Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
They aren’t even bothering with facts anymore. Tony Snow says there is a “War on God,” and our leftists just ritually denounce it as a big bunch of empty ravings as if Snow simply imagined the whole thing.
Well, Snow didn’t imagine the whole thing. We have become quite brittle and inflexible about the completeness of our secularism. Last year, for example, a valedictorian was unplugged during a graduation ceremony — for mentioning God.
Clark County School District officials and a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union say administrators followed federal law when they cut the microphone on Foothill High School valedictorian Brittany McComb as she began deviating from a pre-approved speech and reading from a version that mentioned God and contained biblical references.
“There should be no controversy here,” ACLU lawyer Allen Lichtenstein said. “It’s important for people to understand that a student was given a school-sponsored forum by a school and therefore, in essence, it was a school-sponsored speech.”
I find the ThinkProgress write-up interesting because it is sufficiently brazen to just come out and tell people what to think, with no foundation whatsoever…while accusing Tony Snow of doing exactly that. And the MSNBC write-up is interesting because it pretends something might be in violation of “federal law,” when it’s impossible to logically sustain that this is the case. That is, assuming the “federal law” is the First Amendment to the Constitution. The only specific rule of any kind mentioned by the article is a “policy” (which seems to have required that Ms. McComb be allowed to continue speaking).
To deny there is a War on God is, in my view, just plain silly. I think everyone with an attention span that exceeds any pre-existing agenda, would have to concede the word “God,” or any statement supportive of any monotheistic faith, has become a real hot-button item in any public forum whether “state-sponsored” or not. I think most of us have a lot of concerns about how distantly a non-religion-neutral thing can be related to state sponsorship, and still manage to generate this friction over church-state intermingling. Look how hard that school voucher thing was fought. You say I wanna take my kid out of public school, the district gives you a voucher for two or three thousand bucks, you use it to pay the tuition at a parochial school — oh dear oh dear, we have an establishment-clause issue. Yeah, the Supreme Court injected reason into it, and perhaps cemented it in, but why did the issue ever get that far?
Whoever is willing to be reasonable about this, would further have to concede this is a modern-day event with organized effort behind it. It’s not about original intent with regard to the Establishment Clause. Gosh & golly, if that were the case, let’s inspect Mr. “Wall of Separation” himself, Thomas Jefferson. Just dig up any of his correspondence. Choose some at random. Written while he was President, before, after, during his service as Secretary of State…anything you want. Pluck out the “Wall” letter to Nehemiah Dodge and the Danbury Baptists, if you want. See how he signs off. God, God, God, God, God, God, Heavenly Father, Father of Man, blah blah blah…this wasn’t a guy who thought we should sanitize our society, even our government sponsored society, from mention of a deity.
Nor did anyone of any importance imagine such an unyielding interpretation of the Establishent Clause for the next, oh, century and a half. The Day of Infamy speech, President Roosevelt says “with the unbounding determination of our people – we will gain the inevitable triumph – so help us God.” [emphasis mine]
A generation later, give or take, something happened. This is undeniable. You can’t make a speech like that now. Not without a lot of bellyaching and grousing sure to follow.
If that isn’t a “War on God,” then what do you call it?
Update: Roger Simon, coming across a transcript of the Hugh Hewitt show with West Wing writer Lawrence O’Donnell as guest, makes some interesting points about this. It seems, perhaps, the War on God not only exists — but exists because it is a War of Least Resistance.
HH: Okay. And do you believe, would you say the same things about Mohammed as you just said about Joseph Smith?
LO’D: Oh, well, I’m afraid of what the…that’s where I’m really afraid. I would like to criticize Islam much more than I do publicly, but I’m afraid for my life if I do.
HH: Well, that’s candid.
LO’D: Mormons are the nicest people in the world. They’re not going to ever…
HH: So you can be bigoted towards Mormons, because they’ll just send you a strudel.
LO’D: They’ll never take a shot at me. Those other people, I’m not going to say a word about them.
HH: They’ll send you a strudel. The Mormons will bake you a cake and be nice to you.
LO’D: I agree.
HH: Lawrence O’Donnell, I appreciate your candor.
I appreciate O’Donnell’s candor too, but perhaps not in the way that Hugh meant. In fact, when I first read those statements, my mouth dropped open.
They are particularly disturbing if you compare the estimated number of Muslims in the world (1.5 billion) to the number of Mormons (12 million) and the likelihood of either group being responsible for, say, a bombing in the New York subway. Of course, O’Donnell is clearly aware of this – all too clearly. And he has decided to opt out.
This means he has opted out as well of a whole series of the most important questions of our time, such as are there moderate Muslims, can Islam be reformed, what is the relationship between religious doctrine and violence, what is jihad, what is dhimmitude, can true democracy exist under Islam, is it terminally expansionist in its ideology, can women and homosexuals achieve their rights under Sharia law, what happens when Sharia expands into Western society, etc.
Huh. And they call us chickenhawks.
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