An apocryphal quote that never loses its relevance is: "the definition of chutzpah is killing your parents and then begging the jury for mercy because you are an orphan."

An act of chutzpah can be something courageous and shrewd, like Abraham Lincoln turning wartime constitutional confusion into a means of passing the Thirteenth Amendment -- see Spielberg's biopic, if you can stay awake and concentrate on it for the full marathon.  This is the kind of chutzpah I like and consciously seek to embody.  For instance, I consider it a bit of chutzpah on my part that I went from living a gay lifestyle to marrying a woman, and instead of cowering in shadows and fearing the Gay Identity Gestapo (or GIG), I have chosen to wear the label "bisexual" proudly and shamelessly expose the ideology of the LGBT movement for all its nutty eugenics.

There are other forms of chutzpah that seem to be blossoming on the liberal side of the dial these days, largely dealing with gender.  If you're liberal, they are entertaining and inspiring.  Otherwise, they look quite alarming.  Let's take the issue of gay marriage, which is going to explode in the press by March, when the Supreme Court hears arguments about California's Proposition 8.

In 1999, Vermont's high court legalized civil unions.  The LGBT lobby celebrated for a few hours and then immediately screamed that civil unions were an insult to them because they were akin to the Jim Crow segregation philosophy of "separate but equal."  Hence, having fought in court to receive legal recognition, they then cried foul for being given what they asked for.

To do this strange act of political gymnastics, they likened their community -- an array of people who enjoy anal sex, cunnilingus, and fellatio in atypical combinations -- to a race of people who had been enslaved for four hundred years, bred like animals, and robbed of their own offspring as they and their children were sold as soulless property.

Soon enough, this daring act of racial analogy would be pushed further, as the promoters of "same-sex parenting" would claim that the Fourteenth Amendment - which was written to guarantee equal protection to freed slaves - guaranteed LGBTs the right to buy eggs, rent wombs, and buy babies in India.  When India rejected the notion of being a hotspot for gay baby-farming, cries of "discrimination" were heard rising to the sky:

The rules say foreign couples seeking to enter into a surrogacy arrangement in India must be a "man and woman (who) are duly married and the marriage should be sustained at least two years".

The rule changes, posted on the Indian home ministry's website, were denounced by fertility clinics and gay rights activists as "discriminatory".

In Hollingsworth v. Perry, the Supreme Court case on Proposition 8, the bulk of the argument for gay marriage rests upon gay people comparing themselves to former slaves and ignoring the fact that their fight for marriage equality is really a way to buy and sell the parts to manufacture children, without any regard for how their children might find the whole business embarrassing and haunting, to say the least.

In France and in the United States, proponents of gay marriage insist that since gay people are already "building families" (as one would a new veranda), we must grant them marriages for the good of the children they have forced into fatherless or motherless lives.  Without their parents being "married" as opposed to living in a "civil union," we are told, these captive children will feel unequal to peers whose parents gave them a mother-father-child home the old-fashioned way.

When confronted with the idea that society has an obligation to provide a child with a mother and a father if at all possible, gay marriage enthusiasts point to research showing that children with two parents of the same sex demonstrate no alarming differences from children with a mother and a father.  It turns out that cultural "constructs" such as "mom" and "dad," notwithstanding the fact that they are given separate holidays in May and June, are disposable trappings that don't matter as long as the kids aren't starving, committed to insane asylums, living in filth, or landing in jail.

In all of this chutzpah, there is of course the undeniable truth that no peer-reviewed research has shown that a gay couple in a civil union is materially impaired in an alarming way by not having a "marriage."  So if cultural constructs are disposable, why didn't the LGBT movement take civil unions national after Vermont's 1999 case, and then let us all go back to watching Dancing with the Stars (minus Chaz Bono)?  If your kids don't need such an antiquated phrase as "here's my mom and here's my dad," why must you absolutely have the right to say, "I'm married"?

Better yet, at the same time that sexual assaults in the military are being exposed on a massive scale, let's throw more women into combat operations.  Women are already doing such jobs, and therefore placing more women in combat is a way of acknowledging those who have already served in combat -- only to do so, we must not acknowledge how many of them are getting raped and can't find proper remediation through the Army's current bureaucracy.

Or perhaps the idea here is that you make documentaries about rape on Tuesday and then pretend you don't know what your own documentary said on Wednesday, when you bat your eyes and say it's urgent to place more women in situations where they are more likely to be sexually assaulted and less likely to avail themselves of the already inadequate sexual assault relief the military can offer. 

Meanwhile, at Rutgers New Brunswick, the New York Times reports that the parents of Tyler Clementi are unveiling a new center named after their son, who killed himself in September 2010 after his roommate recorded him having sex with a gay adult twice his age.  The center will deal with "cyberbullying" and "LGBT issues" but won't, for some reason, discuss the sexual ethics involved in a thirtysomething gay man going to a freshman dormitory to sleep with an obviously vulnerable and unstable eighteen-year-old boy -- not once, but twice.  The Times reports:

Tyler Clementi was 18 when he asked his roommate, Dharun Ravi, if he could have the room alone with a man he had met on the Internet. Mr. Ravi, also 18 at the time, set up the webcam and watched from a friend's room. He posted Twitter messages saying he had seen his roommate "making out with a dude," and encouraging others to watch.

Mr. Clementi read the messages on Twitter and disconnected the camera, then reported to a resident adviser that he had felt "violated" and uncomfortable sharing a room with someone "who would act in this wildly inappropriate manner."

After a polarizing trial, Mr. Ravi faced up to 10 years in prison when he was convicted on charges including invasion of privacy and bias intimidation. His sentence included 30 days in jail and 300 hours of community service. He served 20 days, which some criticized as too short.

What was the older man thinking when he went into a freshman dormitory and engaged in sodomy with a boy barely legal (did he even ask to see his ID?), knowing that there were college students milling around in the hallway outside?  Did this older man call Tyler back?  Did he make sure Tyler was okay?  Why couldn't he take Tyler back to his own home to show that his home was a safe refuge for him, should anything go wrong?  Or was this, as my gay friends call crudely, a "pump and dump" or "wham, bam, thank you Ma'am" kind of deal?

Do his parents even care?  Does anyone really care?  Not particularly, it seems, since the response from the LGBT leadership in 2010 was to demand that Congress repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell and launch a video project called "It Gets Better," designed to give millions of self-questioning and vulnerable gay teens access to millions of sexually experienced adults (and vice-versa), under the explicit guise of performing unlicensed psychotherapy over the web.  Jamie Rodemeyer, a fourteen-year-old boy in Buffalo, apparently took the bait of "It Gets Better," disclosed his bisexuality before he was ready to do so, and then killed himself shortly afterward.  In his case, by dint of chutzpah, cause and effect isn't something we are allowed to infer -- we're not allowed to say that "It Gets Better" caused Rodemeyer's suicide, even though we're obliged to say that Clementi's roommate caused the latter's suicide rather than the nameless troll who apparently finds it normal to look for thrills in a crowded freshman dormitory.

But even Tyler Clementi's parents have sadly surrendered to the chutzpah of today's gender politics.  They have backed away from holding accountable the adults in this elaborate chutzpah maze.  As in the case of gay parenting, gay marriage, and women in the military, it is the young or lowest in rank who must bear the brunt of all this gender brio and political posturing.

We are all, as a nation, killing our children and then begging the jury for mercy because they were taken away from us.

Robert Oscar Lopez is the author of Johnson Park.