British ambassador to Poland under fire for promoting homosexual rights

Homosexuals are widely despised in Eastern Europe



The British ambassador to Poland has sparked a diplomatic incident after promoting a controversial gay pride march due to take place in Warsaw on Saturday. Ric Todd has been told by the country's civil rights ombudsman that he has 'exceeded his authority' and Roman Catholic groups have accused the ambassador of representing the 'homosexual lobby'.

The problem arose after Mr Todd, who has been our man in Warsaw for almost two years, gave gay rights leaders a UK Guide To Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual And Transgender People And Their Rights, translated into Polish, earlier this week. It was adapted from the so-called Transgender Toolkit, a political correctness manual for civil servants that the Foreign Office funds with taxpayers' money. It came ahead of the gay pride march scheduled for this weekend.

But the move has provoked a storm of protest. 'Ambassador Todd has exceeded his authority,' Janusz Kochanowski, the Polish civil rights ombudsman, told The Daily Mail. 'He is being improper and doesn't understand the role of a diplomat. He represents the UK, he is not meant to intervene here in the way that he chooses.' Mr Kochanowski added that Polish homosexuals do not live in fear of discrimination as the British ambassador seemed to be implying.

Slawomir Skiba, editor of Christian Polonia, a Catholic newspaper, agreed: 'The ambassador has demonstrated an extreme lack of diplomacy and absolute ignorance of the values by which the vast majority of our society lives.' He added that Mr Todd should confine himself to represent the interests of Britain, not the ' homosexual lobby'.

Poland is arguably Europe's most traditional country and is strongly influenced by the Catholic church. Family values are largely intact, and the country has relatively low rates of abortion, divorce and underage pregnancy. A previous gay pride march was banned by president Lech Kaczynski while he was serving as the mayor of Warsaw.

It is not the first time Mr Todd, who has a wife and three children, has found himself criticised for his stance on gay rights. Last year, he hoisted a 'rainbow flag' - a symbol of gay rights - next to the Union Flag in front of the British embassy, causing some British expatriates in Warsaw to dub him 'Rainbow Ric'. A spokesman for the Foreign Office said the ministry 'does have a policy of promoting LGBT ( lesbian gay bisexual transgender) rights' abroad.'

Asked whether he would raise the rainbow flag at the British embassies in Iran or Saudi Arabia, Mr Todd said: 'I have made a judgment-about what I should do in Poland, and in my opinion this is the appropriate thing to do in this country. 'I am not interfering in Polish politics or society nor am I criticising it. Foreign Office policy is clearly spelt out and I am acting in accordance with policy. 'We have achieved a lot of good things around the world on the subject of LGBT rights. 'None of this is any suggestion by me or the Foreign Office that the Polish policy on LGBT rights is wrong. 'After all the pride organisers met with me and that shows that Poland is a tolerant society.'

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Misusing the word "racist"

The Democrats fling it about willy-nilly on the slightest of pretexts but you must never brand one of them that way, apparently. Comment by Jeff Jacoby below. He seems to think that if Republicans show restraint, Democrats might too. "No chance", I would say

ONE DAY after President Obama nominated federal judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich labeled her a racist. "Imagine a judicial nominee said 'my experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman' new racism is no better than old racism," he wrote on Twitter, referring to Sotomayor's now infamous statement that a Latina woman is likely to make a better judge than a white man. "White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw."

It was a wretched thing to say, and Gingrich wasn't the only conservative Republican to say it. Rush Limbaugh called Sotomayor a "reverse racist" on his radio program; Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck announced that "she sure sounds like a racist." There were similar comments from controversialist Ann Coulter and former GOP congressman Tom Tancredo, and the Washington Examiner headlined an editorial "The racist jurisprudence of Sonia Sotomayor."

Sotomayor's views on race and ethnicity are certainly deplorable. She is apparently an unapologetic chauvinist who believes not only that a judge's perspective is hard-wired to gender, race, and ethnicity -- judging is affected by the "inherent physiological or cultural differences" of color, she says -- but that the "Latina" perspective is especially to be celebrated. Those views are odious to anyone who believes that justice, to be just, must be colorblind. Unfortunately, that is not what contemporary liberals believe. Sotomayor deserves to be questioned closely about her embrace of such benighted identity politics. She did not deserve to be smeared as a racist.

The comments of Gingrich, et al., quickly triggered a backlash. "What the hell is going on here?" demanded Chris Matthews on MSNBC after playing a clip of Limbaugh calling Sotomayor "an angry woman . . . a bigot . . . a racist." In The New York Times, columnist Charles Blow denounced the "fringe Republican race-baiting," and called the "racist" charge "shameful and defeatist." Senator Diane Feinstein of California lamented that "to call someone a racist . . . is just terrible" and only adds a "visceral and terrible heat" to public discourse. David Axelrod, a senior Obama adviser, condemned the accusation as "particularly offensive. . . . It certainly doesn't represent the appropriate language, attitude, orientation."

To his credit, Gingrich retracted his slur after a few days. "The word 'racist' should not have been applied to Judge Sotomayor as a person, even if her words themselves are unacceptable," he wrote on June 3. He now agreed, he said, with those who "have been critical of my word choice."

The demonizing of Sotomayor as a racist was outrageous, and liberals and Democrats were right to decry it. And if they now agree that such political hate speech should have no place in public life, perhaps they will insist on apologies from those in their own ranks who have been guilty of comparable slanders.

Starting with Senator Ted Kennedy.

It was on July 1, 1987, just 45 minutes after Ronald Reagan nominated Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, that Kennedy uncorked a poisonous assault on one of the nation's most distinguished legal thinkers. "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids," Kennedy charged. Bork's thinking was "neanderthal" and "ominous," he said; confirming him would empower censors and slam the doors of the federal courts "on the fingers of millions of citizens."

They were despicable libels, as even admirers of Kennedy acknowledge. "The Bork of Kennedy's speech was a wild-eyed fascist and Bork the nominee was not," writes Kennedy biographer Adam Clymer, a veteran Washington correspondent. Ethan Bronner, who covered the story for the Boston Globe, later described Kennedy as having "shamelessly twisted Bork's world view" -- not in the heat of debate, but with malice aforethought.

The same malice would be visited subsequently on other conservative judges nominated by Republican presidents. In 1991, Clarence Thomas was slimed as a traitor to his race for having married a white woman, and accused of being a mouthpiece for white supremacists. "If you gave Clarence Thomas a little flour on his face," declared Carl Rowan, "you'd think you had David Duke talking." Judge Charles Pickering, a longtime voice of racial reconciliation, was defamed by Senator John Kerry as a "forceful advocate for a cross-burner" and by Senator Charles Schumer for his "glaring racial insensitivity."

In some left-wing precincts, accusations of racism are flung about with astonishing recklessness. The recent "Tea Party" protests by fiscal conservatives around the country, seethed actress/activist Janeane Garofalo, were "about hating a black man in the White House ... racism straight up." The Fox News Channel, says Keith Olbermann, is "as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan." Gingrich himself has been a victim. When, as a Georgia congressman, he led House Republicans to victory in the 1994 elections, New York magazine's Jacob Weisberg blasted his policies as "a proxy for race-baiting," and added: "George Wallace was big in rural Georgia, too."

Few weapons of character-assassination are as abhorrent as the "racist" label falsely applied. Those who grow angry when conservatives apply it to liberals should be equally scandalized when liberals do it to conservatives. And, it should go without saying, vice versa.

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The Liberal War on Science

by Ben Shapiro

Liberals pretend to be the advocates for science. President Barack Obama has repeatedly portrayed himself as the world’s leading advocate for scientific progress; in fact, he has consistently touted himself as the man who will “restore our commitment to science.” So why are liberals so ignorant of science?

Ignorance is the only possible way to explain a recent liberal program considered in the United Kingdom. The Department for Children, Schools and Families is discussing a plan drawn up by a teen sex “advice service” designed to increase the use of condoms by teens. Teens as young as 12 will be subjected to full-scale sex ed, then handed “condom credit cards” that allow them to pick up free condoms at soccer fields, barbers’ shops and “scout huts.”

The logic underlying this program and similar programs like it -- read: American comprehensive sex education -- is that adolescents can be trusted to make adult decisions. As former Clinton Administration Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders puts it, “Education is the best contraception.”

There’s only one problem: science shows that adolescents simply don’t have the brains to use condoms. Literally. According to virtually all scientific studies concerning adolescent neural mechanisms, teens are biologically incapable of inhibiting risky behavior. “(T])e major sources of death and disability in adolescence are related to difficulties in the control of behavior and emotion,” explains Ronald E. Dahl, Staunton Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Although adolescents’ brains have developed enough to allow them the capacity to reason better than children, adolescents are biologically driven toward risky behavior and sensation-seeking by their functionally mature limbic systems. And the part of the brain that generally controls such risky behavior -- the prefrontal cortex -- is not yet fully developed. In other words, despite the fact that teenagers are smart enough to recognize the dangers of risky behavior, their brains ignore the risks when things get hot. Thus, teenagers are morons.

Yet liberals insist that teens are fully capable of making informed choices on subjects ranging from sex to abortion to pot smoking. Even if the science doesn’t back them up, liberals say that we must assume that teenagers are logical, and that they will use discretion -- and condoms -- if told of the risks of unprotected sex. This unscientific philosophy has created an epidemic of sexually transmitted disease and teen pregnancy, and the attendant teen abortions and teen suicides. At least, however, teens are not being grounded by their unhip parents. That would be uncivilized.

Leftist allegiances to disproved myths aren’t restricted to teen rationality. Liberals also ignore the science with regard to the early development of fetuses -- cell differentiation begins in days 18 through 24. By the end of the fourth week of pregnancy, embryos are already visible to the naked eye, and their brains, spinal cords, hearts, and organs have begun to form. During week 10 of pregnancy, the baby’s brain will produce 250,000 neurons each minute. No wonder abortion providers like Planned Parenthood have attempted to block the use of 4D ultrasounds in pregnancy clinics -- they don’t want mothers realizing that their fetuses aren’t merely a bunch of undifferentiated cells. Just another example of liberal ideology triumphing over science.

Want more? How about liberals’ bizarre insistence that men and women are identical, and that gender is merely a social construct? That entirely false belief is the basis for the gay marriage movement, which states that a child with two mommies has essentially the same upbringing as the child of a traditional mother-father coupling. The gay marriage movement also asserts that sex is the equivalent of race -- they say that the differences between men and women are equivalent to the differences between African-Americans, for example, and Caucasians.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Men and women have different brain structures, which have real effects on behavior and perception. “In mammalian species numerous sex differences in brain structure and function have now been documented,” writes Judy L. Cameron of the University of Pittsburgh Departments of Psychiatry, Neuroscience, and Cell Biology & Physiology. “Behaviors showing documented sex difference include behaviors associated with reproduction (mating and maternal behaviors), aggression, activity, and various cognitive functions including spatial cognition, verbal skills, and various aspects of learning and memory.” But this is science liberals don’t like. And so it is largely ignored.

For years, liberals have complained that conservatives ignore science. The truth is that mainstream conservatives often refuse to accept dubious science (e.g. global warming and population bombs). Far more often, it is liberals who ignore hard science in order to promote their agenda of irresponsibility, consequence: free living, and destruction of traditional family values.

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It's a Muslim thing

by Arlene Peck

Growing up in Georgia, the Holocaust and all its horrors seemed a million miles away. My dad and uncles were in the armed forces. When they returned from the war, they didn't talk about it much. As I grew up, I wondered how something so horrible and evil could have happened. Today, we see another evil on the rise that almost makes the Nazis look civilized. They may have put Jews in ovens, but this modern-day evil lives for death and beheads any who stand in its way.

I remain plagued by how an entire nation of supposedly educated people could do nothing - just let it happen. I have been told educated Jews of that time didn't take the approaching Nazi threat seriously. Their mantra was, "We're Germans, not Jews." "We're too important; nothing will happen to us." Today, that same apathy is evident in the form of "political correctness".

Our nation is so dumbed down, people buy whatever hate-filled propaganda is tossed their direction by Muslim journalists who have made deep inroads into our press. When they write that Israel no longer needs to be a Jewish state in order to bring peace to the Middle East, they mean it should be free of Jews. President Barack Obama and Madam Hillary Clinton are demanding Israel empty the villages and towns in Judea and Samaria. They call these Jewish cities "obstacles to peace". They want all Jewish citizens living there removed to make room for millions of Arabs they intend to move onto Jewish land. These are cities! Lovely cities with almost 400,000 people living in lovely homes, with all the trimmings.

It's not about land anyway. It's about a culture that lives for the death of all who fail to live their barbaric tenth-century lifestyle. Emptying those towns is the last thing Israel's leaders should consider. Israel does not jump or ask "How high?" when Obama or any other politician snaps their fingers or barks orders.

I am astounded when I hear Israeli or American Jewish friends tell me that Obama is still their hero. I was even more astounded when I saw that almost 80% of Jews voted for this dangerous man or donated money to his power grab. Why are we our own worst enemies?

Yeah, I'm intolerant of other cultures. California schools strain under open border policies. California hospitals suffer as well. Taxpayers wait for hours and get billed a fortune, while illegals get free treatment for anything. And don't get me started on how our prisons have become Muslim training grounds, incubating home-grown jihadists.

In my book, Prison Cheerleader: How a Nice Jewish Girl Went Wrong Doing Right, I wrote of my time leading a Jewish discussion group at the Atlanta Federal Prison in 1976. Then, there were only about 6,500 Muslims in the whole country. I was unaware of the jihadist plan for world domination, but they were already infiltrating America. Today, the training starts much earlier. I watched in disgust while Barack Hussein bowed in respect to the Saudi King. The very king who makes sure the money America sends to Saudi Arabia, via our oil consumption, is used to fund Islamic schools, many of which turn around and fund the terrorists building more tunnels, funding more suicide bombers and preaching hate against Christians, Jews and all other "infidels".

While apologizing to the Muslim world for "the poor behavior of the United States," Obama should have also brought up the hate taught from the womb to the tomb in those savage countries. We send tax dollars to aid them while they teach hatred in their schools, mosques - and even in our own prisons. They teach their people to kill Jews and Christians. We hear Obama tell his Arab audience that America is no longer a Judeo-Christian country, but one of the largest Muslim countries in the world. Exactly when and by whom was that decided?

Consider the three fields the Muslim communities are now directing their children to study - media, politics and education. Notice, next time you read the paper, how many reporters have Arab names. Notice how many programs on Arab studies, etc. are taught by Arab teachers at American universities. And the grand finale, notice how Muslims now have an American president to call their own. The Islamic heritage Obama worked so hard to conceal during his campaign is now his "key to the city".

Did anyone notice during the election that if someone dared refer to him as Barak Hussein Obama it was "racism"? When an Israeli friend came over to me and said, "I know you're from the south and southerners feel differently about Blacks," I went ballistic. "It's not a Black thing. It's a Muslim thing!" I shouted. And now that the election is over, Obama's speeches to his Muslim brothers are full of acknowledgments of his Muslim "roots".

Meanwhile, our moronic press looks at the ecstatic response from Muslims as a wonderful breakthrough in a part of the world where we have not been very popular. Hey, how could they not like a man who, in such a short time, has not only brought our country to its knees spending us to the edge of poverty, but also trashed Israel in a dozen obvious ways, snubbing the Jewish state and cozying up to everyone from Iran to Saudi Arabia?

I wish Israel would stop acting like a banana republic and start reminding the world that the Middle East has always had a Jewish presence. Don't you remember that Jews lived for hundreds of years in all of these Arab states? What do you think happened to them? They were expelled with the clothes on their backs, leaving vast amounts of property and wealth behind. These countries became Judenrein - Jew free - overnight, just like they now want their 23rd Arab Islamic state to be.

Look at a map, folks! Israel is so small you can barely see that sliver of land; a country which is surrounded by 22 hostile Arab nations with oil and cash reserves. They don't give a diddly-squat about having a "Palestinian state". They just want the Jews gone. Christians, too. Remember Bethlehem? Look how these same 'peace-makers' have murdered, militated, raped and intimidated the Christians there, running them out of town. Today, Christians living in Bethlehem make up about four percent of the total population of what was once a Christian city.

Jews were never compensated for what they were forced to abandon. No one ever mentions it anymore. But the Arabs who fled Israel (by their choice) in 1948 constantly talk about being compensated for what was never theirs; they were simply squatters.

As far as I'm concerned, Israel is too nice to its Arab enemies - allowing them in the Knesset, giving them more rights than among any of their Arab neighbors, and now, possibly, handing them a country. They came from Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt - let them go back.

Israel is a sovereign state. It's time they stood up and made their decisions. If anyone should remember that, it's Bibi Netanyahu. If he doesn't learn from past mistakes, then G-d help them. It's time to remember: with the friends Israel has, they don't need enemies.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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