Tag Archives: rights

“A Battle for the Soul of this Nation”

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That’s what Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Hamlet’s poor relation Joe Biden, said we’re in as he opened his campaign.

We are in the battle for the soul of this nation[.] If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter….

Indeed, we are in a battle for our nation’s soul. It’s a battle between one party that actively tries to improve the situations of our nation’s citizens—whether we agree with those policies or not—and a party that has no aim for our people’s benefit, but is focused solely on anti-Trumpism.

It’s a battle between a party on the one hand that wants to get Government out of our way, to unleash our individuality and individual entrepreneurial spirit, to restore to us our individual responsibilities and freedoms, and a Party on the other hand that wants to take things away from us: our money in the form of higher taxes; our weapons, under the guise of carefully undefined “common sense”…restrictions; our freedom of speech under the cynically offered guise of suppressing “hate” speech or “terrorism fomenting;” our freedom of religion under the just as cynically offered guise of “protecting” others from discrimination (but not the ones asserting their religious tenets); our morality by growing Government to arrogate that morality to it, thereby destroying it in both places; our individualism by mandating what all of us collectively must do because Party says it benefits some of us—even where it plainly does not—and on and on.

It’s a battle between a party that wants to shrink government and Party, which wants to grow a Government run by Party members who Know Better than the rest of us.

It’s a battle between a party that wants government to work for all of us and Party, which has open contempt for millions of us and insists that us ignoramuses must simply be quiet and obey.

What will be altered—an outcome devoutly to be wished—is what this nation has become under the last 80 years of pressures and outright rule of the Democratic Party and of late the Progressive-Democratic Party: a rapidly growing regulatory state with weakened national security, and a nation damaged domestically by Party’s explosively growing national debt, its racist and sexist affirmative action programs, its gilded welfare cage, and lately its revived segregationist policy of identity politics.

There have been excursions from that trend, to be sure, but they have been only occasional and brief: one party’s successful effort to defeat the Soviet Union via its rapid defense buildup and its current, nascent restart toward rebuilding our nation’s defense establishment, together with the beginnings of a rollback of Party’s imposed regulations governing what Party would permit or require each of us to do.

This is a battle we cannot afford to lose.

Banning Violence and Extremism from Social Media

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That’s what France and New Zealand want to do and want others to join them in doing, all in response to the terrorist murders in New Zealand.  The two intend to host a conference involving G-7 members’ IT chiefs and a separate “technology summit” aimed at getting commitments

to end the use of social media to organize and promote terrorism and extremist violence.

But whose definition of violence? Whose definition of extremism? We’re already seeing, in our nation, the Progressive-Democratic Party and their violence-oriented arms, Antifa and BLM, and their university management team associates, defining conservative speech as triggering, dangerous to mental health, violent.

This is a very slippery slope, onto which the first step may well be fatal.

Censorship

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The Wall Street Journal opined the other day on the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Flyers banning Kate Smith and her rendition of God Bless America from the opening of their home games.  The WSJ takes the position that this is overwrought concern for perfection in today’s persons, demanding even perfection of their past.  Smith was, as we all are, and the WSJ notes, a person of her time. The WSJ went on:

Smith’s fate suggests the dominant impulse of our era is in fact to censor—and that those rifling through the histories of people long dead for evidence to destroy their reputations are progressive Puritans, seeking to suppress or cover up anything they object to.

I’m not so sanguine.  The Yankees and Flyers aren’t censoring Kate Smith for her early last century-era songs that very few of us knew about, or remembered—and some of which were satirical, not straight up. No, they’re showing their Liberal bona fides by censoring a song that glorifies America.

Vaccination and Quarantine

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Various jurisdictions in a number of States have begun barring unvaccinated students from schools following an outbreak of a contagious disease, particularly measles and chicken pox (so far).

Some school districts in the US are booting unvaccinated students from campuses where infectious-disease cases have been confirmed, as the spread of measles accelerates in some states.

“Quarantining” on the basis of vaccination status (not the classic quarantine, which blocks departure from a specific location, but one that prevents entry into specific locations) is hitting the courts, too.

In Kentucky, 32 cases of chickenpox at Our Lady of the Assumption Church and Academy in Walton resulted in unvaccinated students being removed from school in March for three weeks, the time it would take for symptoms to appear. An 18-year-old unvaccinated student lost a lawsuit challenging the ban on religious beliefs.

The court ruled entirely correctly on that suit.  A family is entirely within its rights to decline vaccination on religious grounds.  However, that right does not extend to exposing others to the outcome of that non-vaccination; that family may not expose others’ children to the disease targeted by the vaccination.

Nor do such families have any right to expose other families’ pocketbooks to the costs of outcomes from non-vaccination.  Families exercising their right to not vaccinate cannot, legitimately, inflict the costs of treatment on other families, whether those other children have been vaccinated or not.

A Recognition

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At last, the racism inherent in affirmative action is starting to be recognized.

Civil rights officials at the US Education Department are requiring the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center medical school to cease factoring race into admissions decisions, putting other institutions of higher education on notice that their continued use of affirmative action policies will draw federal scrutiny.

The rest of the Texas Tech University System has already eliminated the use of racist (and sexist) affirmative action policies in its admissions process.

There’ll continue to be resistance, though, in the “academic” community.  Here’s Peter McDonough, Vice President and General Counsel for the American Council on Education

We do worry that a college or university may interpret a report of a resolution…as saying, “If you take race or ethnicity into account, you can be investigated.”

I certainly hope so.  Neither racism nor the bigotry of ethnicity preference—nor sexism—has any place in American society, much less as a selection criterion for anything.

Next up: completing this evolution by formally and explicitly ridding affirmative action of its inherent sexism.

Then, to saucer and blow this travesty, we need the Supreme Court to stop dithering, recognize that ex-Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s 20 years are long expired, and eliminate all vestiges of the use of race, or sex, or ethnicity, or any other non-merit-related discriminant from affirmative action programs.