Category Archives: culture

A Thought on Immigration and Amnesty

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The immigration debate in Washington boils down to a debate over how to handle the country’s 11 million or so illegal residents.  A Washington Post editorial over the weekend suggested a compromise: let them stay but don’t give them citizenship.

No.  Either we believe in redemption and rehabilitation, or we don’t.  We do believe in it, at least tacitly, for other criminal behavior—capital murder and sex offenses nearly the only things that are excepted.  And sex offenses get heinous acts.  Nearly all other offenses against us or our society have endpoints to the penalty exacted, and then the offender pretty much is allowed to go on his way with a clean slate.

A man enters our country illegally, though, and after that single and singular crime, he makes himself a productive member of his community.  On what basis do we insist that this crime is so heinous that he must pay for it for the rest of his life—the he must be denied any opportunity to earn citizenship in our country?  On what basis do we say his illegal entry—his sole crime (and it is a crime, no doubt)—is of a piece with capital murder or molesting a child?

Pay a price for having entered illegally?  Pay a price for having violated a traffic law?  Certainly.  And that means there’s no amnesty, either for the illegal entry or the traffic violation.  But there’s also more to this than just the utilitarianism of punishment for a crime and calling it square.  There’s the morality of it—redemption and rehabilitation.  We give that much to our felons, why not also to a man whose only crime is that he came illegally into our country to make a better life for himself and his family?  No.  Allowing a path along which to earn citizenship, a path that includes a price for illegal entry, isn’t amnesty.

The man who comes here and makes his way, who becomes a contributing member of our society—that’s the kind of man we want to immigrate.  That’s the kind of initiative, of drive, of work ethic, of desire to make a better life that brings creativity to our economy and to our nation.

Compare and Contrast

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First, the VA strikes again; Todd Starnes has this sorry…tale.

A choir from the Alleluia Community School, a high school in Augusta, GA, was told—when they arrived to perform at the Charlie Norwood VA Medical Center, and not before—that they could sing about Frosty the Snowman.  They were explicitly barred from singing such offensive songs as “Silent Night,” “Joy to the World,” and “O Come All Ye Faithful” because the American veterans there, all of whom had fought for our country and suffered the consequences of those fights, couldn’t bear the stress of hearing such carols.

Brian Rothwell, spokesman for the VA center, had this excuse:

It is out of respect for every faith that the Veterans Administration gives clear guidance on what “spiritual care” is to be given and who is to give it.

Second, a tale of a Christmas in the Hanoi Hilton in 1970, via Richard Goldstein in The New York Times:

As Christmas 1970 approached, 43 American prisoners of war in a large holding cell at the North Vietnamese camp known as the Hanoi Hilton sought to hold a brief church service.  Their guards stopped them, and so the seeds of rebellion were planted.

A few days later, Lt Cmdr Edwin A Shuman III, a downed Navy pilot, orchestrated the resistance, knowing he would be the first to face the consequences: a beating in a torture cell.

“Ned stepped forward and said, ‘Are we really committed to having church Sunday?  I want to know person by person,'” a fellow prisoner, Leo K Thorsness, recounted in a memoir.  “He went around the cell pointing to each of us individually,” Mr Thorsness continued.  “When the 42nd man said yes, it was unanimous.  At that instant, Ned knew he would end up in the torture cells.”

The following Sunday, Commander Shuman, who died on Dec 3 at 82, stepped forward to lead a prayer session and was quickly hustled away by guards.  The next four ranking officers did the same, and they, too, were taken away to be beaten. Meanwhile, as Mr. Thorsness told it, “the guards were now hitting POWs with gun butts and the cell was in chaos.”

And then, he remembered, the sixth-ranking senior officer began, “Gentlemen, the Lord’s Prayer.”

“And this time,” he added, “we finished it.”

Yet, the VA claims its policy is meant to welcome and respect all faiths while at the same time protecting them from “unwelcomed religious material.”  By disrespecting the Christian faith.  By defining the Christian faith as “unwelcomed.”  The faith for which those men in the Hanoi Hilton had fought, even in barbarous captivity.

How does any of this work, exactly, Brian?  A (very) belated Merry Christmas to you, too.

 

h/t Power Line

Merry Christmas

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First posted in 2011, I repeat it here.

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.
-Ralph W. Sockman

A good conscience is a continual Christmas.
-Benjamin Franklin

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.
-Hamilton Wright Mabie

Christmas is not a time or a season but a state of mind. To cherish peace and good will, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas.  If we think on these things, there will be born in us a Savior and over us will shine a star sending its gleam of hope to the world.
-Calvin Coolidge

Some celebrate Christmas as the birthday of a great and good philosopher and teacher. Others of us believe in the divinity of the child born in Bethlehem, that he was and is the promised Prince of Peace.
-Ronald Reagan

 

Update:

Why do bells ring at Christmas?

Because someone pulls the rope.

Petty

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Every Friday, Anne Tabat has met the school bus in her subdivision with a basket of cookies. It began as a thank you to the bus driver.  And, Tabat said, she couldn’t give the driver a cookie without giving one to every child on the bus.

Tabat said the cookies were also a way to get to know her neighbors.

But.  There’s always a but.

For the first time in many years, Tabat won’t be at the bus stop Friday.  She received a phone call from the school this week telling her someone had complained and that she should cease and desist the dispensing of cookies.  She said she never really had a straight answer about the specifics of the complaint.

Her efforts at neighborliness had worked to some extent, though: the school knew who she was and her telephone number.  And Ms Tabat hasn’t lost her community spirit.

She’s busy making 200 cookies for her neighborhood party Saturday [yesterday].

“People are good.  I’ve yet to find someone I can’t find commonality with.  We’re all crawling around on the planet dealing with circumstances in our life, and most of us just want to raise a nice family and be successful in however you define success and for most people it’s just surviving.”

Merry Christmas to Ms Tabat, and a Happy New Year.  And a Merry Christmas to the anonymous complainer, too.

Who’s Excluding Whom?

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Todd Starnes has this sorry tale.

It seems a high school teacher in a Connecticut high school has decided to ban explicitly Christmas decorations from her classroom door, never minding that decorating the classroom door is a tradition at this school, and she’s the only one to ban the practice there this year.  A parent reported to Starnes that

[The teacher] said no reference to Christmas at all can be on the decorations on the door[.]

Greg Hatzis, the school’s…headmaster…proffered this rationale:

It is the policy of the Board of Education that no religious belief or non-belief will be promoted by the district or its employees and none will be disparaged.

Never mind that the teacher’s (apparent) non-belief is exactly what’s being promoted by her ban, or that a religious belief specifically is being disparaged.  Hatzis went on:

The difficulty is that we want everyone to feel a part of the school community.  Anytime there is a preponderance of any particular holiday, you don’t want people to feel excluded.  It’s really a lesson in respect.  It’s a lesson in community.

We want people to be able to have a chance to celebrate, but just in a way that is not exclusionary.

We don’t want somebody to be offended.  We try to make sure that everybody understands the need for respect and diversity.

But where is Hatzis’ or his teacher’s sense of community?  What “lesson in community” is being taught here—that the minority view gets to exclude the majority view?  If there’s a “preponderance of a particular holiday,” it’s because that community preponderantly celebrates that holiday.  By excluding Christmas decorations at Christmas, those who celebrate are being deliberately and carefully excluded.

There’s no sensitivity here, either: none at all toward those who celebrate Christmas.  The only sensitivity present is that of a few, who thereby are allowed to dominate the rest.

This is not “respect for diversity;” this is the hypocrisy of political correctness.