transgenderism and public policy

I am saddened by the death of any person under tragic circumstances, and being trans is certainly one of those instances.  (Chicago LGBTQ activists decry ‘genocide on trans identity’), April 28

As much as we might mourn the death of those in our community, we must not see and look for enemies anyone who sees problems with certain trans public policies.

It is not genocide or even transphobic to want to bar children from having body altering surgeries and procedures, because they somehow identify with the other sex.  Children haven’t even thought yet about whether they will want to marry and have children, and we should let them mature first and do nothing to interfere with their natural growth and development.

One of the indicators of maturity is to learn to accept the things we cannot change and the wisdom to know the difference.  We don’t help children when we suggest to them or encourage them that they can change the sex they were born with.

And it is not genocide or even transphobic to say that men and boys should not compete with women and girls in gender-differentiated sports.  That’s why they have separate sports to begin with.  That was decided long before anyone was even talking about transgenderism, so these prohibitions have nothing to do with transphobia or hatred.  People are trying to conflate gender with sex, and frankly, it doesn’t work. 

I am sure most people don’t really care what trans people want to do or how they live their lives, but when our children are being encouraged to change genders or when our girls are competing against boys, well, you can expect some pushback.  It’s not personal.  Just leave our kids and girls alone.

cleaning the air

The Sun-Times had two major articles about pollution in Chicago, but no mention was made anywhere about planting thousands of trees.  (Clearing the air, Chicago air pollution among the worst in U.S., new report finds, April 23)

Trees are nature’s way of cleaning the environment. 

Our political leaders want to reinvent our entire energy system in ten years, fill all our open land with windmills, have everybody buy really expensive new cars, drive most people into debt, poverty, or government dependence, and essentially destroy the middle class with enormous energy, transportation, and taxes. 

When nobody talks about a major effort to plant trees, then I seriously question the sincerity, integrity, honesty, knowledge, and wisdom of our political leaders.

 

The high cost of trying to keep people from killing each other

The Sun-Times was finally able to announce the answer to the gun and overall violence problem in Chicago.  (Anti-violence meets science, The cost of cutting crime in Chicago, April 22)

Science and experts agree here, so we need look no further for solutions to the growing violence. 

The answer? 

In a nutshell, spend a lot of money. 

Not randomly, of course, but if we only spend enough money, we could have this under control, and the world would be a happier place. 

In fact, and I know this goes beyond the scope of those two articles, we can solve all of our societal problems by spending more money. 

We need now to pass our findings along to Congress, so that they can allocate the necessary funds here to finally eradicate or significantly reduce violence in our city.

This is why our country is in so much debt.  We are determined, as a government, to solve every problem, meet every need, and that all involves spending more money. 

I would like to suggest here that our Founders were familiar with this problem and would have taken a different path to solving it.

John Adams, our second President, said: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion.  Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.  Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

True freedom requires a small government.  A small government requires a people who want to do what is right and who love their neighbors.  And, frankly, that requires religion.

Anybody who wants to hurt, shoot, or kill people has no fear of God, no fear of being accountable for their actions.  And they have no love for other people. 

We used to talk about God and the Bible in our public schools and our public life.  We were better off as a society and a nation when we did.  None of our society’s problems today are new problems, unknown to previous generations, but violence and crime were rarely a problem then.

 

 

 

Ghost Guns

Ghost guns have been in the news lately.  Those are guns that you order the parts on the internet and assemble by yourself at home.  (What the right doesn’t get about ‘ghost guns’, April 20)

They don’t have serial numbers.  That concerns a lot of people.  When law enforcement recovers a gun from a crime scene, they are ablet to trace the gun to the current or previous owner.  Which is a good thing.

I don’t own any guns.  Or do I?

I have always said that if I owned guns, I wouldn’t register all of them.  Because when the government knows who has guns and what kind, it’s only a small step to where they can come looking for them and taking them.  All in the name of public safety, or something like that.

Contrary to many politicians today, the primary use of guns as our Founders saw it was not hunting or collecting, but self-defense, and not from criminals but government. 

We can see an example of this in Ukraine.  If the war was simply between the army of Russia and the army of Ukraine, Russia certainly has an advantage.  But if the war is between the army of Russia and the people of Ukraine, then the Russian army is vastly outnumbered, and its chances of success are highly diminished. 

Our Founders noted that the tyrannical governments of Europe only existed, because their people were unarmed.  (Federalist no. 46)

The Tribune article asserted that “there’s no need to have a ghost gun unless you’re planning to commit a crime.”  I disagree.

I think our political leaders are focused too much on guns and not enough on why people commit crimes or want to shoot people in the first place.  It’s not the presence of guns that inspires killing people but hatred, envy, greed, revenge, and little fear of punishment either in this life or the next. 

This is the real problem.  We no longer teach our children to love our neighbors or that there is a God to answer to for their lives.  And it certainly doesn’t help that our criminal justice system is trying too hard to minimize the evil of crime as well.

I’m sorry, but our country has bigger problems than having too many guns and now guns that don’t have numbers on them.

 

giving poor people money

Must be something in the water, but both Chicago newspapers today had articles touting the benefits of our government just giving people money.  One called it the best way to help the needy permanently, and the other said it would humanize government and revitalize our economy.  (April 18)

The first thing that must be said is that when our federal government is $30 trillion in debt, and most governments at the city and state level are drowning in debt, how does anyone see that it’s a great thing to just keep borrowing and printing money?

Doesn’t anybody know that when you borrow money with no intention of actually paying it back but just paying interest on the debt forever, you’re just wasting enormous amounts of money which actually could have been spent on things.  So it keeps pressure to keep raising taxes.  Incomes get squeezed, which puts pressure on increasing wages, which raises prices, and all those who got the free money find that it didn’t go as far as it used to.

You want to help poor people?  Make it easier to start a business, run a business, easier for businesses to hire more people and pay more wages.  Like that saying, give a man a fish you feed him for a day, teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Just giving people money solves nothing.  It just creates more people either unwilling or unable to take care of themselves.  And it takes money from other people so that their work becomes less rewarding, and so we disincentivize that too.

It’s like parents who let their kids live at home far into adulthood.  They may mean well, but they are not helping their kids.  They are hurting them.  And this is what mother government wants to do here. 

Stop growing government, stop spending enormous amounts of money, let people keep more of their own money, make it easier to start businesses and keep them open. 

I know people have good intentions here and think they are helping people, but in the long run it will only make things worse.  More people not working, higher taxes on those who are, and less incentive to work.  And a people no longer independent but living off the labors of others. 

That is no way to run a country.

religion and government

I appreciated a reader’s comments about America returning to its roots.  (Returning America to its roots, April 16)

I strongly agree with his sentiments, but I think we need to remember or learn how we got away from our roots.  In the early 60s, the court called supreme ruled that prayer and the Bible had no place in our public schools.  The government of the United States had to be neutral with regard to religion, and our country could not favor one religion over another.  Thus making all religions equal.  And equally irrelevant in society. 

In order to not favor one, it became necessary to ignore them all. 

All religions claim to be true, true descriptions of life and reality, bearers of all the answers to the questions of life.  By declaring them off-limits to our public life, religion was relegated to the place of personal opinion, like your taste in music, movies, and food. 

The problem is that our country was founded on the fact, not the belief, but the fact that God gave unalienable rights to human beings.  The belief that God had done so is not a belief common to all religions.  But by relegating religion, all religions, to the realm of personal opinion, we can no longer teach our children in public schools where our rights come from. 

So people today think our rights come from the Constitution and our government.  And, of course, the Constitution can be changed.

But with God no longer in the picture in public life, that leaves an enormous gap in the public consciousness, a void that the government then responds by filling.  The government now assumes the responsibility to take of people, to solve every problem, meet every need.  People used to rely on God, but with God removed from the public consciousness, government must fill that hole. 

If government is responsible for the outcomes of its citizens, then we need a large, strong government run by experts to tell us what to do and what to think. 

 

ranked choice voting - why it's good and what to watch for

Mona Charen didn’t make the best case for ranked-choice voting (RCV) by focusing on extremists.  (Ranked-choice voting would help neutralize extremists, April 15)

In our current two-party election system, most elections only give us two major choices, so the winner will get more than 50% of the vote.  If you think they are extreme, fine, but most people still wanted them over the alternative.

There are other, better reasons to use ranked choice voting.

First of all, it finally breaks the two-party system on elections.  I remember when we had Hillary and Trump in the Presidential election, and I thought, 300 million people in our country and only two choices for President?

When there are more than two candidates in a race, our current system allows a winner to get less than 50% of the vote, which is both stupid and wrong.  People often don’t vote for who they really want, because that third candidate usually splits the vote of one party and essentially gives the election to the other party.

With ranked choice voting, you can vote for who you really want without worrying about that helping the other side.

But even more important than that, ranked choice voting finally ensures that whoever does win, they will have more than 50% of the vote.  They will often have far more than that.  It’s the only way to ensure that the person with the most support wins. 

An alternative to RCV is to have runoffs, but not only is that far more expensive, it becomes less useful the more candidates there are in the race.  The last mayoral race in Chicago had a runoff with two candidates who each got less than 20% of the vote in the primary.  That means that more than 4 out of 5 people didn’t vote for them the first time around.  That’s not right.  RCV would fix that. 

I do offer two caveats for RCV. 

With the use of computers, results should be known the night of the election.  I hear that in some cases, it took a lot longer to determine the winner.  That’s where we need to be careful and watchful.  Too many opportunities for mistakes and mischief.

My second caveat is that in complicated elections, like with a lot of candidates, all results should be double checked by hand.  Computers can be programmed.  Hand recounts are costly and time-consuming, but the benefits of RCV are well worth it.

Are open primaries a good idea?

The Tribune hosted a major opinion piece contending that open primaries will cure what most ails the state of Illinois.  (To remake Illinois politics for the better, we need open primaries, April 14)

His biggest issue seems to be that “in election after election, as many as half of Illinois House members have run unopposed,” and “uncontested and lightly contested elections tend to skew policy in favor of powerful special interest groups at the expense of everyone else.”

He believes that having open primaries will solve this problem by allowing “independent-minded candidates to run for office,” and voters will get to “choose the best candidate for the job.”

But what stops that from happening now?  The independent-minded candidates can run for office now.  If races are uncontested or lightly contested, it’s because Republicans aren’t even fielding candidates.  The field is wide open for anybody to run now.

The question is why they don’t.

I will give you three reasons why independent-minded candidates aren’t running for office in Illinois.

1)      The districts are gerrymandered to favor the Democratic candidate.  I tried to help the Republican candidate for Congress last time around, and I noticed that the district was shaped like two fists joined together by the thumbs.  The legislators picked their voters very carefully.

2)      The second reason is that they don’t trust the voting system in Illinois.  Last time around, there were some very close contested races that took days to determine, and voila, the Democrat won.  Was there any doubt? 

3)      When there are more than two candidates running for the same office, a person doesn’t need a majority of the votes to win, so in a three-way race, a person only needs to get as little as 34% of the vote.  That’s both dumb and wrong.

Open primaries won’t give the voters the best choices, because candidates don’t declare their parties then.  Now, more than at any time in our nation’s history, party affiliation will tell you more about that candidate than all their political speeches combined.  Party affiliation in general will tell you more about their priorities, their view of the role of government and their position on many of the major issues.

And the writer concludes his piece by advocating for non-partisan election maps.  Whatever that means.  As long as map-drawers have access to voting records and patterns when drawing maps, they will always create contorted maps to achieve their own political goals.  Is a non-partisan goal creating districts that are all divided 50-50, ensuring that half the district will never like their representative?  I contend that the only way to draws maps fairly is to draw them blindly.  The only information a person should have when drawing a map is where the people live.

the plight of the undocumented elderly

I fully sympathize with undocumented people who were hoping that they would one day become citizens.  (Undocumented elderly face meager protections, April 10)  They came here looking for a better life.  They want to be able to think that they can keep it.  The front-page Tribune article put a face on people we rarely think about.

So let’s think about them, and the whole big mess that is involved here.

Probably the biggest single reason why Congress fails to provide a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants is that the government refuses to secure the border.  A pathway to citizenship will only multiply the number of people who now enter the country illegally. 

Yes, human compassion dictates that we must help as many people as possible, but a country still needs to know who is coming into it and have the right of refusal. 

A country’s first responsibility is to the citizens of its own country and not the citizens of other countries.  Just like families take care of their own kids before the other kids on the block.  It doesn’t mean that they hate the other kids or will do nothing for them.  But no parent will take from the welfare of their own children and give it to others.  But many parents are willing, eager, and able to help far more people than just those of their own family.

Yes, we can assume that most of the people who come here illegally are hardworking, responsible people who just want a better life, but how many criminals either escaping the law in their old countries or those intent on committing crimes in their new one should we tolerate in the name of niceness?  Currently, we have no way of knowing who is coming into our country.  That is simply wrong.

Then too our country through its duly elected representatives has created a system of immigration laws.  But the media and many of our own elected leaders choose to ignore them.  And I don’t think that is wise.  That only breeds further resistance to and negligence of our laws. 

It is never good policy to suggest that we can choose which laws we should obey and which not. 

Yes, there have been bad laws.  But who is saying that our immigration laws are bad?  Yes, people are complaining that children brought here illegally by their parents have no path to citizenship, and I feel for them.  But should we encourage even more illegal immigration to remedy that?

Close the bleeping border.  Give every person who wants to live here a background check and medical exam, and Dreamers will soon get their dream.

 

 

 

Is Voter Suppression a Problem?

The Tribune thinks that there is an evil plot among Republicans to restrict the voting of minorities.  (A campaign is underway to suppress the right to vote.  It must be defeated, April 11)

Last time around, many states greatly eased election rules, because our nation was gripped with a life-threatening pandemic.  Now any reduction of those modified election rules is seen as suppression.  And suppression aimed at minority voters. 

So what exactly are they doing to suppress voting and particularly to restrict the votes of minorities?

1)      “barriers to voting by mail”   Until the pandemic, there was never felt to be a need for massive mail-in voting, particularly for minorities.  This was only deemed necessary, because people’s lives were in danger if they were to go a polling place.  And certainly the lives of non-minority people would be in the same danger.

 

So why is a restriction on mail-in voting particularly more severe for minorities?  They don’t like interacting with people?  They can’t fit voting in person into their lives, because they all work 2 jobs? 

Mail-in voting should only be used in rare situations, because it violates the very basic principles of a fair and safe election. 

a)       With mail-in voting, we don’t know who is voting.  When people vote in person, we do.  And we usually or should make sure we identify that person too.

b)      With mail-in voting, we don’t know if the person filled out the ballot without interference from other people.  When people vote in person, we know they voted in private, away from the eyes and words of others.

c)       With mail-in voting, we don’t know if the ballots entered into the machine are only the ballots that were mailed in.  When people vote in person, each person puts their own ballot, sight unseen, into the box.  With mail-in voting, stacks of ballots are put in at the same time, in full view of the polling judge, and there is no way to ensure that additional ballots weren’t added to the pile.

2)      “cumbersome voter ID requirements”  Why is a voter ID requirement cumbersome, and why does this disproportionately affect minorities? They don’t drive cars or have bank accounts?  They don’t cash checks?  Who doesn’t have or need an ID? 

3)      “shortened early voting”  How does this restrict anyone from voting, particularly minorities?  The big voting event is once every four years.  If it’s important to you, you make the time for it.  Simple.

4)      Then there were some vague references to “restrictions on what steps election officials can take to help foster voter access” and “harsh constraints on voter registration groups.”  But no details.  If people want to participate in an election once every 4 years that they need to sign up for ahead of time, they have four years to do that.  They shouldn’t need to have some organized group reach out to them.  Anybody who needs that probably doesn’t know enough about what’s going on to make a good choice anyway.

The editorial lauds anything that makes voting easier but shows no concerns about securing the integrity of the vote.  Is the Tribune concerned about whether non-citizens vote?  Making voting easier will make that easier too.  Is the Tribune concerned that additional ballots could be added to massive stacks of mail-in ballots?  Nah, they would only favor their candidate of choice anyway.

 

How to End Racism

Honestly, I am not sure if everybody who complains about racism really wants to end it.  I think a lot of these people want to complain about racism, because they want to reinvent America, and they need to keep focusing on her problems and failings. 

But for the rest of us, I will tell you how to do that.  (Racist dating video at Lincoln Park High sparks difficult discussions, April 10)

Stop the constant labeling of people by race and the constant identification of achievements by race.  This is the first Elbonian to serve in this position, and that gives hope to Elbonians everywhere that they too can one day serve in this position. 

The key to ending racism is to take race out of the public consciousness.  The constant labeling is essentially accentuating the differences between us.

This person is not simply an American, for example; they are an African-American.  You are telling me immediately that this person is different from me.  We are told that voting districts must be drawn in such a way that ensures that an African-American is elected to represent other African-Americans.

So these African-Americans must have unique needs that only another African-American can understand and represent.  A big part of racism as highlighted in the article is stereotypes.  But if each demographic needs representation in government by people of that same demographic, then you saying that they are significantly different from you.  You can’t understand them if you are not of that demographic.  Therefore, you cannot represent them in government.

When you label people by race or whatever, you are saying that these people have more in common with other people of that same type than with people who are not of that type.  And those commonalities and differences are what stereotypes are all about. 

The idea of America is that people who are different in every possible way can be one people, united by common beliefs.  This is unique in human history, and we should not be critical when people prefer to date, marry, or otherwise associate with people who are more like them. 

We have been told for years now that diversity is our strength.  Diversity also divides, because it focuses on our differences. 

We need to focus on what unites us, the founding principles of America, and stop focusing on our differences.  Then and only then will racism recede in our country.

why I would have voted no on the latest Supreme Court Justice

I am not a legal expert, nor did I watch the confirmation hearings of Ketanye Brown Jackson.  But I would not have voted for her either.  (47 senators who voted ‘nay,’ April 9)

I learned enough about her judicial thinking in her answer to one question, the question about what a woman is.

She declined to answer, saying that she is not a biologist. 

The question was not looking for a scientific answer.  Our laws were not written by scientists.  Words and terms like ‘woman’ in our laws are not meant to be defined by scientific definitions but by the common understanding of the word. 

Our society is going through a strange time right now where we have people who are transgender, whatever that means.  We have already changed the meaning of gender, where it is no longer synonymous with sex.  A man, a male, can now be female in gender, whatever that means.

We are morphing gender identity into gender and gender into sex.  So we are starting to call men women, because they say they are.  And because they have received surgeries and hormone treatments that give them certain traits of the opposite sex.

Judge Jackson will soon be asked to interpret laws that were written long before there were any thoughts that men and women can have any other meaning than what people have always thought them to be.

Jackson’s answer shows that she will be quite willing to apply laws that never had transgenderism in mind to whole new situations, and she will do so by resorting to legal sleight-of-hand to clearly circumvent the intent of the original laws to make them suitable for woke culture.

Transgenderism is a new phenomenon in our society.  Let the legislature figure out they want to do with it, and not let the Court twist current laws to match their ideologies.

diversity, inclusion

For years now, we have been told over and over that diversity is our strength.  I submit that that is not true.  I hope that was a mistake and not a lie, but I am not confident about that.

The Times printed a letter from a high school student pressing the need for students to spend, sorry, “invest more time to making sure the preferred identities of students are being heard and considering the interplay of race on societal and systemic scales,” whatever that means.  (Racist dating video shows schools need to talk more about diversity, inclusion, April 7)

The idea of America (e pluribus unum) was that we would no longer form a nation from one particular national, ethnic, linguistic identity but a nation from any national, ethnic, or linguistic group based on common ideas. 

We no longer teach those common ideas, but we focus on our differences.  We are no longer trying to create Americans; we are trying to retain, create, and magnify as many different identities as possible. And we are spending valuable, limited time in our public education systems promoting and highlighting them.

This is only dividing our country into competing groups all with distinct needs and interests. 

All the under the guise of not offending anyone, inclusion, diversity, and tolerance, we are dividing our country.  It’s happening slowly, so nobody’s panicking.  It’s not making the news.  No shots are being fired.

It was said by a very wise man: A house divided cannot stand.  And that is where we are today.

A Challenge to the Media

The Sun-Times printed a sad story today about Mayor Lightfoot.  She has only $1.7 million on hand to run a political campaign.  (Mayor’s campaign cash crunch, April 6)  She needs at least $8 million, according to an expert.

But that’s not the sad part.  The paper missed that.  The papers print the news, what happened.  It is left to others to try to figure out what it means.

What is sad here is that politics requires so much money for people to run for office.  Raising money is shady business as it is.  You try to massage potential donors, telling them what they want to hear, maybe even making promises that you won’t keep.

People who make donations often make the politician feel a sense of obligation to them.  They trade money for political favor.  That is simply wrong. 

We know this is all wrong, but we don’t know what to do about it.

Well, I offer my solution.

Media, whether newspapers, television, or radio, should be expected to make political campaigns as we know them obsolete.  They should make it their duty to fully inform the public about political candidates.  Candidates should be able to make their cases through the media without paid advertisements. 

Won’t this cause the media to lose money?  I venture to say that they will get far more viewers and readers, because the public will know where to go to learn about the candidates.

So many in the media and other places complain about political corruption.  And most of that starts with political campaigns.

We need to make that irrelevant.  I submit this is the duty of the media. 

 

 

The political divide and political buffoonery

We all know how divided our country is.  We are divided on just about everything.  There is no more common ground on so many things. 

Many of us are experiencing some degree of political fatigue.  We read about what those on the other side of the political divide are saying or doing, and we let it pass.

We don’t really know how or if we should respond. 

But then at times we see where all this political buffoonery is going.  (Jan. 6 insurrectionists are barred by Section 3 of 14^th Amendment, April 6)

The events of January 6 are unfortunate.  I just don’t think we understand what actually happened. 

Yes, some people used violence to try to enter the Capitol Building.  Probably more just walked in when the other guards opened the doors and let them in.

The bigger question is what did they do when they were inside.

Most just walked around and took pictures.  A few caused damage, and they should be punished for that. 

But many including the media call it an insurrection.

If it was an insurrection, they would have presented a list of demands.  They would have insisted on television cameras to hear them present them.  These demands would have been all over social media

And then they would not have simply walked out of the building.  They would have stayed there until those demands were met, or until they were able to meet with government leaders.  A real insurrection would probably take hostages.  How can they insist their demands be met without some leverage?  If they were there to prevent the Senate from voting to certify the election, then why didn’t they?  They walked out, and the Senate went back to business.

Now a lot of people are saying that anyone associated with January 6 be barred from holding public office. 

I’m sorry.  This is all political baloney, because they don’t want to have to face these people in the next election.  That is the only reason they are trying to get these candidates out of the way.

uniting a divided country

A Sun-Times reader longs for the old days when if your choice for President didn’t win, you could easily live with the other guy.  (No enemy wants to take on a unified America, April 5)

He urges the President and Congress to work together more.  He thinks it’s all about politics now.  Petty politics.

Actually it’s a lot more than that.  Our country is in the midst of an identity crisis.  We no longer know who we are as a nation, or more, what the United States is all about.

Our nation is divided over whether the United States is a good nation or a bad one.  Whether our country was founded as a religious nation or a secular one.  We are divided over the role of government.  Should the government try to solve every problem, right every wrong?  Is it the government’s job to take care of people, or just to manage things and keep bad things in check?  Should government be small or large?

The problem is that we are not discussing these questions.  Nobody is trying to answer them.

Actually, most people have already answered the questions in their own minds, and they are all going in opposite directions.  If you are going northeast, and I am going northwest, we could just go north and each get much of what we want.

But if you are going east, and I am going west, there is no common middle ground.  It becomes a tug-of-war, a stalemate.

This is the problem.  We need to talk about these issues, but we don’t.  Newspapers could help a lot with this.  But we need to have these conversations.  Everywhere.  Until our country reaches some kind of consensus, we will always be divided.  Years ago, we had that consensus on most things.  Now we have a consensus on almost nothing.  Don’t blame the politics.

is climate change a problem, or is there a problem with climate change?

The Tribune reported on a major warning from the UN: Earth ‘on track’ to being unlivable, April 5.

The culprit is carbon dioxide emissions.  We forget the fact that we had no way to accurately measure average world temperatures until the advent of weather satellites in the 70s, but they are sure that the world has gotten a few degrees warmer in the last 150 years. 

I admit a little bit of skepticism over the seriousness of this claim.

If the problem is too much carbon dioxide in the air, there are two ways of dealing with this, not counting, of course, doing both at once.

The first way is to reduce as much carbon dioxide emissions as possible; the other is to increase ways to remove carbon dioxide from the air. 

Everything I read is about stopping the use of fossil fuels.  Reinvent the entire world’s energy system in ten years. 

But nobody ever says anything about planting a couple billion trees.  Trees use carbon dioxide and replace it with oxygen.

Frankly, until the people shouting about climate change and its dangers don’t start talking about planting billions of trees, I strongly suspect that they have another agenda in mind besides the climate.

political discussions

I’m sure the Tribune doesn’t want to carry a discussion between readers on its pages, but some things need to be discussed, and if we can’t discuss it here, where will we discuss them?  (Founding Fathers faith, April 4)

The questions raised in this letter are important, because they determine the very nature of our country, and that frankly is the single biggest reason why our country is so divided today. 

The reader asserts that many of the Founding Fathers were deists and that that thinking is reflected in our Constitution and defines the character of our nation. 

She doesn’t say how the Constitution reflects deism, but then the true founding document of America that defines our nation is the Declaration of Independence, and that is hardly deist.  In fact, it’s implicitly Christian.

The Declaration asserts that God gave unalienable rights to human beings.  A deist god wouldn’t do that, and it certainly wouldn’t tell anybody that it had if it did.

Two of these rights that God gave to human beings are the right to life and the right to the pursuit of happiness.

Those two rights aren’t even common beliefs among the world’s major religions.  They are distinctly Christian. 

Many people today insist our country was founded as a secular nation and is one today.  But then these rights are no longer unalienable, and we can see today the government relentlessly chipping away at them. 

So much speech is deemed hate speech or misinformation that people are constantly being censored or intimidated for speaking, so free speech is disappearing.  And the right to keep and bear arms is seen increasingly as a privilege given grudgingly by a reluctant government. 

So our country needs to have a frank discussion about just what this United States is all about.  Because most people today don’t have a clue.  We don’t teach this in our schools, because it involves a Higher Being, and we certainly don’t teach it to the millions of people who come here to live every year.

So we are slowly moving further and further away from what we were founded to be.