Category Archives: morality

Compare and Contrast

Posted on by
Reply

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

Broken Immigration

Posted on by
Reply

This is how twisted things can get with a Byzantine legal system, here concerning our immigration laws, combined with an Obama administration that enforces or disregards the laws at political convenience.

Chris Crane, National ICE Council President, says

That’s what we do now, we babysit kids.

The very people patting themselves on the back as humanitarians are putting these children at more risk than they’ve ever been before.

What Crane is talking about is a ruling and public statement issued by Federal Judge Andrew Hanen in US v Nava-Martinez, a case concerning the defendant’s attempt to smuggle a 10-year-old child to her illegal alien parents.

Hanen says that immigration officials arrest human traffickers smuggling children and then

deliver the minors to the custody of the parent illegally living in the United States.

And

The DHS has simply chosen not to enforce the United States’ border security laws[.]

And

Time and again this court has been told by representatives of the government and the defense that [drug] cartels control the entire smuggling process. … the government is not only allowing [illegal immigrants in the US] to fund the illegal and evil activities of these cartels, but is also inspiring them to do so.

And

To put this in another context, the DHS policy is as logical as taking illegal drugs or weapons that it has seized from smugglers and delivering them to the criminals who initially solicited their illegal importation/exportation.  Legally, this situation is no different.

And morally, too.  Except that the guns aren’t at risk of being harmed en route, like the children are.

So: DHS breaks the law to unite children with their parents, while those parents are here illegally.  It’s a truly broken immigration system that allows illegal aliens to be here with impunity, that puts children at risk in smuggling operations ostensibly aimed at reuniting those children with their parents, all while funding drug dealers.  The system needs to be fixed.

Hanen’s ruling can be seen here.

Who’s Excluding Whom?

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Can’t Happen Here

Posted on by
1

Enquiries by the Daily Mail have revealed:

  • Four of the nine-person Climate Change Committee, the official watchdog that dictates green energy policy, are, or were until very recently, being paid by firms that benefit from committee decisions.
  • A new breed of lucrative green investment funds, which were set up to expand windfarm energy, are in practice a means of taking green levies paid by hard-pressed consumers and handing them to City investors and financiers.
  • £3.8 billion of taxpayers’ money funds the new Green Investment Bank, set up by the Department of Business and Skills. One of its biggest deals involved energy giant SSE selling windfarms to one of the new green funds, Greencoat Wind.  The Green Investment Bank’s chairman, Lord Smith of Kelvin, is also chairman of SSE.  The bank says it ‘provided expertise’ to enable BIS to take a £50 million stake in Greencoat, which helped fund the SSE sale.
  • The same bank’s chief executive, Shaun Kingsbury, is one of the UK’s highest-paid public sector employees.  His £325,000 salary is more than twice the Prime Minister’s.
  • Firms lobbying for renewables can virtually guarantee access to key Government policy-makers, because they are staffed by former very senior officials—a striking example of Whitehall’s ‘revolving door’.

The Daily Mail identifies specific players in the Green Charade at the link.

 

h/t Power Line

Union…Hubris

Posted on by
Reply

Neal Erickson, was convicted last spring of the repeated rape of a young boy from 2006-2009.  He was, at the time of his crime, a teacher at Rose City Middle School in Rose City, MI.

Erickson’s fellow teachers and his/their union, the Michigan Education Association, think that’s no big deal: they argued for leniency at the time of last spring’s sentencing, and now they’re looking for severance pay–$10,000—for Erickson.  Fellow teacher Sally Campbell wrote a letter to the presiding judge:

Neal made a mistake.  He allowed a mutual friendship to develop into much more.

Much more.  Yeah.  For three years, Neal made his “mistake.”  Hey-ho, nothing serious though, nothing to see here, says the union.  Even the district’s school board condones Erickson’s behavior; that body has refused to take any action against the teachers who rallied to Erickson’s excusal—not even public condemnation of their behavior.

When it became clear that the other teachers in the school were actively supporting Erickson, downplaying his rape behavior, and that the school board was refusing to do anything on its own, parents started taking their children out of the school.  Enrollment is down some 87%.

West Branch-Rose City School Superintendent Daniel Cwayna is all wide-eyed innocence:

I can’t speculate as to why the students have left, but there were certainly parents who vocalized that they were pulling their children out of school because of the teacher’s support[.]

Here’s a thought: maybe it’s because a teacher crew, a union, and a school board that condone child molestation can’t be trusted with children.