerance of objective morality and those standing for it.”

Goldberg says his activism on behalf of those voluntarily seeking help with SSA, or other forms of what he calls “sexual brokenness,” is for him a religious and moral imperative.

“If a Jewish homosexual turns to another Jew for help in finding a way out of his homosexuality, the Torah indisputably forbids turning him or her away,” Goldberg said.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/cancel-culture-targets-civil-rights-and-biblical-values-activist_4359235.html

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Germany still likes its links with Russia

Chancellor Olaf Scholz surprised the world, and his own country, when he responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with a 100-billion-euro plan to arm Germany, send weapons to Ukraine and end his nation’s deep dependence on Russian energy.

It was Germany’s biggest foreign policy shift since the Cold War, what Mr. Scholz called a “Zeitenwende” — an epochal change — that won applause for his leadership at home and abroad.

But six weeks later, the applause has largely ceased. Even as images of atrocities emerge from Ukraine since the invasion by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Scholz has ruled out an immediate oil and gas embargo, saying it would be too costly. He is dragging his feet on sending 100 armored vehicles to Ukraine, saying that Germany must not “rush ahead.” There are new debates in the ruling coalition about just how to go forward with the massive task Mr. Scholz has laid out, let alone how fast.

Already doubts are building as to the German government’s commitment to its own radical plans. “Zeitenwende is real, but the country is the same,” said Thomas Bagger, a senior German diplomat who will be the next ambassador to Poland. “Not everyone likes it.”

The changes Mr. Scholz announced go far deeper than his commitment to spend 2 percent of gross domestic product on the military — some €70 billion ($76 billion) a year, compared with France’s €41 billion ($44 billion).

They go to the heart of Germany’s postwar identity as a peaceful exporting nation — and to the heart of a business model that has enriched Germany and made it Europe’s largest and most powerful economy.

Now Germans are being asked “to rethink everything — our approach to doing business, to energy policy, to defense and to Russia,” said Claudia Major, a defense expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “We need a mind-set change. We need to recognize that this is about us — that power politics are back and Germany must play a role.”

But she added, “Once again Germany is not leading, it is being dragged.”

Truly reorienting Germans for a new world where security has its real costs — not only in terms potentially of lost lives, but also in lost trade, higher energy prices, slimmer profits and lower economic growth — will be a wrenching endeavor that will take time, even a generation, and more than an afternoon’s policy pronouncement.

That realization is dawning, for Germans and their frustrated European partners.

“I don’t understand how anyone in Germany can sleep at night after seeing horrors like this without doing anything about it,” said Andriy Melnyk, Ukraine’s outspoken ambassador in Berlin, referring to the atrocities in Ukraine. “What does it take for Germany to act?”

Even Annalena Baerbock, the self-assured Green foreign minister, expressed concerns that Zeitenwende may be more temporary than fundamental. She said she worried that the consensus was fragile, that Germans who favor close ties to Russia were silent now, but had not changed their views.

“You can feel this,” she said in an interview. “They know they have to do it right now with regard to sanctions, energy independence and weapons deliveries, also with regard to how we treat Russia. But actually, they don’t like it.”

Since Mr. Scholz put forth his Zeitenwende before a special session of the Parliament on Feb. 27, multiple cracks in Germany’s commitment to change have already begun to appear.

German celebrities made headlines with an appeal to the government against rearmament and the “180-degree change in German foreign policy” that has so far been signed by 45,000 people. Green lawmakers have lobbied to spend only part of the €100 billion special fund on the military, citing other needs like “human security” and climate change. Labor unions and industry bosses are warning of catastrophic damage to the economy and an immediate recession if Russian gas stops flowing.

As the chief executive of the German chemicals giant BASF, Michael Heinz, put it last week: “Cheap Russian energy has been the basis of our industry’s competitiveness.”

It has in fact been the basis of the German economy. Now that German businesses are facing the possibility of being asked to do without it, resistance is quietly mounting. Government ministers say they are being asked discreetly by business leaders when things will “go back to normal” — that is, when they can return to business as usual.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/12/world/europe/germany-russia-ukraine-war.html

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Socialism deserves the same revulsion as Nazism

Nazism was in fact a form of socialism

Why don’t we view socialists and the hammer and sickle with the same revulsion as we view Nazis and the swastika?

As a Modern History teacher for the past two years, I have had the opportunity with my classes to cover a broad spread of the worst atrocities ever committed in the 20th century – the Nazi Party’s rise to power, the Cold War, Communist China. However, in our professional groups on social media, there are a vocal minority of fellow history teachers who, in spite of the clear lessons that history teaches us, feel it appropriate to share openly socialist propaganda among our fraternity.

Now I understand that the economic system that we have, with governments and corporations giving concessions to each other, is hurting young people most of all. Many young people feel that they have no future in our society as it stands. They perceive that those who are wealthy are using their wealth not to help their communities, but to slam the door on the rest of them who are trying to make a comfortable life. They see that the government has been bought out by special interest groups to give our taxpayer dollars to and to make laws that benefit big corporations who don’t need the help.

But having seen this, many in my generation have concluded that the only course of action is to embrace socialism, to forcibly redistribute the wealth at the end of the barrel of a gun, or the improvised weapons of the mob. Of course, whether due to ignorance, wilful blindness or realpolitik, they dare not admit this openly.

Socialism, on the face of it, does not like being seen to indulge itself in street violence. Its proponents position it as an intellectual movement that demands to be answered on an equal footing with our beloved classical liberal ideals. We must not forget also that the Nazi party used the veneer of academia, science, and philosophy to grant legitimacy to their genocidal dogma, even as their will to power was enforced by similar ideologically-possessed footsoldiers to those that walk the streets of America today.

In contrast to our forgetting of Nazism’s intellectual claims and reduction of Nazis to jackbooted thugs, why must we contend with Soviet commissars, pistols against our foreheads, as if they are a study circle of Parisian intellectuals?

Socialism is all too quick to claim the moral high ground over our decadent and uncaring capitalist system. While Nazism’s dogma of racial superiority is apparent in its barbarism, socialism, on the other hand, claims to have the best interests of every citizen at heart. After all, what kind of sociopath doesn’t care about equity for all people? Socialism can, through its generosity with the possessions of others, claim the mantle of morality while sweeping its history of bloodshed and tyranny under the rug.

It is a grave injustice that, between Nazis and socialists, only the 13,000,000 industrialised murders* committed by the Nazis are accepted as a self-evident refutation of the legitimacy of that ideology. Why are the 75,000,000-110,000,000 deaths** from repression, engineered famine, ethnic cleansing not considered enough of an argument to consign forever socialism’s broken promises to the dustbin of history? Why is that ‘not real socialism’?

Socialism pretends that everybody will benefit from the confiscation of private property by the state – but what about those who don’t want to give up the businesses and land they’ve worked so hard to own and maintain? Quite simply, they will be executed; as they have in every other socialist regime. Business owners and private landowners in our service economy would most assuredly face the wall, as did the landholders of every previous agricultural economy to suffer a socialist takeover.

But the bourgeoisie have no more to fear from a socialist regime than do socialist revolutionaries themselves. No one is more in danger from socialism as its activists, most of whom history shows are liquidated by their newly-crowned regime when their usefulness expires. In a sense, I have said all that I have because I love socialists and communists; I want to see them give up their wrong-headed beliefs that will get them killed if they ever get what they want.

Let us make no mistake: socialists deserve to be treated with as much scorn as do Nazis, and we have neglected our civic duty by failing to do so. The Cold War may have ceased in 1991, but the pernicious ideas that first took root in 1917 pose no less of a threat to our society. As we have successfully ostracised anyone who would dare raise their hand in salute of a fascist ideology, so must we relentlessly run out of public spaces any who would so much as speak a word in favour of socialist principles.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/04/socialism-deserves-the-same-revulsion-as-nazism/

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Sanity is winning the TERF wars

Feminists versus trannies

Four immovable words have become emblematic of a welcomed cultural reset taking place in the West – namely, what is a woman?

Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s inability to answer this question set tongues wagging several weeks back.

The dominance of Lia Thomas over female competitors in the NCAA national championship 500-yard freestyle event sparked further debate about the boundaries of gender.

USA Today’s decision to decorate Rachel Levine with a ‘Woman of the Year’ award only added fuel to the fire – as did Twitter’s decision to lock The Babylon Bee’s account for seeing the funny side and dubbing Levine ‘The Babylon Bee’s Man of the Year’.

Britain has had its own ‘What is a woman?’ moment in the recent debate over Emily Bridges’ place – or lack thereof – in female cycling.

And it is from Britain that Hadley Freeman, writing for UnHerd, has declared that the wheels have finally begun falling off the bandwagon of trans ideology. She writes:

‘Not very long ago, the fear of being denounced as a transphobe meant that doubts about extreme gender ideology were confined to private WhatsApp groups and quiet conversations among friends. This is very much no longer the case.’

Citing a string of events similar to that above which led even Prime Minister Boris Johnson to decry the presence of ‘biological men’ in women’s sports, prisons, and change rooms, Freeman heralds the dawn of a new day:

‘Gender ideologues complain that this shift in public tolerance is merely a conservative backlash against trans rights, but they are wrong. What we are seeing is the inevitable result of trans activists … pushing far beyond civil rights for trans people and insisting instead on unpopular and unworkable policies, such as trans women in sport, child transition, and any open acknowledgement of female biology.’

‘This was the week the spell began to break,’ she writes, adding that she sensed all along that sport would be the catalyst for our collective return to sanity:

‘When historians write about that relatively brief but extremely toxic time when gender extremism gripped Western countries, and they describe the moment when that grip loosened, they will start with the photos of Lia Thomas, the Ivy League trans swimmer, towering over her teammates.’

‘Toxic’ is an apt descriptor. The TERF wars have been short-lived but brutal, for feminists especially. For those unaware of the acronym, TERF stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist – a rather opaque way of describing those who believe women are women, and men are not.

Astute cultural observers foresaw the events of recent weeks. In 2020, Christian historian Carl Trueman noted in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self that the LGBTQ+ movement is not as coherent as it appears at first glance.

The union of these assorted letters, he argues, ‘Is not the result of any intrinsic affinities shared by its component parties but an alliance of historical and political convenience rooted in a shared sexual iconoclasm.’ So while the L and G assume the fixed nature of gender, the T and Q reject biology altogether.

This is no small thing. Trans ideologues will not rest until gender categories are effectively erased and gender identity is seen merely as software that can be uploaded into any human body. Team reality, on the other hand – and traditional feminists in particular – see the female body as central to the female experience and identity.

Both teams cannot win. Like it or not, this one is a zero-sum game.

And while the war rages on, truth now has the upper hand, thanks in large measure to four simple words. Liberal Senator for South Australia Alex Antic discovered the power of those words this week, and the results were, as you might expect, glorious. [Antic said that radical gender theory has ‘seeped into our institutions’].

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/04/sanity-is-winning-the-terf-wars/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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