Category Archives: culture

Ashamed of our Heritage

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The Democratic Party of Connecticut is that. They’ve voted to strip the names of two of our Founders from their annual fund-raising dinner. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were slave holders, and so are unfit to be…what…Founders? Never mind that most of our Founders were slave holders—that was the norm of the time—or had feet of other serious clay.

What’s next, Washington’s Birthday will exclude George Washington, slave owner?

This was Party Chairman Nick Balletto’s “brainstorm.”

Democrats are the party of inclusion. And in my opinion, the time has come to reevaluate the name of the JJB [the dinner] to reflect the diverse makeup and forward-looking vision of our party[.]

Sure. The party of inclusion via the KKK. The party of inclusion via Jim Crow. The party of inclusion of racist, sexist affirmative action that excludes groups of Americans because they don’t have the preferred—dare I say privileged?—skin color or gender.

This is the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the Democratic Party made manifest.

Freedom to Dissent

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Four men already had been convicted of murder in southeastern China when a fifth person confessed to the crime. But when lawyers demanded to review case documents to clear the men’s names, the court stonewalled. So the lawyers unfurled banners outside the venue.

They protested for days, alongside social activists who insulted the top judge, and uploaded pictures online.
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Authorities say these lawyers have strayed far beyond their professional role into illegal activism aimed at sabotaging the country’s legal system. …

Since late May, police across China have detained and called in at least 215 rights lawyers and social activists, most of them during the past week or so. State propaganda has kicked into high gear to denounce them as rabble-rousers, criminal gangs, profit-seeking opportunists.

Wisconsin’s John Doe persecutions have been struck by that state’s Supreme Court. We’ll see how long that lasts before our own Left starts up again.

In the meantime, our own national Left’s loudly protected IRS continues to persecute Americans: those who dare to speak contrary to the Left’s approved speech—all those exposures of personal and personal tax information, all those stonewalls of tax status applications for particular groups who would dare speak contrary to the Left’s approvals. The same IRS continues to refuse to return seized funds to those from whom the money was…confiscated…under patently false pretenses, even after this IRS said they would stop the confiscations.

Murder Free Zones?

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Does Portland State University disagree with the concept of murder free zones?

It seems that a couple of students at PSU wanted to “set up a table on campus” to advocate for the school becoming a Murder Free Zone. The school said, “No, probably not.”

The school insisted that the students hosting the table would themselves become targets of violence: their advocacy of murder free-ness would be “triggering,” it would incite overt violence; the school even suggested that if the thing went forward, the students should have campus security be present to quell any violence that might be triggered.

No, PSU doesn’t disagree with being murder free. That school’s administration was simply satirizing the whole question of gun/murder/anything “free zones.”

Weren’t they?

Justice Anthony Kennedy’s Free Speech

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Not directly, because this Oregon law predates Kennedy’s Obergefell ruling, but this is the inevitable outcome of his ruling on free speech.

Aaron and Melissa Klein, bakers who refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, lost in an Oregon court and have been ordered to pay $135,000 in “emotional damages” to the couple for whom they refused the baking. Administrative Law Judge Alan McCullough, who found for the victimhood couple, ordered the fine, but nothing further.

However, Brad Avakian, Oregon’s Labor Commissioner and Политический Руководитель, and for whom this Administrative Judge works, overruled the omission. On hearing that the Kleins had assured Oregonians in an interview with the Family Research Council that they intended to pursue the matter, he ordered them to speak no further. He gagged them.

So much for freedom of speech in Oregon. So much for freedom of religion in Oregon. Look for this sort of thing to accelerate in the wake of Kennedy’s ruling.

A Thought on Iron Curtains

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Shortly after World War II, Winston Churchill spoke of an Iron Curtain descended across Europe. The curtain was made concrete with the erection by the Soviets of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The purpose of that wall was more than simply to divide the USSR and its occupied territories from the rest of Europe; it was to keep the people inside that wall—inside the USSR or those occupied territories—from leaving for a better place, for a place where freedom and individual choice could be had.

Shortly after our Revolutionary War, our Founders wrote, and We the People ratified, our Constitution and its attendant Bill of Rights, which include the 10th Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

So was born a Federation and ultimately 50 laboratories of democracy, particularly as described by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in New State Ice Co v Liebmann when he wrote in his dissent how a:

state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.

Now keep in mind the concern of John Jay who, while the Constitution was being drafted in those fateful summer days, considered that, in contrast to the failing Articles of Confederation, the States should be reduced to the same relationship to the proposed central government as counties then had relative to their States (although, in the event, he strongly advocated ratification of the Constitution itself):

merely as districts to facilitate the purposes of domestic order and good government.

Next, consider these activities of our Federal government:

  • it terminated the democratic discussion in progress among and within the several states concerning abortion and when it might be appropriate or inappropriate, nationalizing the thing in Roe.
  • it terminated the discussion in progress among and within the several states concerning the nature of marriage, nationalizing the thing in Obergefell.
  • it terminated the democratic discussion in progress among and within the several states concerning the provision of health care and of health insurance, nationalizing the thing with the Affordable Care Act.
  • it terminated the democratic discussion in progress among and within the several states concerning the market behavior of private enterprise, nationalizing the thing with Dodd-Frank.
  • it removed from all possibility of local discussion the relationship between private enterprise and private citizens with the creation of the wholly unaccountable Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The list goes on.

The USSR’s physical iron curtain was designed to keep people from leaving in an era when they had a place to go to. There is another kind of iron curtain, though.

Our government is no longer requiring—as the Constitution above it does in Article IV, Section 1—that every state honor the decisions of every other state. Rather, it’s demanding that every state behave the same as every other state.

With the reduction of our 50 laboratories of democracy to mere districts to facilitate the purposes of the Federal government, this government is erecting a legalist iron curtain by deprecating the 10th Amendment, and so denying Americans a place to go to, denying us any place more compatible with our individual views, needs, moral imperatives.