Category Archives: culture

Discrimination

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Now FEMA is doing it, and it’s religious discrimination.  Churches, bastions of succor in times of disaster—like Hurricanes Harvey and Irma—suffer their own damages in those disasters, as they did in Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.  However, unlike other charitable organizations in similar straits, churches are being denied FEMA assistance to recover.

Law on this is not clear because separation of church and state, New York University Law Professor Burt Neuborne is claiming.

The difficulty is that the Constitution has two provisions in it. It has a freedom of religion, but it also has kind of a freedom from religion which prevents government money from being used for religious purposes, worship purposes.

No, it doesn’t.  This is, at best, mistaken.  The two relevant 1st Amendment clauses are the Free Exercise Clause—Congress shall make no law…prohibiting the free exercise thereof [of religion]—and the Establishment Clause—Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.  There’s nothing in there about freedom from religion; that’s just the distortionate drivel used by crowds like the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the like.

The Federal government cannot favor one religion over another or favor religion over atheism; there’s nothing in there that prohibits the Feds from providing disaster recovery help to religious organizations along with the same sort of help for secular non-profit organizations.  In fact, refusing to do so violates the Establishment Clause by actively disfavoring religion rather than acting neutrally toward it—as the Clause requires.

Neuborne wasn’t finished.

The question is: can they get the money and rebuild their worship facilities? Because then the money would be going towards worship, not to help people from not getting skinned knees on the playground, or being able to get food at the food bank.

This is just disingenuous.  No, the money would not be going toward worship, it would be going toward restoring a building.  A building that comes in critically handy for sheltering those displaced by disasters, natural or otherwise.  Regardless of the religions (or lack) of the sheltered or the shelter.

The attacks on religion from continues.

Berkeley and Free Speech

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It seems that Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos have been invited by the The Berkeley Patriot, a student publication at the university, to speak at a four-day “Free Speech Week” later this month.

UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof is claiming that the organizers haven’t yet “submitted the information or forms required to ensure the events occur.”

“This is all about providing to them the security they want and we want to offer for their events, and it can’t happen overnight,” he added, noting that a speech given by conservative Ben Shapiro on Thursday requires the university bring in “a huge number” of police officers and “spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Recall the violence with which the Left attacked those attending, or trying to attend, Shapiro’s speech.  There’s a hint in Mogulof’s remarks regarding the safety of those of whom the Left disapproves.  There’s a hint regarding Berkeley’s attitude toward the speech of which its management disapproves.

But, But….

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Cops act out of ignorance, a famous man said.

No, they don’t.  They act out of honor and integrity, especially when the chips are down.  Or the storm is up.  Follow the link in the quoted paragraphs.

Dramatic footage shows a Florida sheriff’s deputy saving an American flag that was being battered in Hurricane Irma’s powerful winds.

The video, which was posted to the Martin County Sheriff’s Office, shows Lt. Danny Cunningham running from his car into strong winds and rain to retrieve the beaten flag from a pole.

“I couldn’t watch it get blown apart,” Cunningham reportedly said.

And this bit by an Aransas Pass cop during Harvey.

A Misconception

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The Wall Street Journal wrote an op-ed about Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ speech at George Mason University regarding her intent to withdraw the Obama administration’s infamous Dear Colleague Letter that threatened the due process rights of students accused of sexual assault.  In it, though, the WSJ included a misconception.

The Obama Education Department’s response was to circumvent Congress and neglect normal executive-branch rule-making procedures mandated in the Administrative Procedure Act, such as soliciting public comment. Instead, it simply jammed the policy through by sending out a “Dear Colleague” letter, including an explicit threat that noncomplying schools could lose federal funding.

It takes two to tango.

The op-ed implied that the university/college recipients of the Letter were somehow bound by it.  This is not true: the Letter was not, and could not be, binding in any way shape or form exactly because the procedure for promulgating it by-passed statutory requirements: the Letter was no more than that, and certainly not a regulation implementing a statute.

The folks sitting in the management chairs at those universities and colleges knew this full well at the time, and they know it today.  The Letter gained force only from the cowardice of those folks sitting in those chairs.  They had only to push back and to refuse to comply with the urgings of the Letter.

Even the threat to withhold funds could never have effect since it was, and is, an entirely unenforceable claim, coming as it does as part of a non-binding Letter that could only urge an action.  The threat, inconvenient as it might have been to resist, had and has only the effectivity of a bully’s threat given it by a coward’s surrender to that bully.

It takes two to tango.  But it only takes one to duck and cover.

No Surprise

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Howard Kurtz was on the right track when he wrote that Republicans shouldn’t be surprised that President Donald Trump cut a deal with Congress’ Progressive-Democratic Party* leadership regarding our debt ceiling and financial aid for Harvey and Irma victims.

However, Kurtz’ laying the blame on House Speaker Paul Ryan (R, WI) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) is misplaced, though.  Ryan did get one Obamacare compromise repeal passed in the House.  McConnell did get 49 out of his 52 Senators to vote for that bill.  It’s the rank and file—the party as a whole—who are failing their duty.

The question of whether the Trump deal is good or bad in its own right also is irrelevant.

Trump has been saying since the Republicans collectively chose the first time to perpetuate Obamacare rather than pass a compromise, however flawed but that would have been an important first step toward remove and replace that he would have to work with the other party.

Since that initial failure, since that initial betrayal of each Congressman’s home district constituents (and yes, that includes Senators, whose home district is statewide) and of their not-too-distant secondary constituents, all of us Americans, those Republicans have continued to choose to inflict Obamacare on us rather than pass successive efforts at compromise toward remove and replace.  They have quibbled with each other over budgets, spending, and on and on, rather than passing Conservative budgets, spending bills, and on and on.  In the Senate, the Republicans won’t even take action on a House-passed bill that would rescind a destructive CFPB regulation.

Republicans still have no plan for removing and replacing Obamacare.  They still have no plan for reforming our mendaciously byzantine tax code.  In fact, here, they’re behaving even more shamefully: instead of acting on their own initiative, they’re meekly pleading for Trump’s tax reform plan details.

Since the Republicans in Congress have chosen not to act for the good of their constituents—either set of them—instead preferring to engage in the personal ego boost of virtue signaling, or preferring to wait to be told what to do, Trump had to act on his threat.

No, his deal with the Progressive-Democrats is no surprise.  Who else is he going to work with, since the Republicans won’t work?

 

*My term, not Kurtz’, which I use because there’s no daylight between today’s “Democrats” and the Progressive beginnings of Herb Croly, TRoosevelt, Woodrow Wilson.  Even today’s party bigwigs brag about being Progressives.