A Supreme Cross to Bear

     The Supreme Court of the United States, now with Justice Sotomayor, is hearing the case of the cross on Sunrise Hill  in California.  It is a World War I memorial that was erected 75 years ago.

     It’s strange that it was constitutional for 70 years or so and then suddenly became unconstitutional.  These cases always annoy me for that reason:  how is that judges can suddenly discover that some practice that has occurred for decades, or even centuries, is unconstitutional?

     I predict that the Supreme Court will rule that the cross can stay.  If they do not, it will set a precedent that could result in the costly and disrespectful removal of crosses in parks and cemeteries throughout the country, including at Arlington National Cemetery.

     I believe that they will rule that the cross serves a secular and ceremonial purpose beyond its strictly religious significance.  They will rule that in the context of a memorial it is no longer a symbol of the Christian faith but a way to honor the dead.

     The Obama administration supports the keeping of the cross.  Good for them.

     Do you think that I am right?

Kennedy’s Guilt

     A memoir by Edward Kennedy will be published soon.  In it, he reportedly wrote that the guilt of the incident with Mary Jo Kopechne stayed with him throughout the rest of his life.  I am glad to hear that he felt that way.  I wish I had known that he felt that way while he was still alive.  It would have given me much warmer feelings for him than I generally felt for him.

     I am surprised and sad that Senator Kennedy never ackowledged his feelings of guilt publicly.  I believe that it would have done him a world of good and that it would have done others a world of good, too.  I wonder if the Kopechne family knew.  I hope so.

     Had the Senator come clean in public and acknowledged his guilt in the matter, perhaps he could have relieved himself of the heavy burden that he carried.  I’m sure he knew what people said and thought about him, and it seems strange that he would not have wanted to set the record striaight for the public.  I do not say this to slight him or judge him.  I take it, rather, as a cautionary tale for myself, and perhpas others can do so, as well.

     I have done some bad things in my life that very few people know about and that I never talk about.  If the knowledge of those things were to become more widespread, I hope that I could be open about my regret of those actions and the guilt and shame that I felt and still somewhat feel.

     I hope that Kennedy died with a clear conscience despite his saying that he felt guilt for over four decades about what happened on Chappaquiddick.  If not, then I hope he has found peace now.  I really do.

     Note that I have not expressed any opinion about what exactly happened that terrible night.  I have no way of knowing more than what the official reports said.  I assume that Kennedy was referring in his memoir to leaving the scene of the accident and not reporting it sooner.  He had already admitted to those things, and as far as I know that is all that he was guilty of.

What’s the Difference?

     What is the difference between John Wilkes Booth and William Kostric?  In case you don’t know who Kostric is, he is one of the people who carried a gun to a town hall meeting recently.  In his case it was in New Hampshire, and doing so prompted Chris Matthews to compare him to Booth.

     Although I think Matthews is pretty knowledgeable, he must not have realized that Booth did more than carry a gun.  He fatally shot President Lincoln.  Kostric, on the hand, did not shoot or kill anyone, much less a president.  He has not even threatened to kill the President.  I would say that it is an important difference.

     Referring to a man carrying an AR-15 rifle, Contessa Brewer on MSNBC fretted about having “a man of color in the presidency and white people showing up with guns.”  She conveniently overlooked the fact that the man with the AR-15 was a black man.  The picture that they flashed on the screen was a blurry image of the rifle cropped closely with the man’s dark skin not visible.

     That black man, Chris Broughton, did not shoot anybody at the meeting.  In fact none of the dozen or so gun-carriers verbally threatened anyone or assaulted anyone in any way.  No gun was fired.  The Phoenix Police were already aware that guns would be present before the meeting and gave their approval.  They had no choice, really, since Arizona law is clear on the matter. 

     Facts are stubborn things.  They are not as fun as paranoia and hysteria, but they are much more useful to those who are brave enough to examine them and stick to them.

     The next thing you know kids will be punished for having a butter knife in their lunch box at school or for offering a friend a Tylenol for a headache.  Oh, wait!  That has already happened.

     I had better stop.  There is a stack of paper on the desk beside me, and I might get a paper cut.

Why Carry Guns?

     First I will make a general comment.  I am highly amused that the grown-up hippies who protested the Vietnam War in the Sixties are now appalled by protests of health insurance reform.  I’m just sayin’.

     Now I will get to the specific point of the post.  I think it is important to understand what people are saying before we condemn anything that they say.  Specifically, it is important to understand why people bear firearms at town hall meetings.  I’m not sure that everyone is getting the same message.

     There is probably not a single message being conveyed by carrying guns to these forums, but one of the prominent ones is that we live in a Constitutional republic in which we have delineated rights and freedoms.  What many of the gun-toting protestors are saying, and I know because I have listened to their explanations is this:  I am asserting my Second Amendment right in order to remind my representatives that they are bound to uphold the Constitution and to defend my rights and my freedom.  In short, I am carrying a weapon because it is my right to do so.

     Nobody that I know have has pointed their guns at anyone.  Nobody has issued threats.  Nobody has fired a weapon.  Had anyone done so, we would have been reading about arrests already.  (The only arrests that I have read about are of the goons who have attacked protestors.) 

     As I wrote before, the hysteria over guns ignores one very important fact.  These people already own guns and many of them already carry them around all the time, depending on the law where they live.  If they were bent on killing people, they could do so any day of the year and would not have to wait until a town hall meeting to do so.

     If all the rightwingers out there wanted to kill all the abortion doctors, it would have been accomplished ten years ago already.  If they wanted to assassinate members of Congress, there would already be funerals on television.  If they intended to overthrow the government, they would already have staged a coup, and–ironically–would have been stopped by officials carrying (guess what?) guns.

     Even though some folks have legally carried guns to these meetings, so far the meetings have been much more peaceful than the protests of the 1960’s that I barely remember.  When the current protestors get as riled up as those so-called peaceniks, then we should start getting alarmed.

Hysteria Over Guns

     Our great-grandparents would have thought we are really, really weird.  They owned guns for hunting and other sports.  They owned guns for self-defense.  Guns were an extremely useful tool for many of them.  They would have been either shocked or highly amused at the current hysteria over guns.

     Before that it was swords, and before that it was clubs.

     People have become so sissified (and that was a carefully chosen word) in our modern world.  To be scared of a hunk of metal because it could be used to hurt or kill people is idiotic.  (Most of the people who are scared of guns routinely drive on freeways!)

     Long ago the state where I was born supposedly had a law that whenever a married couple was in town, the man had to walk five feet in front of his wife with his rifle against his shoulder.  He had to be ready to defend her (from bears, I suspect, more than from other people).  Apparently nobody went into panic mode when they saw people strolling around town carrying rifles.  They did not think that the gun itself had the power to harm them, and they did not fear that their friends and neighbors were just itching to shoot them down in cold blood.  They apparently felt more secure with guns around rather than less secure.

     There has been a lot of talk about people who have legally brought weapons to the recent town hall meetings with their representatives.  The fact that the weapons have been there and nobody has been killed should say something.  It should say, “Don’t fear guns.  They are inanimate objects!”

     It should also say, “The average American citizen is not a homicidal maniac but a peace-loving, law-abiding person.”

     Fearing guns has not stopped people from shooting up schools and churches and fitness centers.  Banning them certainly hasn’t, since most of those horrific shootings have been in places where weapons are banned.  Many of the shooters procured or owned the weapons illegally, which means that laws cannot stop people from committing mayhem.  No person bent on mass killing thinks to himself, “I’d better not do it.  It’s against the law!”

       Let’s think really, really logically.  Consider how many guns are around each of us all the time in America.  Most homes that I vist have at least one.  If the guns themselves were able to harm us, we’d all be dead or maimed.  Seriously.  If all of our neighbors were out to get us, we’d all be dead.  In any given neibhborhood, there are enough guns for everyone to get wiped out.  Seriously.

     But here we are alive and well.  Most of us have no intention of killing our fellow citizens or our elected leaders.  Most of us own guns, but most of us never, ever use them to hurt another human being.

     By the way, I do not own a gun and never have.  I’ve never fired one.  I write out of principle, not because I care that much about guns.  I actually have no interest in hunting, target practice, or anything else requiring them.  I would not use one to defend myself, even if I had one. I just thought it would lend more power to what I wrote above to mention those things.

The Worst of the Health Insurance Bill

     I want to start with a question. Why have advocates of the President’s health insurance bill referred to it as a “health care” bill.  Is the government going to build hospitals and hire doctors in order to provide health care for everyone?  No, the government is going to provide some kind of new health-insurance program and mandate certain policies for existing health insurance providers.  So let’s stop calling it a health care program and call it what it is–government-sponsored health insurance.  And let’s stop saying that people in America do not get health care.  With few exceptions, people have access to health care in America, although not everyone is covered by health insurance.

     Now on to my main topic–the three worst aspects of the health insurance program being proposed by the administration and Congress. 

The government will not call the fees it imposes taxes: “The tax imposed under this section shall not be treated as tax imposed by this chapter for purposes of determining the amount of any credit under this chapter or for purposes of section 55.” (page 203, lines 13-18)

What makes this provision bad is that it tricks people into believing that the government’s health insurance program will not cause taxes to be raised.  By not calling a tax, a tax, people will believe that they are getting absolutely free health care, as if doctors and nurses are suddenly working out of the goodness of their hearts and as if hospitals do not have to pay the utility bills.

The government will not let you sue over coverage limits and costs decisions: “There shall be no administrative or judicial review of a payment rate or methodology established under this section or under section 224.” (page 124, line 4–page 125, line 2)

I had brought up this subject before.  If a private insurance company fails to provide promised coverage, their customers have legal recourse.  It is not always easy, but an individual or group can sue a private insurance company for breach of contract or otherwise failing to cover people according to the law.  Can you sue the government?  Apparently not.  You and I will be at their mercy when it comes to getting the care that we need.

The government will ration your care: Establish an annual limitation on cost sharing to ensure that “the cost-sharing incurred . . . with respect to an individual (or family) for a year does not exceed the applicable level specified–$5,000 for an individual and $10,000 for a family.” (29.4-29.16)

So it’s there in black and white.  You will be covered, but only so much.  Under a private insurance plan, you decide how much coverage you get, based on what you think you need and what you are willing to pay out of your own pocket.  You can purchase extra policies, as I have, to cover catastrophic illnesses or accidents.  Under the government system, it sounds like you had better not get too sick or need too many tests or operations.

This section of the bill does not seem to mean what the folks at World Magazine thought.  It seems to refer to the part of health care expenses that individuals will pay out-of-pocket.  It does strike me though as odd.  If people will still have to pay that much out of their own pockets, how is it different from the current system in which most private insurance plans have deductibles or co-payments?

SOURCE:  World Magazine, “Washington’s Prescription“

Click on the link to read more of the contents of the health insurance proposal and to find a link to the entire bill, if you are brave enough to read it.  Most of the politicians planning to impose us on it do not intend to read it all, apparently.

The One Obvious Fact

     You might like the idea of taxpayer-funded medical coverage, or you might hate it. However, let’s all please think straight and talk straight about one crucial fact that is pretty obvious. Most people will have no choice once the plan is approved by Congress. Despite what President Obama and his administration and his supporters in Congress are saying, most peopel will not get to keep the insurance they have, no matter how sattisfied they are with it.

     Most Americans get their health insurance through a group plan adopted by their employer.  Most employers are in business to make money, which means that they generally choose the most affordable health insurance plan possible while still trying to attract employees and comply with laws and regulations.

     Therefore, given a choice between a taxpayer-funded program that will seem to cost them less and a private program that will seem to cost them more, hardly any employers will opt for the latter.  Once the employer chooses to go on the government plan, the workers will have no choice.  (I wrote seem because if the program is being paid for with taxes, it could cost everyone more in the long run.)

     So, support the President’s program all you want, but let’s all be honest.  It takes only plain old common sense to realize that the new program will pretty much wipe out the old system and leave people with no choice at all.

     Besides, even if individuals are somehow given a choice in such a system, very few would be able to resist the temptation of accepting what looks like the cheapest alternative.  Once the government has almost everyone on their program, will there be any going back for those people who are disatisfied with it but who cannot afford private insurance on top of higher taxes?  Obviously not.

     Oh, and one more thing to think about.  Which individuals would still have a choice under the new system?  The wealthy people who already pay for private insurance out of their own pocket.  I thought this president was for helping the poor rather than the rich.

Stimulated Enough

     There is talk about another stimulus package.  It reminds me of a joke:

     Two men were discussing a new movie.

     “It was pretty good.  I’ve gone back 10 times,” said one.

     “Why do you keep going back?” asked the other.

     “Well, at the end of the movie this feller on the golf course  trying to sink a putt.  Every time I watch it he misses the putt.  I keep going back to see if he ever sinks it.”

     Isn’t it stupid to keep doing the same thing and hoping for different results?

     If Congress wants to try again to “stimulate” the economy the way they did last time, I guess there’s not much we can do.  However, I hope that they actually look at how well the last stimulus program has worked before launching into another one.

Just a Thought

     As I look at comments made here over the last few days, a thought flashes through my mind like a huge neon sign: how far we have fallen!

     The culture war is real, and it has heated up in last few years.  I see it not only as a sign of moral and spiritual decline but also as a decline in just plain common sense.  I can only wonder what my grandparents would think if they were alive today.  I do not think that they could even conceive of having such conversations, let alone finding anyone taking them seriously.

     [At this point somebody will say that our great-great-grandparents would have been equally dumbfounded about the abolition of slavery and equal rights for all races.  I dispute that historically, since there were people since the very beginning of our country who wanted to abolish slavery, my ancestors among them.  I also dispute the relevance of it, since neither of the hot potatoes in America, abortion and same-sex marriage, has much to do with race.  In fact, I consider it specious logic and dubious morality to compare these issues with racial problems.]

     Behold the result of the Enlightenment!  Or perhaps it has not reached its full fruition.  That’s a thought I’d rather not pursue very far.

     People who uphold traditional morals are called bigots and haters and sociopaths.  What I wonder is when the detractors of conservative, evangelical Christianity plan to do to “cure” us?  Are we far from a new Inquisition–a politically correct one?  Will it be long before the things I write on this blog will be classed as hate crimes, and people like me will be sent to “retraining” centers?  We have already seen folks sent to “sensitivity classes.”

     I’m convinced that we simply cannot have a civil conversation about the two hot-button issues in the United State–the life of the unborn and the definition of marriage.  Since both sides consider the other side completely wrong and even completely immoral, I do not know how we can proceed. 

     From my perspective the best way is to hash it out democratically.  That’s probably the best that we can do.  As the Constitution outlines, these questions should be (and should have been) settled by state and local governments as provided for in their own constitutions and laws.  I really don’t see any other way forward in the debate that is both just and right.

     How about you?

Justice for Firefighters in Connecticut

     Suppose you were a working class American serving with the Fire Department of New Haven, Connecticut.  You want to get ahead in life, so you study hard for the promotion exam to achieve a higher rank and a higher salary.  Owing to a learning disability, you have to hire somebody to read the study material out loud for you.  You record the material so that you can listen to it for several hours every day.

     Then suppose that when it comes time for the results to be announced, the Fire Department says that the results would not be certified or announced and that nobody would receive the promotions.  They don’t even tell you what your score was, so that you could at least see how well you did.

     That happened to Frank Ricci and to other members of New Haven Fire Department.  The reason that the test results were not certified and announced is that there was a huge disparity between the scores of the Caucasians, the Hispanics, and the blacks who took the test.

     Some background information is very important.  The Fire Department had taken great pains and had spent $100,000 to get a fair test and fair testing situation.  They hired a firm to write the test.  The firm based the test and the study material on interviews with high-ranking officers with the fire department, and they made sure that they included a significant number of minorities in those interviews in order to avoid bias.  For the oral portion of the test they made sure that each panel of judges had a white firefighter, a black firefighter, and an Hispanic firefighter.  The questions were job related and really had no connection to the test-taker’s race or ethnic background.

     The Fire Department and the City of New Haven were stunned when the results were determined.  They would have had to fill almost all the available positions with white people, according to the rules already in place.  They were terrified that the African Americans who took the test would sue them.  They threw out the test.

     So Frank Ricci and nineteen other plaintiffs, including one Hispanic person, sued them instead, believe that they were the ones who had been discriminated against.  The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, agreed with them and overturned lower court rulings in favor of the city and the other defendants.

     The majority members of the court ruled that, according to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, an entity is not allowed to change test results in order to achieve a favorable racial “balance.”  They found that the city and the Fire Department had done everything possible to achieve a fair, unbiased promotional procedure.  They also found that the main alternative proposed, weighting the written and oraltests differently, was not possible.  The city had a contractual agreement with the union to count the written test as 60% and the oral portion as 40%.  They could not break the contract with the union and make the ratio 30/70 as suggested by some of the defendants in the case.  Besides, that would be changing the rules of the “game” after it had already been played and the results were not acceptable to certain players.

     I applaud the Supreme Court.  I would never want any qualified black people being turned down for a promotion because of the color of their skin.  However, I do not want to see any other qualified people turned down for a promotion because of the color of their skin either.  It should be wrong no matter which way it goes.  What would the city say to Mr. Ricci if he got the highest score on the test but was refused the promotion because he was “white”–”Sorry, sir, you are the most qualifed, but you’re the wrong color.”  How would that not be racism?  I put “white” in quotation marks because Ricci is not exactly an Anglo-Saxon name.  I would guess that none of his ancestors were slaveholders, and that they suffered a bit of discriminattion themselves.

News Article:  Supreme Court rules in favor of Conn. firefighters, The Boston Globe

The Decision:  Ricci et al. v. DeStefano et al.