FrontPage magazine.com - By Mark Steyn - The National Post


This one has a good perspective on the Glyn O'Malley "Paradise" controversy (among other stuff):

The other day, Barbara Amiel was writing about the transformation in the European view of the United States and Israel, and came up with an arresting metaphor:


"Laying out the world's changing attitudes to Israel and America so barely makes it sound like a conscious decision -- which is absurd. But changes in the spirit of the times are as difficult to explain as those immense flocks of birds you see sitting on some great African lake, hundreds of thousands of them at a time, till all of a sudden, successively, they fly up and turn in a specific direction. One can never analyze which bird started it and how it became this incredible rush. All you see is the result."


The world is always changing. In 1967, when the British Parliament decriminalized homosexuality in the teeth of some pretty vigorous opposition, no one would have predicted that a mere 30 years later the Conservative Party would be electing a leader in favour of gay marriage. If you're a British gay who's been longing to marry since 1967, that's an eternity. But it's a blink in the eye of a very old civilization's social evolution. Things change. You don't notice the iceberg melting, only that one day it seems a lot smaller than it was, and that the next it's not there at all.


So what will the "spirit of the times" look like in the Western world in 10 or 20 years' time? Here's a couple of early birds on the lake, plucked more or less at random from recent headlines:[...]