Army Spc. Jeremy Hall is suing the Department of Defence and the Secretary of Defense, because he claims to have been discriminated against as an atheist.  While I believe it is possible that he was discriminated against, I find it highly unlikely.  I understand from people that I know in the military that they bend over backwards not to discriminate or even “offend” people nowadays.  Undersecretary of Defense, Bill Carr, commenting on this lawsuit, said, “If an atheist chose to follow their convictions, absolutely that’s acceptable.  And that’s a point of religious accommodation in department policy, one may hold whatever faith, or may hold no faith.”  

     This Hall seems like one more person in an endless line of perpetual victims that we have somehow bred in the United States.  He appears, from what I read, to want to discriminate against Christians, whose rights (along with the rights of other religious practitioners) are specifically guaranteed by the Constitution.  I could be wrong, and would change my mind if there is solid evidence to support Hall’s complaint. Keep reading →

     Certain “sex offenders” don’t scare me very much, while others scare me a lot.  A man who committed statutory rape when he was 20-years-old and his girlfriend was 17-years-old should pay the consequences and be given a second chance.  A man who has molested numerous children and can’t seem to control himself should probably be locked up nice and tight for the rest of his life.

     All such criminals must register and provide their addresses.  In most states they are restricted from living near schools or public parks.  Georgia has a strict law in that regard, and the law is being challenged because it is unfair to homeless sex offenders.  How can you tell your local law enforcement officers what your address is, if you don’t have an address? Keep reading →

     If you were to steal something, would you:

          (a) Hide the evidence and keep it a secret, or

          (b)  Post a video of yourself using the stolen item on YouTube?

     A man from Wisconsin reportedly stole a stun gun and then posted a video on YouTube of himself and his father using it on each other.  He must really have been shocked when the police arrested him.

     If you had a stolen cell phone in your possession, would you:

          (a)  Get rid of it, so that you wouldn’t be tracked, or

          (b)  Call the police using it?

     A man in Minnesota allegedly called the police using a cell phone that they say he found in a purse that he had snatched.  I wonder how he used the one call that they allowed him when he got to the police station.

     My advice to all future law breakers is this:  try not to get caught.  Unless you feel guilty and want to turn yourself in, that is.  In that case, just go to the police station and tell them what you did.

     Do you believe in academic freedom?  I think that most of believe in it to some extent.  Students have the right to learn many different viewpoints, don’t you think?  Instructors should be allowed to expose their students to ideas that may be new to them or that may challenge some of the ones they have previously held.  Of course, there should be some limits, based on the age of the student. 

     If you do believe in academic freedom, then you must accept that it applies to all points of view.  That includes conservative as well as liberal views.  It also includes religious and non-religious views. 

     Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal believes in academic freedom.  He just signed the Louisiana Science Education Bill, which allows supplemental material to be used in science classrooms on the topics of evolution, cloning, and global warming.  The supplemental material helps students to analyze and critique various views on those issues.

     I think that kids should learn about the existence of views that are held by millions of people in America that are not politically correct.  I think that they should learn what various religions teach and what atheists and agnostics think.  They should learn mainstream scientific views and alternate scientific views.  After all, an education should not be about brainwashing them to accept only the “official view.”  We are not living in Big Brother’s world.  At least not yet.

     The only thing about Obama that smacks of change is his name.  He used to be called Barry, but now he is Barack.  Obama promised change, but he is exactly the same as most other successful politicians.  He is doing and saying whatever he and his advisors think will allow him to win the election.  Lately his positions have changed so fast that journalists cannot even keep up in their reporting of his flip-flops.

     What I have been wondering is how the great host of Democrats out there in the trenches are reacting to his flip-flopping.  Are they laughing behind our backs, because they know he is just pandering and making empty promises he doesn’t intend to keep?  Are they shocked and outraged that he has reversed himself on some of their key positions–positions that helped him get their votes in the primaries?  Or are they just too stupid and oblivious to know that he has reversed himself?  (If you spend most of your time talking about “hope” and “change,” how would the general public realize that you even held any positions that you could filp-flop on?)

     How has he flip-flopped?  Let us count the ways:

     *He is wearing a flag pin again.  At one time he called it a “substitute for true patriotism.”  Hmm, by his own words he is saying that he is not truly patriotic now.

     *Last November he said that the District of Columbia’s gun ban was constitutional.  Now he says he agrees with the Supreme Court’s ruling that it was unconstitutional.  (I’m looking for him to brandish a Colt-45 and wear a cowboy hat at an upcoming campaign event!)

     *He said that he would hold unconditional talks with Ahmadinejad.  Now he’s not so sure.

     *He said that he was for unconditional, immediate withdrawal from Iraq.  Now he says that he has always been in favor of withdrawing troops only when Iraq is stable enough and when it would be safe to do so.  (After his upcoming trip to Iraq, I expect him to appear in fatigues and announce what a great job our military has done in bringing stability and in rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure!)

     *He said that he would use public finances for his campaign.  Now he plans to use private donations.

     *I’m not sure if he ever expressed an opinion on faith-based charity funding, but his fellow Democrats certainly have.  He plans to expand President Bush’s funding program for religious groups.  That’s a change all right!

     *I can’t really get a handle on his positions on NAFTA or on government wiretapping, but it seems to me that he has flip-flopped on those issues, too.

     So tell me, Democrats, did you think that when he promised change, he meant a change in his platform?  And did you think he would change into such a pro-Bush kind of guy?

SEE ALSO:

 ”Is His Campaign Dishonest or DIsorganized?” by Jonathan Last

“Flip-Flopping Through the Campaign” by Patrick Casey      

“In Campaign, One Man’s Pragmatism Is Another Man’s Flip-Flopping” by Jonathan Weisman

     I am sure that everyone who is reading this believes that there should be equal opportunity in hiring people for jobs.  I certainly believe that.  The question then becomes, whether such equality should be achieved naturally or artificially.

     By naturally I mean persuading people to voluntarily hire people without regard to their race, sex, or other consideration that would be irrelevant to the job.  By artificially, I mean forcing people by law to hire employees without discrimination, regardless of the willingness or unwillingness to do so.

  The main drawback to allowing employers to hire and fire as they please is that many of them will unfairly discriminate.  I would like to think that in 2008, all employers will hire people according to their qualifications only and will fire people only for good reasons.  I’m not that naive.  Nevertheless, I think there are ways to give employers freedom of choice but also fight discrimination, which I will outline further down.

     The main drawback to forcing employers to hire according to some kind of anti-discrimination policy is that it takes away their right to run their business in any way they please.  Such an approach can also harm businesses, because it can force employers to hire some people that are not as qualified as they should be or prevent employers from firing unproductive employees.  It can also lead to reverse discrimination, as qualified white men are passed over for jobs because the company needs more women and racial minorities on the payroll.

     I would like to remind my liberal friends how they always favor choice when it comes to abortion or same-sex marriage.  Following their usual logic, they should support the right of employers to hire and fire whomever they want for whatever reasons they want.  Why should women be allowed to choose whether or not to kill an unborn baby, but the head of an engineering firm is not allowed to choose his employees as he sees fit?  Talk about messed-up thinking!

     There are several ways to deal with equal opportunity in hiring besides forcing people to implement affirmative action.

1.  You can promote the idea of non-discrimination through the media. 

2.  You can publicly shame companies that hire and fire unfairly.

3.  You can boycott companies that unfairly discriminate.

4.  You can start your own company and hire as many women and ethnic minorities as you want, thereby providing opportunities and setting a good example.

5.  You can encourage women and ethnic minorities to get better grades and work harder than their white, male counterparts, thus making them more attractive to potential employers.

There are several reasons that I listen to black conservatives.

BALANCE

     I would not want to listen exclusively to Jesse Jackson, Maxine Waters, Al Sharpton, or Jeremiah Wright.  While they have important things to say, they have very slanted views.  I would like to hear from Thomas Sowell, Ken Hamblin, LaShawn Barber and Walter E. Williams to get a view from the other end of the political spectrum.  For a long time, the media fed us only the views of liberal blacks, but thankfully the new media have provided platforms for conservative blacks to be heard. Keep reading →

Happy Birthday, United States of America!

     Apparently I was wrong yesterday when I wrote that Barack Obama’s plan to give even more grants to faith-based groups would not require them to obey anti-discrimination laws in hiring.  I wrote it based on the news reports I read, which either said nothing about the matter or indicated that Obama would not impose that requirement.

     After making the speech, Obama said this:

 If a church or a synagogue wants to hire using its own money for its own membership, they can obviously hire people of their own faith. That makes perfect sense. If they are getting federal money to run programs that are providing services to the public, then both in the provision of those services and in the hiring they have to abide by anti-discrimination laws.

     So, there you have it in his own words.  If some church, synagogue, mosque, or temple takes any of the promised money, they will then be forced to hire people who do not share the beliefs or practices of the religion.  They will also be forced to hire people whose lifestyles and behaviors they do not approve of.

     Obama’s plan is wrong on two counts.

     1.  It is wrong to spend public money on any charitable programs, whether those programs are religious or secular.  I don’t approve of President Bush’s use of our money in that way, and I wouldn’t approve of Barack Obama’s doing so if he were to become president.

     2.  The government has no business telling religious groups whom they must hire and how and why they can fire somebody.  If the money isn’t given freely, with no strings attached, then it is just a way for the government to control religion, which is precisely what the First Amendment says they are not supposed to do.  A church would be very foolish indeed to take such money.

     I wonder if Obama’s worshipful followers ever thought that he would out-Bush the President.  How must they feel now!

     What makes America such a great nation?  Is it that Americans are smarter or stronger than other people?  No.  I believe that America strength lies in the principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence.

     Yes, it is principles that have made the United States of America great, and if we ever fully abandon those principles, then we will no longer be great.  I pray to God that we return to them, for gradually we have been abandoning those founding principles.

     One of those principles is that certain truths are self-evident.  Currently in America the very idea that there are truths, let alone self-evident ones, is considered quaint by some people.  The fashion now, among our intellectuals, is to take truth statements as merely the opinion of the person making the statements.  Worse yet, some people chalk truth statements up to “perception,” thereby saying, essentially, that they are not true at all.  But we had better get back to self-evident truths, or else full equality will never be realized and people’s rights will no longer be protected–even to the extent that they are now.  The fact that people are equal and have unalienable rights  was considered by Jefferson and the other wise men of the Continental Congress a self-evident truth.

     According to the Declaration of Independence human beings are inherently and intrinsically equal.  It was an ideal that was not realized for a long time.  Some say it still has not been realized.  However, we would not even have the measure of equality that we have now in the United States had our Founding Fathers not codified human equality into the Declaration of Independence as one of the self-evident truths.  Women and racial minorities have based their just fights for equality on this principle in the Declaration.  Otherwise, they sould simply be demanding rights solely on the basis that they want them, and that would have been no reason, in and of itself, for them to have them.  (Nor would white men have any basis for their rights.)

     Another principle that makes America strong is our belief in God.  The Founding Fathers said that people “are endowed by their Creator” with rights.  They did not say that people have those rights just because they say so; we have rights because God gave them to us.  No person and no government should deny or abridge those rights, because to do so is to defy God Himself.  You are free not to believe in God, but once you do, I wonder what you will base the existence of human rights on.  The men who signed the Declaration believed in “Nature’s God,” the “Creator,” and the “Supreme Judge.”  We would be wise to follow them.

     I could go on, but I will end with a mention of one other principle, which is the self-evident truth that human rights come before governmental authority.  Our Founders said that the purpose of government is to secure our rights.  So often these days, governmental bodies act as though it is they who gave us our rights and they who determine the extent of those rights.  It is the other way around, according to the Declaration; humans naturally have rights, and the government, that is the folks in charge, have only the powers that we yield to them–and only to the extent that we allow.  The exact wording:  “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, . . .”

     So there you have it.  First comes God, then human equality, then human rights, then government by consent of the governed.  What do you say we return to that order and to those great principles that have made the United States the envy of he world and the newfound homeland of many an oppressed person?