Assorted

I have a terrible headache, which is getting worse as I watch the snow piling up again, so let's have a miscellany column today. (It always eases my pain to discharge my duties here by appropriating the words of others.)

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First, my secret love Adrienne, who's been pleading with me to relocate from the frozen desert of Long Island to the frozen wilds of north Idaho, notes that the campaign for same-sex marriage has taken aim at the Catholic Church:

Fontbonne Academy in Milton, MA, a Catholic girls' high school, is under attack by the homosexual movement.

Across the country whenever a "gay marriage" battle heats up pro-family people are always told, "It's all about civil rights. It won't affect your religious institutions." And the politicians and judges believe them.

That's about to change. This week the powerful Boston homosexual legal group, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination (MCAD) against a Catholic girls prep school because the school declined to hire a man because he is "married" to another man.

Anyone who can draw a line through two points could have seen this coming. Homosexuals want their deviancy normalized. They won't rest until they've compelled every institution in America to accept them on an equal basis with heterosexuals. If that requires the destruction of every right in the book, most especially freedom of religion and freedom of association, so what?

We're finding out "so what" in real time, Gentle Reader. It simply doesn't matter what opinion you hold about homosexuality. Think about the implications, and be afraid.

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Next up is Jonah Goldberg yet again:

There is a very real sense — from the "Occupy Left" to the "Tea Party Right" — that the system is being rigged from the top. Who is doing the rigging depends on whom you talk to. But whether your villains are super rich hedge-fund managers, rent-seeking insurance companies or elitist environmentalists, pretty much everyone feels a powerlessness as decisions about how we should live are being made without our input or consent. When did we vote to get rid of the incandescent light bulb, for Pete's sake?...

For practical purposes, people don't live in the United States of America. They live in their neighborhoods, towns and communities. Yes, these are American communities, but your neighbors live in your neighborhood, not seven states over. Your kids don't go to "U.S. schools"; they go to the school down the road.

Yet most of our money goes to the government in Washington, and so does most of the power. Why not flip that around? Want to see the rich, poor and middle class interact more? Give them a reason to show up to a city council or school board meeting. Sure, money has power at the local level, too, but so do votes.

Moreover, when rich people get their way at the local level, people usually know who they are and why they are doing things. And you can bend their ear at the supermarket or at soccer practice.

But when all the decisions are made in Washington or New York, most Americans are simply out of the loop.

And they resent it.

Another gem of insight and candor. Americans expect to be unequal to one another in matters such as wealth and income. What causes our necks to swell up is the perception of class distinctions, such as those that divided the common subjects of the Soviet Union from the nomenklatura. It's one of the sharpest second-order effects of Obamunist policy to create such divisions and fence them with razor wire -- and I find it very hard to believe that it's unintentional.

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Phil at Random Nuclear Strikes cites the latest horror to emerge from the combination of "public" schools and the worship of "diversity:"

A popular gifted program will get the axe after Ditmas Park school officials chose diversity over exclusivity.

Citing a lack of diversity, PS 139 Principal Mary McDonald informed parents in a letter that the Students of Academic Rigor and two other in-house programs would no longer accept applications for incoming kindergartners.

“Our Kindergarten classes will be heterogeneously grouped to reflect the diversity of our student body and the community we live in,” McDonald told parents in a letter posted on the photo-sharing site flickr and obtained by Ditmas Park Corner.

More than two thirds of the school’s roughly 1,000 students are black or hispanic while Asian-American and white students made up 28%, according to Education Dept. records.

Get the idea? It doesn't matter whether your five year old has already demonstrated smarts enough to have his own monthly column in Scientific American. That's irrelevant if some drooling moron of a darker shade feels offended that his microcephalic progeny didn't get into the "gifted" program. Skin color trumps everything.

Yet supposedly smart people wonder at the steady rise of interracial tensions. It is to laugh.

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Let's round off this round-up with a light-hearted piece. Apparently rich women report greater satisfaction with their sex lives than those of lesser means:

It's good to be rich. Not just because of the obvious things that having money can buy you, but because according to new results revealed from the Spanish National Sexual Health Survey found that your socioeconomic status actually impacts how happy you are with your sex life.

The survey polled around 10,000 respondents, and found that around 90 percent of them were "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with their sex lives. But here's where the data gets interesting. The study also examined sexual satisfaction against financial status. Across the board, people who had more money, reported more sexual satisfaction.

Well, that's very nice -- it's always nice to learn that someone, somewhere, is enjoying himself, as long as it's not at my expense -- but it's not really informative. There are a few more questions to be asked here:

1. How much sex are they having, both in absolute terms and compared to less wealthy persons?
2. Is the sex / money relationship linear, quadratic, exponential, or really complicated?
3. Are we speaking of sex in a conventionally restrictive sense -- i.e., heterosexual intercourse within marriage -- or in the extremely broad anything-goes sense that would include adultery, all the various sexual deviances, and associated practices such as bondage and ageplay?
4. What about factors not spoken of, such as age, health, height, weight, intellect, locale, climate, employment status, political alignment, pastimes and enthusiasms, and other factors that might contribute?
5. Finally and most critical, which is the tail and which is the dog? Did becoming wealthy lead to better sex, or did having great sex lead to becoming wealthy?

Inquiring minds want to know!