Category Archives: rights

Duplicity

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The American Civil Liberties Union and Southern Poverty Law Center are at it, this time.

‘Way back in 2019 the Tennessee legislature created Education Savings Account pilot programs for Davidson and Shelby Counties. The ESAs grant money to students accepted into the programs; the funds facilitate students’ departure from poorly performing schools in favor of better schools.

The two county governments promptly sued to block the ESAs from taking effect, and the Tennessee Supreme Court ultimately ruled, last May, that the ESAs were jake, and in June that court denied the counties’ petition to reconsider.

Now the ACLU and SPLC are suing on the legally frivolous (IMNSHO) premise that that delay, manufactured by the county governments, is sufficient reason to further delay implementation of the ESA pilot program.

That’s how desperate the Left is to keep poor and minority kids—especially in Shelby County, although Davidson has a significant poor and minority population—trapped in bad schools instead of letting them transfer and actually get an education.

Nor am I sympathetic to the county school districts’ imagined plight. Those school districts really did have all that time since 2019 to prepare their budgets: they had no reason to ignore the possibility that the ESAs would be upheld and to prepare accordingly. It’s also not at all beyond the districts’ capabilities to have prepared two budgets, with one being centered on no ESA impact and one centered on an ESA impact.

Bias and Gun Trafficking

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Dan Frosch and Zusha Elinson had a piece on illegal gun trafficking in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal in which they decried the degree of illegal trafficking, especially across State borders. In the graph below, they particularly called out five States as being particularly egregious sources of this interstate trafficking.

Sadly, their article exposes more about the press’ bias in reporting on guns and (by their implication from their trafficking emphasis) on gun control.

No doubt gun-trafficking is a serious problem.

However, some context is informative, also; it took me about 10 grueling seconds to conduct the Bing search that turned up this context from the year following Frosch and Elinson’s graph.

  • 5,000 guns trafficked out of Texas against 1.6 million guns sold in Texas in 2021.
  • 6,000 guns trafficked out of Georgia against 496 thousand guns sold in Georgia in 2021.
  • 4,800 guns trafficked out of Arizona against 480 thousand guns sold in Arizona in 2021.
  • 4,700 guns trafficked out of Virginia against 620 thousand guns sold in Virginia in 2021.
  • 4,300 guns trafficked out of Florida against 1.4 million guns sold in Florida in 2021.

It’s interesting that Frosch and Elinson chose to elide this context-providing information.

More Government Overreach

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This time by President Joe Biden’s (D) Attorney General, Merrick Garland (D). Garland has decided to sue Idaho over that State’s abortion law because, Garland claims, that law might put doctors at hospitals that accept Medicare, and those hospitals, at risk of Federal law violation if they follow Idaho’s law.

That Federal law

requires hospitals accepting Medicare to provide emergency treatments, which can sometimes include abortion.

Idaho’s law, on the other hand,

has exceptions allowing doctors to perform abortions to save the life of a pregnant woman or in cases of rape or incest that have been reported to law enforcement.

That satisfies the Fed’s Medicare law, and the administration’s suit demonstrates the overreach—and demonstrates the Biden administration’s utter disregard for the Supreme Court.

More Gun Control Distortion

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Delaware, President Joe Biden’s (D) adopted home State, has a new gun law [emphasis added].

Under the bill, known as the Delaware Lethal Firearms Safety Act of 2022, the manufacturing, sales, offer to sell, transfer, purchase, receipt, possession, and transport of assault weapons, aside from those lawfully possessed or purchased before the bill became law, is prohibited.
The law classifies weapons that feature a high rate of fire and capacity for firepower used in a sports, or recreational, form is outweighed by “the danger that is can be used to kill and injure human beings” and are restricted on the possession and use of those weapons. However, the bill states that it is not the intent of the Legislature to place restrictions on those weapons designed for hunting, target practice, or other legitimate sports or recreational activity.

This is Progressive-Democrats presuming to dictate to the good citizens of Delaware those Government-approved purposes for which they will be permitted to keep and bear Arms, even though no such authority exists in the 2nd Amendment or anywhere else in our Constitution.

There’s this, too, in that bill:

The law also provides that anyone currently owning, or possessing, those weapons are encouraged to receive a certificate of ownership from the state’s Department of Homeland Security[.]

Encouraged. Sure. There’s no reason for this, either, given the unconstitutionality of the law (which obviates any need to prove grandfathered ownership) other than so that Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, who continue to decline to identify their limiting principle, can know who has weapons for future confiscation.

This is yet another example of the lawlessness of the Progressive-Democratic Party.

Government Intrusion

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A particularly bad effort by the Progressive-Democratic Biden administration, this one attempts to insert Government between parents and their children, have the children engage directly with Government persons, and block the parents from participating or any sort of oversight at all.

The proximate subject is a CDC-generated

private chat platform that enables teens to discuss—without parental oversight—a range of highly fraught issues, including LGBT challenges, occult topics, dealing with difficult relatives or even finding an alternative “family” through communities that are more accepting.

This Q Chat Space

includes features that enable its teen users to evade parental scrutiny and oversight.
For example, the platform offers two options for text reminders of upcoming chats—discreet or detailed. Detailed reminders include a “Q Chat Space” tag and other identifying information. Discreet reminders, however “are private, they do not include ‘Q Chat Space’ or the name of the chat,” the platform explains. “They only say ‘Reminder: You have an online discussion in about 1 hour.’ or ‘Reminder: You have an online discussion in about 24 hours.'”
At the bottom of the Q Chat Space website, there is a bar with a button reading “Click/tap here for a quick escape…” accompanied by a picture of a person running towards an exit door. Clicking on the button changes the screen to Google’s website.

Jaco Booyens has the right of it:

It is not the role of the CDC or any school environment to educate Americans’ children on gender, sex, sexual conduct, or sexual preference. In fact, this particular site is highly deceiving, encouraging children to hide their activity on the site from their parents by giving them an easy exit button.

There are two major Government crimes in Booyens’ objection: one is that intrusion of Government into parental responsibilities. The other is Government teaching children to not trust their parents, to hide important family matters from them, functionally to lie to their parents, if only by omission.

This is what the Progressive-Democratic Party is trying to do to traditional family structure. We must start the removal process this fall.