CNN host Don Lemon recently became the latest in a string of high profile individuals to "come out of the closet" and inform everyone who would listen that he enjoys practicing homosexuality.  Every time this occurs, and we are treated to the seemingly endless litany of interviews that applaud the recently outed individual's courage and fortitude, I'm left scratching my head.

First, why do the very people that constantly tell us that what a person does in their bedroom is no one else's business, simultaneously find it necessary to inform everyone of what they do in their bedroom?  If this is a private matter, Don, then let's keep it private.  Perhaps I'm the only one who feels this way, but frankly, I don't care to know what kind of sex the evening news anchor is into.  Beyond it being remarkably irrelevant to the dissemination of news, it's just kind of creepy that these proponents of sexual anarchy feel it is their civic duty to incessantly shove their unconventional behavior in front of our children's faces.

But beyond that, let me be blunt: there is absolutely no courage to be found in following what has become an alarming fad amongst the entertainment glitterati by joining the LGBT crowd.  Does anyone actually think that in the politically correct world of American media there was any chance Don Lemon was going to be publicly criticized amongst his peers for such a declaration?  Lemon's home network of CNN has become notorious for their one-sided reporting of the emerging face-off between homosexual rights claims of sexual anarchists on the left and the rights of conscience for the traditional morality crowd on the right.

Homophobia has become a buzzword that is ceaselessly applied to anyone with moral objections to homosexuality.  In her celebratory interview with Lemon, congratulating him for telling everyone who he enjoys having sex with, uber-leftist Joy Behar demonstrated this very truth.  She asked Lemon, "And so you're going to have people sit there with you like Rick Santorum, who seems like a big homophobe...how do you feel that you'll be able to handle that easily?" 

Gee, Joy, maybe like every Christian feels when they sit down to talk with a Christophobe like you?  And that's the point: far from eliminating discrimination and prejudice, these homosexual rights champions that dominate the press and entertainment world are advocating their own version of bigotry towards those who espouse Biblical morality.

If Lemon really wanted to demonstrate courage, let's see him "come out" in the media as a Bible believing, born-again follower of Jesus Christ whose faith teaches him that homosexuality is morally improper.  Rather than basking in the glow of the entertainment crowd's unyielding affection, he would be immediately tarred and feathered for his draconian allegiance to discriminatory and prejudicial fairy tales coming from an ancient, bigoted book.

He would watch his convictions be publicly twisted as nothing more than masked hatred.  He would see his entire career and livelihood threatened as a result of his supposedly backwards beliefs.  Think I'm exaggerating?  Ask two-time gymnastics gold medal winner Peter Vidmar who just this month was forced to resign from his position as head of the 2012 U.S. Olympic gymnastics team simply because he donated $2,000 to support traditional marriage in California.  Far from being hailed as a hero or courageous for standing up for who he was and what he believed, the homosexual crowd vilified Vidmar, as outed figure skater Johnny Weir labeled his convictions, "disgraceful." 

In our pop culture, courage is apparently a one way street.  This reality was further demonstrated by former NBA star turned social commentator Charles Barkley's recent comments to Washington Post columnist Mike Wise.  Praising Phoenix Suns president Rick Welts for his courage in announcing - what else - that he was "gay," Barkley opined, "The first people who whine and complain is them Bible-thumpers, who are supposed to be non-judgmental, who rail against them.  Hey, may, I don't worry about what other people do."

In case you're wondering, no, Charles didn't notice the irony of claiming he doesn't care about what people do the sentence right after he viciously condemned "Bible-thumping" people for what they do.  Perhaps I'm expecting too much intellectual integrity from a man whose most famous contribution to his profession was spitting on opposing fans in the crowd.  But Barkley's glaring hypocrisy is reflective of a systemic problem of inconsistency on the left.

That inconsistency is what leads us to a culture where someone as genial and pleasant as Dr. James Dobson is branded a hater, while someone as vile and perverted as Lady Gaga is hailed as a courageous trailblazer.

In the end, it's not the presence of decadence in our culture that is the issue.  Free societies will always produce the occasional oddball, and embracing liberty means securing the basic rights of those who are different.  But what we're experiencing is a move on the part of the oddballs not to secure their own rights, but to deny and disparage the rights of others to disagree with them and their choices.  If outlawing decadence is bigoted, codifying it is even worse.

This column was first published at The American Thinker.

There's an old African proverb that says, "Who knows whose womb carries the chief."  This simple truth has taken on a powerful meaning recently for every American paying attention.

According to recently secured documents from the Immigration and Naturalization Services, evidence has emerged that President Obama's father, Barack Obama, Sr., apparently paid to send a young Kenyan girl he had impregnated in Massachusetts to London to have an abortion.

Doing the work that investigative journalists of the mainstream media used to do, author Jack Cashill reveals that the foreign press, unlike their American counterparts, are all over the story.  Far from speculation, according to the INS documents, the high school aged girl was in Massachusetts on an exchange program when she evidently became pregnant by the 29 year old Obama.  Asian News International notes that this incident occurred prior to 1973's Roe v. Wade decision, meaning, "abortions were illegal in the U.S."

One cannot help but wonder if such a revelation would not cause a man whose own wife describes the heinous butchery of partial-birth abortion as a "legitimate medical procedure" to consider: that could have easily been me. 

Let me pause to acknowledge that I don't typically like using these kinds of tactics when discussing the issue of abortion.  The truth is it doesn't matter whether the child being killed is the next Beethoven, Bach, Edison or Einstein.  What makes human life valuable and worthy of protection is that it is human life, bearing the inviolable image of the Creator.  Life is valuable because of what it is, not what it does - whether that's making beautiful music or being tone deaf, inventing a light bulb and unlocking spectacular scientific mysteries or needing help tying shoe laces...or yes, leading the most powerful nation in world history.

But this unfolding bombshell regarding Barack Obama's family is highly instructive given our President's life-long commitment to defending abortion.  The simplest scenario arising from the story is this: President Obama had a half-brother or half-sister who, rather than having the chance to thrive and succeed as he has, ended up in a dumpster in London.  The more complex reality for the president to grapple with is that it is not that far of a stretch to assume, given the complexities of his relationship with mother Ann Dunham, that Barack Obama, Sr. might have preferred the same end for our current president. 

Such a scenario, beyond offering a brand new perspective on Obama's memoir "Dreams from my Father," would provide the most pro-abortion president our country has ever known with the same chilling realization that so many of us born after the disastrous Roe decision encounter: had it not been for the strength and resolve of loving, pro-life mothers, we could have been legally slaughtered.

It was former President Ronald Reagan who is credited with having stated the obvious but enlightening fact that those fighting for abortion rights are those who have already been born.  This disquieting account about his father allows our current President the chance to put himself where his half-brother or half-sister once was...where he once was...and reconsider his tragic position on life in the womb.

As I read the heartbreaking details of this story about a soul deprived of its unalienable right to breathe free, I'm taken back to President Obama's response to Rick Warren at the Saddleback Church presidential forum in the lead-up to the 2008 election.  Asked when a baby gets human rights, Obama cowardly surrendered righteousness for convenience and politics, infamously asserting that, "answering that question with specificity is above my pay grade."

That embarrassing response shouldn't have been a surprise given that just a few months prior, Barack Obama addressed the issue of sex education on the campaign trail.  Speaking specifically about his own daughters, the man who could have been aborted himself proclaimed, "I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby."

Like father, like son.

This column was first published at The American Thinker.

Remember the days when Iraq was the "dumb war," when President Bush was nothing but a political punching bag, and the war-weary American mind began to tolerate the second coming of anti-war retreads of the 1960s and 70s?

Who knew how quickly a little extralegal military assassination done on the watch of a Democrat president could turn the left's resurgent "peace community" into a fist-pumping, flag-waving, patriotic cabal of jingoistic chickenhawks?  All of a sudden, for the first time in their adult lives, it seems they are really proud of their country.

Take MSNBC's Ed Schultz, a man for whom self-contradiction is a way of life.  After berating the illegal methods of waging war and the ineffective tactics of gathering intelligence that supposedly took place during the Bush years, Schultz crowed that, "Osama bin Laden is the Republicans' Waterloo on national security.  They don't have the upper hand.  Their plan didn't work for all those years. They did the illegal activity and it didn't work. And it was President Obama and it was the Democrats who have supported this strategy that was well played out on the campaign trail and now is enacted big time and we're getting ... results!"

The only problem with this analysis, of course, is the evidence.  As anyone with a coherent mind recognizes, it takes more than just waking up one day and saying, "You know what, I think it's time we go get bin Laden," to eliminate the fugitive terrorist mastermind.  It took years of intelligence gathering.  Had the left's strategy - the one that Obama proudly touted from the campaign trail - actually been employed during those years, we would have never found him.

Had Guantanamo been closed, had aggressive tactics not been used, had government secrets been released, had habeas corpus been extended, had civilian show trials been conducted, had terrorists been provided legal counsel, had "courageous restraint" been employed - all liberal policy ideas - Osama bin Laden would still be planning, plotting, and killing.  That he's dead serves only as proof that when liberals actually get serious about national security, they jettison their own foolishly naïve arguments and follow a conservative path.

The truth is that the entire liberal philosophy on protecting America has been rendered a joke.  Take their passionate insistence that enhanced interrogations like waterboarding violate our values.  It's fine to be morally opposed to such techniques, but what warped ethical interpretation of our values does one have to possess to condemn non-lethal interrogations, yet condone and celebrate shooting an unarmed, pajama-clad man in the face with an assault rifle? 

That question was put to Obama's National Security Advisor Tom Donilon by Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday.  Donilon's response was a priceless depiction of the awkward position the left now finds itself in.  When Wallace asked Donilon to explain the contradiction of believing that waterboarding a violent terrorist like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was not consistent with our values but shooting a violent terrorist like bin Laden in the head was, Donilon paused and then stammered, "We are at war with Osama bin Laden."  Of course we are.but isn't the same true for KSM and the entire al-Qaeda network?

But perhaps the final nail in the coffin of the left's national security credibility is the most satisfying.  In the first presidential debate between Senators Barack Obama and John McCain, the man who now occupies the White House laid out his familiar condemnation of George Bush's war in Iraq by saying, "Six years ago, I opposed this war because...we hadn't caught bin Laden. We hadn't put al Qaeda to rest, and as a consequence, I thought that it was going to be a distraction. I wish I had been wrong."

Great news, Mr. President: as it turns out, you were!  Evidence has now emerged that the key al-Qaeda operative who helped our intelligence community pinpoint Osama bin Laden's courier (the rat who led us to the cheese) was captured in...wait for it...Iraq.  Hassan Ghul, a terrorist nabbed by American forces in Iraq in 2004, has been identified as providing the "key moment" when our interrogators put the final piece of the puzzle in place.

So the road to bin Laden traveled straight through the streets of Iraq.  This fitting conclusion provides the self-congratulating left with a most uncomfortable and inconvenient reality: those who wish to celebrate the killing of Osama bin Laden are compelled to acknowledge and appreciate the wisdom and courage of President Bush - a man who faced withering criticism by those who now bask in the glory of what his policies (the very ones they demagogued) wrought.

As it turns out, Ed Schultz is right about the killing of bin Laden being a "Waterloo."  He simply has mistaken who is playing the part of Napoleon.

This column was first published at The American Thinker.

Much is being made of President Obama's recent decision to employ presidential signing statements -- refusing to enforce certain portions of a Congressional budget bill he signed into law -- given that during the 2008 campaign he railed against such a practice proclaiming, "We're not gonna use signing statements as a way of doing an end run around Congress."  This glaring inconsistency would strike most people as hypocritical.  But coupled with his decisions to use military tribunals after blasting them during the campaign, to keep Guantanamo open for business after previously blaming it as nothing but a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda, and to start new wars after vociferously condemning "dumb" ones, this is par for the Obama course.

But beyond the blatantly obvious flip-flops which the Obama-loving mainstream press find a way to excuse as just part of the president's remarkably nuanced mind, this behavior fits a much larger pattern of inconsistency that has come to define the liberal mind in America.  Inconsistencies that should bring great embarrassment when exposed, and that rationality would demand be confronted and resolved, are systematically embraced and welcomed in the land of left-believe.

How else can one explain the recent protest that took place in Washington, D.C.?  There, over 40 liberals (including the city's mayor and several councilmen) took to the streets to complain that the budget deal recently passed by Congress would deprive the nation's capital city of federal tax dollars to fund abortions.  In the name of choice, these left-wing activists blocked the streets until being detained by police.  On its own, seeing a group of liberals championing the right to choose to kill children in the womb is nothing new.

But that wasn't all they were protesting.  Another part of the budget deal that had raised their ire was the reinstatement of the Opportunities Scholarship Program.  This school choice program provides poor families the chance to move their children from failing inner-city schools to higher performing ones, allowing future generations of predominantly minority students the opportunity to escape the cycle of poverty that engulfs them.  This protest, then, is the perfect embodiment of modern liberal thought: rally in the streets to continue facilitating the choice to slaughter innocent children in the womb while simultaneously demanding that those children who survive the abortion holocaust be given no choice to break free from their deplorable surroundings.

Or consider the brewing controversy in the New York public libraries where patrons are allowed virtually unfettered access to view hard-core pornography on the computers.  The ACLU and their fellow liberal travelers are quick to defend the smut as a constitutional right.  Library spokesman Angela Montefinise explained as much, stating, "In deference to the First Amendment protecting freedom of speech, the New York Public Library cannot prevent adult patrons from accessing adult content that is legal."

Of course, no deference to the First Amendment protection of freedom of religion is necessary when and if library officials would want to set up a Nativity Scene on the front lawn.  Here again, we see the state of the liberal mind: Jesus Christ on public library taxpayer-funded lawns violates the U.S. Constitution, but porn star Jenna Jameson on public library taxpayer-funded computer screens -- in plain sight of little Bobby checking out his Curious George book -- is the essence of the First Amendment.

And finally, how can we overlook the witch hunt liberals are instigating against the evil oil speculators that they claim are single-handedly driving up the cost of fuel in America?  In a desperate bid to divert the nation's attention from the logical consequences of President Obama's war against domestic oil production, the left attacks those who attempt to make money in oil futures by buying low and selling high.  They create a patently absurd fantasy that there is a secret room where a handful of evil masterminds sit around cackling like madmen as they play us all like harp strings.  But as Columbia Business School finance professor Bob Hodrick explains, "The market is so competitive that that's nonsense.  There's no way for everyone to communicate and get together and say, ?we're going to buy and drive up the price.'"  Of course not.

Ironically though, the only power cabal capable of wielding enough influence over the market to make any significant difference in our economic health is the Obama Administration -- the very ones ordering investigations into these non-existent secret price manipulators.  Bill Kristol drew attention to this inconvenient truth on last week's Fox News Sunday, explaining that Obama's speculation on the massive stimulus package has exploded the deficit while failing to create any noticeable economic growth.  What it has done is generate, "more government spending and unbelievably cheap money depreciating, [thus] debasing the dollar." 

That, in the end, is what contributes far more to high gas and food prices than any other factor.  If liberals want to blame speculators for our troubles, intellectual honesty demands that they begin with our Speculator-in-Chief.

But intellectual honesty is not the order of the day in the modern liberal mind -- a place where if it weren't for double standards, there seemingly would be no standards at all.

The column was first published at The American Thinker.

We did not waver, we did not tire, we did not falter...and we did not fail. 

After nearly a decade of spent American blood, sweat and treasure in an arduous struggle against those who perpetrated the most brazen and dastardly attack on the American homeland in our nation's history, the United States military has struck its most significant blow.  Osama bin Laden is dead.

Those simple words mean much. 

They mean closure - or as close to it as is possible - for the families who suffered the death of loved ones in the fire and rubble of 9/11. 

They mean a sense of peace to those who have watched their sons and daughters volunteer to serve the great cause of freedom on distant and hostile shores. 

They mean dread confirmation of the reality our enemies face that no matter how long it takes, the American military will get their man. 

They mean justification to a former president who had vowed to his people that justice would be served. 

They mean vindication to a current president whose commitment to the war against terror had been criticized and questioned. 

And most importantly, they mean exactly what they say: that a murderous butcher who had masterminded countless plots to kill innocent people in pursuit of his unholy and mad designs no longer treads our sod, and has been dispatched to deal with an Authority far greater than any earthly judge.

To the heroic members of the U.S. Armed Forces that carried out this cunning and skilled attack - men and women who never cease to amaze or impress us with their loyalty and resolve - words do not express our pride in your professionalism and courage.  As details emerge, we will learn and understand more about the mission, its risks and dangers.  And the precision with which it has been carried out will become known throughout the world. 

When it does, it will reaffirm to our citizens what we already know: that ours is the best trained, best equipped and most effective fighting force the world has ever known.  The U.S. military, in cooperation with our superior intelligence agencies, are well worth our investments and our support.

It will also reaffirm what our enemies would be wise to learn: we may bicker and disagree vigorously amongst ourselves, but that should never be taken as a sign of weakness.  Americans may be slow to anger, but that should never be taken as a sign of ambivalence.  When it comes to the values that unite and inspire us, Americans of every generation including our own are strong, resolute and fiercely determined.

And finally, to our Commander-in-Chief, well done, sir.  You have defied the left-wing of your base by continuing the vast majority of the anti-terrorism strategies left in place by President Bush because you knew they would make us safer.  You have ramped up predator drone attacks on terror camps and made the killing or capture of Osama bin Laden a top priority.  It paid off. 

There are a great many issues upon which I disagree vehemently with you, Mr. President.  And undoubtedly, I will continue to express those frustrations and concerns.  But your devotion and commitment to this end is one that demands and receives my utmost respect. 

Security officials are already revealing the intensity with which you have pursued the intelligence tip on bin Laden's whereabouts that your office received months ago.  No one of any political persuasion can question your dedication to fulfilling the "dead or alive" demand made by your predecessor. 

No matter how symbolic some will attempt to say this action was, Mr. President, you made our country safer by your decisiveness.  For that, every American - including this one - owes you a debt of gratitude.