Category Archives: culture

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.

Microaggression

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It’s all the latest rage in the PC fascism that’s running amok in our United States these days.

There are these, for instance, from a list of allegedly microaggressive statements put out by Janet Napolitano, late of DHS and now President of the University of California system:

  • I believe the most qualified person should get the job.
  • Of course he’ll get tenure, even though he hasn’t published much—he’s Black!
  • Men and women have equal opportunities for achievement.
  • Gender plays no part in who we hire.
  • America is the land of opportunity.
  • Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough.
  • Affirmative action is racist.

The whole list goes on in this vein, but these are the ones most directly and deliberately aimed at the fabric of Americanism.

Of course it could be argued that the second on the list is, indeed, racist, but it’s a direct fallout of the last item on the list. Affirmative action isn’t only racist, though, it’s sexist, too, and by design: deliberately, race and gender are additional selection criteria, and for the explicitly racist and sexist purpose of achieving “diversity”–because, so the Liberals believe, blacks, minorities generally, and women simply are incapable of competing on their own–while simultaneously downplaying qualification, much less merit, in the selection.

Another problem with foolishness like this is that while many remarks are certainly rude, and polite people shouldn’t use them, courtesy is a thing that can come only from within the person; it cannot be imposed from without, and certainly not by diktat. That only leads to rule-following, or rule-breaking; the courtesy of the thing will have been wholly removed.

Lists like these are themselves plainly microaggressions.

Keep in mind, too, that the Napolitano of this list is also the Napolitano of the DHS lists that called American military veterans “right-wing extremists” and that cynically, if not cowardly, substituted “man-caused disaster” for “act of terrorism,” and on and on.

Now that’s microaggression of a hugely macro nature.

White Supremacy

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Baynard Woods, writing for The Washington Post, had some thoughts on this.

[I]t is up to white people to rescue white people from our own worst selves, from the distorted monsters we have allowed ourselves to become. It is time to stop making excuses. We have to stop hiding from the truth of race—that this country, and the state of South Carolina in particular, were created on the idea of white supremacy. We’ll never overcome that history unless we acknowledge it.

Trouble is, the rest of us already have. It’s how we’ve made all the progress we’ve achieved.

Though some members of my family casually referred to African Americans as “bears,” we were not racist by the standards of a city that flew the Confederate battle flag above the state capitol. We did not use the N-word.

Never mind the mindset here, declining to speak it aloud with a particular term makes it all good. To the Liberal.

His piece went on in this vein.

Trouble is, like all (or so it seems) Liberals today, Woods is projecting his own and his fellow Liberals’ shortcomings onto the rest of us, as though we’re like him. It’s the Liberals, though, who are the party of the murderously racist KKK; it’s the Liberals, in their guise as nascent Progressives, who resegregated the Federal government after the Republicans had been steadily integrating it since the Civil War; it’s the Liberals who attack anyone who disagree with them as being racist; it’s the Liberals who demand racist- and sexist-based affirmative action.

The rest of us have moved on from that. It’s certainly true that, as Senator and Presidential candidate Lindsey Graham (R, SC) said, we have much work yet to do on racial equality, but as Graham also noted, we have made great progress, too.

Guys like Woods, who wallow in the past and assume the rest of us are, too, hold us back from faster progress and from completing the task.

No Heart

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According to Defense Secretary Ash Carter, the US has successfully trained about 7,000 Iraqi soldiers and about 2,000 counterterrorism service personnel out of a goal of 24,000 in total. Carter said this about that rather large shortfall:

We simply haven’t received enough recruits[.]

Hmm….

Yet President Barack Obama thinks it’ll be cool to send 450 more US soldiers to Iraq to train the Iraqis.

Again I say, Hmm….