Public Schools and Gender Ideology

The belief that one’s internal sense of self determines maleness or femaleness and that subjective feelings take precedence over an objective physical reality constitutes a severing of mind from body. Our sex is who we are: it can’t be amputated from our body like a limb. But the true believers in gender ideology are hard at work, pulling in converts to this gnostic worldview that shuns the material that we humans are made of: the body. You can be assured that an ideology like this will, to use Pope Francis’s words, lead to the “annihilation of man” in our culture, in the law, and in the lives of those who fall prey to the tenets of this weaponized “civil rights” movement.

What worries me most is that schools across the country are quashing debate, abandoning academic excellence, and reducing themselves to pawns in a political movement whose claims are highly questionable, unscientific, and harmful to children. Public schools have a duty to serve all children, but a school cannot serve children and a totalitarian ideology all at once. . . . 

First, schools will teach children to accept an ideology that is predicated on the lie that biological sex plays second fiddle to a self-proclaimed, subjective gender identity, and that the sex of one’s body is mutable or even irrelevant. This isn’t just an idea that you can tuck away in a unit study or an anti-bullying presentation. It will inevitably find its way into every aspect of a school and make a deep impression on the developing minds of children. For example, girls, under the regressive mandates of anti-bullying and gender inclusion policies, would have to agree to call boys in their locker room “girls,” effectively losing their rights to free speech and to privacy from males. And science—particularly biology—would die a quick death at the hands of a concept that necessarily eradicates observable facts about human sexuality. Gender ideology in the curriculum is a lie enshrined as truth.

Second, institutionalizing gender ideology will require that schools ignore the evidence that it causes real harm to children. You can’t extol the virtues of gender ideology and question its soundness at the same time. By celebrating transgenderism as a valid identity, schools are promoting a body-mind disconnect that may very well bring on the gender dysphoric state they were attempting to prevent. And when the widely accepted “affirmative” medical treatments of gender dysphoria in children are both poorly studied and glaringly injurious, we have nothing to celebrate.

Elizabeth Zinos, “Biology Isn't Bigotry: Christians, Lesbians, and Radical Feminists Unite to Fight Gender Ideology.”

"General Welfare" Clause

Regarding the general welfare phrase, James Madison addressed this question in 1817 in vetoing a bill for internal improvements.  He said, "To refer the power in question to the clause 'to provide for the common defense and general welfare' would be contrary to the established and consistent rules of interpretation, as rendering the special and careful enumeration of powers which follow nugatory and improper.  Such a view of the Constitution would have the effect of giving to Congress a general power of legislation instead of the limited one hitherto understood to belong to them. . . ."

Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Volume 5: The Welfare State 1929-1985, pg.61-62

Minimum Wage Laws

If you need government to set you a “living wage,” it’s because you have failed to make yourself worth a living wage.  A higher minimum wage is merely a subsidy to ensure you don’t have to put in the effort necessary to earn what you want.  I’m unclear why your failure to work hard, gain skills and not do the stupid things that lead a 30 year old to be making minimum wage morally compels me to give you my money.

Kurt Schlichter, Townhall, March 31, 2014

Evidences for Ideology vs Principled Position

When people make blanket claims about a group (“white people are like X;” “black people never do Y”), they are expressing an ideology, not using words tailored to fit reality. Human beings are simply too diverse and complicated to fit into such universal categories. If you hear someone summing up the “state of the Russian mind” or “what the American people want” or claiming that politician X shows sure signs of a social pathology, but there is no evidence of research nor of any time spent personally examining the psychology of the individual, then you’re dealing with quackery; the person is a fake. Such people will check their scientific methodology at the door in order to gain a place in the arena of modern media’s ideological shouting match. They are welcomed by groups that want a certain sort of “voice”—not a quiet, calm, thoughtful voice, but one that will provide pseudo-intellectual “cover” for all the prejudices that group already possesses.

If, rather than trying to glean evidence from observable reality, a person seems more intent on forcing reality into the categories of his or her system, then you’re dealing with an ideologue. If evidence supporting a theory is trumpeted loudly and repeatedly, and evidence that may refute it is ignored repeatedly, then it’s an ideology, not a principled position. If every bit of data, no matter how contrary, is taken as evidence of the truth of the theory, then it’s ideology, not science.

If media conversations are staked two-to-one against a position, then the organizers are ideologues, not holders of a principled position. If organizers clearly set out to disadvantage one side rather than the other, they are ideologues. If interlocutors spend most of their time engaging in ad hominem attacks rather than examining terms, premises, or arguments, then they’re ideologues, not holders of a principled position. If an interlocutor seems more concerned with “looking smart” than with coming to some common understanding of the truth, then he or she is probably an ideologue. If the most pressing argument is the prestige and ostensible expertise of the speaker, or the supposed lack of these on the part of the interlocutor, then you’re probably dealing with an ideology.

Randall Smith,  “Ideology and the Corruption of Language”

The Language of Ideology

[H]ow do we recognize the language of “ideology” and distinguish it from a “principled position”? One common clue is that those who hold a principled position welcome arguments; they welcome having their position tested and possibly corrected. A principled position always has room for increased subtlety and greater complexity. Holders of an “ideology,” on the other hand, will tend to eschew argument or any examination of the ideology’s underlying presuppositions or premises, often refusing to concede that greater subtlety may be required to apply the principles to real-life situations. Ideology disdains argument; people with principled positions embrace it warmly and engage in it gladly. . . .

[C]orruption of language is a characteristic sign of ideology. Throughout the Platonic dialogues, Socrates spends a great deal of time trying to clarify words, attempting to get clear on what people mean when they use terms such as “good” or “just” or “great.” Ideologies want to skip over all that hard work. Asking what someone means by “good” or “just” or “fair” is, to the devoted ideologue, like the greengrocer refusing to put the sign in his window. It suggests you’re not a party member.

Watch out for this. Refusing to discuss one’s terms because the point is “obvious,” insisting on using euphemisms rather than plain speech, relying on a very specialized vocabulary and being unable to express one’s thoughts without it, using speech to vilify persons rather than to clarify positions: these are all clues that you’re dealing with ideology, not principle.

Randall Smith,  “Ideology and the Corruption of Language”

Looters vs Producers

When a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law — men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims — then money becomes its creators’ avenger.  Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them.  But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it.  Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to the most ruthless at brutality.  When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket.

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Public School and Government Indoctrination

I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down.  Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it?  That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to “prevent” children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.

John Taylor Gatto

Freedom Untethered From Truth

Freedom untethered from truth is freedom’s worst enemy.  For if there is only your truth and my truth, and neither one of us recognizes a transcendent moral standard (call it “the truth”) by which to adjudicate our differences, then the only way to settle an argument is for you to impose your power on me, or for me to impose my power on you.  Freedom untethered from truth leads to chaos; chaos leads to anarchy; and since human beings cannot tolerate anarchy, tyranny as the answer to the human imperative of order is just around the corner.  The false humanism of the freedom of indifference leads first to freedom’s decay, and then to freedom’s demise.

George Weigel, “John Paul II and the Crisis of Humanism,” First Things, December 1999.

Good Ideas in Plato’s “Republic”

With regard to the censorship of stories, Socrates (or Plato) seems above all concerned with what we expose our children to. What intelligent parents don’t regulate what their children read, watch, listen to, etc.? But once this becomes a matter of public legislation, we stir up a hornet’s nest. And outlawing certain types of music, musical instruments, food, and so on, does appear extreme. Yet I have always suspected that Plato’s main purpose with all of this is to get us to see that aesthetic worlds aren’t morally or politically neutral. . . .

Beyond mere survival, for human beings to flourish, they need the virtues. Actually, this is a tautology: human flourishing just is living a virtuous life. As Socrates argues at the end of Book 1, a pruning knife needs its “virtue,” that is, sharpness, to be a good pruning knife. So too, he adds, human beings need the virtues to live the good life. But which virtues are the virtues? In Book 4, Socrates tells us that they are wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice—what St. Ambrose would later call the virtutes cardinales. We can discuss whether this is a complete list, but, rightly understood, I don’t see how anyone can deny that the cardinal virtues are essential for a good human life.

However, just as no one teaches himself his mother tongue, no one trains himself in virtue. We are trained in virtue by others. Not only, then, do we need a community to survive, we also need it, as I mentioned earlier, to flourish. Ideally, training in virtue occurs in the family. But families need environments that are friendly to this training in virtue, even reinforcing it where appropriate. In other words, virtue shouldn’t be merely a private matter but a public and political one. Socrates gets this. You might say that he gets it all too well. It’s the reason for the censorship, the closed social classes, and the banishment of the mimetic poets. These are among the measures Socrates proposes to make the city a well-ordered city.

Joseph G. Trabbic,  In Defense of Plato’s Republic 

Importance of Books

Books are carriers of civilization.  Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.  They are engines of change, windows on the world, “lighthouses erected in the sea of time.”

Barbara W. Tuchman

From “Civics” to “Social Studies”

Civics was a class that you used to be required before you could graduate from high school.  You were taught what was in the U.S. Constitution.  And after all the student rebellions in the ‘60s, civics was banished from the student curriculum and was replaced by something called social studies.  Here we live in a country that has a fabulous constitution and all these guarantees, a contract between the citizens and the government — nobody knows what’s in it.  It’s one of the best kept secrets.  And so, if you don’t know what your rights are, how can you stand up for them?

Frank Zappa

Dare To Tell the Truth

Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught falsehoods in school, and the person that dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool.

Plato

H/T J.L. Pattison

When Thoughts Aren’t Controlled

The implications of controlling one’s thoughts are huge.  One arena of life in which much damage is caused by the secular position is that there are no bad thoughts in married life.  Mainstream magazines often quote therapists who encourage sexual fantasizing as harmless and at times even beneficial.  The truth is that male human nature being what it is, no real live woman, let alone a wife who has borne him a child or two, can possibly match up to the object of her husband’s fantasies.  Likewise, few middle-aged men would win the Mr. Olympia contest.  Why would anyone encourage husbands or wives to engage in behavior that can only make them less content in their marriage?

Children raised with no ability or desire to restrain their fantasies of sensual and material appetites are being condemned to a life of constant dissatisfaction.  Dissatisfaction regularly leads to resentment and then envy.  It is a short step from envy to a justification for taking what is not rightfully yours, or to exacerbating your problems by blaming them on anyone but yourself.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.253-254

Losing Liberty

Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks.  Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools.  And their grandchildren are once more slaves.

D.H. Lawrence

A Road to Terror

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.

Harry S. Truman

Rule by Force Won't Have Peace

So long as [men] hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged "good" can justify it — there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations. 

Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

You Can't Fix Stupidity

When Government Denies Guns to Citizens

When any nation mistrust its citizens with guns, it is sending a clear message.  It no longer trusts it citizen because such a government has evil plans.

George Washington

The Problem of the Welfare State

Grover Cleveland once asked, “If the government supports the people, who will support the government?”  His meaning was this:  The government is wholly dependent upon tax receipts (or occasionally other types of payments) for its revenues.  It is a nonsensical reversal of roles for the people to be dependent upon the government for their material well-being.  To put it yet another way, the government produces no goods; rather it consumes some portion of the goods taken from the people.  It can only play a larger role by increasing the portion that it takes and thus reducing the amount available to people generally.  Cleveland’s question still wants a satisfactory answer, but a welfare state has been established based upon the premise that government will provide for a vast assortment of material and other needs.

Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Volume 5: The Welfare State 1929-1985, pg.1

Good Education!

I find television to be very educational.  Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book.

Groucho Marx

Human Laws Best When Reflecting God’s Laws

Limited government and religious liberty are best served when human laws reflect the “laws of nature and of nature’s God,” as the Declaration of Independence puts it.  All men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with a right to life.  Mankind is created male and female, and marriage, by nature, is the union of a man and a woman.  Only by redefining these concepts according to desire rather than nature is it possible to concoct a “right to choose” that extends to the killing of an unborn child or and endlessly malleable concept of “marriage.”

Ryan T. Anderson, “Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom,” pg.199

"Casual Sex" is Immature and Selfish

Casual sex is fundamentally selfish and degrading. Both partners agree to use and be used by the other. The message they send to each other, quite explicitly, is this: “I’m using you for your body, which I value only as a masturbatory object. You are a sex toy with a brain, but I don’t care about your brain and would rather you not use it right now.” . . . 

In marriage, we give ourselves to the other, lifting them and ourselves up in the process. This is why sex ought to wait for marriage, because only after that lifelong oath has been sworn can we hope to use sex in a way that’s truly sacrificial and self-giving. Sex should be enjoyable, but it should also be an expression of love and devotion. If we take the love and devotion out of sex, we’ve turned it into an act of mutual objectification. And eventually, without the love and devotion, we won’t even have the enjoyment anymore.

Matt Walsh, “Millennials, ‘casual’ sex is not casual. It’s immature and selfish”

Men Are Responsible for Abortion

Men—all too frequently seeking to maximize their sexual pleasure at as little cost as possible—found the right to abortion extremely liberating for them; all they risked was having to pay a few hundred dollars to avoid the potential result of their behavior. Meanwhile, women were too often reduced to mere objects for the sexual gratification of their liberated male counterparts. . . .

Rather than liberating women, abortion has rendered women vulnerable to the sexual appetites of unscrupulous men who—freed of society’s expectation that they will care for the mothers of their children—use, abuse, and discard them in assembly-line fashion. 

Brian E. Fisher, “Abortion Widens the Gender Gap and Exploits Women”

No Rights If Not Self-Aware?

If self-awareness is necessary to confer rights upon individuals then rape would be legal provided that the woman was drugged beforehand. Ideas have consequences so think before you decide what makes people valuable.

Mike S. Adams

Tyranny in the Nursery

Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education.  It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.

Benjamin Disraeli

H/T:  J.L. Pattison

Don’t Be A Coward

He who has truth on his side is a fool as well as a coward if he is afraid to own it because of other men’s opinions.

Daniel Defoe

Bad Logic

The soundest reasoning leads to the wrongest conclusions when the premises are false.

Vilhjahmur Stevansson

The USA is Rotting From Within

The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.

Charles-Louis De Secondat 

H/T J.L. Pattison

An Illiterate Culture

We are a people now illiterate in a way that is unprecedented for the human race. We can decipher linguistic signs on a page, but we have no songs and immemorial stories in our hearts. The pagan Germanic warrior could not read, and where were the books for it anyway? But he had centuries of song in his mind, and he well knew of that specially gifted man, the scop, who could sing by heart many thousands of verses about the old heroes and their adventures, and could even compose new songs of his own: wordum wrixlan, weaving patterns of words that were as intricate as the vermiculate embellishments upon the hilt of a warrior’s sword.

Anthony Esolen, After Exile: Poetry and the Death of Culture

College "Education"

College education is less about the pursuit of truth and more about imparting a carefully guarded, often forcefully imposed narrative of economic socialism, political globalism, moral relativism, militant secularism, and personal meaning through hedonism.

Alex McFarland, “Higher Education: ‘A Four-Year Attack on America and God’”

Proper Education

To educate a person in the mind but not in morals is to educate a menace to society.

Theodore Roosevelt

Building on Sand

Never, never pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world.  There are lots of nice things you can do with sand: but do not try building a house on it.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, chapter 7

Tyranny

There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want, merely because you think it would be good for him.

Robert A. Heinlein

We CAN Control Our Thoughts

Judeo-Christian principles insist that people have the ability to control not only their actions but even their thoughts.  And that, therefore, people are (and must be) accountable for their actions and thoughts. ...  While the modernist, particularly in the field of art, may consider unfettered and undisciplined thought to be just one step removed from genius, the Bible directs us to rein in our minds.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.253

How Revolutionaries Play Victim

It is well to note in connection with the crackdown of revolutionaries of the appearance of a tactic that has often been used since by Communists, their sympathizers and fellow-travelers.  It is the device of taking attention away from Communist methods and violence by focusing attention on real or imagined wrongs done by those who oppose them.  To put it more bluntly, it is the device of turning revolutionaries into the victims and the prosecutors into aggressors.  This is accomplished by downplaying the purposes and methods of revolutionaries and focusing upon the allegedly unsavory tactics of those who act to contain and restrain them. Revolutionaries are portrayed as innocent advocates of unpopular ideas, beset by heavy-handed Yahoos. 

Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 4: The Growth of America 1878-1928, pg.224-225

And Yet They Still Believe It!

In biology, evolution is largely a mental construct built on imagination, because the time scale of animal evolution is immense relative to the time available to us for observations.  We cannot witness animal evolution, and this places the biology argument for evolution at a disadvantage.

Adrian Bejan

[Notice the admission that there is no science behind the religion of evolutionism.]

Talking With Liberals

It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.

Thomas Sowell

Homosexual “Rights” Fight Not Comparable with Blacks’ Civil Rights Fight

Those who promote what they call marriage equality have unjustly appropriated the language and mantle of the black struggle in the United States, the civil rights movement.  But there can be no equivalence between blacks’ experience of slavery and oppression and the circumstances of homosexuals.

Jackie Rivers, Ph.D., Cited by Ryan T. Anderson, “Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom,” pg.186

How to Destroy the USA

America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life.  If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within.

Joseph Stalin

[The LEFTISTS/Liberals in the USA are following Stalin’s thoughts.]

The “Virtue” of Tolerance

Tolerance is the virtue of those who don’t believe anything.

G.K. Chesterton

When the Only Allegiance Allowed is to Government

The worst indecency of the totalitarian mind is that it wants to wipe out all special ties of emotion or allegiance such as might exist between husband and wife or parent and child.  These kinds of loyalties threaten the only allegiance considered important, the one owed to Big Brother.  It is in this atmosphere, of course, that children willingly denounce their parents to the secret police.

 William K. Kilpatrick, Psychological Seduction: The Failure of Modern Psychology, pg.127

Reverence for the Laws

Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap; let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in primers, spelling-books, and in almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.  And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation.

Abraham Lincoln, Address before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, IL, 27 January 1838

Be Careful of Even Little Decisions

Good and evil both increase at compound interest.  That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance.  The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of.  An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, chapter 9

A Root of the Collapse of the Family

The family ceases to be necessary.  It is not necessary to the state because domestic economy is no longer advantageous to the state, it needlessly distracts women workers from more useful productive labor.  It is not necessary to member of the family themselves because the other task of the family—the bringing up of children—is gradually taken over by society.

Alexander Kollontai, Bolshevik. cited by Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 4: The Growth of America 1878-1928, pg.219

[This ideology built into the Communist system in Russia spread to the “progressives” of the mid-to-late 20th century in the USA, leading to the collapse of the family in the 21st century]

Think About It

It is magnificently better to have a Jewish state that is hated by the whole world than an Auschwitz that’s loved by it.

Rabbi Meir Kahan

Stand By Your Convictions

When principles that run against your deepest convictions begin to win the day, then battle is your calling, and peace has become sin; you must, at the price of dearest peace, lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy, with all the fire of your faith.

Abraham Kuyper

Be Careful of Government Snapshots

[A] snapshot of a successful lawyer photographed a year before she graduates law school may well show someone apparently in need of government assistance. The snapshot will show a young woman working (well, okay, studying) all day without being paid a penny. She may live in just one room that she shares with another student. She may subsist on macaroni and cheese. The snapshot demands a compassionate response from anyone seeing it, but it fails to show that this woman is only months away from earning an enviable income and in absolutely no need of help from anyone. Least of all should she extract assistance from middle-income families whose total income is considerably less than she will earn in her first year with a prestigious law firm.

Yet government policies use misleading snapshots such as these to convince hard-working and big-hearted Americans that higher taxes are necessary to help the poor.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.250-251

How Same-Sex Fake Marriage Was Attained

The redefinition of marriage as a genderless partnership is possible only in a society that has already done serious damage to the institution.  Long before there was a debate about same-sex marriage, Americans of every political stripe bought into a sexual ideology that undermined the rational foundations for the marital norms of permanence, exclusivity, and monogamy.  Cohabitation, no-fault divorce, recreational sex, nonmarital childbearing, and pornography all contributed to the breakdown of the marriage culture.  If marriage is simply about emotional companionship, then of course men and women are interchangeable.

Ryan T. Anderson, “Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom,” pg.179

The Problem With Sex Outside of Marriage

The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kid of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, chapter 6

How to Get a Job and Keep One

There are only three job skills necessary to find and keep an entry-level job; none of these skills can be taught by government programs. First, show up regularly and on time. Second, obey instructions. Third, keep quiet. These are character attributes and can only be acquired from parents and family who care. Anybody obeying these three rules in America can obtain an entry-level job and keep it. By keeping the position, one quickly becomes trained and worth more to an employer. At that point, the potential inconvenience and expense of finding and training a new employee is countered by the employer raising the wage of his worker. The investment of his time during the first six months at one employer has made him more valuable in this position than a newcomer could be. Thus our fortunate American newcomer to the job market finds himself on the economic escalator. 

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

Real Marriage Equality

Obama and five U.S. Supreme Court Justices did not win marriage “equality.” They imposed a radical revision of the legal definition of marriage on the entire country. Equality demands that like things be treated alike. Equality does not demand that we treat unlike things as if they were alike. An intrinsically sterile union of two people of the same sex is as different from a union composed of two people of different sexes as men are from women (which is a difference that even homosexuals acknowledge is real, substantive, and profound). 

Homosexuals have always been free to marry. They’ve been as free to marry as polyamorists have been. They weren’t fighting for a right they were denied. They were fighting for the unilateral right to revise the legal definition of marriage.

Laurie Higgiins, The Audacity of Obama

Capitalism Can Seem Strange

Buying a pair of shoes, or a purse, or a fancy sports car, is much more fun than paying an electricity bill, or paying rent, although human nature being what it is—people who complain about electricity bills don't hesitate to go out and spend $300 on a pair of blue jeans that look like they came from the dumpster. And it's just very strange. But each gets something from the transaction.

Steve Forbes, Liberty University Convocation, 12/7/16

The Idea of Science Originated from the Judeo-Christian Tradition

The real history of the Western world, Judeo-Christian tradition, is that it was the rise of Judaism and then Christianity that enabled us to move forward, because these faiths emphasized curiosity, searching for how God's world worked instead of saying this is it; that's it. 

And that curiosity led to what we now call science, which flourished in the West as nowhere else in the world. You know, they all talk about Galileo's trial before the Vatican hundreds of years ago, but if you actually look at what was going on at that time, all of the great discoveries in astronomy and science in those early years came from priests. Came from priests! The man who invented modern physics, at least a precursor of modern physics, Isaac Newton, spent a lot of time studying religion and faith. They didn't see it as polar opposites. They saw it as one in the same-curiosity, finding how God's world worked, and that enabled us to make these great rises. And the truth about the power of knowledge can be seen today, as we know, as the 75th anniversary of the attack on us at Pearl Harbor-changed fundamentally world history and American history. World War II was devastating in Europe and Japan—massive physical destruction, tens of millions of lives lost, and experts thought that after that conflict it would take decades, generations for the world to recover. But the thing is, despite that loss of life, despite that physical destruction, the fact of the matter is knowledge was not destroyed, and within a handful of years after the end of that terrible conflict, thanks to the US Security military umbrella, which allowed security in people to really strive again. Within a few years, Japan and Western Europe exceeded their pre-war levels of production, because knowledge was not destroyed. 

Steve Forbes, Liberty University Convocation, 12/7/16

A Virtuous Citizenry is NECESSARY!

Without a virtuous citizenry, John Adams memorably warns us, democracy always commits suicide. Freedom, without virtue, seems bent on its own self-destruction, as we witness all too well in our country these days. But, of course, virtue cannot be taken for granted. It must be taught, inculcated, practiced, and esteemed in every generation, every family, and every human heart. This is a tall order—and a real struggle for anyone who takes it seriously—but it is this interior struggle that was passed from one generation to the next until quite recently.

Indeed, over the last several decades, we have witnessed the Supreme Court in particular use arguments from personal autonomy (or freedom misunderstood as its own end) to weaken precisely those institutions—motherhood, fatherhood, marriage, other mediating structures—that are best suited to sustain the social ecology, to shape persons to use their freedom well. America’s long tradition of self-determination has morphed over the years into a constitutionalized sort of no-holds-barred self-invention, the freedom to define myself just as I wish, free from any claims or constraints upon me.

Erika Bachiochi, Safeguarding the Conditions for an Authentic Human Ecology

Human Ecology

Human ecology. . . allows one to reflect with fewer intellectual stumbling blocks upon the design and dynamism of the human person and his life experience. That is, human ecology more readily calls to mind the reality that the human person is created and yet, by his choices, creates himself; that he is deeply influenced by and, in turn, influences others; that he is conditioned by the environment in which he finds himself and yet is capable of transcending it. The analogy to natural ecology is helpful in today’s philosophical climate, because it implies an interdependence of influences and actors, a complexity of causes and effects, while calling for empirical and scientific validation. Just as we can measure toxins in our waterways, we can use social science to empirically corroborate the destructive “downstream effects” of the pill, pornography, and fatherlessness on real women, men, and children. Contrary to the prevailing libertarian view, the ecological analogy also reveals that the putatively “harmless” acts of solitary individuals, when adopted by a large proportion of the population, can have deeply harmful effects.

Erika Bachiochi, Safeguarding the Conditions for an Authentic Human Ecology

Liberals Are Whiny Brats

At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless.  Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.

P.J. O’Rourke

Redistribution of the Wealth

You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom.  What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.  The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.  When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.  You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.

Adrian Rogers, 1931

The Lover of Truth

The lover of truth must choose, in every way possible, to do and say what is right, even when threatened with death, rather than save his own life.

Justin Martyr, First Apology 2:1

Be Careful How You Live

I will govern my life and my thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one, and to read the other.  For what does it signify to make anything a secret to our neighbor, when to God, who is the searcher of hearts, all our privacies are open

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC - 65 AD)

Modern Education Removes Historical Culture

A student tells you that he is weary of learning about American culture in school. You say that you do not actually believe that his teachers have imparted much of that culture to him, or of what used to be a culture. You are thinking of the seaside observations of Winslow Homer and the plaintive love songs of Stephen Foster and the startling progressions of John Coltrane. You are thinking of Pickett and his men making their desperate charge at Gettysburg. You hear the plain and honest blank verse rhythms of Robert Frost: “I can’t think Si ever hurt anyone,” says the farmer of the hired man who has come back like a stray dog and who has, unbeknownst to him, just breathed his last. You are thinking of Protestants singing “Nearer, My God, to Thee” in four-part harmony; of John Greenleaf Whittier whistling along a country walk, and George Washington Carver patiently grinding peanut skins in a pestle. Henry Adams, John Ford, Herman Melville, Billy Sunday, Billie Holliday—how much of what is quintessentially American has he really encountered? But before you can ask a question probing more deeply into culture, he rolls his eyes and shuts the conversation down. Such is the certainty that the correct political position confers.

Anthony Esolen, Higher Education in Hell

Education is Not For Political Activism

If a young person comes to believe that education is to be valued as preparation for political action—if his English teachers choose novels not for their beauty and their insight into the human condition, but for their usefulness in advancing a political cause; if his history teachers encourage not that forbearance that tends to forgive the faults of those who have come before us or who lived under conditions whereof we have no experience, but rather an easy and self-confident judgment of their moral darkness because they were not like us in all things; if his art teachers foster contempt for the patient and heart-breaking quest for precision, and substitute for it indulgence in what is supposedly “edgy” but is merely tiresome and politically tendentious—then I fear that he will be, strictly speaking, ineducable, a monolith of manufactured stolidity.

Anthony Esolen, Higher Education in Hell

Forcing a Republic to Be a Democracy

By the late 19th century, the idea was gaining ground that United States was a democracy, or that it ought to be anyway.  Reformers began to latch on to democracy in the latter part of the 19th century, pushed for popular control over government to be expanded, and linked this to progress and progressivism.  They linked it to broader and deeper reform, too, by identifying democracy with equality, and proposing to use the power of government to make men more nearly equal.  The expansion of the power of the central government and the use of that power to transform not only America but the world setting as well was a part of the progressive ethos.

Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 4: The Growth of America 1878-1928, pg.117-118

[Our current horrid social situation in the USA is a direct result of this ideology.]

Government is Force

Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force!  Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.

George Washington

Defense of a Cause

A cause defended by nasty language deserves suspicion.  Truth needs no such weapons.

Anonymous

The Ideas of the LEFT Do Not Work

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

Thomas Sowell, The survival of the left

Liberals' False Assumptions

Liberals seem to assume that, if you don’t believe in their particular political solutions, then you don't really care about the people that they claim to want to help.

Thomas Sowell

The Academic Politician

The builder of railroads has a clear enough idea of the utility whereby he judges the value of his education; it is made manifest in rails that do not warp and axles that do not crack. He is still bound to a salutary though severely constricted truth. The political player—the man who falls in adoration before the cloaked vacuity of politics as the summum bonum—can have no such clear idea, because man will always frustrate anyone who demands perfection on earth, or even reliable prosperity and peace. The builder of railroads, when a gear turns up worn or toothless, alters the design of the gear or seeks a more durable alloy. The political player, when he meets with inevitable disappointments and reversals, turns in anger against his opponents, who must be wicked, or against the very mankind whom he purports to raise up.

The builder of railroads is interested in railroads; the academic politician is interested in victory. He has the moral code of Machiavelli, but, because he is too impatient to submit to the instruction of history, he has not the old master’s shrewd sense of human limitations and contradictions. He makes the worst of rulers: he is neither a lover of truth, nor a practical man of the world, nor an habitual examiner of his all-too-human and persistent failings.

Anthony Esolen, Higher Education in Hell

Unhappy Childhood Is NOT an Excuse

Murderers may in some cases have had unhappy childhoods, but there is absolutely nothing that anybody can do to change their childhoods after they are adults. The most that can be done is to keep murderers from committing more murders, and to deter others from committing murder. People on the left who want to give murderers “another chance” are gambling with the lives of innocent people. That is one of many other examples of the cruel consequences of seemingly compassionate decisions and policies.

Ironically, people on the left who are preoccupied with the presumably unhappy childhoods of murderers, which they can do nothing about, seldom show similar concern about the present and future unhappy childhoods of the orphans of people who have been murdered.

Thomas Sowell, Backward-Looking “Progressives”

Bad College Admissions Policies

There are people who urge college-admissions committees to let disadvantaged students be admitted with lower test scores or other academic indicators. Those who say such things seldom even attempt to see what the actual consequences of such policies have been. The prevailing preconceptions — sometimes called what “everybody knows” — are sufficient for them. Factual studies show that admitting students to institutions whose standards they do not meet often leads to needless academic failures, even among students with above-average ability, who could have succeeded at other institutions whose standards they do meet.

Thomas Sowell, Backward-Looking “Progressives”

Man Is Not an Animal

Many a sensible modern man must have abandoned Christianity under the pressure of three such converging convictions as these:  first, that men, with their shape, structure, and sexuality, are, after all, very much like beasts, a mere variety of the animal kingdom; second, that primeval religion arose in ignorance and fear; third, that priests have blighted societies with bitterness and gloom. Those three anti-Christian arguments are very different; but they are all quite logical and legitimate; and they all converge.  The only objection to them (I discover) is that they are all untrue.  If you leave off looking at books about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then (if you have any humour or imagination, any sense of the frantic or the farcical) you will observe that the startling thing is not how like man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is.  It is the monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation.  That man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being so like they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock and the enigma.  That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton.  People talk of barbaric architecture and debased art.  But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory even in a rococo style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, though equipped with the material of many camel’s-hair brushes.  Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior to ours.  They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization.  Who ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants?  Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old?  No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural explanation, but it is a chasm.  We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal.  It is man that has broken out.  All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.  All other animals are domestic animals; man alone is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a monk.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pg.141-142

Liberals Deny Reality

Many of the dangerous errors that have crept into our legal system arose from a progressive desire to pursue equality by denying reality.

Thomas Sowell, Backward-Looking “Progressives

The Death of Common Sense

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years.  No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape.  

He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as: Knowing when to come out of the rain; why the early bird gets the worm; life isn’t always fair; and maybe it was my fault.

Common Sense lived by simple and sound financial policies (don’t spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge).

Common sense went on life-support when the schools could no longer discipline a trouble-making kid; when the schools could not give an aspirin for a headache and did not have to inform parents about the abortion for their daughter; when churches became more secular in structure and went out of the Bible-teaching business; when criminals were better treated than the victims; when you could not defend your home from the robber.  Common Sense finally gave up the will to live after a woman was awarded millions of dollars because she spilled hot coffee on herself and sued the restaurant.

Common Sense is survived by his four stepbrothers: (1) I Know My Rights, (2) I Want It Now, (3) It Is Someone Else’s Fault, and (4) I’m A Victim!

Not Many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone.  If you still remember him, pass this on. 

Author unknown

The Decline of Public Education

There was no mysticism in the first American schools which produced pioneers who carved this industrial giant out of a wilderness; which produced the Patrick Henrys, the George Washingtons; and which lifted this nation to international prominence.  The simple fact is, teachers read their Bibles, led children in prayer, and wrote textbooks like the McGuffy Readers.  They acknowledged the basic theistic presuppositions which built a sense of responsibility into the character of children.  The first schools taught Christianity, morality, and knowledge based upon…fundamental presuppositions.

These were the basic presuppositions of the early Americans regardless of their theological background, and they were, in fact, the basic Christian beliefs upon which out founding fathers built our Constitutional system.  These prevailed through the Colonial period, the Expansion period, the Industrial Revolution, the Reconstruction, and up until the days of John Dewey.  Some misinterpret the Constitution when they contend that no religion can be taught in the schools. The humanistic repudiations of God by Owen, Mann, and Dewey, have become law in education.  The drive to make education nonsectarian reduced it to humanistic indoctrination which is the worship of man.  This has become the religion of government schools.

Dr. Donald R. Howard, Let’s Save Our Public Schools.  Cited by Mal Couch,This Great Nation: The Things That Made it Great — and How we Lost Them, pg.109-110

Education Is More Than Information

Educate your children in self-control, to the habit of holding in passions and evil tendencies, subject them to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes from society. … Knowledge does not comprise all which is contained in the larger term of education.  The feelings are to be disciplined; the passions are to be restrained; true and worthy motives are to be inspired; a profound Christianity is to be instilled and pure morality included under all circumstances.

Daniel Webster.  Cited by Mal Couch,This Great Nation: The Things That Made it Great — and How we Lost Them, pg.105

Families Are Foundational

All government originates in families, and if neglected there it will hardly exist in society. … The foundation of all free government and of all social order must be laid in families and in the discipline of youth. … The education of youth, an employment of more consequence than making laws and preaching the gospel, because it lays the foundation on which both law and gospel rest for success.

Noah Webster.  Cited by Mal Couch,This Great Nation: The Things That Made it Great — and How we Lost Them, pg.102