Which Worldview is Best for Government?

If we were … to adapt a system of instruction … for the people of the United States which was adopted and has for ages been employed to teach the religious ideas of Brahminism, and the despotic power of the princess of India, it would be impossible to preserve the republic. … If we could teach the body of the children of India the doctrines of Christianity and the operation and effect of republican laws, it would be utterly impossible for India to remaining its present condition. … We wish to perpetuate the institutions of the republic, because we believe them wise, beneficial, and well calculated to produce prosperity: hence we must adapt instruction to that object. … The education of a free people must correspond to the necessities of freedom, in regard to intelligence, public virtue, activity of mind, general growth, and Christian progress.  In order to attain these results, those studies should be principally regarded which tend to instruct the mind of the structure and operation of republican government.

Edward Mansfield, American Education, Its Principles and Elements. 1856.  Cited by Mal Couch,This Great Nation: The Things That Made it Great — and How we Lost Them, pg.99

The Muslim Conquest of the World

At the present birthrate America and Europe will be no more.  The Western nations will be Muslim and Arabic.  Not culture in the past has ever reversed a decline of a 1.9 fertility rate.  It would take 80 to 100 years to turn this trend around!

Western birth rates are shrinking the cultures of Europe and America.  As of 2007 the fertility rate in France was 1.8; England, 1.6; Greece 1.3; Germany, 1.3; Italy 1.2; Spain 1.1, and across the entire European Union of 31 countries the fertility rate is a mere 1.38.  With France’s shrinking birthrate, there is no way they, or the other peoples of Europe, can catch up with Muslim population growth of 8.1.  In Europe there are now more mosques than churches.  Thirty percent of the children in France, under the age of twenty, are Muslim.  In just a few decades, the Middle Eastern population of England has risen from 82,000 to 2.5 million.  In the Netherlands fifty percent of all newborns are Arabs, and in only fifteen years half of the population in that country will be of the Muslim faith.

In Russia, there are over 23 million Muslims; that’s one in five who belong to that faith.  Twenty-five percent of those in Belgium are Muslims.  The parents of fifty percent of all newborns would be of the Muslim faith.  Currently there are fifty-two million Muslims in Europe.  In the United States other cultures are out-racing Europeans.  In 1970 there were 100,000 Muslims in America; today there are over 9,000,000, though this figure may be high and more lie 2,000,000!  In thirty years there could be fifty million Muslims living in America.

Muammar al-Qadhafi of Libya has said:  “There are signs that Allah will grant Victory to Islam in Europe, without swords, without guns, without conquest.  We don’t need terrorists, we don’t need homicide bombers. The fifty plus million Muslims in Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent in a few decades.”

Mal Couch, This Great Nation: The Things That Made it Great — and How we Lost Them, pg. 1-2 (written in 2009, so numbers will certainly be worse now)

No Co-Existence With Islam

Genderlessness Is A Fraud

The complementarity of man and woman is not a religious construct; it is written on our hearts, spelled out in our DNA, and present everywhere we turn and look at nature.  Resisting it requires a truly herculean campaign by academics, politicos, and media personalities advocating the novel idea of genderlessness.

Doug Mainwaring, “Nature vs. Synthetics: What’s at Stake in the Dolce and Gabbana Controversy”

Fallacy of Gun Control Laws

Concealed guns protect not only those who carry them but also those who do not. If concealed guns become widespread, then a mugger or a car jacker has no way of knowing who has one and who does not. It makes being a mugger or a car jacker a less safe occupation. Gun control laws are in effect occupational safety laws -- OSHA for burglars, muggers, car jackers and others.

The fatal fallacy of gun control laws in general is the assumption that such laws actually control guns. Criminals who disobey other laws are not likely to be stopped by gun control laws. What such laws actually do is increase the number of disarmed and defenseless victims.

Thomas Sowell, “A Public Service”

Most People Move Up From Minimum Wage

We could examine a snapshot of ten Americans struggling to get by on minimum wage. It is not a pretty picture. However, were we to revisit them six months later, most would be earning somewhat more for their work. Government statisticians would have to select another ten Americans to produce a snapshot purporting to show that ten Americans are still on minimum wage. While true that there are still ten Americans on minimum wage, it is surely not irrelevant that they are a different set of ten Americans and that the first ten are moving up the economic escalator.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.250

A Good Army Is Needed

A truly successful army is one that, because of its strength and ability and dedication, will not be called up to fight, for no one will dare to provoke it.

Ronald Reagan

Liberals Need the Black Vote

Liberals desperately need blacks.  If the Democratic party lost just 30 percent of the black vote, it would mean the end of the liberal agenda.  That means blacks must be kept in a perpetual state of grievance in order to keep them as a one-party people in a two-party system.  When black Americans finally realize how much liberals have used them, I’m betting they will be the nation’s most conservative people.

Walter Williams

Liberals Hate Black Conservatives

There is only one group of people liberals hate worse than conservatives, and that’s conservatives who happen to be black.  The reason for that is real simple.  They resent conservatives who happen to be black for leaving the Democratic plantation.

Herman Cain

Blacks and Welfare

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of liberal’s expansion of the welfare state.

Thomas Sowell

Do NOT Believe Absurdities

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Voltaire

Judges Ignore Law and Rule on Sympathies

In the 20th century, it has become commonplace for courts to listen to or read vast quantities of evidence, much of it irrelevant by almost any standard, before making rulings.  Judges are invited to make their decisions on the basis of tendentious materials rather than attending to law and precedent.  Virtually overwhelmed by factual details, they are invited to rule on the basis of their sympathies.

Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 4: The Growth of America 1878-1928, pg.101

Progressivism Isn’t Progressive

Now here comes in the whole collapse and huge blunder of our age.  We have mixed up two different things, two opposite things.  Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision.  Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision.  It should mean that we are slow but sure in bringing justice and mercy among men: it does mean that we are very swift in doubting the desirability of justice and mercy: a wild page from any Prussian sophist makes men doubt it.  Progress should mean that we are always walking towards the New Jerusalem.  It does mean that the New Jerusalem is always walking away from us.  We are not altering the real to suit the ideal.  We are altering the ideal: it is easier.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pg.101-102

Without the Wise Republics Fall

Republics are created by the virtue, pubic spirit, and intelligence of the citizens.  They fall when the wise are banished from the public councils because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded because they flatter the people in order to betray them.

Judge Joseph Story

Thomas Sowell on Gun Control

Children Suffer with Same-Sex Parents

While children in straight families are allowed to “express unhappiness about something going on in their home,” the same is not true for children in gay families.  They are “warned that they are guilty of homophobia if they are unhappy with their home life or, alternatively, told always to direct blame at external homophobia and exonerate their parents’ decisions.”

For all of Justice Kennedy’s concern about concern about conferring the “dignity” of marriage on same-sex couples, there’s little concern about conferring suffering on the children raised in such relationships.  A relentless focus on adult desire has left us astonishingly calloused.

Ryan T. Anderson, “Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom,” pg.172

Freedom of Opinions

If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter.

George Washington

Freedom of Thought

Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech.

Benjamin Franklin

Freedom of Speech

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Benjamin Franklin

Things Are Wrong Intrinsically

Biblical truths are reflected in everyday life.  So, stealing and murder and lying aren’t wrong because the Bible says so.  Rather, the Bible says stealing and murder and lying are wrong because they are wrong.  They were always wrong, and the Bible testifies to that timeless Truth that predates the Bible itself.... Thus the wrongness of sexual immorality should also be as self-evident as the wrongness of stealing or murder.

David Kupelian, How Evil Works, p.43

Don't Be a Political Sheep

Multiculturalism

Lincoln Did Not Enter the Civil War to Free Slaves

[During the presidential campaign], Lincoln firmly and even vehemently denied he had anything like racial equality or amalgamation in mind.  “I will say that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”  Nor did he favor making blacks voters or jurors, or qualifying them to hold office.  “There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social or political equality.”

Thomas Fleming, A Disease in the Public Mind, pg. 233

A World Without Borders?

A world without borders is a world without citizens, and a world without citizens is a world without the rights and privileges that attach exclusively to citizenship. Rights and liberties exist only in separate and independent nations; they are the exclusive preserve of the nation-state. Constitutional government only succeeds in the nation-state, where the just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed. By contrast, to see the globalist principle in practice, look at the European Union. The EU is not a constitutional government; it is an administrative state ruled by unelected bureaucrats. It attempts to do away with both borders and citizens, and it replaces rights and liberty with welfare and regulation as the objects of its administrative rule. Constitutional government—to say nothing of liberal democracy—will not be a part of the politically correct, borderless world into which so many of our political leaders wish to usher us.

Edward J. Erler, “Who We Are As a People—The Syrian Refugee Question,” Imprimis, October 2016, Volume 45, Number 10

Character Test

Sufferings and persecutions are the schoolhouse that teaches us who we really are.  It is in the difficult times that our responses to adversity reveal our true character.

Author unknown

Blacks Are the Main Victims of Lawlessness

Among the nation’s most dangerous cities are Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, Memphis, Milwaukee, Birmingham, Newark, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. These once-thriving cities are in steep decline.

What these cities have in common is that they have large black populations. Also, they have been run by Democrats for nearly a half-century, with blacks having significant political power. Other characteristics these cities share are poorly performing and unsafe schools, poor quality city services, and declining populations.

Each year, more than 7,000 blacks are murdered. That’s a number greater than white and Hispanic murder victims combined. Blacks of all ages are killed at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined.

According to the FBI, the police kill about 400 people a year; blacks are roughly one-third of that number. In Chicago alone, so far this year, over 2,000 people have been shot, leaving over 320 dead. It’s a similar tale of mayhem in other predominantly black cities. …

The primary victims of lawlessness are black people. To address this problem and most others, black people should ignore the liberal agenda. If civil authorities will not do their job of creating a safe environment, then black people should take the initiative. ...

Black residents of crime-infested neighborhoods should set up patrols—armed if necessary—to challenge thugs, gangs, drug dealers, and other miscreants, and make black neighborhoods safe and respectable.

No one should have to live in daily fear for his life and safety. Most Americans have no idea of—and wouldn’t begin to tolerate—the climate of fear and intimidation under which so many black people live.

Without self-initiative, there is not much that can be done about the high crime rate in black neighborhoods. Black and white liberals and their allies in the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as many libertarians, will not countenance the kind of tools needed to bring about civility. … 

Black people have the capacity to run the criminals out of their neighborhoods. Let me put the issue another way. Suppose it were the Ku Klux Klan riding through black neighborhoods, murdering 7,000 blacks year after year. How many black people would be willing to wait for the Klansmen to behave themselves or accept political promises and wait for a government program?

Walter E. Williams, “The Primary Victims of Lawlessness Are Black People”

Why SCOTUS Called Same-Sex Unions “Marriage”

Recent attempts to fashion laws explicitly denying biological reality can only be understood as the terminal state of absurdity after political discourse has been subjected to generations of absolute skepticism. They are the sort of dictates promulgated when an entire civilization becomes convinced that “reality exists in the human mind.” 

Mark Signorelli, “‘1984’ Was Supposed To Be A Warning, Not A DIY Manual For Progressives”

[Quoted phrase is from “1984.”]

The Poor

The word “poor” is comparative and means having a lot less than those around you. You may well have far more money than a Bangladeshi peasant but if you have less than your friends, neighbors, and relatives, you could feel rather poor. How then did the word “poor” enter our political vocabulary? Originally, from God’s Word, we became aware of an obligation toward those with less than we have. In cultures that have never been touched by the Judeo-Christian tradition, one encounters an almost eerie indifference on the part of those blessed toward those less fortunate. …

One of the great indictments of the changes that thirty-five years of secularism have inflicted upon us, is that America’s so-called poor pay few taxes and give little charity themselves. Secularism has converted an entire class of Americans into people who take but do not give.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.249

The Docile Student

Even if students’ motives are mixed, and their ultimate reason for study is a high-paying job and early retirement, they seem willing to learn inasmuch as they work to master the material. According to [Fr. James] Schall, however, learning is not equivalent to passing exams. The docile student is one who wishes to learn the “truth of things” or “what is.” Wanting to know the truth of things is different from wanting to ace the test. …

The docile student does not merely accept whatever the teacher says, but tests and judges the truth of the explanation. Rather than passivity, teachability requires an active seeking and reaching for truth, even against the opinions of the teacher. The docile student demands proof, not necessarily in the sense of a demonstrated argument, but in the older sense of revealing the goodness (probus) of a thing, the way young athletes prove themselves on the field, or how the military tests weapons at a “proving ground.” Such proof demonstrates goodness, integrity, and worthwhileness. Docility may demand rigorous evidence, but ultimately it seeks goodness and worth. Actively willing to learn what is the case, the docile student tests and considers, deliberates and discerns. He or she does not merely wait for pronouncements to transcribe.

R.J. Snell, “Universities and the Dangers of Docility”

Socialism Defined

Socialism is an ideology built around opposition to private property, in favor of public — “social” or, in practice, governmental — ownership of the means of production, the principle of equality in the distribution of goods, and an assortment of other programs which receive greater or lesser emphasis from time to time.

Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 4: The Growth of America 1878-1928, pg.63

Homosexual Behavior is Slavery

The West held that freedom, liberty, is the opportunity for a being to express its essential nature, not to do things that corrupt or contradict it.  Homosexual behavior being an obvious denial of what is true about the essence of human sexual nature, the “freedom” to act out homosexual desires is akin to the freedom of a dog to fly like a bird.  The dog can jump off a balcony, but his passage through the air could never be called “flight.”  To the Western Mind, then, there is no “freedom” in acting to betray one’s essential being.  This is, in fact, slavery, because once your will has taken you outside your nature as a human being, you cannot exercise true freedom.  You can’t be true to your nature, because you have chosen to do the opposite.  And the longer you practice such betrayals, the more likely you are to become addicted to them, deepening your enslavement; the more you think you are practicing “freedom,” the less truly free you are getting.

Patrick Michael Murphy, “How the West Was Lost,” p.144-145

Same-sex Marriage Leads to Collapse of Culture

As the national marriage rate remained stable, the marriage rates in states that redefined marriage fell at least 5 percent.  This is perfectly logical.  If marriage is simply a matter of romance between consenting adults, some persons, content simply to cohabit, will not bother to get married.  But cohabitation isn’t as stable as marriage and…a drop in the marriage rate of only 5 percent would mean over a million fewer women marrying.

In the Netherlands—the first country to redefine marriage as a genderless institution—marriage rates for young women dropped an additional 5 percent over the rate at which they were already declining. That is, same-sex marriage is a symptom of a collapsing marriage culture, and it then becomes a cause of further and more rapid decline.

Ryan T. Anderson, “Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom,” pg.159-160

Controlling the Culture

Since the days of President Wilson and John Dewey, Progressives (née Socialists) have fought to gain control of America’s gatekeepers — academia, the media, entertainment. This struggle didn’t just begin amidst the turmoil of the 60’s with Timothy Leary’s infamous “Turn on, tune in, drop out” mindset. Certainly there were giant leaps for Progressive minds made in that decade. Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” programs began the wholescale dependence of lower income upon the government.

In the span of one decade, Progressives set the stage for subtle, but unrelenting indoctrination of subsequent generations of young people. Conjoined with LBJ’s Great Society agenda, the Left moved the public away from the Founders’ vision of faith and freedom, and toward an ever-increasing government dependency.

Now, 50 years later, academia in the United States is mostly controlled by the Progressives who have ushered in new textbooks to reaffirm their worldview. The gatekeepers keep a stranglehold on education materials, only approving those texts which reinforce the revisionist history worldview, a worldview that typically demonizes America, the Founders, the early settlers and pioneers.

Tami Jackson, “One Woman Battles to Restore Real, Not Revisionist, History to the Classroom”

Liberals and the “Poor”

The liberal Left likes to use the nation’s “poor” to justify its constant cries for higher and higher taxes, demonizing all who resist granting money to the visible at the expense of the invisible. Those who do not want taxes raised still higher to help the poor are not compassionate.  Over time, this short-sighted philosophy has robbed the term “poor” of any meaning. … No group of people would, on their own, come up with the concept of charity or the notion of poor.  These are both legacies of western civilization’s Judeo-Christian origins…. The main reason it is so difficult to define “poor” is because we are people, not animals. …  You see, it is relatively easy to define poverty in an animal. Say an elephant requires sixty pounds of vegetation each day to remain healthy. Say a lion requires twenty pounds of meat. If either animal receives less than this, it can safely be regarded as poor. They each have less than they need.  However, if you speak of what a person needs you start sounding a bit like Karl Marx, who felt that communism would provide all a person really needs. His spiritual heirs discovered that Karl Marx erred.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.247

Transgenderism Is Identity Politics

The transgender movement has made clever use of the powerful force of identity politics. Clearly, personal identity, the totality of one’s sense of self, does not consist simply of gender any more than it does of one’s race, ethnicity, religion, or class. Such, however, are the categories upon which identity politics are built. To be politically effective, identity politics depend upon lumping people into groups that obliterate personal identities and characteristics. There are no individuals in identity politics, only amorphous masses of people with a common and defining property, one exploited for a political purpose.

This process exploits differences between people (cultural, social, ethnic, religious, etc.) to build constituencies of the aggrieved, the marginalized, and those led to believe they’re marginalized. They are assured redress of their grievances by a special interest group—commonly a political party that profits at the polls from activating them as a victimized group. The victimized must of course have victimizers, who are vilified as oppressors of the community of aggrieved.

Richard B. Corradi, Psychiatry Professor: ‘Transgenderism’ Is Mass Hysteria Similar To 1980s-Era Junk Science

Appeasement

Parents Who Allow Children to be “Transgender” Are Insane

If a four-year-old girl, who, afraid of being displaced in her parents’ affection by a new baby brother, announces that she is a boy, wise parents do not begin treating her as a boy. They do not assume she is transgendered. Instead, they embrace her and assure her that she is their precious little girl whom they love. Parents who allow prepubescent children to choose whether they want to be male or female have relinquished their role as rational adults, and are themselves in need of psychiatric consultation.

Richard B. Corradi, Psychiatry Professor: ‘Transgenderism’ Is Mass Hysteria Similar To 1980s-Era Junk Science

Government and the Economy Don’t Mix

Government intervention produces distortions in an economy, makes for uneven and often wasteful development, sets the stage for booms and busts, tends to enrich some and impoverish others.

Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 4: The Growth of America 1878-1928, pg.14

Sexual "Orientation" and "Gender" Are Fluid

Nor is there any convincing evidence that sexual orientation is biologically determined; rather, research tends to show that for some persons and perhaps for a great many, “sexual orientation” is plastic and fluid; that is, it changes over time.  What we do know with certainty about sexual orientation is that it is affective and behavioral—a matter of desire and/or behavior.  And “gender identity” is even more fluid and erratic, so much so that in limited cases an individual could claim to “Identify” with a different gender on successive days at work.  Employers should not be obliged by dint of civil and possibly criminal penalties to adjust their workplace to suit felt needs such as these.

Paul McHugh and Gerard V. Bradley, “Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Employment Law”

Tradition Refuses to Submit to Oligarchy

There is one thing that I have never from my youth up been able to understand.  I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition.  It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time.  It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. … If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable.  Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise.  Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.   It is the democracy of the dead.  Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pg.40-41

The Psychiatric Field’s Manipulation to Promote Fraud

The transgender movement was greatly energized when The American Psychiatric Association (APA) in its 2013 revised edition of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders” (DSM-5) delisted “Gender Identity Disorder” as a psychiatric “disorder,” reclassifying it as “Gender Dysphoria.” However, rather than providing a scientific validation of the transgender agenda, the APA’s action was a remarkable abrogation of professional responsibility in the interest of political correctness.

Unlike medical diseases, psychiatric disorders have no diagnostic biologic markers—no physical findings, laboratory tests, or imaging studies. Psychiatric diagnoses consist of symptom checklists determined by committee consensus. It should come as no surprise that the process is exquisitely reactive to prevailing cultural and political winds. Absent biomarkers that define illnesses, there is no end to the mental and emotional conditions that can be called psychiatric disorders. It can be extremely profitable for an activist special-interest movement to succeed in getting its cause legitimized as a mental disorder, not least for a pharmaceutical industry poised to retarget psychotropic drugs to treat any new mental illness.

Richard B. Corradi, Psychiatry Professor: ‘Transgenderism’ Is Mass Hysteria Similar To 1980s-Era Junk Science

What Really is the Meaning of “Poor”

The liberal Left likes to use the nation’s “poor” to justify its constant cries for higher and higher taxes, demonizing all who resist granting money to the visible at the expense of the invisible. Those who do not want taxes raised still higher to help the poor are not compassionate.  Over time, this short-sighted philosophy has robbed the term “poor” of any meaning. … No group of people would, on their own, come up with the concept of charity or the notion of poor. These are both legacies of western civilization’s Judeo-Christian origins…. The main reason it is so difficult to define “poor” is because we are people, not animals. … You see, it is relatively easy to define poverty in an animal. Say an elephant requires sixty pounds of vegetation each day to remain healthy. Say a lion requires twenty pounds of meat. If either animal receives less than this, it can safely be regarded as poor. They each have less than they need. However, if you speak of what a person needs you start sounding a bit like Karl Marx, who felt that communism would provide all a person really needs. His spiritual heirs discovered that Karl erred.  People’s ability to produce is finite and limited by their strength, ability, and life span. People’s needs, on the other hand, can be infinite. While all individual animals of a species are pretty much alike, no two humans are alike. It is simply not possible to speak of a human’s needs. … There is one additional complication in trying to speak of people’s needs. We all have limitless desires. … To put it directly, wealth and poverty to animals are absolutes; to humans, they are comparatives. …

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.247

The Delusion of “Transgenderism”

Transgenderism would refute the natural laws of biology and transmute human nature. The movement’s philosophical foundation qualifies it as a popular delusion similar to the multiple-personality craze, and the widespread “satanic ritual abuse” and “recovered memory” hysterias of the 1980s and ‘90s. These last two involved bizarre accusations of child abuse and resulted in the prosecution and ruined lives of the falsely accused.

Such popular delusions are characterized by a false belief unsupported by any scientific or empirical evidence and have a contagious quality that overrides rational thinking and even common sense. This all-too-human tendency to suspend individual critical judgment and go along with the crowd is greatly facilitated by social media. Most important, however, the cause has received the imprimatur of “experts.” The very people who should know better have bought into the hysteria. Just as “mental health professionals” a generation ago supported the child abuse delusions, and even participated in prosecuting the unjustly accused, so too have they fueled the fire of the transgender delusion.

Richard B. Corradi, Psychiatry Professor: ‘Transgenderism’ Is Mass Hysteria Similar To 1980s-Era Junk Science

REAL Marriage

The Reason for Public School

The public school movement was always more than simply an effort to have schools provided at taxpayer expense.  Nor was it simply an effort to have an educated electorate as the franchise was extended to more people, as is sometimes alleged.  The most zealous of the reformers were determined to use the power of the state by way of the schools to break the hold of religious tradition and the inherited culture and to change society through the child’s training.  These American reformers were influenced by European educational reformers such as Rousseu, Pestalozzi, and others who taught that the child was naturally good and needed only an environment within which to unfold.  American Transcendentalists usually held similar ideas.  They were influenced also by the Prussian schools, where a thoroughgoing system of state-controlled compulsory education was well established.  The common school, Horace Mann wrote, “is the greatest discovery ever made by man. . . .  Let the common school be expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged; men would walk more safely by day; every pillow would be more inviolable by night; property, life, and character held by a stronger tenure; all rational hopes respecting the future brightened.”

The public school movement is especially significant, because it was the first major effort in the United States which succeeded in linking the power of government to an effort to reform and transform society.  It was hardly the last, however.  It should be said, too, that local communities continued to control the schools throughout the 19th century, and the schools were generally kept within the framework of local belief and traditions.  The early reformers did little more than set the stage for more determined ones later on.

Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 3: The Sections and the Civil War, 1826-1877, pg.90-91

The Public School Assault

The public school movement [of the mid-1800s] thrust toward the center of American life, affecting Americans generally, and has resulted in a structure which has lasted to the present.  It was aimed at the children, impinged upon the family, and entailed the use of government power in ways that endangered, at the least, the life, liberty and property of Americans, or, if not their lives, their liberty and property. . . . 

Nobody much supposed that it was the duty of the taxpayers to pay for the education of their children, nor the right of the government to impose schools or the taxes to pay for them upon parents or others.

Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 3: The Sections and the Civil War, 1826-1877, pg.89

The Christian Religion is the Barrier of Protection

The whole modern world is at war with reason; and the tower already reels.  The sages, it is often said, can see no answer to the riddle of religion.  But the trouble with our sages is not that they cannot see the answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle.  They are like children so stupid as to notice nothing paradoxical in the playful assertion that a door is not a door.  The modern latitudinarians speak, for instance, about authority in religion not only as if there were no reason in it, but as if there had never been any reason for it.  Apart from seeing its philosophical basis, they cannot even see its historical cause. . . . [T]he modern critics of religious authority are like men who should attack the police without every having heard of burglars.  For there is a great and possible peril to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary.  Against it religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier.  And against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier, if our race is to avoid ruin.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pg.25-26

Race vs Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

First, sexual orientation and gender identity are linked to actions, which are a proper subject matter for moral evaluation, and race is not.  Second, race manifests itself readily, whereas sexual orientation and gender identity are ambiguous, subjective, and variable traits. Third, special privileges based on sexual orientation and gender identity undermine the common good by weakening a marriage culture, while protections against racism do not.

Ryan T. Anderson, “Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom,” pg.140

Pernicious Effects of Pornography

Pornography leaves the impression with its viewer that sex has no relationship to privacy, that it is unrelated to love, commitment or marriage, that bizarre forms of sex are the most gratifying, that sex with animals has a specially desirable flavor and that irresponsible sex has no adverse consequences — no venereal disease, illegitimate births, abortions, premature marriages, single-parent families or moral erosion.  I see no way that a torrent of material with this subliminal message, which ultimately fans out to reach people of almost all ages, can fail to have pernicious effects.

Dr. Reo M. Christenson, “Political science calls for common sense in porn issue,” American Family Association Journal, April 2000, pg.12

A Quandary

How can a couple build a marriage when they must walk down the aisle to become husband and wife in order to make respectable the fact that they have already become father and mother?

William S. Banowsky, It’s A Playboy World, p.82.

Only Real Christians Have the Power to Hold Back the State

A nation made up of citizens with deep religious faith will never allow its government to plunder tomorrow to pay for today.  Citizens with true faith in God will never offer their votes in exchange for assets forcibly seized from other fellow citizens.  So those who wish to seek and retain political power over their fellow citizens must first attenuate the religious faith of their populations.  In America this means that those in government who view themselves as masters (rather than servants) over the rest of us must do all they can to weaken Christianity.  Those of us who venerate freedom, be we Jewish or Christian, be we religious or secularized, have no option but to pray for the health of Christianity in America.  No other group possesses both the faith and the numbers sufficient to hold back the ever-encroaching, sometimes sinister, power of the state. 

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.246

The Rights of Merchants

The man who owns an article of trade or commerce is not obliged to sell it for any particular price, nor is the mechanic obliged to labor for any particular price.  He may say that he will not make coarse boots for less than one dollar per pair, but he has no right to say that no other mechanic shall make them for less.  The cloth merchant may say that he will not sell his goods for less than so much per yard, but has no right to say that any other merchant shall not sell for less price.  If one individual does not possess such a right over the conduct of another, no number of individuals can possess such a right.  All combinations therefore to effect such an object are injurious, not only to the individual particularly oppressed, but to the public at large. . . .

New York court, 1835, in summary of their judgment against a union which was fixing prices and not allowing non-union members to be hired. Cited, by Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 3: The Sections and the Civil War, 1826-1877, pg.61-62

Comment:  According to this judgment, even the government has no right to fix wages, nor do activists have the right to force people to sell products to them.  Isn’t it interesting how the modern activist judges now rule against private rights of the merchants.

Our Constitution Does Not Permit Government Alms

I readily, and I trust feelingly, acknowledged the duty incumbent on us all, as men and citizens, and as among the highest and holiest of our duties, to provide for those who, in the mysterious order of Providence, are subject to want and to disease of body and mind, but I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States. . . . It would, in the end, be prejudicial rather than beneficial to the noble offices of charity. . . . 

President Franklin Pierce, 1854.  Cited, by Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 3: The Sections and the Civil War, 1826-1877, pg.48

Arguing With a Madman

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pg.11

Character Matters

Liberals and Morality

Although they seek to ban morality … from law and public discourse, liberals face a dilemma whenever competing claims to the good emerge.  Affirming one group’s liberty claim, or claim to “equal” treatment, often inflicts harm on others. The decision to grasp one horn of this dilemma, to privilege one group’s interests over another, inevitably expresses a particular and non-neutral understanding of morality, despite anyone’s efforts to call it something else.

Leaving behind the bonds of history and tradition animating morality does not produce freedom because a new morality emerges in its place, raising new demands. We are seeing the consequences of these processes in our public life. Instead of allowing competing truth claims to be aired, we see “safe zones” emerging to protect some from the “harm” of discomfort. The putative right to define one’s own existence and meaning, projected as fundamental by a majority of wise heads on the Supreme Court, apparently now extends to various forms of sexual expression, even at the expense of those who have different moral commitments. And these kinds of decisions that prefer one group’s version of rights over others (including even those explicitly enumerated in the Constitution, such as religious liberty) are expanding. Problems compound as the formulation of rights requires an affirmative duty of governmental and social support, which requires the coercion of others to achieve the good for some.

Government is intruding into the private sphere in ways that would have been unthinkable in American life a generation ago. No one predicted that transgender bathroom access would become a condition for withholding federal funds or that Catholic religious orders would be required to pay for contraception and sex transformation surgeries in their healthcare plans. Political tendencies toward incremental change and social dialogue, familiar to Burkean conservatives, have been abandoned in favor of bold new movements that are detached from constraints of tradition. Judge Posner recently remarked that “I see absolutely no value to a judge of spending decades, years, months, weeks, day, hours, minutes, or seconds studying the Constitution, the history of its enactment, its amendments, and its implementation.” He seeks to avoid the threat of “allowing the dead to bury the living,” but he offers no basis for the living to discern the propriety of these changes apart from their own preferences and beliefs. Apparently, the wisdom of the ages resides in those who wear the robes, who will become our rulers.

Edward A. Morse, “Unmasking Liberalism.”

What Fundamentally Makes a Marriage

Marriage can and should be color-blind, but it cannot be blind with regard to the two sexes.  The color of two persons’ skin has nothing to do with whether they can unite in the sort of comprehensive union naturally oriented to family life, in which the lovemaking act is also a life-giving act—the kind of union that demands permanence and exclusivity.  Race has nothing to do with whether they can give any children born of their union the love and knowledge of their own mother and father.  Race has nothing to do with society’s orderly reproduction, which the court’s preceding cases recognize as central to the fundamental right to marry.  The sexual difference between a man and a woman, however, is central to each of these concerns.  Men and women, regardless of their race, can unite in marriage, and children, regardless of their race, need their mom and dad.  To acknowledge such facts requires an understanding of what most fundamentally makes a marriage.

Ryan T. Anderson, “Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom,” pg.70

It Never Changes

Modern Economics Comes From Atheists

Not surprisingly, only one group of Americans is consistently resisting this massive cultural change in our values. Only they possess the faith to forego short-term snake-oil fixes in order to ensure the long-term fiscal and social health of society. …only America’s religious conservatives, both Jewish and Christian, possess the spiritual muscle to attack the malevolence at its root, which is the secular tendency to ignore the invisible. No wonder that Adam Smith and most of the other fathers of modern economics were God-worshiping Christians. No wonder that Keynes and other big-spending fathers of economic modernism were atheists.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.245-246

Rights and Responsibilities

Each individual of the society has a right to be protected by it in the enjoyment of his life, liberty, and property, according to standing laws.  He is obliged, consequently, to contribute his share to the expense of this protection, and to give his personal service, or an equivalent, when necessary.

John Adams, cited by Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 3: The Sections and the Civil War, 1826-1877, pg. 47

The Best Government

The best government is that which governs least.  No human depositories [of power] can, with safety, be trusted with the power of legislation upon the general interests of society so as to operate directly or indirectly upon the industry and property of the community.

Democratic Review, first issue, 1837.  Cited, by Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 3: The Sections and the Civil War, 1826-1877, pg.28

Who Does SCOTUS Think They Are?!?

[T]he court invalidates the marriage laws of more than half the States and orders the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs.  Just who do we think we are?

Chief Justice John Roberts, in his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges

Describing the Current American Culture

A family of little faith is doomed.  Children will be allowed to spend precious and unrecoverable hours before a television.  They will be allowed a virtually unrestricted diet of fats and sweets.  They will know little discipline, little postponement of gratification, because the convenience of the present is of far greater priority to their parents than the long-term health and social development of the children.  The pleasures and benefits of this indulgent policy are immediately felt; its price will be paid far off into the future.  Seeing that ultimate price demands faith the family does not possess.

A society of no faith is equally doomed.  They will demand goodies from their leaders who, lacking the faith to say no, gladly indulge the populace in exchange for the votes that keep them in power.  They know full well that the price will have to be paid on some future leader’s watch.  At least it won’t be paid on theirs.  Whether the issue is Social Security, socialized medicine, rent control, making married couples pay more tax than they would pay were they single, or any other fiscal policy, too many of us see only the immediate benefits. We have been indoctrinated with the propaganda of compassion. Feeling people’s pain sounds noble and good. In reality it serves the need of those who seek to benefit now by making future generations pay the price.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.245

A Government Without God

Where theistic religion grows weak, that is where religion related to God grows weak, justice will weaken.  Crimes, then, are defined as antisocial activity which, in turn, then is merely what the majority says it is. Then punishments seem to be the result of the majority's ganging up on the minority. This, in turn, seems inconsistent with democratic feelings.

The result is a decline in uniform application of penalties for crime, resultant miscarriages of justice, trampling on the rights of law-abiding people, together with an increase in what ought to be called crime.

Robert D. Culver, Civil Government: A Biblical View, pg.78

H/T Doug Evans

The Church vs. the World

It is precisely the world’s mockery that will again and again be a sign that the Church is on the right road:  It is a surer sign than the world’s applause.  Where the Church retreats into invisibility, it despises the reality of the Spirit.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Sexual Revolution is War Against Family

The sexual revolution always has been a war waged against the ordinary family, against the ordinary ways of men and women and children. The moral law as regards sex is meant to protect that family from threats without and within: from the pseudo-marriage that is fornication, from the betrayal of marriage that is adultery, from the rickets and scurvy of impure habits, and from the mockery of the marital act that is sodomy. If a man’s home was his castle, then the walls round that castle were his people’s understanding of the moral law and the customs that gave the law vigor and force. Who then would benefit by riddling the walls with holes? All people who could not, because of their own failings and vices, enjoy the good of family life; all people who saw the family as the great opponent in the way of their statist ambitions; all rebels against Nature and Nature’s God, who would be happier to see a man leave his wife and children to take up with another man than to see a young woman turn away from the hothouse of a lesbian relationship to become a wife and mother after the ordinary way of nature.

Anthony Esolen, “Pronouns, Ordinary People, and the War over Reality”

Don't Force the Rosebud

Don’t have sex before you are married.  Remember, you’re like a rosebud.  If you force a rosebud open too early, it’s ugly.  If you let it open naturally, in its own time, it’s beautiful.

This statement is addressed to young ladies, and is one version of a teaching I’ve read in many sources and heard by many people.  I think it is a great analogy.

Good Question!

If gay apologists really believe homosexuality is not a biblically forbidden sin, why do they bother arguing, vehemently, that they cannot change?  If something is not a sin, after all, then it doesn’t matter if it’s inborn or chosen, immutable or changeable.

Joe Dallas, The Gay Gospel?, pg. 120

A Necessity for Both Mother and Father

When studies confirm that boys raised without fathers have higher rates of impulsivity and antisocial behavior; when children have a better chance of success when both mother and father are present in their homes; when a 1987 study of violent rapists shows that 60 percent of them came from single-parent homes; when 75 percent of teenage suicides come from broken homes; and when girls raised without fathers are shown to be sexually active sooner in life and at higher risks of having children out of wedlock; can we seriously deny the need children have for both a mother and a father?

Joe Dallas, The Gay Gospel?, pg. 56-57