The dumbest, most inconsiderate, unproductive, evil thing that Congress does

We often hear the call for bipartisanship in Congress.  We are told that we need to compromise and work together to solve our problems.  And when things don’t get done, we blame politicians for putting party and politics over a genuine concern for our country.

The latest bill before Congress shows where the real problem is.  (Dems report ‘uniformly positive’ reaction to climate, tax, health bill, July 29)

This bill is 725 pages long and covers taxes, energy, environment, prescription drug prices, and health care assistance.  And those are only the things that the Sun-Times mentioned. 

Compromise is, say, we are debating a speed limit bill.  You want 65 and I want 55.  A compromise would be 60.  Compromise is not voting for what you don’t want to get what you do.

How will Congress debate this bill?  How do you debate a bill that is 700 pages long and covers at least 5 totally different subjects?  You can’t, and they know this.  And that is why they do that.

They don’t want these things to be debated.  They negotiate these things in private offering incentives for votes.

This bill should be broken down into at least 5 parts and debated individually.  They know that half of this will never get passed unless they put it with something that they know has to pass.  That is corrupt, unconscionable, and criminal.  It’s a breach of the public trust.

 

 

 

why not replace lost rain forests?

Everything is on fire.  At least that’s what the Tribune says.  (Everything is on fire.  It doesn’t have to be.  July 29)

The article notes that Congo has the world’s second largest rain forest, and Congo is happy to destroy what they can of it to make life better for them in the short run.  The world’s largest rain forest, in Brazil, has been suffering the same fate for decades. 

These rain forests have a very positive effect on the world’s climate, so their loss or even their partial loss hurts all of us.

If their loss has a measurable negative impact on the rest of the world, then it is incumbent on the rest of the world to start planting trees.  Billions of them.  All over the world. 

I hear that this climate thing is a crisis.  Why am I not hearing calls equally loud to plant trees? 

Someone told me that planting trees won’t make a difference, yet everybody is trying to get everybody to do their part.  If the efforts of individuals are important in the fight to save the climate, then surely the efforts of governments to plant billions of trees will have a major impact. 

When I don’t hear of or see the calls to plant trees, I wonder if there really is a crisis or if our leaders really believe there is.

Another Look at Gay Marriage

There are concerns today that the Supreme Court will nullify the right of gay people to get married.  The Court doesn’t think you should apply the Constitution to controversial issues that were never in the minds of those who wrote it or any of the later Amendments.  If people think this is a right, then Congress can make a law saying as much.

But the issue should really be called same-sex marriage and not gay marriage.  Nobody cares or asks whether a person is gay before they get married.  The issue is whether two people of the same sex can have a relationship that can and should be called a marriage.

This is a new thing in human history, and is it a right as well?  This whole matter has raised the question of what exactly is a marriage in the first place.  Is marriage just a word that we give to a relationship where people love each other and decide to live together, and we give that a legal status so they can have visitation rights and other privileges only defined for family members.?

Why is the definition of marriage even important?  Who cares?  What difference does it make?

A healthy society needs to reproduce at least enough people to maintain its population.  When reproductive levels fall too low, societies shrink.  They get older, and that places financial stress on that society, because it has to take care of the elderly with relatively fewer people to pay for it.  With the advances of modern medicine, we have a vastly increasing senior population, and we have a shrinking pool of workers able to support them.  Our society has been below replacement value for a long time now.

That was the main point of marriage, the creation of biological families.  And, of course, marriage was encouraged prior to the fact of having any children.  After they had children was too late to start asking those questions.  No, not all marriages end up that way, but we won’t know that until after the marriage. 

A society also needs to encourage the things that make for an optimal upbringing of these new generations to become productive members of society.  Historically, marriage has been about the relationship of a man and a woman, not only because that is how children are created, but because this couple also united to raise them until the children could take care of themselves.  Unlike animals, these children required an enormous amount of time and energy to make all this happen.  Marriage was to ensure that the two adults involved would work together to do that. 

Parents are like lifelong one-on-one tutors, mentors, role-models, and caregivers but at no cost to society.  So it is in society’s interest to encourage people to get married and have children. 

But do people need to get married to have children?  Technically, no.  But having children as a single parent is a very difficult undertaking.  It’s one of the leading causes of poverty, and these children are at a greater risk for all kinds of adverse outcomes.  So it is in the interests of society that children grow up in a two parent household.

We do know that same sex couples cannot create children.  Same-sex couples often want to have their own children, but in order to do that, they have to remove one of the child’s natural parents from its life.  That is not good, and we shouldn’t pretend that it is.  We also know that role models are important in a child’s life, but in same sex couples, should we then try to limit them to having only same sex children?  And how would we do that?

We stretch the meaning of family today to include any number of different arrangements, but biological ties still remain the ideal.  The rest are simply adjustments to a breakdown in that, for whatever reason, usually a death.  Because a healthy society requires new generations of contributing members, the health of families is a proper and important concern of society.

When we legalize same-sex marriage, we are also normalizing it, and we are telling our children that same-sex marriage is just as good as regular marriage, and homosexual relationships are just as good as heterosexual ones.  Our public schools are even encouraging children today, long before they have ever given any thought to whether they want to have children of their own or if sexual relationships have any meaning apart from personal pleasure, and even before they have reached puberty, to decide what gender they want to be and what sexual orientation. 

Some will say that this is only a matter of self-discovery, but they are encouraging children to experiment with all the various possibilities and decide now the entire course of the rest of their lives.  They are being taught that one way is not better than another.  And they are teaching sex apart from even loving relationships.  It’s just something that gives you pleasure, and you need to decide which way you like best, and that will define whether you are gay, straight, and any of a number of other possibilities.

In recent times, after our country threw off its religious associations which stigmatized homosexuality, people were more open about these kinds of relationships, and certain problems developed.  They were in undefined relationships with no legal status.  So visitation rights were non-existent.  Inheritances were non-existent.  Some areas created a legal status for these relationships, so they could be listed as family or next of kin.

Which is fine.

But the goal was not legal status, though they wanted that.  Heck, it was never really about privacy either.  We were told that what people do alone in their homes doesn’t affect you and needn’t concern you.  People should be free to love whomever they will.  But that was not it.

It was about something more.  It was about equality, just like ‘separate but equal’ was deemed inherently unequal.  A separate category was deemed as second-class status, and that was unacceptable.

But we have to ask what equality means. 

To use a rough analogy: if we call a bicycle a vehicle, then is a Schwinn equal to a Ford Explorer, since they are both vehicles, and should they have equal access on a highway?  To limit Schwinns to a narrow strip on the side of some roads is discriminatory and unequal, and that becomes wrong.

Equality can mean equal status.  There were civil unions that were created to provide legal status and rights to same-sex couples, but that was not enough.

But what was wanted was equality in value, such as one is as good as the other.  There is no preferred choice.  Like chocolate and vanilla.  One is not right and the other wrong.  It’s all just a matter of personal preference.  And they will insist, this preference is built into our very natures. 

Not only is it to be deemed equal, but you better damn well like it too.  Otherwise, we will put you out of business if you don’t.

Our presumed secular society will no longer stigmatize same-sex relationships, however they are named, but equality is a term that is misleading and inaccurate, particularly when we talk to our children about this. 

These kinds of relationships are best left for adults to consider, after people are fully aware of the ramifications of committing their lives to people of the same sex.

But, no, same-sex marriage is not a Constitutional right.  You can’t decide or determine what the Constitution or any of its Amendments means in situations totally unlike anything that those who wrote them would have even thought about when they were written.  This is a matter left to our legislative bodies.  This is a totally new thing in history, and we need to talk about it.

 

 

 

saving our democracy

I appreciated reading Arne Duncan’s thoughts on saving our democracy.  (Democracy won’t save itself, July 27)  It’s important that we discuss ways to improve things.

He has three main recommendations for us:

1)      He believes voting should be mandatory.  Before we do that, I think we should look into why people don’t vote.  If they are just lazy and don’t care, then I don’t think I want them to vote.  They probably wouldn’t look past the politician who gave them the most freebies.  They would be bought with their own money.

Maybe there are problems with our election system that we are ignoring.

2)      He favors having non-partisan primaries, like they have in Chicago, with the top two vote-getters pairing off in a runoff if one is needed.

There are two problems with this:

a)       The first is that in a non-partisan primary, candidates don’t declare their party alignment, and that is the single most defining piece of information we need on a candidate.

b)      Chicago had a runoff in their last mayoral election, and the top two vote-getters in the primary each got less than 20% of the vote.  That means that more than 4 out of 5 voters didn’t vote for them.  Yet one of them won the election. 

That is simply wrong.  With that many candidates, you need to have ranked choice voting, or you can even let people vote for as many candidates as they wanted.   That would be easier to figure the results.  If there were only three candidates in the race, you could do a runoff, but not when you get more than that.

3)      He advocates for a 2-year program of national service.  That would be good if we can decide on where our kids would serve.  We should in turn pay for two years of their college at least in repayment.  That can be debated, but a lot of people are on long career paths.  Perhaps someone on a medical career path could be exempted as long as they stayed on that path.

Thank you, Arne.

Another Look at the Separation of Church and State

The concept of a separation between church and state is being talked about a lot today, and that is a good thing.  What is exactly the relationship between religion and government?  And why is it a separation between ‘church’ and state?  Why not synagogue or mosque?  Why not religion in general?

The founding document of our country is the Declaration of Independence.  The Constitution describes the system of our government, but the Declaration tells us what it’s all about, what our country is all about, what our government is all about.

In defining our country, the Founders talked about God.  They didn’t present God as the object of their beliefs but as an Actor in life.  God created human beings.  The court called supreme ruled that talk of creation was a religious idea not suited for public schools, but the Founders called it a fact. 

Not only that, but God created human beings equal.  This means that nobody has a divine or inherent right to rule over other people.  This fact of creating people equal determines the form of government that we can have.  We reject the idea of kings, because they have no right to rule over other people.

This God also gave human beings unalienable rights, rights that precede and supersede government.  Rights that the government did not give us and that it cannot take away.  

The first Ten Amendments to the Constitution are called the Bill of Rights.  They are meant to encapsulate what these unalienable rights are.  Other Amendments can be repealed, like the 18^th Amendment was, but these cannot. 

So while the Constitution doesn’t explicitly use the word ‘God,’ it certainly recognizes Him.

But what God exactly does it recognize?

All religions talk about God, but not the same God.  They can’t all be talking about the same God, because their beliefs about God are not the same.  They don’t all recognize that God gave these rights to human beings.  Not all religions recognize a right to life.  In some major religions, you don’t have a right to life if you are not of that religion.  And you certainly don’t have a right to the pursuit of happiness.  Anyone ever hear of the caste system?

So whatever this separation is, it certainly doesn’t mean that we can’t talk about God and politics.  We say that religion cannot influence politics.  Well, too late for that.  It already has.  That’s why we have a republic instead of a monarchy.  And we have to talk about God in our public schools if we are to teach our children about the foundations of our country, what America is all about.

The fact that this separation is between church and state and not religion and state shows that we are misunderstanding the concept.  The Founders didn’t want our federal government to choose which church, or Christian denomination, is the official one, like they did in Europe. 

But they were great fans of the Bible and religion being taught in our public schools, because they knew they had to have a moral people if they were to live in freedom, otherwise they would abuse their freedom, hurt other people, and require a large, strong government to rule them.

Questions to ask the candidates in the next election

Following the example of a letter in today’s newspaper, I thought I should write a list of the most important questions to ask all the political candidates in the fall election.  I also included a list directed to candidates in my own state.  Illinois has some unique problems, but the questions might spur relevant questions for other states as well.

1)      Will I uphold the law of the land?  You are free to want to change them.  Tell us what you would change.  But will you follow the laws that exist.  Immigration is one example you can give.

2)      Will you work for the benefit of the citizens of the United States before the citizens of other countries?  This doesn’t mean that you hate the citizens of other countries.  It’s just that you are elected to take care of the citizens of your own country.  That is your job.

3)      Will you stop spending money you don’t have?  Debt is only acceptable for purchases that you can reasonably pay off, like a mortgage or a car.  Government debt is never paid off, and what we spend in interest keeps getting higher, and that is just wasted money.

4)      Do you believe it is the role of government to solve every problem, meet every need.  And we will go (further) into debt to do these things.

5)      Do you believe America is a good country, the freest country in the world with the best opportunities for success for any person living here, or do you believe that America is irredeemably flawed and must be completely reworked?

6)      Do you believe in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution?   More specifically, as examples,

a)       that human beings are endowed by God with unalienable rights.  If our rights come from God, then we cannot live as if there is no God.

b)      that the role of government is to secure these rights for its citizens

c)       that the role of government is to form a more perfect union and to ensure domestic tranquility, to unite us, meaning, not to force controversial things on the American people before reaching a consensus on them.

7)      What reforms will you try to implement while in office?  I can suggest a few.

a)       Term limits

b)      No pensions for elected officials, though if they had one before going into office, we could fund that pension while they are away from their last job.

c)       Short bills, so that they can and will be read and debated before voting on them.

d)      Political contributions will be held in a blind trust.  Essentially, no candidate should know who gave what to his campaign. 

e)       Politicians should be forbidden from work as lobbyists after leaving office.  Their public service should not be a stepping stone to a paid position influencing legislation.  And lobbyists will have no place in creating legislation.

8)      Do you believe in what is unfortunately called meritocracy?  Like in sports, where people are evaluated solely on their abilities and not on their demographics, 

9)      Will you focus on what unites us or on what divides us?  How we are alike or how we are different?

 

Questions for state candidates:

1)      Will you fix the pension crisis in Illinois?  I don’t care what promises somebody made 70 years ago.  Those were not wise promises, and they are bankrupting the state.  They can be modified, and most state retirees will still make off like bandits.  If you don’t want and work toward fixing that, we don’t need you in office.  You are part of the problem.

2)      Property taxes are the most absurd tax there is, because it is the only tax that does not take into consideration a person’s ability to pay for it.  Do you believe in property tax reductions, and what will you do?  I can think of several needed changes.

a)       Two-thirds of property taxes goes for public education.  Fund that through the income tax.  This would need to be a distinct income tax with all funds kept separate from all other funds.

b)      Any person who is retired on a fixed income should have their property taxes frozen.

3)      Will you help parents who want to send their kids to schools different from public schools?  There are two ways this can be done.

a)       You can give parents vouchers toward any private school, or

b)      you can give a tax break for private school expenses up to the amount they would have paid in taxes for public schools.

4)      Do you think the government in Illinois is too large?  (We have more governmental agencies than any other state in the country. By far.)  Will you try to reduce it?

These are by no means all the questions I would want to ask.  I suspect that, in order to get all the right answers, I would have to run for office myself.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: A Needed Assessment

For most of our nation’s history, our nation’s moral code, or values, was taken from the Bible:  You shall love your neighbor as yourself, Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, and the Ten Commandments: Honor your father and your mother, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not bear false witness, thou shalt not covet anything of your neighbor’s, and there were four others that had to do with God.

These were often posted prominently in public places including our public schools and courtrooms. 

Then the court called supreme called that whole practice unconstitutional.  Forget that that had been the practice without incident for over 200 years. 

Something else had to be found to take its place.  It was always believed that that moral code was given to us by God; now a new one was needed, and we had to figure one out on our own.  Make one up as we go along.

The first draft was much simpler than the old rules: Instead of ten commandments, they were four: tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity.  But then they did it one better: diversity, equity, and inclusion.  I think this will probably be the last attempt, and it is gradually being codified throughout our country, one municipality at a time.

No public comment was asked for, but comment we must. 

We might ask: who came up with this motto, or mantra?

Was it a group of our religious leaders?  No, religion was a private matter.  It had no place in public life.  Besides, we were too diverse of a people to agree on anything religious.  No, it was Marxists, the political left.  They have never been shy about anything except using such terminology to describe themselves.

So what should we make of it?

Diversity: They tell us diversity is our strength, but they don’t really mean that.

Why do I say that?

Because it is not about diversity. 

Because the only parts of the population they want to be diverse are the predominantly white ones. 

If a community were all black or all Hispanic or all Muslim, nobody would complain about a lack of diversity.  Nobody says we need more blacks in Hispanic areas or more Hispanics in black ones.  It is only white areas that people don’t like.

Whites are the only ethnic group that people complain about if they have a homogeneous community.  That is deemed racist and elitist, but any other ethnic group can be as homogeneous as possible without a word. 

The goal is a majority-minority society, but calling it diversity is the first step in making this happen.

It is important here that everybody be definable by a group that they are a part of, race being one of the major groups, because history is defined by the various groups interacting with the others.  But primarily it is defined by white people oppressing all the others.  This is why things that suggest white rule, white power, or white majority must be broken up and tempered with minorities.

Whites have been and still are oppressors of all the other people groups, and the others are victims.

Which leads to the second rule: Equity.

Equity means that all the oppressed groups are victims, and this historical victimhood must be addressed.

Equality was a starting point.  You don’t want to be arguing against that.  But equity takes it a step further. 

If history is about oppression and victims, then it is not enough to simply stop the oppressing.  The victims have been too severely damaged or disadvantaged in our society to succeed now on their own.  We must take action to assist them in becoming equal.  It is not enough to merely treat people equally; we have to ensure that they ‘look’ equal as well.  They are incapable of recovering from past injustices without remedial help from our government and our society.

Equality means that people are judged by what they do.  Equity means that that is not what we should be looking at.  Certain groups have been perpetually disadvantaged, so personal achievement is not as important as group advancement.  In practical terms, it is not the most skilled, the highest performing that wins the job, the position, or who should, but different groups have different standards, and all jobs, positions, and awards must be given out in ways that reflect the various groups’ representation in society, at minimum.  Like participation trophies instead of rewarding only the ’winners.’

Inclusion: On the surface, this seems the natural complement to equity.  There have been many marginalized groups in our society, not merely ethnic ones.  Inclusion affirms their full acceptance.

But there is more here than just making people feeling accepted and welcome.

There is a higher goal to all of this.  That doesn’t mean that every person embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion is in on the plan.  As presented, they seem like admirable ideals, but that is what is known as marketing.

The goal is the reinventing of America.  The United States has long been the freest and richest country in the world.  It was also essentially white, capitalistic, and Christian.  It was also seen by its people as being good, blessed, and exceptional.

The new narrative is that the United States is an evil nation, built on the backs of slaves and driven by greed.  The whites are racist oppressors.  And religion, particularly Christianity, has no place in public life or policy.

Diversity addresses the white problem, equity addresses the capitalism problem, and inclusion addresses the Christian problem. 

The religion of Christ says that God created the world and gave us His laws on how things work.  What we used to call truth.  Now truth is whatever you want it to be.  Truth is individual.  Everything we have learned from childhood, from our parents, from our history in our schools, is all wrong. 

Boys can be girls, girls can be boys, and nobody can tell you that you are not.  Inclusion simply means that we are not to question things anymore.  All the old ways of looking at things are wrong, outdated, unenlightened, and hateful.  And so they must be eliminated.

The only reason this has gone on unchallenged for so long is that most people have been just living their lives, working, raising a family, being involved in church and volunteer work that they just haven’t been paying attention.  They never imagined that anyone would want to take away what they had here.  But they were wrong.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are tools to redefine what America is, discredit its history, its traditions, its values, and to bring about a new world order. 

Freedom means that your potential is theoretically boundless.  That essentially means that people’s success, however you want to define it, is as unique as the individual.  In other words, it will be entirely unequal.  Some people have achieved enormous wealth.  The mistake is thinking that there is a fixed amount of wealth to be had, that if one has more, then all the others will have less. 

No, his wealth only shows us what is possible, that one’s potential is not limited by our society.  Diversity, equity, inclusion is a rejection of society as we have known it and attempts to create a new one - less free, less prosperous, and less tolerant.

 

prayer in public schools

Two questions: if the First Amendment to the Constitution built a wall of separation between Church and State such that the government cannot endorse or favor religion in any of its forms, how could the same Congress that wrote the First Amendment create an office of chaplain for Congress paid for by taxpayer dollars and then have this chaplain open each day of Congress with prayers in the name of Jesus?

If it is constitutional for Congress to open a day with prayer, and that specifically Christian prayer, then why is it unconstitutional for schools to open a day with prayer and that a not specifically Christian prayer?

The Tribune faults the Supreme Court for allowing a coach to pray on the field after a football game. (Court’s ruling on school prayer is supremely questionable, July 11)

The paper notes “60 years of precedent -setting battles to maintain a separation of church and state” that should have made it clear of the unconstitutionality of prayer in public schools.

But they fail to note that there were 173 years of precedent starting from the very beginning of our nation and before where prayer in public schools was considered not only fitting and proper but necessary for the success of the educational enterprise.  When the Court ruled then to remove prayer from the public schools, it wasn’t maintaining a separation of church and state, it was creating it.  At least by modern definition.  That ruling had no precedent to base it on.

Since the Court removed prayer from our public schools, God was removed as well.  Our children are receiving an education that essentially says that there is no God to speak of and that need not concern them.  This is not a position of neutrality toward religion.  Actually, that is impossible. 

There are not three options in the area of religion: pro, con, or neutral.  There are only two.  Pro or con. 

Our Founders were pro.  They realized that God created human beings equal, and He gave them unalienable rights.  Without God, you don’t have equality and you don’t have unalienable rights. 

If our country is founded on a belief in God, then it is not unconstitutional to acknowledge this and God in our public schools.  You may say that some kids don’t believe this or are of other religions.  OK, but this is why they have the rights they do in this country, and why countries that don’t believe in God or who believe in other religions have less rights than we do here. 

This is why the United States is unique.  And we need to teach this uniqueness and not pretend that we somehow have all kinds of rights for no apparent reason other than our Constitution.  The Constitution didn’t give us these rights; it defined them.

The one message our nation needs to hear right now

I should send this message out everyday to everybody I can.  It should be posted in every classroom, every library, and prominently in all our government buildings.  If I were really rich, I would put it on billboards all across the country and daily in every newspaper.

The one message that this nation needs to hear is this:

‘Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

So said John Adams, our second President. 

Those people who keep calling for a separation of church and state miss the point of that First Amendment.  The Founders knew that without religion, this whole freedom thing was doomed.  With freedom without religion, you’re not going to be able to have enough police to keep order in society.

As that whole quote says: “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.”

Notice he didn’t even mention gun violence or other serious evils.  They had a moral and religious people, and those weren’t problems then.  The worse examples that he could give were avarice [greed], ambition, revenge, and gallantry.  Gallantry was a fine quality but at times referred to certain deceptive behaviors. 

The Founders weren’t forbidding government from anything religious; they didn’t want the federal government to choose which branch of the religion of Christ was the official one, like in England where the Queen of England is the Head of the Church of England.  And that is why that First Amendment calls for the free exercise of religion.  It can’t do that unless the values of [that] religion are consistent with the values of this country. 

No, they weren’t establishing the religion of Christ as the religion of the United States; they were assuming it.  They weren’t worried about people of other religions or even no religion.  With freedom of speech and the free exchange of ideas, they were confident that when people discussed the issues of life and the existence of God, the religion of Christ would win the day. 

Yes, Christians are flawed people, like everybody else, and some have done bad things and even in the name of the Christ.  But no other religion teaches people to love their neighbors as themselves, do unto others as you would have others do unto you, that you are created in the image of God, that God loves you such that He gave His Son to die for you that you might have eternal life, and that if God so loved you, so you should also love one another.  And, of course, there was always that Thou shalt not kill.  And then, know that God shall bring into account all the deeds that were done in the body.  We are accountable to a Supreme Being for what we do in our lives.

It is the lack of religion that emboldens evil people to do evil things, people who think that they will not be held accountable to Somebody Higher than them.  Or, it is the lack of hope in life that God offers people that breeds the despair, the anger, the loneliness, and the hatred that propels people to do evil things.

Great freedom requires great responsibility, and it is only in religion, and specifically the religion of Christ, that you get the responsibility and hope that is needed for great freedom.

 

 

 

What does it mean when we say that “all men are created equal?”

What does it mean when we say that “all men are created equal?”

Obviously, there are many ways that we are not equal.  We are all unique individuals with varying degrees of intelligence, looks, and ability.  Any of those qualities offers distinct advantages to those who have them.

Much of what we are stems from our birth.  Many of our traits are inherited and define who we are or will be in many concrete ways: whether we will be fathers or mothers, artists or engineers, white-collar workers or blue-collar workers, entrepreneurs or salaried workers.  Much of what we are is determined by upbringing, where we were born, who our parents were, how we were raised, and what opportunities were given to us as we grew up.

But being created equal has to be different from all of the above.

The defining issue of the time when those words were written in the Declaration of Independence was whether we were to be ruled by kings or to be self-governing. 

Being equal meant that nobody had a divine or inherent right to rule over other people.  We would not have kings to tell us how to live or to rule over our lives, but we would have a voice in the things that concern us.

The meaning of equality here is being scrutinized today, because slavery is still being talked about today.

Our nation had slavery at the time when these words were written.  Our Founders could have created two new nations, one slave and one free, but they decided to create one and to work through the issue of slavery as it could.  It finally took a war to end it.

Slavery has been with us everywhere since very early in human history.  Probably most often, slavery was the result of military victories.  They could have just killed all their prisoners, or they could subject them to forced labor on their behalf.

Now there have always been people who believed that certain races or peoples could and should rule over others.  The Japanese, for example, were extraordinarily cruel to both the Koreans and the Chinese prior to World War 2.  Call that an inherent right to dominance. 

People in debt often worked as slaves to pay off their debts.

Now in the United States, a hundred and fifty years after the end of slavery, we are told that the effects of slavery still linger and affect people.  I’m not so sure that slavery is the real issue today.  I am watching a video series now about the relationship between the Irish and the Chinese in 1870s San Francisco.  No, it was not slavery, but the two groups lived distinct lives with often violent interactions when they occurred. 

I remember the slaughtering of the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda back in the 90s.  There weren’t even distinguishing physical characteristics between them, but the mutual hatred cost them over a million lives. 

Ethnic discomfort didn’t start with slavery in America, and it’s not going to end with government programs and government payouts.  It’s a long slow process as the different groups interact with each other and gradually accept them more.  And it would really help if everybody stopped focusing on all the differences and the constant counting of this and that. 

If you want people to unite, then stop talking about all the differences.  Talk about what we have in common.  It’s doable, but it’s like a headache.  It’s not going to go away if you keep talking about it and analyzing it.  You forget about it, and then realize later that it’s gone.

Religious Neutrality: Good, Bad, or Neither?

Steve Chapman is worried that the Supreme Court has abandoned religious neutrality.  (The Supreme Court has abandoned religious neutrality, July 3)  And I say, Thank God for that!

He understands neutrality as, and he says “scrupulously neutral,” the government being “not the champion of religion in general or any particular belief.”  Neutrality has been commonly understood to mean that the government cannot even push theism, the belief in God. 

The problem is that our country was founded on the fact, not the belief, that God created human beings equal and He endowed them with unalienable rights.  We generally think of religion as things people believe about God.  Well, the Founders didn’t say that they believed that God gave unalienable rights to people, but that He did.  An historical fact. 

And neither of these propositions, equality and unalienable rights, is a universal religious sentiment.  And when you explain unalienable rights to include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, these are exclusively Christian teachings.  Our nation has a Christian foundation. 

How can we teach our children about the founding principles of our country without talking about God?

And how did our Founders know that God had done this?  Now these are not the natural rights of the philosophers.  Natural rights don’t require a God, but the Founders said that God did it.

These are also not the rights from a deist god, as is commonly ascribed to the Founders.  A deist god wouldn’t give rights to human beings and certainly wouldn’t have told them about it if it had.

No, this is the Christian God, and it was the Bible that informed the Founders of this fact. 

When the Founders were debating the First Amendment, they were concerned about the government establishing ono particular Christian denomination over the others, like in England where the Queen of English is the Head of the Church of England.

And when John Adams, our second President, said that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other,” he was thinking particularly of the Christian religion and Christian morality. 

No, Christians don’t require that everybody be a Christian.  That’s why you’re free.  It’s the countries that don’t believe in God that persecute those who do and who have no compunctions about killing off millions of their own people who don’t fit into the program.  e.g. China, the Soviet Union, Cambodia.

Without Christianity, you don’t have unalienable rights, and without unalienable rights, you don’t have the United States of America.

 

 

hypocrisy and the religious right

A Tribune reader had angry words for the religious right.  (Hypocrisy of religious right, July 1)  I would be described as one of those religious right people, but those aren’t the words I would use to describe myself. 

The writer asserts that the religious right believes in civil liberty for some people but not others.  Civil liberty for them but not for everybody.  He uses abortion as his prime example of this hypocrisy.  He also accuses the religious right of imposing “religious doctrine on the American people,” though he doesn’t tell us which ones they are imposing.

Were the Founders imposing their religious beliefs on Americans when they asserted that God gave unalienable rights to human beings?  Was that some church creed that they were quoting, or were they merely asserting what they considered an irrefutable fact?  They don’t say that they believed that God gave human beings unalienable rights, they said He did it.  It happened.  Historically.

Is crediting our unalienable rights to God an imposition of religion on the American people?  If there is a God, which our Founders certainly believed, you cannot put everything that God did or does or says in a box and say that we will live our lives as a nation without looking into that box and that box must remain out of sight and out of mind when we formulate the laws of our land. 

Civil liberty to this letter writer means that a woman has the right to kill her children before they are born.  Can we kill small animals in our basement if we want?  Can we view child pornography in the privacy of our own homes?  Can I use prohibited words in my own home and in private conversations?  Can I say hateful things in my own home or in private conversations?  You may say yes to some of these things, but you know that if those things ever became public, someone can lose their job and be publicly shamed.  Civil liberties never meant no limits on what we can do.  The Founders relied on people’s own sense of personal responsibility to do the right thing.

This issue with abortion is not personal autonomy, but what exactly is this thing that everybody wants to be able to kill?  And the country is greatly divided on this.  Nobody is trying to force anything on women.  Like when the Secret Service blocks an intersection to allow the President’s motorcade to pass, they are not trying to restrict your right to travel.  They are only thinking about the safe passage of the President.  The question is whether that baby has a right to life independent of what other people think about it.

Our country is founded on a belief in the right to life.  That baby is alive with its own DNA.  It is not a part of the mother.  It is a separate human being.  I’m sorry that evolution or God had to involve women in the process of creating new life. 

The Supreme Court merely said that a hundred or two hundred years ago when our country added certain Amendments to the Constitution, they didn’t have abortion in mind, so it wouldn’t be right for people today to apply what they said back then to this situation.  Let the legislatures decide what to do with it, and we can add however many Amendments to the Constitution as we want.