The Illinois State Constitution

The Illinois State Constitution contains the following lines:

1)      Membership in any pension or retirement system of the State, any unit of local government or school district, or any agency or instrumentality thereof, shall be an enforceable contractual relationship, the benefits of which shall not be diminished or impaired.

2)      A tax on or measured by income shall be at a non-graduated rate.

My question is: why is one considered a promise that cannot be altered and the other not?  State pensions are bankrupting the state, Chicago, and who knows how many other communities, but politicians refuse to address this, because they call it a promise. 

Does a promise mean that nobody can say, “Hey, we made a mistake”?  Or, circumstances have changed.  We are now broke.  We cannot afford this.  I’m sorry.

But the same wording is used to say that an income tax shall be at a non-graduated rate. 

Isn’t that a promise too? 

But the state wants to change one but not the other.  I’m sorry, but that is wrong.

The Constitution also says that:

3)       The State has the primary responsibility for financing the system of public education.

Two thirds of public education funding is done at the local level through property taxes.  The state is clearly acting in defiance to the state Constitution.  Who holds the state accountable for this?  The state could easily raise the income tax to pay for schools and reduce property taxes all across the state.  That would have no problem passing, because it would reduce housing costs substantially.

4)      Appropriations for a fiscal year shall not exceed funds estimated by the General Assembly to be available during that year.

Our state routinely spends far more than it takes in in revenue.  Nobody is surprised by this.  They pass the budgets knowing full well that they will have to borrow money to pay for everything. 

Does nobody pay attention to the State Constitution?

5)      The State militia consists of all able-bodied persons residing in the State except those exempted by law.

Our country fought its first war against its own government.  Many of the Founders were concerned that this new national government might at some point try to limit or infringe on the people’s unalienable rights.  In the Federalist Papers which were written to encourage the passage of the new Constitution, they talk about states being able to resist the power of this national government through their militias. 

A semi-automatic gun is modern engineering applied to guns, like an automatic transmission on a car.  Gun violence is a lot more than a gun problem, which is beyond the scope of this letter.  To prohibit semi-automatic guns is essentially rejecting the whole concept of a militia. 

My last question is: who can and will confront the state and hold it accountable for not following the Constitution it is based on?

curbing gun violence

The Sun-Times (Americans want new laws to curb gun violence, August 21) is dismayed that Congress hasn’t passed more laws to curb gun violence.

CURB gun violence?

Houston, we have a problem!   And nobody’s getting it.

We used to go to Sears and buy guns like we were buying a new screwdriver.  We used to have gun clubs in high schools. 

It’s not the easy accessibility to guns that is the problem.  It’s the people that are the problem

.

We have lost our collective moral foundation.  We used to believe in and teach our kids: Thou shalt not kill, Love your neighbor as yourself, Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.  But that was deemed religious and unsuitable in public conversation.

The best we can teach our kids today is tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity.

I’m sorry, but that won’t work.  It doesn’t work.  It won’t stop the violence. 

When we were a religious nation, we could live with a couple hundred million guns, and we felt safe.  Now we don’t feel safe anywhere anymore.

The Statue of Liberty and Trump

There is a lot of talk today about the Statue of Liberty and its inscription about tired, poor, and huddled masses and recent talk and policy changes from the Trump administration.

A little context is needed here.

Our country has changed a bit since that statue was erected but not in the way you’re thinking.

Our country was built on freedom, the freedom of the people here to pursue their dreams.  Our government existed to protect those freedoms.  And people came to live here for the same reason.

In the 1800s, when the Statue of Liberty was erected with its famous poem about the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, there was no TANF, SNAP, CHIP, EITC, or HA.  There was, however, a myriad of voluntary usually church-supported charitable organizations to help people in need.

But the role of our government has changed.  Instead of existing to protect our freedoms, it now exists to take care of people.  This comes at an enormous expense to the public, and it certainly attracts far more people to our country than who would have come here otherwise.  And, frankly, we no longer know or care who is coming here to live free or who is coming here to be taken care of. 

Our country is over $22 trillion in debt, and that’s just at the federal level.  This is not a situation that can end well. 

The President thinks we don’t have enough money to take care of everybody who wants to come here and who also needs to be taken care of.  We are adding 2 -3 million new immigrants a year, legal, refugees, or otherwise.

gun laws and gun violence

The Sun-Times is demanding more laws to curb gun violence.

Isn’t there already a law against that?

Oh, you mean laws against guns.

We have laws against the possession of all kinds of drugs.  How is that working out?

You’re looking for band-aid solutions and not trying to solve the real problem. 

If there’s an epidemic of headaches, you don’t subsidize Tylenol tablets and require everybody to take two in the morning.  Something is going on that you need to find out what it is.

If the problem is hate, you can’t fix that with new laws.  If the problem is just too darn many guns floating around, you need to find out why that is.  This didn’t just happen a few years ago because of some legal loophole.

Guns have always been an essential part of the American identity.  We have always had a lot of guns.

Why?

Because we fought a war against our own government to protect our liberty, and they figured we might have to do it again.

If we’re turning against our own people now, then we need to take a good long hard look at what has happened to our society.  A few feel-good gun law changes won’t fix the problem.  

Why we have the Second Amendment

Read the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers.

Our country had just fought a war against its own government.  The Founders thought we might need to do that again. 

Governments exist to protect the unalienable rights that God gave to the people.  When they don’t, the people have the right to change the government.

The Founders figured that any state would be able to amass far more troops than any national army would have.  The people were already “armed”, unlike the people in Europe who were unarmed and ruled by kings and tyrants.

But what about all the gun violence today?

The Founders knew that our rights come from God, and that people had a corresponding responsibility to God.  Our nation has rejected God, and secularism knows no corresponding responsibility toward God.  Secularism cannot restrain hatred and evil.  That requires the fear of God.

The Immigration Myth

Anyone who talks about immigration is required to begin by saying something like: Both my wife’s and my grandparents were immigrants, and my wife’s grandfather had the proverbial $5 in his pocket when he came here.  He went on to start a business and built several apartment buildings.

There are almost 7.5 billion people in the world who do not live in the United States.  That means that there are over 7 billion possible immigrants to the United States. 

According to modern immigration thinking, every single one of them would make a positive contribution to our country, simply by virtue of not living here already. 

Our modern immigration system is like a job fair where there are no job interviews or resumes.  Everybody who can make it here is accepted.  We have no requirements; we make no demands. 

The words on the Statue of Liberty are often quoted when discussing immigration:

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Do you know what’s missing here?  It doesn’t say what happens to them when they get here.  It doesn’t say that we will take care of you.  You have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  You have the freedom to pursue your dreams, and our government will not stand in your way.

The United States has always been a compassionate country, but it’s the people who are compassionate.  Government cannot be compassionate, because it is not spending its own money.  It is spending other people’s money.

The fact is that the rule about immigrants being self-sufficient has been around at least 100 years.  Our government has just been loosening the definition of self-sufficiency over the years.  We are essentially paying people to come here.  Would they still come here if we weren’t so generous with our government benefits?

speeding up baseball games

 I have seen a lot of articles lately about speeding up baseball games, the most recent was a letter to the Tribune (Limit foul balls to cut time, August 10).

The only rule change I think that that has merit is a clock for batters and pitchers.  It shouldn’t rush them, but there are some players who definitely take way too long.

But nobody seems to be asking how much time is being set aside for commercials.  Baseball keeps statistics on everything.  Surely, they know.  

Commercials are killing baseball as much as anything.  Some will argue that you need more commercials to pay these exorbitant salaries.  Well, exorbitant is right.  If commercials were limited, maybe it could curb salaries a bit.  And maybe that might even curb ticket prices a little.  And then maybe more average people could go to baseball games again.

guns and the Constitution

A reader (August 11) wondered if the right to bear arms is reconcilable with the Constitution’s directive to our government that it exists “to insure domestic tranquility” and “to promote the general welfare.”

The Tribune printed the letter, so I’m guessing he wasn’t the only one who’s wondering the same thing.

The same people who ratified the one ratified the other.  The Second Amendment is part of the Bill of Rights which a lot of the people who ratified the Constitution wanted included, because they were afraid that the new national government might try to limit their unalienable rights, and the right to bear and carry arms was no. 2.  So that was very near and dear to their hearts.

The difference between then and now is that they were not hesitant about their belief in God and the importance of God’s laws for the moral foundation of our country: the Ten Commandments, Love our neighbor as yourself, and Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

Guns were always a big part of our country, and gun violence only became a problem when our country decided to become a secular country, and all things religious were considered unimportant, irrelevant, and shunted off the public square.

stopping mass shootings

A NU researcher has studied mass shootings in our country, and she has a lot of answers for all of us (NU researcher urges fighting hate speech: ‘killing follows’, August 11).

Now I’m against mass shootings as much as anyone.  I’m just not sure about the solutions that people are offering to stop them. 

Like many people who are trying to provide answers, she strongly recommends banning semi-automatic weapons.  She, like so many others, calls them military-style weapons.  That’s not really accurate.  Making a gun semi-automatic is just a simple improvement in engineering, like an automatic transmission in your car.  Calling them a military-style weapon is just using language to frame the argument. 

Certainly, restricting access to different things, like guns, knives, baseball bats, explosives, trucks, will reduce the incidence of people using those things to commit crimes, but it won’t reduce the hate that drives the crimes.  Resourceful people will find alternatives to act out their hatred.

She also recommends preventing people from having large capacity magazines for their guns.  I heard that it took the police 57 rounds to stop the killer in Dayton, Ohio.  And those were trained law enforcement agents.  It would be morally indefensible to limit people in this way in protecting their homes, property, family, or, in many cases, other people.

She’s worried too that we must stop all hate speech, because that spurs people to violence.  But violence comes from hate.  Did the hate speech cause the hate or just precede the act of hate?  Hate speech would not find an audience unless people had already felt the same hate.  And what prompted that hate in the first place could later prompt it into an outward act.

People are either forgetting or never learned that our country has always been a nation of guns.  The Founding Fathers applauded that, because they saw that as essential to preserving our liberty. 

Mass shootings have only become a problem since our nation removed the moral code that had undergirded our country since its founding: the Judeo-Christian ethics of the Ten Commandments and the Love your neighbor as yourself, and the fact that there is a God in heaven to whom we will all have to give account after we die.

racism and immigration

OK, let’s say for the sake of argument that all white people are racist.  Inherently, subconsciously, blatantly, in whatever form, let’s say that all white people don’t like minorities.  I’ve certainly read enough to know that there are a lot of academics, politicians, and very vocal public people who believe this.  They say that America is a racist nation and always has been.

If this is true, or even if there is a good possibility it is true, or even if there is just the perception that it is true, then I would contend that the government has no business or right to bring 2 to 3 million more minorities into our country every year.  That would only increase the division and turmoil that already exists in our country.  And this has been going on for more than 50 years.

Since 1965, our immigration policy has favored minority immigrants almost to the exclusion of white immigrants.  This was changed partially or maybe even entirely as a response to the Civil Rights Movement, which was certainly a very contentious time in our nation’s history.

The opening lines of the United State Constitution, you know, the document that tells us how our country is supposed to function, says that “We the people in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility,. . . , promote the general welfare, . . . do ordain and establish this Constitution to the United States of America.”

Establishing justice could apply to the civil rights laws that had just been passed, but I see the government doing nothing to form a more perfect union, ensure domestic tranquility, or promoting the general welfare.  On the contrary, I would say that it is hellbent on promoting division, strife, and turmoil.  It is putting the welfare of foreign citizens over the welfare of its own.

I am by no means trying to justify or condone racism.  I am just saying that the government has no right to force things on the American people that can promote division, strife, or turmoil, and if our country is racist, then the government is wrong to keep pushing diversity.  It should stop all immigration then until our country as a whole can agree on a policy that it can fully support.

solving the problems of the black community in Chicago

I like Father Pfleger.  (How to encourage more Chicagoans to work with police to solve murders, August 8).  I also have a lot of respect for him.  He sees his responsibility as not only speaking to the people who come to his church on Sundays but speaking to the whole society at large as well.

Having said that, I must say that I was greatly disappointed in his recent article about helping the police to solve murders.  His article covered a lot more ground than simply public relations with the police.  He also went into what he saw as all the underlying problems in the black community that contribute to the current violence so rampant there.  And this is where he, and so many others, is missing something, and a big something at that.

His list of problems in the black community was long.  And serious.  But,  he missed something.

Everything was somebody else’s fault.  Everything depended on other people spending money on programs, businesses, and monetary assistance for people in these communities.  Everything involved waiting for someone else to ride in and rescue them.

 

I won’t deny that the city and some of those other people can and should do more where they can to improve the lives of the people in this community, but Pfleger said nothing about what the people themselves can do to end this seemingly endless cycle of violence.  I won’t offer any suggestions here, because I am an outsider.   But the first step in solving any problem is figuring out what I can do before thinking about what other people can do.

white supremacy

This was written in response to an article in HuffPost about white supremacy.

The article equates white supremacy with white nationalism.  They’re not the same.  White supremacy says that white people are superior to other people. 

A white nationalist, and I admit there are probably varieties out there, says that when the United States was mostly white (90% when I was a kid), we did pretty good.  We were the richest nation in the world, we felt safe, and we had the best schools in the world.

Since 1965, our immigration system has focused almost entirely on bringing minorities into our country, about 2 million a year and that’s just those who came legally.  Now we are over 40% minority.

We are also now $22 trillion in debt, just at the federal level, we don’t feel safe, and our schools are average or mediocre on the world stage.

White people in general don’t hate blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims.  They do reject the government’s attempts to make this a black, Hispanic, Muslim country.

Mark Steyn is quoted very briefly.  I’ve read some of his books.  I would really like to see his quotes in context.  But he raises a good point.

If you read the Preamble to the Constitution, it says that our government exists to form a more perfect union and to insure domestic tranquility for We, the people.  Our government exists for the sake of the citizens of the United States.  It is to seek and promote their welfare first.  Just like you take care of your family before all the other kids on the block.  It doesn’t mean that you hate all the other kids, but your first responsibility is to your own family.  You wouldn’t give your kids’ college fund to provide housing for the homeless.  Is that bad?  Our government is more concerned about citizens of other countries than the citizens of its own.  That is wrong.

Lastly, your article quotes the SPLC as an authority on hate groups in our country.  I have read of a number of organizations that are definitely not hate groups that the SPLC thinks are.  It also says that there are 148 documented hate groups devoted to white supremacism, an increase of 50% since 2014.  Maybe each group has three members.  The left likes to charge people and groups with hate in an effort to stop them from talking.  It’s hard to defend yourself when the media generally takes the side of the accuser. 

Guess what?  In a free country, people are free to hate.  The only antidote to hate that I know of is Christianity that gives people a command and a reason to love other people.  Our country has officially turned its back on religion and declared itself a secular country, but secularism has no answer for hate or evil.  It can only make more laws and hire more police.

finding an answer to mass shootings

In the wake of two mass shootings, politicians and the public are scrambling for answers.   I’m not sure they will be looking in the right places.

In many parts of the world, the weapon of choice for mass violence is explosives.  Japan and China have had a number of incidents of mass stabbings, while London had to crack down on knives, because so many were being used to kill people.  And let’s not forget the 80-some people who were mowed down by a truck in France. 

It wasn’t the wide availability of explosives, knives, and trucks that made all these atrocities happen.  It was evil from the human heart. 

Guns have always been a major part of the American way, but so were the Ten Commandments, with its Thou shalt not kill.  We also had Love your neighbor as yourself, and Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.  All of these were from the Bible, the same Bible that informed our Founders that God gave people unalienable rights, the founding principle of our country.

A secular society has no answer for evil and hatred, except laws that restrict everybody’s behavior, the addition of thousands of law enforcement officers, and billions of dollars on government agencies devoted to protect us from each other. 

thoughts on God and religion

I wrote this in response to a Facebook post.  I could just delete it, but I thought maybe somebody else might find it useful.

If you went to Mars and found a computer lying on the ground, you would conclude immediately that somebody had been there.  You would not conclude that random forces over billions of years put it together.  The human body is thousands of times more complex than a computer.  You can’t explain life without an intelligent being doing it.

The next question is whether this God has a relationship with what He created.  Has He tried to communicate with human beings?  I assert that if He had, by this time, it would have to be one of the major religions in the world today.  They are all mutually contradictory so they all could not be true.

Confucianism and Buddhism aren’t really concerned with God, don’t claim to be, and are essentially only confined in a small part of the planet.  Islam is new on the scene, relatively speaking, and has grown almost entirely through the use of violence.   

That leaves Christianity and Judaism, with Christianity claiming to be Judaism 2.0.  The one claims to fulfill the other.  Is that true?  Judaism is a religion based on a priesthood and animal sacrifices.  All that ended in 70 A.D.  There is no historical, logical, empirical, or theological reason to think that God’s program, system, or way of communicating to human beings changed into what exists today.  And, besides, there is no interest among Jews to carry their message to the rest of the world.

Then there is Christianity, which is the most widespread religion in the world, where people have sacrificed everything to take the message of God’s love for people to every end of the earth.  The Bible is the most widespread book in history and has been translated into every major language and maybe about 4,000 of the not-so-major ones.

in the wake of two mass shootings

Every so often, and now would be a good time, we as a nation need to look again at our founding principles.  Right now, many people in our country are experiencing grief, anger, and/or confusion in light of these two recent mass shootings.

In our pain, anger, and confusion, we want answers and solutions, and we want them now.  And politicians may do something, and we hope they did the right thing, enough, to prevent the next one. 

Now the big push is for universal background checks, but nobody has figured out yet if that would have made any difference in these two shootings.  Would these two shooters have passed a background check, and were their guns recent purchases that a time delay might have cooled heated emotions?

The fact is that guns have always been a big part of what America is.  The Second Amendment is a part of the Bill of Rights, rights that our Founders believed to be unalienable and given by God.  Guns were also a big part on why we are a free nation.  We were an “armed” people, unlike those in Europe who were unarmed and ruled by kings and tyrants. (Federalist Papers no. 51)

But with freedom comes great responsibility.  John Adams, our second President, said that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” 

The court called supreme was wrong to remove God from the public square and public schools, it was wrong to say that our government must be neutral toward religion, and it was wrong to remove the Ten Commandments from public life. 

We used to teach our kids to love your neighbor as yourself, and do unto others as you would have others do unto you.  It takes religion to love your neighbors, because that tells you that this other person is created in the image of God.  And it takes religion to stop people from killing people, because religion makes people aware that they will give account of their lives to their Creator when they leave this one.

If after almost 250 years of being a nation, guns are now a problem, we have to look at what has changed in our country.  And the answer is not; semi-automatic.