healing the hate in Chicago (or anywhere)

I feel like the latest Sun-Times headline says it all: Chicago has no love left.  (June 29)  This after one of the bloodiest weekends in Chicago’s history, but particularly with reference to the innocent people who were killed.

Love isn’t a word used much in public circles today.  This happened to be a quote from somebody close to a victim, not the Times itself.

Love is a religious word.  We used to teach our kids in school and even say publicly that we should love our neighbors as ourselves.  These mass shootings should be labeled as hate crimes.  Are hate crimes only when the victims are of another race or religion?  Heck, no.  It takes hate to gun down people, whether it’s one or a 11, as in this last case.

You can’t fight hate with laws.  Laws may stop a few people from expressing that hate, but too few.  You want to stop hate crimes, mass shootings, or any killing?  You need to get people to love each other. 

And you can’t do that with laws either.  It takes religion to do that, and not just any old one.  For almost 200 years, we used the Bible in our public school education, and loving our neighbor is a basic principle found in it. 

It may take a generation to raise a generation of kids with love in their hearts rather than hate, but any other proposed solution is like trying to hold down a lid on boiling water with your hand.  It may work for a short while, but the boiling water will always spill over.

 

The government wants to teach your kids about sex

Our federal government created standards for sex education for the public schools in our country.  States get to decide if they want to implement them. Illinois passed the legislation to do that, but it seems that the governor has not yet signed it.

I believe this curriculum not only fails our kids but is harmful to them in three major ways:

1)      It claims to be medically accurate, yet it ignores basic biology.   

Biologically, human beings have what we may call sex organs, but most of them biologically are considered to be reproductive organs.   They are all part of an intricate reproductive system that the species needs to continue existence.  According to modern biology, life, all life, is driven by the need for its species to survive, and this curriculum sees reproduction merely as an adverse side effect, a condition that people need to know how to treat, like catching a cold.

The curriculum treats these organs as built-in sex toys that exist solely to provide pleasure to the owner.  There are risks involved, such as disease and pregnancy, but the student learns what to do to treat those conditions, where to go, and how to prevent them.

This curriculum sees no normative function of this reproductive system such that its use is a totally arbitrary decision of the owner.  This is like teaching digestion without teaching nutrition, such that ice cream has the same practical value as vegetables, and is even more desirable, because it tastes better.  It’s entirely your choice whether to eat ice cream or vegetables.  One has no more inherent value than the other, and no one has the right to say that one is better than the other.  

What modern lingo calls cisgenderism is simply humans using their sexual organs in the way that they are designed to work.  Obviously, the activity that actually reproduces the species has results and satisfactions that have nothing to do with reproduction.  This curriculum insists that humans should treat this basic biological function as unimportant and secondary to the goal of achieving pleasure, such that a person contemplating their future and how they want to live their life need not and should not even take that into consideration.  It’s all about what you feel comfortable with at the time, meaning, what you feel now.

And obviously, they are asking this question to children who may not even know what this all even feels like, yet alone asking and deciding questions that only adults can answer, like whether to get married and have children. 

2)      This curriculum treats sexual activity entirely on mechanical functioning rather than on its purpose and value.  Like teaching firearms in middle school. 

We teach our kids what guns are, how they work, how to maintain them.  We would give them target practice in school, but we are essentially telling our kids to practice sex on their own, to see what kind they like best.  No thought is given to whether, as an adult, they might not want to marry somebody who has already had sex with half their class or who might want to present themselves to their spouse as one who saved themselves for them.

Kids don’t ask these kinds of questions, and the adults in the room here don’t want the kids to know that they might have those questions later on.  That’s highly irresponsible teaching.  And even abusive to children.  You know something is good for them, but you withhold it? 

What is sex?  Is it merely a form of mutual masturbation, something that exists merely to provide pleasure to ourselves, and having someone do it with us only makes it more pleasurable?

These are questions far beyond the realms of science and medicine.  Science and medicine don’t give us enough information to make these kinds of life choices.  Like studying love and only measuring physiological changes to our heart and brains and thinking we understand it.  We won’t know what came first, the feelings or the love, or whether love is just feelings or something apart from it that creates the feelings.

Science and medicine cannot tell us what sex is, what it means, and what its value is.  That requires, I could say, psychology, but that still approaches life without consideration of God, which many people still believe in and use to guide their lives.

This curriculum tries to teach values by saying that there are no normative values, none that correspond best with your physiology or psychology, let alone religious ones.  That is beyond the purview of a public school.  If they want to present the natural worldview in a public school as an alternative to a religious worldview, they can do that, but they don’t.  They use the words medicine and science to present this as the only viable way to look at this.

3)      And, lastly, this curriculum simply encourages our kids to experiment on all the sexual possibilities so they can figure out which one they like best.  All apart from being married or even loving the person you’re having this intimacy with.  This curriculum divorces sex from commitment, marriage, and even love.  It’s just an act for the sake of pleasure that can lead to pregnancy which you should know how to terminate.  And they will judge its value entirely on how much pleasure they get from it.

This curriculum is not in the best interest of our children, because it is taking one small part of life and teaching it as if it exists or is meant to exist by itself.  This is at best irresponsible and at worst abusive to our children.

police in public schools - why are they there again?

The Chicago Sun-Times is again calling for the removal of all police from Chicago public schools.  (Will Chicago take a final big step toward police-free schools, June 25)

Have we forgotten why they are there in the first place?  Maybe it’s a good thing we have, because they are there to protect the students and staff from mass shooters.  The fact that we seem to have forgotten that suggests that maybe their presence there has worked.  The rash of mass school shooting has stopped. 

The Times editorial had a picture of protestors who want nurses instead of cops in their schools.  Will nurses run to the sound of gunfire in a school? 

If schools decide to remove the police, I hope they ask the parents of the schools affected what they want before they do that.  If they remove the police and there is a mass shooting in that school, I would expect a rash of expensive lawsuits.

Maybe if we taught our kids in school the meaning and value of human life, students wouldn’t be coming back to shoot up the place and kill their classmates and teachers.

The Transgender Myth

What does the word transgender even mean? 

Part of the problem is that someone, somewhere decided to give separate meanings to the words gender and sex, and society accepted it.

But what is gender apart from sex?

Gradually we are being trained to refer to a person as a man or a woman entirely on a person’s self-identification apart from the objective markings that have defined them throughout all of human history.

So now we often refer to a man as a woman and a woman as a man apart from their biology, yet it is biology that defined them in the first place.

What is a woman, and how is she different from a man? 

A woman has a womb.  A woman is able to create living beings in that womb.  The survival of the human race depends on women creating living beings in their womb.  When the average woman in a society bears less than 2.1 living beings in her lifetime, the society shrinks.  There are fewer people in it, and the average age increases, which gives that society fewer productive people and more people dependent on others for their care.

A man has the ability to get that life started in the woman’s womb.  A woman cannot do that on her own, and a man cannot create life on his own.  The world needs the two to join together in the process.

It can be argued today that science can make the need for human interaction here unnecessary, but that also removes the human emotional involvement in the life of the child, as if that were not important.  Personally, I don’t think it would be wise to do a longitudinal study on that, because if it were proven to be detrimental to the life of that child, we will have inflicted damage on thousands of children just to prove or disprove our theories.

We have gone so far as to think of sex as having been assigned to us at birth, like maybe the doctor preferred one over the other, or they drew straws in deciding what sex to call the children.

But why is this all important, important enough to call it a myth and no doubt incur the wrath of innumerable people.

If a person thinks they are of the other sex and they want to live like that and even undergo physical changes through surgery, why is that even any of my business? 

It’s not.

Except for one thing.

Our schools and our society insist that we teach this to our children and demand that they make their choices NOW.

We recognize a distinction between children and adults, where adults can assume full responsibility for their actions, and children need the consent of an adult or guardian to do certain things and other things they are strictly forbidden from doing until they reach adulthood, because we deem them not mature or knowledgeable enough to make wise or informed decisions.

But now, we are telling our children that the biology they were born with means as little as the clothes they wear as to who they really are inside.  They can really become one of those other humans who we detect are different from us, and we are now encouraging these children to undergo life-changing medical procedures that alter their outward appearances yet cannot change what they are inside.

The most egregious example of this is an enormous number of young girls who believe that they are boys, whatever that may mean.  Or that they can become boys if they take the right medicines and have the right surgeries.  And the medical community has been coerced into accommodating their wishes.  They routinely give hormone treatments and do surgeries even without the children’s parents’ knowledge or consent.  I understand that there is a push such that if parents object to this, they may be deemed abusive parents and lose custody of their children.

So young girls, long before they have ever thought of having children or getting married, are pushed into making permanent decisions about the rest of their lives.  Some will argue that the effects of the medicines are not permanent.  Surgeries certainly are.  And I understand that puberty blockers and then later hormone injections do have permanent ill effects.

These girls will never play on the boys’ sports team nor will they ever become comfortable changing in a boys’ locker room.  They will never create life in another woman’s womb, though they will still have that ability in their own, but they have made it as difficult as possible.  So what exactly do they think they are becoming, and what are we telling them that they can become? 

This is all absurd, wrong, and nothing other than child abuse.

What to do about the filibuster

The filibuster is in the news a lot lately and for all the wrong reasons. 

For those of you not familiar with the term, the filibuster is essentially a policy in the U.S. Senate that requires 60 votes out of a hundred on many bills in order for them to pass.

And we should know that when the Democrats were the minority party in the Senate, they never called for the elimination of the filibuster.  The Democrats were quite pleased that Senate rules gave them a voice in legislation they disagreed with. 

And when Democrats blocked Republican bills, because Republicans didn’t have the 60 votes, the Republicans did not try to eliminate it.

What we are forgetting here is that when a bill has the slimmest of majorities in the Senate, it is not usually just the Senate that is greatly divided on the bill but the whole country.  When major bills pass and they require the vote of the Vice President to do that to break a tie, expect that you are passing a bill that will only antagonize half the country, further the divide in our country, and show the American people that their government is not working on their behalf, and that the government doesn’t really care about the people. 

Most recently, the Senate rejected an 800-page bill to overhaul our entire election system and remove state control over them, which has been the rule from the beginning of our country.

In an 800-page, you can expect that there will be a lot of controversial issues.  When bills are controversial, no party should try to just ram them through.  That’s only going to rile people up.  That’s no way to run a country.

If bills are contentious, like this one, then break it down into smaller pieces and vote on them separately. 

 

 

 

 

What We Have Forgotten

In Chicago, there is a fierce debate in the City Council about changing the name of iconic Lake Shore Drive after the name of Chicago’s first non-indigenous settler, because he is black.

In Washington, Democrats want to overhaul the entire election system in our country with the barest possible majority in the Senate.

There is something wrong in each of these situations. 

We have forgotten the basic premise of our Constitution. 

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Our government is about forming a more perfect union.  We have never been more divided.  

Establishing justice.  Justice is about treating every person the same.  Now it depends on your economic status, your race, gender identity, and an ever-increasing number of factors that individualizes your justice. 

Ensuring domestic tranquility.  We have never had as much domestic turmoil and unrest as we do today. 

Providing for the common defense.  The oaths our leaders take recognize enemies, domestic and foreign.  We no longer even understand the roots of our country to know what a domestic enemy is.

Promoting the general welfare.  We have divided our country into a myriad of groups all competing for a share of the common pie such that there is no general welfare anymore.  Everybody has their own list of what they want.

So in Chicago, people are trying to ram through a change of name for Lake Shore Drive, knowing it is a divisive decision.  In Washington, the Democratic Party, with the slimmest majority possible, wants to eliminate the filibuster, so it can pass highly contentious bills with a split Senate that will only divide the country more.

The purpose of our government is for the welfare of the American people, to bring peace and tranquility, but it seems the government only wants to foster anger and division. 

We need to stop being in a such a rush to pass bills that we know are controversial and spend more time talking about them and trying to reach more of a consensus before we expect to make changes in our country or our city.

We are told that this unrest, this turmoil, all these divisions are a reckoning for centuries of abuse, mistreatment, and exploitation.

Yet for the last 55 years, since our immigration system was changed to favor minorities, our country has been flooded with minority immigrants, legal and not.  It seems that America, with all its flaws, is still the most attractive country in the world in the eyes of the world to move to.

What is lost in the discussion here is that changes that result from a conflict without efforts at conciliation only harbor and build resentment.  Many of the changes that are rushed through are only symbolic and do nothing to change the regular lives of anybody.

At the core of these divisions is the basic idea of what America is all about.  We all agree America is about rights, but we don’t agree on what that means.

The founding document of our country is the Declaration of Independence.  The founding principle of our country is that all people are created equal and that God gave inalienable rights to human beings.  And it is the role of government to protect those rights.

Being created equal meant that nobody has a divine or inherent right to rule over other people.

And inalienable rights are rights that precede and supersede government.  Government did not give them, and government cannot take them away.  Things you can do without the government’s permission, regulation, or interference.

Now we think of rights as things the government owes you, things that other people have to do for you, things that compel other people to change their behaviors. 

These rights require the government to spend enormous amounts of money, incurring ever-increasing levels of debt.  These rights require that the government take money from some people and give it to others.  These rights require people to do things they don’t want to do, to accommodate the rights of other people.

I believe we have lost our way as a country, and the divisions have created a fog that keeps us from seeing clearly the real issues that we need to talk about.  I hope this is a start.

 

a few thoughts on private schools

Contrary to some oft stated opinions, a tax cut is not a subsidy.  (Funding religious schools, June 17)

A Tribune letter found fault with a program that gave a tax break for those who provided scholarships to private schools.  I agree with the letter that the program helps far too few students, but I believe that far more tax cuts should be given.

When our kids were young, we wanted to sent them to a private school but couldn’t afford it.  It was then that I realized that 2/3 of my property taxes went for public schools.  So I am paying thousands of dollars for public education but can’t pay for my own kids’ education?  That’s absurd.

So since then, I have been advocating that anyone who sends their kids to a private school should get a tax break for the cost of private school up to the amount they would have paid for public schools in their taxes.

Is that a subsidy?  No, it’s called fairness.  Parents shouldn’t have to pay twice for their kids’ education. 

The letter also said that “the principle of the separation of church and state was written into the U.S. Constitution.”  No, the Constitution prohibited the idea of a national church, like they have in Europe, and particularly the UK.  The Queen of England is the head of the Anglican Church.  Our Founders did not want anything like that. 

They wanted moral and religious instruction in the public schools, because “religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”  [Northwest Ordinance, 1787]