#222: Stanley Kurtz

Stan Kurtz is a social commentator, adjunct fellow of the Hudson Institute and Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, with a special interest in America's “culture wars” – and a name that seems to pop up frighteningly often. Kurtz is a staunch enemy of political correctness, which permeates his writings on the family, feminism, child rearing, religion, psychology, homosexuality, affirmative action, and similar topics. His screeds are widely published (National Review, Policy Review, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, and Commentary). Kurtz holds a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard and is as such brilliantly positioned to exploit that uncanny union of religious conservatism and post-modernistic relativism (that magic combination one often encounters in freshman college students).

He may be most famous for several editorials penned during the 2008 election cycle, bringing to light and discussing relationships between Barack Obama and people such as Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers. Kurtz's book “Radical-in-Chief” states that Obama is (very secretly) a socialist, and Kurtz seems to think that Obama and Ayers are still rather closely connected (the book seems, for instance, to have short-circuited the last remaining operative synapses of Robert Ringer).

He is, predictably, very afraid of ze gays, and is indeed counted as a major mover and shaker by many on the farthest fringes of the anti-gay movement. Kurtz has, for instance, pointed out that “... most gays and lesbians do not want to marry each other. That would entangle them in all sorts of legal constraints. Who needs a lifetime commitment to one person? The intention here is to destroy marriage altogether. With marriage as we know it gone, everyone would enjoy all the legal benefits of marriage (custody rights, tax-free inheritance, joint ownership of property, health care and spousal citizenship, etc.,) without limiting the number of partners or their gender. Nor would ‘couples’ be bound to each other in the eyes of the law. This is clearly where the movement is headed." The occurrence of “clearly” appears without argument, of course, but I am not sure this is the main problem with this piece of reasoning. In his writings on gay marriage Kurtz does not consistently avoid hysteria; discussed here.

The previous president of Generation Rescue, this Stan Kurtz is (most probably) a different person, but an equally looney one who claims to have single-handedly cured children from vaccine-induced autism. That kind of guy.

Diagnosis: Shrill and tiresome wingnut maniac who specializes in incoherently inferring idiocy from insane premises. Relatively famous and as such moderately dangerous (as is his name brother at Generation Rescue).