The View From 1776

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial gives chapter and verse about what is in store for you if the Democrats take control of Congress.

The Non-Contract With America

October 28, 2006; Page A6

A joke in Washington these days is that the only thing that can save the Republicans on Election Day is the Democrats. House Speaker-in-waiting Nancy Pelosi seems to get this joke, because with few exceptions she’s kept her Members tight-lipped and unspecific: As New York Senator Chuck Schumer has put it, why take the focus off the GOP?

This is in notable contrast to 1994, when the Gingrich Republicans ended a 40-year Democratic House majority by laying out a 10-item agenda known as the Contract with America. What Democrats are campaigning on this year is a Non-Contract with America—mostly generalities about “helping the middle class” and “ending the corruption in Washington.”

As a campaign strategy, this may well pay off. But if they do win, Democrats will have to fill their campaign vacuum with something, and the best clue to what that would be is what they’ve already proposed. We’ve taken some time to inspect these policy priorities and thought we’d share a few of the highlights, if that’s the right word. (Warning: Keep sharp objects away from drug-company and Wal-Mart shareholders.)

Tax increases. The Bush tax cuts expire in 2010, and any chance that they’ll be made permanent will vanish with a Democratic Congress. The question is whether Democrats will try to raise taxes even sooner. Most Democrats voted against the Bush tax cuts, but this week Ms. Pelosi said on CNBC’s Kudlow & Co. that “Democrats like tax cuts. We support middle-class tax cuts.”

The same isn’t true, however, for the “investor” tax cuts of 2003 that coincided with the acceleration of the current expansion. Ms. Pelosi says reversing these tax cuts “at the high end” would be “an earlier resort.” This would raise the top income and dividend tax rate back to 39.6% from 35%, and the capital-gains rate back to 20% from 15%, substantially raising the cost of new investment in the United States. Economist John Rutledge estimates that raising the dividend rate alone would reduce the value of the S&P 500 stocks by between 5% and 8.5%, roughly a $500 to $700 billion decline in the wealth of the 52% of American households that own stock.

"Paygo budgeting." President Bush would no doubt promise to veto any direct tax increase, but having the power of the purse would give Democrats plenty of leverage. What if they framed the political choice as a tax increase on “the rich” versus funding the war on terror?

Democrats have also pledged to restore so-called pay-as-you-go budget rules, which sound like a restraint on budget deficits but in practice restrain only tax cuts. They don’t apply to the growth of current entitlement programs or to domestic discretionary spending, only to tax cuts or new entitlements. This formula would probably take us back to the 1980s, when Democrats insisted on higher domestic spending while fighting Ronald Reagan’s increases in defense spending.

Health-care regulation. Big Pharma and private insurers, watch out. Michigan’s John Dingell, who would run the Energy and Commerce Committee, has co-sponsored the “Patients Before Profits Act” that would gut funding for the new Medicare Advantage plans that are proving so popular with seniors. Instead, he and the other Democrats who run health-care panels want to direct all seniors into a single government-run Medicare drug plan. Another proposal from top Democrats, the Medicare for All Act, would make all Americans, of any age, eligible for Medicare and pay for it with a new 1.7% payroll tax on workers and 7% on employers.

Ms. Pelosi has also pledged to pass, in her first 100 hours as Speaker, legislation to require the government to “negotiate lower drug prices.” That’s a euphemism for imposing price controls on new medicines, which can take as much as $800 million in research and development to bring to market. The actor Michael J. Fox is getting headlines for his ads in favor of Democrats who support stem-cell research, but price controls would do far more to delay the introduction of new treatments for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or cancer.

The union label. AFL-CIO headquarters would be rocking with hope once again. A job-killing hike in the minimum wage, to $7.25 from $5.15, would whisk through Congress, and we’d expect that Mr. Bush would sign it.

But another top priority for Democrats is the Employee Free Choice Act, which has at least 215 co-sponsors in the House and 44 in the Senate. This would allow labor to turn workplaces into union shops without an election or secret ballot. Unions would merely have to gather signatures from a majority of workers at a work site, which means labor organizers could strongarm employees who opposed such a petition. This would almost surely pass the House.

Democrats have also moved well to the left on trade since the Bill Clinton-Nafta era. Mr. Bush’s trade-promotion authority, allowing up-or-down votes on trade deals without amendment, expires next July, and there’s little chance House Democrats would extend it. The entire Democratic leadership opposed free trade with tiny Oman and with Central America, so deals now in the works with Vietnam and other countries would also be long shots. Sorry, Robert Rubin.

Energy. The Pelosi Democrats favor a “windfall” profits tax on oil companies and a virtual moratorium on drilling for more domestic oil in Alaska and on the outer continental shelf (where the U.S. may have more energy than Saudi Arabia). These policies would make the U.S. more dependent on foreign oil. There would also be an effort to pass new, and higher, fuel-mileage mandates, which would make things tougher on what’s left of Detroit. And lobbying would begin for the U.S. to sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and to subsidize, even more than Republicans already have, ethanol and other “alternative” fuels.

We could go on, in particular in the regulatory arena, where agencies would be under greater pressure to restrict mergers, among other things. But you get the idea. A Democratic triumph would produce a major shift in the national policy debate, and we can understand why Ms. Pelosi isn’t plastering most of this agenda on billboards around the country. Not everything would become law, to be sure, especially if Mr. Bush were finally willing to use his veto pen. However, elections have consequences, and we thought our readers might like to know about them before November 7.

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First Things
October 31, 2006

Elizabeth Powers writes:

An academic colleague of mine has carved out considerable expertise for himself in the area of slavery. I roused his ire once by asking if, two centuries from now, people might regard abortion the way we now do slavery. This was at a meeting of Enlightenment-period scholars. There is in all of us a tendency to see the past through the eyes of the present, what is called “provincialism of the present,” and this tendency extends to academics, perhaps especially so. Still, it always surprises me when I encounter it among those in my own discipline of eighteenth-century studies.

On this occasion, the paper that was read concerned a Frenchman, a friend of philosophes and in all other respects apparently a very enlightened person but who, as a man of considerable wealth, owned several ships on which Africans were transported to the New World to be sold as slaves. In the Q&A, one of those present shook his head and, with bewilderment, remarked that the acceptance of slavery, especially in one who was otherwise so enlightened, was beyond his comprehension. At which point I piped up with my question, to the ire of the colleague who had made the presentation and, I think, of several others present.

The slaves were in time freed, which certainly makes a huge difference in evaluating the similarities between abortion and slavery. In addition, the evil of the latter is, in a real sense, always present to us, since the descendants of slaves live on, whereas the aborted have no legacy. In the long run, however, abortion may achieve, like slavery, its own political and moral turn, simply because those who most favor abortion rights are leaving behind fewer children who share and will transmit their values.

There is an enormous personal investment in having and raising children, and it’s a wonder that anyone makes the sacrifice anymore. Right after September 11, however, while reading the small capsule biographies in the New York Times of the victims of the terrorist attacks, I was struck by how many children they left behind. I refer not simply to firefighters, who have legendarily large numbers of children, but to men and women in white-collar jobs. And not just two or three children but five or six even. About the same time I began to notice how many young children there were on the Upper West Side where I live. Children are indeed coming back, even among the very well off, which you must be to live on the Upper West Side with children. It is becoming a far-different place from when I first moved here in 1980.

Another feature of the Upper West Side is immigrant labor: construction, restaurants, laundries, housecleaning, childcare. At a Senate Judiciary hearing on the issue of immigration held in Philadelphia this past summer, New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, claimed that the city’s economy would be a “shell of itself” if illegal immigrants were deported. Since our mayor appears to be angling to be a presidential candidate, it is worth placing his comments within the framework of the debate over slavery. As a prominent liberal, Mr. Bloomberg no doubt finds the idea of slavery abhorrent. Though his comment on the collapse of the city’s economy might be a bit hyperbolic for the normally sober mayor, our way of life, like that of plantation owners in the pre–Civil War South, would be compromised without the cheap labor provided by illegals who are underpaid, exploited, and doubtless without health insurance. It is interesting how liberals go on about the uninsured employees of Wal-Mart, but ignore the health woes of the more than one million illegals in this city, including the nannies they employ.

I will concede an important difference between slavery and the exploitation of cheap labor: Like my own Irish ancestors, the current crop of foreign workers are more or less willingly exploited, earning here more than they would back home. The same goes for those laboring in sweatshops in China, Bangladesh, and Peru. In this connection, I recall an anecdote of a man who taught English a few years back in a small college in the backwoods of China. He was impressed with how readily his Chinese students, in contrast to American students, took to studying sonnets, until he realized their alternative: slaving away in rice fields in water up to their ankles for the rest of their lives. In their own way, all these people are shaping their own future.

Mr. Bloomberg, also an active supporter of abortion, made another comment at the hearing in Philadelphia that sheds some light on the approach of the enlightened to social issues. On border control, he said: “You might as well sit on the beach and tell the tide not to come in.” To Mr. Bloomberg, this was no doubt the voice of reason speaking. It reminds me of the voice of reason of abortion advocates: “You can’t stop kids from having sex, but you can teach them to have it responsibly,” as if having sex at fifteen could be considered responsible. Responding to that voice of reason, the country has spent untold millions of dollars on sex education and, in the process, produced ludicrously opposite consequences. Since Roe v. Wade, we have had more than forty million abortions in America, a disproportionate number of them by black women. That’s the loss of a lot of jobs for schoolteachers (empty classrooms), not to mention the loss of workers who would be filling the jobs for which illegals are now competing. For those who say our citizens wouldn’t work for low wages, uncontrolled immigration (like “free” sex) has driven down the value of labor (of sex).

The ancient Egyptians believed that the afterlife was a continuation of the present and that the deceased would be required to fulfill the duties expected of them while alive, including regular labor for government projects. A magical solution, so to speak, to this onerous eternal burden was the shawabti, a figurine inscribed with spells from the Book of the Dead, which would be animated when required to perform the labor. Over time, the numbers of shawabtis in the tomb grew, “until there was a figurine provided for every day of the year, to insure an eternity of relaxation for the owner of the tomb.”

Many Americans are happy with the proliferation of contemporary shawabtis, so long as they deliver sushi, iron shirts, and mow lawns. Unlike the fabricated Egyptian variety, however, they are real people who also propagate. What will their lives be like? What will their effect on us be? I use the future tense, because, whatever the benefits or burdens of immigration (terrorism? political radicalization?), it is future generations who will most feel its impact. There is a correlation between advocacy of abortion and uncontrolled immigration, which comes down to an unwillingness to make sacrifices for the weal of future generations.

Elizabeth Powers is currently completing a memoir of American life since the 1950s.

In Understanding the Paleoconservative Perspective on Life, Dr. Dan Phillips notes the political weakness of basing opposition to abortion solely on the ground of an infant’s right to live. 

Not that he disagrees with that position, but that it pits one asserted right against another, the infant’s right to live vs a woman’s right to control her body.  It reduces the political argument to “he says” vs “she says.”

What is almost impossible to counter-argue is:

Not only is it wrong to murder, it is particularly wrong to kill your own child. This is intuitive. Only the most rigorous universalist would dispute it....

In some cases the law can enforce this obligation. Parents are not at liberty to just abandon or “take care of” their “unwanted” or “inconvenient” child. The father can be held financially liable for his child if paternity is established. Parents are required to meet the basic needs of their child lest they be charged with neglect. In the eyes of the law and in the estimation of society, this parent/child bond and obligation is NOT VOLUNTARY. It is a duty. So in the case of abortion, on what grounds does this bond and obligation become a matter of choice when the child is in the womb?

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Barton Bennett called my attention to the following article by Paul Belien, the ever-astute editor of the Brussels Journal, a lonely voice standing for truth in the capitol of the atheistic and socialistic EU.

Belien recounts evidence of apathy and suicidal inertia in the face of the Islamic onslaught.  The real key is the following quotation:

Secularists, it seems to me, are also less keen on fighting. Since they do not believe in an afterlife, this life is the only thing they have to lose. Hence they will rather accept submission than fight. Like the German feminist Broder referred to, they prefer to be raped than to resist. 

“If faith collapses, civilization goes with it,” says Bethell. That is the real cause of the closing of civilization in Europe. Islamization is simply the consequence. The very word Islam means “submission” and the secularists have submitted already. Many Europeans have already become Muslims, though they do not realize it or do not want to admit it.

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Published on The Brussels Journaal

THE RAPE OF EUROPE

By Paul Belien
2006-10-25

The German author Henryk M. Broder recently told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant (12 October) that young Europeans who love freedom, better emigrate. Europe as we know it will no longer exist 20 years from now. Whilst sitting on a terrace in Berlin, Broder pointed to the other customers and the passers-by and said melancholically: “We are watching the world of yesterday.”

Europe is turning Muslim. As Broder is sixty years old he is not going to emigrate himself. “I am too old,” he said. However, he urged young people to get out and “move to Australia or New Zealand. That is the only option they have if they want to avoid the plagues that will turn the old continent uninhabitable.”
Many Germans and Dutch, apparently, did not wait for Broder’s advice. The number of emigrants leaving the Netherlands and Germany has already surpassed the number of immigrants moving in. One does not have to be prophetic to predict, like Henryk Broder, that Europe is becoming Islamic. Just consider the demographics. The number of Muslims in contemporary Europe is estimated to be 50 million. It is expected to double in twenty years. By 2025, one third of all European children will be born to Muslim families. Today Mohammed is already the most popular name for new-born boys in Brussels, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and other major European cities.

Broder is convinced that the Europeans are not willing to oppose islamization. “The dominant ethos,” he told De Volkskrant, “is perfectly voiced by the stupid blonde woman author with whom I recently debated. She said that it is sometimes better to let yourself be raped than to risk serious injuries while resisting. She said it is sometimes better to avoid fighting than run the risk of death.”

In a recent op-ed piece in the Brussels newspaper De Standaard (23 October) the Dutch (gay and self-declared “humanist”) author Oscar Van den Boogaard refers to Broder’s interview. Van den Boogaard says that to him coping with the islamization of Europe is like “a process of mourning.” He is overwhelmed by a “feeling of sadness.” “I am not a warrior,” he says, “but who is? I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

As Tom Bethell wrote in this month’s American Spectator: “Just at the most basic level of demography the secular-humanist option is not working.” But there is more to it than the fact that non-religious people tend not to have as many children as religious people, because many of them prefer to “enjoy” freedom rather than renounce it for the sake of children. Secularists, it seems to me, are also less keen on fighting. Since they do not believe in an afterlife, this life is the only thing they have to lose. Hence they will rather accept submission than fight. Like the German feminist Broder referred to, they prefer to be raped than to resist.

“If faith collapses, civilization goes with it,” says Bethell. That is the real cause of the closing of civilization in Europe. Islamization is simply the consequence. The very word Islam means “submission” and the secularists have submitted already. Many Europeans have already become Muslims, though they do not realize it or do not want to admit it.

Some of the people I meet in the U.S. are particularly worried about the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. They are correct when they fear that anti-Semitism is also on the rise among non-immigrant Europeans. The latter hate people with a fighting spirit. Contemporary anti-Semitism in Europe (at least when coming from native Europeans) is related to anti-Americanism. People who are not prepared to resist and are eager to submit, hate others who do not want to submit and are prepared to fight. They hate them because they are afraid that the latter will endanger their lives as well. In their view everyone must submit.

This is why they have come to hate Israel and America so much, and the small band of European “islamophobes” who dare to talk about what they see happening around them. West Europeans have to choose between submission (islam) or death. I fear, like Broder, that they have chosen submission – just like in former days when they preferred to be red rather than dead.

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Liberal-socialists, with our educational system in the vanguard, have made diversity into an end in itself, a principle of materialistic social justice.

In education, for example, the goal of diversity is elevated to a higher status than providing the best possible education for students.  Diversity is, not an educational principle, but a correlate to Lenin’s program to create the New Soviet Man via material factors imposed by intellectuals.  Students are somehow to be made better by the corruption of a system that supposedly is devoted to academic excellence.

As economist Thomas Sowell has so articulately observed many times, poorly prepared students, of whatever race, gain nothing by being admitted to colleges with academic standards beyond their reach.  Either the better students are held back, or the poorly prepared students are discouraged and eventually drop out.  Nothing is gained by the mendacity of liberal-progressive educators giving every student a minimum grade of B.  Victims of grade-inflation have simply been set up for failure and embittered cynicism in real-world job competition.

Less well prepared students can get a good education at colleges with less stringent academic standards.  Students who earn Bs and As in those colleges can have the priceless gift of real self-respect based on their own hard work.

Diversity of the liberal-progressive stripe has disastrous consequences for the survival of the United States.  Economically we see its results in the widening gap between linguistic, mathematical, and scientific competence of average American graduates and their overseas counterparts.  In an increasingly technical world, the United States is suffering, not only from inflated production costs arising from the welfare state and unionism, but from falling behind in the innovation curve. 

We can celebrate the diversity of our student bodies, but at the cost of fewer and fewer Nobel Prizes for science awarded to Americans in the future, along with more and more manufacturing transferred overseas.

At a more fundamental level, diversity is moral relativism masquerading as virtue.  Liberal-progressives paint diversity as a democratic principle of equality.  It is, in fact, the opposite.  Rather than supporting an equal opportunity on the basis of merit, the doctrine of diversity confers special privileges based on non-essential factors such race and ethnicity.

Morality, a unifying factor essential for social survival, is replaced by the selfishness implicit in diversity, which subtly teaches the view that gratifying personal desires is more important than voluntarily working with others for the common good. 

If any culture, and any set of moral standards (except, of course, for those of Judeo-Christianity), is as good as the next, why should we be surprised when business executives behave as they did in Enron and Tyco?  If highly-qualified students are passed over in the college admission process for manifestly less qualified students, only for reasons of diversity, how can qualified students avoid cynicism about society’s rules?

The Latin roots of the word diversity mean to bend apart, to diverge, in other words the opposite of unity.  In that sense, diversity is opposed to the concept of the United States itself: e pluribus unum, i.e., one nation from many colonies and many peoples.

Had diversity in the liberal-progressive sense been the order of the day, there would have been no War of Independence in 1776 and no Constitution in 1787-89.  The colonies would have remained independent units, relishing their diversity, but unable to resist the tyranny imposed by Parliament and George III.

How did we fall off the tracks?

In the early decades of the 20th century, Columbia University sociologist Franz Boas and his acolytes Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead sold the modernist intellectuals in Greenwich Village the socialistic hypothesis that cultures and human behavior standards are relativistic and merely the product of their surrounding material circumstances of economy and geography. 

Materialistic factors – government regulation, income redistribution, and education – were theoretically capable of perfecting society, but only if society’s common cultural standards could first be removed.  The unifying characteristics that Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America in 1833 – the Christian religion and respect for tradition and the rule of law – had to give way to the intellectual vision of a Brave New World. 

Along with diversity, we got the doctrine of multi-cultural education in the 1970s.

Diversity as an iconic end in itself leaves us defenseless against La Raza’s Reconquista movement to impose Hispanic culture and the Spanish language upon the Southwestern and Western states and, ultimately, to separate them from the United States and incorporate them into Mexico.

Worse, the doctrine of diversity supports the anti-Americanism rampant on American college campuses.  Making diversity an educational goal leaves students convinced that 9/11 was our fault, that al Queda was merely redressing justifiable grievances against the feeble vestiges of Judaism and Christianity in our nation.

None of that is to disparage the multitudes of national, racial,ethnic, and linguistic origins of our burgeoning population.  It is to say rather that those people coming here from so many different parts of the world do so to enjoy the benefits of living in a nation unified by common understandings about morality, private property rights, the rule of law, individual responsibility, and the work ethic.

Far better than the liberal-progressive worship of diversity is returning to the paradigm of the melting pot that prevailed at the beginning of the 20th century.  Let every national, ethnic, and language group proudly celebrate its heritage and pass that heritage along to its children.  But let all of us be unified, not divided, as one nation seeking the common good.

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In an editorial to be published Sunday, October 29th, the Post opines:

WHAT DEMOCRATS WOULD DO

Their agenda is a hodgepodge of good ideas, bad ideas and no ideas.

Sunday, October 29, 2006; B06

PERHAPS, AS President Bush says, it’s too early for Democrats to be “measuring their drapes” in congressional leadership offices. But with it looking increasingly as if Democrats, after 12 years in the minority, will take over the House at least, it’s worth looking at their stated agenda—“A New Direction for America”—for a glimpse at what a Democratic majority might entail.

On national security, the House Democrats’ plan offers more goals than details. Who could disagree with promises to “eliminate Osama Bin Laden, destroy terrorist networks like al-Qaeda, finish the job in Afghanistan and end the threat posed by the Taliban” or “redouble efforts to stop nuclear weapons development in Iran and North Korea?” But the hard part—on which Democrats offer no details—is how that is to be done.

On Iraq in particular, the agenda calls for “the responsible redeployment of U.S. forces,” with “Iraqis assuming primary responsibility for securing and governing their country.” Again, what’s missing are the details of what “responsible redeployment” might look like. “Insist that Iraqis make the political compromises necessary to unite their country and defeat the insurgency,” the Democrats say. Okay, what if that insistence doesn’t yield the desired result?

As to another piece of the security agenda, energy independence, the Democrats assert that they will “achieve energy independence for America by 2020 by eliminating reliance on oil from the Middle East and other unstable regions of the world”—a super-sized version of Mr. Bush’s pledge to “replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.” The Democratic plan for doing this—tax credits and research funds—sounds remarkably like the Bush approach, down to increased use of switch-grass ethanol. Unlike the president, the Democrats rightly frame energy independence as an environmental as well as national security issue; like the president, they’re unwilling—for the obvious reason that they don’t want to be branded as tax-raisers—to recommend a carbon tax.

The agenda is heavy on ideas—raising the minimum wage, letting the government negotiate Medicare drug prices—that may have more popular appeal than real-world impact, though we agree it’s past time for the minimum wage to go up. Other proposals sound good but are bad policy. Screening 100 percent of cargo containers at the point of origin would be expensive, time-consuming and impractical. The vow to “prevent outsourcing of critical components of our national security infrastructure—such as ports, airports and mass transit—to foreign interests that put America at risk” is more Dubai ports demagoguery.

Making the first $3,000 of college tuition tax deductible would be a wasteful way—albeit one that resonates with voters—of ensuring affordability if Democrats don’t impose an income cutoff; none is mentioned in the proposal. The laudable pledge to lift the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research passed the Republican-controlled House and would almost certainly again face a presidential veto.

The Democrats promise a return to “pay as you go” budget discipline, something that is sorely overdue. But the agenda does not then explain how to pay for a raft of new spending and tax credits, from cutting college loan interest rates in half to doubling funding for basic research to giving a $1,000 match to middle- and working-class families that contribute at least that much to a retirement account.

The agenda is best on outlining a specific new ethics package (though it’s questionable whether even a Democratic-controlled Senate would be willing to go along) and promising a legislative process that is more open and fair to the minority. It’s weakest in what it doesn’t say about how to tackle the looming surge in entitlement spending. Predictably, Democrats renew their vow not to “privatize Social Security in whole or in part”; equally predictably, they are silent about what, precisely, they would do to put Social Security and, even more important, Medicare on a sustainable and affordable course. Also unmentioned are trade and immigration, issues on which the party, as well as voters, are divided.

Campaign documents are, almost by definition, gauzy things—long on poll-tested rhetoric and short on specifics. Elections aren’t the best time for politicians to be playing up sacrifice and hard choices. House Democrats say their document isn’t meant to be a comprehensive menu, just an indication of priorities. But Democrats will need to do better than what they’ve proposed in 2006 if they are given the chance to govern in 2007.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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What’s Really Scary This Halloween

By Nathan Tabor

These are the nights when schools around America are filled with Harry Potters, soldiers, Draculas, and Disney princesses—at least those schools that still observe Halloween.  There may be parades, parties, and picture-taking—and enough candy to keep dentists’ chairs occupied for the next year.

But this Halloween I find myself contemplating something scarier than any Halloween fright mask—even a Nancy Pelosi “Speaker of the House” mask.  It’s the thought of how money is spent in the name of educating the next generation.

A survey cited by National Public Radio in 2004 showed that 47 percent of schools teach something dubbed “abstinence-plus.” The theory behind this sexual school of thought is that, while abstinence is best, some students will simply refuse to abstain, so schools should teach kids about condoms and contraception as well.  But, at a time when technology is advancing faster than our hands can fly across a computer keyboard, should we really be spending part of the school day teaching kids how to put on condoms?  If parents are responsible for ensuring that their children are potty-trained by kindergarten, shouldn’t it be up to parents to make sure their offspring learn about the birds and the bees? 

Or consider this:  A national poll reported by CBS News two years ago indicated that Americans don’t believe in human evolution.  Fifty-five percent said God created humans in their present form, i.e., no apes were involved in the creation of man and woman.  And yet, school districts throughout the U.S. continue to waste their precious resources teaching children that man evolved from monkeys.  It seems to me that, if a child believes that he or she has an ancestor who’s an ape, he or she is more likely to behave like one.

And then there’s the biggest money-waster—the failure to teach children the difference between right and wrong.  The fancy name for the problem is moral relativism.  It’s a concept that’s preached in the mainstream media everyday:  “No one should force his or her moral values on anyone else…That’s your truth, but not my truth…Don’t post your Ten Commandments here.” There is a religion taught in public schools—it’s just not the Judeo-Christian kind.  It’s a religion dedicated to the principles of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Education Association.  God is irrelevant; the state is divine; and everyone should take an oath of “tolerance”—meaning an acceptance of whatever kind of deviant lifestyle is being promoted at the moment on television.

Why not spend some of our tax dollars teaching schoolchildren that life really means something—that every child in the womb deserves a chance at life?  Let’s face it—if you teach a student that killing an unborn child is acceptable, what’s to prevent that child from growing into a teenager who thinks it’s O.K. to pick up a gun and shoot someone?  It doesn’t matter whether the weapon is a semi-automatic or a scalpel—a killing is a killing. 

In the kind of school budget that I’m proposing, we’ve cut out money for condom education, evolution propaganda, liberal indoctrination, and abortion promotion.  That leaves quite a bit of money left.  And we should be using that money to make schools safer and teenagers more disciplined.

Let’s take some of the leftover cash and spend it on metal detectors.  After all, a middle school student’s life is just as precious as a business traveler’s.  If we care enough about airborne terrorism to place metal detectors in airports, we should care enough about school-based terrorism to install detectors in schools.  It’s a shame that we would have to take this step but, with school shootings becoming a routine part of the headlines, it’s now necessary.

And finally, let’s devote some money for boot camps for teens.  It’s the only way to get some teenagers in shape—and out of prison.

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Nathan Tabor’s website is The Conservative Voice
http://www.theconservativevoice.com/

A New York Times editorial dated October 26, 2006, proclaims, “The New Jersey Supreme Court brought the United States a little closer to the ideal of equality yesterday when it ruled that the state’s Constitution requires that committed same-sex couples be accorded the same rights as married heterosexual couples.”

The Times editorial implicitly presumes that the “ideal of equality” means entitlement to actual equality in all respects.  Same-sex marriage is just the latest in a long list of socialist intellectuals’ demands that judicial pronouncement, if not statute law, mandate equality of condition, rather than equality of opportunity.

Of course, even for the Times, equality has limits.  There is no thought to equal protection of an infant’s right to life, when weighed against the “right” to sexual promiscuity implicit in the pro-choice advocacy of abortion.

Our nation was founded on a completely different understanding of equality.  Not until President Lyndon Johnson’s full-bore-socialist Great Society did the politicians adopt the New York Times’s definition of equality as entitlement, rather than opportunity.

English political traditions brought to North America in the early 17th century remained the founding traditions of the United States in the 18th century, when the Constitution was written.  In that framework, equality meant only that everyone was entitled to equal treatment under the law, that the ruler, as well as the ruled, was subject to a higher law of God-given morality. 

The Bill of Rights was intended, not to legislate equality, but to safeguard individuals’ natural-law political liberties from arbitrary government power.  One inescapable consequence of the individuality protected by the Bill of Rights is the absolute impossibility of uniform equality in social station, distinction, and income.

James Madison, a principal architect of the Constitution, explained its principles in the Federalist Papers.  In Federalist No. 10, he wrote,

"The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties."

Whence came the 180-degree distortion in the meaning of equality?

The New York Times’s inclusion of same-sex marriage within the “ideal of equality” is part of the modernist philosophical disillusion that emerged from the disaster of the First World War and the Soviet Revolution of 1917.  A few adjustments were required to Auguste Comte’s 1830s gnostic doctrine of the “inevitable laws of history,” which theoretically had led Western civilization out of bondage under religion and into the new scientific age.

Western intellectuals, artists, musicians, and writers began to question all of their previous certainties about the inevitability of “progress” toward enlightened, socialistic government around the world.  Disillusion led to cultural destruction. 

Western civilization’s art and literary forms were rejected, along with belief in God, Judaism, and Christianity.  The unspoken expectation was that the act of tearing down the structure of society would result in its replacement with a Brave New World, much better than the old.

With the Soviet Union’s purported socialistic equality as a model, Greenwich Village artists, musicians, journalists, novelists, and playwrights in the 1920s disparaged American traditions as hypocrisy and championed new art forms.  Freudian psychology became fashionable, substituting worship of our genitals and our sexual urges for worship of God. 

The stage was set for New York Times editorialists to crawl out of the socialist sewer with their conception of equality.

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It is nothing less than criminal to tell the voting public that reverting to higher taxes to fund new welfare-state spending is more important than defending our nation against the barbarism of Islamic jihad.

Jeff Lukens gives us the personal viewpoint of a parent whose son is fighting for us, while Democrats and liberal Republicans think only of gratifying hedonistic lusts on the home front.

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FOLKS, LET’S TALK SERIOUSLY ABOUT THE WAR

By Jeff Lukens

My 21-year-old son recently joined the Army reserves, and is now in basic training at Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri. He writes to tell me that his drill sergeants are telling him that, reservist or not, get ready to go to Iraq. He has no reason to doubt them. For my son, it is a reckoning he calmly accepts.

What can I say? He wants to serve his country, and I couldn’t be more proud of him.

I’m just a regular guy like millions of people everywhere who love this country. I was in the Army years ago, but they never deployed me to a war zone. The thought of my son going into one sets me back a bit. When I think about the thousands of parents who have sons and daughters over there already, I get a bit choked. And when I think about those who have had their child die over there, I go beyond choked. God forbid . . . it could happen to my son too.

We’ve all heard fellow Americans badmouthing our country while military personnel overseas are risking their lives. They say they support the troops but they don’t support the war. Well, that’s baloney. It’s the same thing.

They say we shouldn’t question their patriotism either. Well, that’s baloney too. To actively root for our side to loose just so they can further their politics is more than unpatriotic. It’s criminal.

Let’s face it; many politicians, media people and others simply don’t care about this country. They don’t care about you or me, my son or your daughter. They’re not willing to make any sacrifices.

Folks, it’s us, the regular people who need to own the issue of the war on terror because we’re the only ones who are serious about fighting it.

We’ve all witnessed the political pretenders who say they voted for the Iraq war, but then have no problem when leaked classified information is used against it. Nothing is prohibited in their two-faced attempt to gain power, even when their tactics do our nation lasting harm.

The spin is that, by fighting terrorists, we somehow are the ones creating the terrorists. That thinking harkens back to the pre-9/11 days of waiting to be attacked before responding. What these people don’t understand is that our government’s most sacred duty is to protect the American people.

Think about it. After 9/11, there were just a few options open to us and all involved invading somebody. The only way to fight terrorism was to go on the offense and hit them so hard that they can’t hit back. And so we did. But invading Afghanistan alone was not enough to alter the root causes of terrorism.

The real reason for the Iraq invasion was that it was strategically necessary to influence the entire Middle East. The invasion was meant to show that we meant business in this war against al Qaeda.

Much complex analysis lay behind U.S. strategy, and much of its basis was too complex to present to the public. So, for right or wrong, WMD became the selling point for the invasion of Iraq.

The leaders in Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia have no doubt noticed the large presence of U.S. ground and air forces within easy striking distance of their countries. It no doubt is a major reason why they no longer support Al Qaeda, when they tolerated it - and even funded it - before.

So, now we have established a fledgling democracy in Iraq, and sectarian violence has become a problem. The government cannot be our ally if it is itself allied with terrorists. And terrorists are exactly what Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army are. We should’ve taken them out in 2004. Now we need to finish that job.

But this is a secondary issue. We cannot allow disappointments to turn to disillusionment about our reasons for engaging in this war. Poor decisions can surely make matters much worse.

Wavering members of congress have been calling for a timetable for a withdrawal from Iraq. This is all hot air in an attempt to score political points. They’ll say anything to get elected. Nowhere in the history of warfare has a nation pre-announced such a timetable to their enemies. It would be disastrous.
Whether democracy succeeds in Iraq is up to the Iraqi people, not us. But they are watching our domestic politics too, and many more may decide to side with our enemies based on what the “loyal opposition” in Washington is doing to undermine the war. We cannot afford such irresponsibility.

It is naive to think that by getting out of Iraq, we can spare ourselves from the clash between radical Islam and the rest of the world. With Iran next door moving steadily toward a nuclear bomb, the question now is whether we are going to remain serious about terrorism, or frivolously pretend it is no longer important.

It’s up to us, the ones with a personal stake in winning the war, to make our voices heard. We owe that to our nation’s future. And we owe it to our sons and daughters who wear its uniform.

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Jeff Lukens writes engaging opinion columns from a fresh, conservative point of view. He is also a Staff Writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc., a non-profit (501c3) coalition of writers and grass-roots media outlets. He can be contacted through his website at http://www.jefflukens.com