Tag Archives: culture

Religious Freedom

Posted on by
Reply

Lebanon High School Principal Kevin Lowery gave a commencement address to his high school students. In the course of his speech, he spoke repeatedly of God and His role in our individual lives and in the life of our nation. Among other things, he reminded his students that our national motto is “In God We Trust,” and that it is imprinted on all of our currency. He gave a short history lesson, generally absent from the classes, that Francis Scott Key’s original version of our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” made references to God.

Lowery also wryly noted during the May 23 commencement that even though “God is reflected in the very fabric” of the nation, it would be inappropriate to mention The Almighty at a secular ceremony.

“So while it would not be politically correct for us to have an official prayer this evening,” he said, “I would like for us to have a moment of silence in honor of tonight’s graduates. Thank you. And just in case you’re interested, during my moment of silence, I gave thanks to God for these great students, their parents, their teachers, and for this community.”

A YouTube clip of Lowry’s address is here. Among the comments on the clip, Dave Muscato, Public Relations Director for American Atheists, had this to say:

I find this extremely objectionable. I think it’s clear that Kevin Lowery violated the spirit of the First Amendment separations of religion and government. This was an underhanded and dishonorable way for him to forcibly inject his personal religious views onto his students and the others present and into his role as a government official.

That’s…unfortunate. I find Muscato’s comment extremely objectionable. I think it’s clear that David Muscato is trying to violate the spirit of the First Amendment’s free exercise of religion. This is an underhanded and dishonorable way for him to forcibly inject his personal religious views onto children and the others present and an abuse of his role as gadfly.

Another Aspect of American Education

Posted on by
Reply

The College Board, makers of the SAT college “readiness exam” that high schoolers across the country take and supporters of the Common Core standards that so many Americans and American school districts dislike on the merits, now wants to bring PRC “teachings” to our children’s classrooms—in 20 school districts across the US, so far.

The tool for this intrusion is the College Board’s partnership with Confucius Institutes, an agency under the control of the People’s Republic of China government and which will act as College Board’s “partner” in this venture.

The College Board carefully ignores that connection with the PRC government. The College Board also carefully ignores the fact that

Hanban—the Chinese state agency that supervises, funds, and provides staff to Confucius Institutes—may bully teachers or censor lessons within American classrooms.

The College Board also chooses to leave unmentioned the Confucius Institutes’ “seven taboos,” or unmentionables, little things like:

freedom of speech, universal values, judicial independence, and the mistakes of the Communist Party.

However, the President of the College Board, David Coleman, does say this, loudly, and often:

Hanban is just like the sun. It lights the path to develop Chinese teaching in the US. The College Board is the moon. I am so honored to reflect the light that we’ve gotten from Hanban.

Coleman says pretty much all there is to say on the matter, even if he doesn’t realize that.

It’s time our local communities take back control over their/our American education.

Minimum Wage and Morality

Posted on by
Reply

Seattle has passed an ordinance that will raise the minimum wage private businesses in the city must pay to $15/hr. The wage increase will take effect in stages over a few years, starting next April. I’ve written elsewhere (here, for instance, and here) on the economic utility of raising the minimum wage.

What about what a government-imposed minimum wage does to a worker’s morality? A Seattle home health worker earning $10.95/hr had this to say about her situation and Seattle’s minimum wage mandate, as summarized at the first link, and also quoted there:

[She] is looking forward to the way a higher wage will help her support her three children.

She said she and her three kids are living with her brother because she can’t afford an apartment of her own even though she works full time. “This will make changes to myself and also a lot of other people in my shoes.”

She says that like family taking care of family is a bad thing. But why shouldn’t family take care of family first, rather than strangers being forced to do so ahead of family? Plainly, this family does not need the outside help; they just find it…convenient.

The Meaning of the Recent European Union Parliamentary Elections

Posted on by
Reply

Spiegel Online International wrote earlier in the week about the EU’s parliamentary elections. From those elections, there could be a power shift away from the European Council, made up of the heads of the EU member nations, toward the European Parliament, made up of Members of the European Parliament elected by the citizens of the member nations.

This power shift is possible because of two things: one is that the citizens cast their votes for their MEPs based in large part on dissatisfaction with the EU leadership in what in the US would be the Executive Branch—including the European Commission President—with the proximate outcome of a large increase in the number of MEPs representing various euro-skeptic parties at the direct expense of the pro-EU parties.

The other is that these citizens, through their new MEPs, now want their say on who their next Commission President should be, and they have a clear preference. However, the Commission, the traditional determiner of the President with the EU Parliament simply rubber stamping the choice, want to retain that decision, and they want someone else.

That’s a long introduction with which to get to the point of this post. The IOS had this to say, in part, on the matter:

[I]n many countries, the vote’s outcome was more a reflection of domestic political frustrations than a broader statement on European issues.

That, though, is the nature of federations. The constituent states vote their individual interests as determined by the citizens of those states, by design, and compromises among those states’ MEP contingents occur, to be implicitly ratified or rejected by the states’ citizens in the next round of MEP elections—Adam Smith in the political world.

As long as the EU continues to not understand that simple fact, it always will be fraught with the sorts of economic and political failures it has experienced—and still is experiencing— every time there’s even a minor crisis in politics or economics.

It appears as though the misunderstanding will continue for a long and dangerous time.

It comes down to who, in the end, is responsible for choosing the next head of the Commission, a body of 33,000 employees that is in charge of proposing new legislation and monitoring compliance with EU treaties. Is it up to the voters? Or up to the governments of EU member states?

New Publications

Posted on by
Reply

I’m pleased to announce two new pamphlets, A Conservative’s Thoughts on Rights and Duties, their Duality, and some Implications and A 21st Century American Crisis.

In Rights and Duties I talk about our inalienable rights and our inalienable duties and their attributes as endowments from and by our Creator, as well as how they and the fact that they’re duals of each other, are a part of the fabric of our existence—both as those individual rights and duties and in the capacity of those duals.

Further, and just as importantly, our inalienable rights and our inalienable duties are in each of us as individuals; they are not in groups of us, they are not in the whole of us as a nation. Each one of us is possessed of them entirely in ourselves.

This, of course, has implications for the role our government, and especially the roles of “civil law” and “civil rights,” have in our lives.

American Crisis is a call to arms for all of us to become active and to rescue our Republic from its dangerous drift away from our founding principles of small, limited government; individual liberties; personal responsibilities.

From the pamphlet:

In the era of our War of Independence, governments, said the Conservatives of the time—those monarchists, forerunners of today’s Big Government Progressive disciples—exist first and above the people, and the rights of the people are those granted by these governments.

“The time’s Liberals, though—the men and women of our War, of our Founding, and of our earlier history—had a different view. A man, they held, has rights that are indivisible from him because they are inherent in his humanity, in his very existence, as endowments from his Creator. Government, they held, exists to protect these rights and for no other purpose.

And

The blows we struck in 2010 were a worthy start, but they were only a start. The progress we added in 2012 has been inadequate to our cause. But we are not finished. Wisdom is not the purchase of a day.

See the links to the right or my Books page for information about how to get them in either Kindle or epub (Nook-compatible) format.

I hope you get as much out of them as I enjoyed putting into them.