Defining Deviancy Down

Have we had enough? It’s beginning to look that way. The final straw? Maybe. Kids, 11-13, can now get birth control pills at Portland’s King Middle School, possibly without their parents’ knowledge. Boys’ voices haven’t changed yet but the school gives them condoms. Five students told the nurse they were sexually active and she decided that the school should prescribe them birth control. The School Committee in that bluest city of the very blue state of Maine agreed with a 7-2 vote. According to the Portland Press Herald: “Of 134 students who visited King's health center during the 2006-07 school year, five students, or 4 percent, reported having sexual intercourse, said Amanda Rowe, lead nurse in Portland's school health centers. ‘This is a service that is totally needed,’ Rowe said. ‘It’s about very few kids, but they are kids who don’t have the same opportunities and access as other students.’”

Opportunities? What is she talking about? She wants to offer them opportunities to behave irresponsibly and avoid some of the consequences? What will she offer next? A taxi service to Planned Parenthood’s Abortion Clinic? Or, is she offering the rest of us an opportunity to keep our blinders on, to avoid taking a hard look at how low our culture has sunk? Students need parental permission to take Tylenol, but not to take strong hormonal birth control pills or injections - or even to get an abortion. Parents of school kids might object if they knew their unborn grandchildren were going to be killed. Better that they never know there was a pregnancy. What they don’t know won’t hurt them.

The blue “progressives” who rule this state believe we must catch up to Canada and Europe with their enlightened permissiveness and socialized medicine. They agree with Hillary Clinton that It Takes A Village to raise a child and parents sometimes get in the way. Some mothers and fathers here in Maine don’t believe the varied versions of sexuality so popular in Portland are wonderful things. They still think a lot of them are just plain wrong and they don’t want parades to celebrate them. So it becomes necessary for Hillary Clinton’s Village People to go around bigoted parents and use schools to influence their kids “progressively” - make students more like those sophisticated Europeans. It’s for the children.

When the story broke, Maine’s Christian Civic League (CCL) demanded that state Attorney General Stephen Rowe investigate Portland’s school-based health clinics for not reporting underage sexual activity as Maine state law requires. That was awkward, because Rowe is married to Amanda Rowe, the lead nurse who wants to pass out the birth control. Cumberland County District Attorney Stephanie Anderson did investigate, however, and determined that the CCL was right - sexual activity by thirteen-year-olds violates Maine law and has to be reported. According to the Press Herald:

Although Portland officials intend to comply with the law, exactly what the law requires remains unclear, [Portland City Attorney Gary] Wood said. Having sex with a 13-year-old is clearly illegal, he said, but the law doesn't address the possibility of the other person involved being 13 years old, too. "I think (Anderson) has raised a legitimate point," Wood said. "I'm just not sure that consensual sexual activity (between two 13-year-olds) constitutes abuse." If Anderson's office received a report of two 13-year-olds having sex, she said, each minor would be considered a victim and a perpetrator and the case likely wouldn't be prosecuted. Wood said he plans to seek guidance from Maine Attorney General Steven Rowe.”

Around and around it goes. Where the buck stops, nobody knows - not in Portland anyway. Maybe the Village People there can look to those sophisticated Europeans for guidance about what to do next. An Oslo, Norway paper reported last week that:

Norwegians woke up Tuesday morning to news that a respected Oslo pre-school teacher, backed by child psychologists, thinks children should be allowed to openly express their own sexuality, not least through sex play and games in the local day care centers known as barnehager, or kindergartens. . . . Pia Friis, leader of the popular Bjerkealleen Barnehage in Oslo and a well-known pre-school educator, told newspaper Dagbladet on Tuesday that children should be allowed to express their own sexuality at day care centers. She doesn't want to stifle what comes naturally. Children, she said, should be able "to look at each other and examine each other's bodies. They can play doctor, play mother and father, dance naked and masturbate.”

I wish I were making all this up but, sadly, I’m not. It’s outrageous of course, but so was the idea of “marriage” between two men or two women only ten years ago. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said four decades ago, we’re “defining deviancy down.” How low can we go? There’s evidence that we may finally be nearing bottom. In Norway, there’s a backlash to the idea of naked, masturbating kindergarteners similar to the backlash Portland’s Village People are feeling about their idea of birth control for eleven-year-olds. Have people finally had enough? Maybe. About time, huh?

Survey Said . . .

“The Portland School Committee voted last night to give birth control pills to middle schoolers,” I told the class, holding up a copy of the Portland Press Herald. Several students were quick to tell me and each other that they had seen the story on the news. “Okay! one person speak at a time! Please!” I said over the din. “Raise your hand if you have something to say. Can one of you sum this up?”

A girl down back said, “Kids at the King Middle School will be able to get birth control pills if their parents give permission, but they won’t necessarily know about it.” Others were holding up their hands enthusiastically, waiting for me to call on them.

“That sounds contradictory,” I said. “Parents give permission, but they might not know about their kid getting birth control pills?”

“It’s confusing,” she said, “but parents give permission for their child to go to the health clinic for something else. Then the nurse, or whoever, might give them birth control and the parents won’t know. There’s a confidentiality thing going on with the kid and the nurse.”

“I get it,” I said.

“Why would sixth graders need birth control, Mr. McLaughlin?” asked a boy.

“Good question,” I answered. “It says here in the sidebar that: ‘The percentage of middle school students in Maine who reported having sexual intercourse dropped from 23 percent in 1997 to 13 percent in 2005, according to the Maine Youth Risk Behavior Survey.’ Now you guys filled out that survey in 2005 when you were in sixth grade,” I continued, “and you can see that the results from it are being used here to justify the school committee’s decision. Do you think the surveys are accurate?”

They looked at each other for a second, seemingly perplexed. “Oh yeah,” said a girl. “I remember that.” Several others nodded as they recalled the survey too.

“The survey indicated that, back in 1997 when you were only three years old, about one out of four middle schoolers were having sex,” I continued. “So, of course you were too young to know if that’s accurate or not. But you were eleven when you filled out the survey in 2005 and those results indicated that one in eight middle schoolers were having sex. Those are your answers and the answers from other kids around the state that are being used here. Does that one-out-of-eight statistic sound right to you?”

“You can’t go by what kids wrote on those,” said a boy. Most other students also voiced skepticism. A dozen side conversations sprang up.

“Okay,! Okay!” I said, trying to bring them all back. “Why not?”

“Nobody’s going to tell the truth on those,” someone said.

“Why not?” I asked again. They all wanted to talk at once. “One at a time!” I said again. Raise your hands!”

“First of all,” said a girl, “kids would be afraid the teacher would know what they wrote.”

“But they were supposed to be anonymous,” I said. “You didn’t put your name on them.”

“But teachers would know what your handwriting looked like and they could find out,” she said.

“Or they’d get the results back from the state saying there were X number of kids at Molly Ockett Middle School having sex, and the teacher could probably figure out who those kids were,” said another student. “They sort of suspect already.”

“Or they’d be afraid the kid sitting beside them would see what they wrote,” said another.

“I see,” I said. “So, were the results under-reporting sexual activity among middle school kids? Over-reporting it? Or were they just unreliable?” I asked them.

“Well,” said a boy, “Boys would probably put that they were having sex more than they really were, and girls would probably put that they were having it less. That’s the way it is.”

“I see. So would they balance each other out?”

“It’s all unreliable,” said a girl. “They shouldn’t go by what was on those surveys.”

“I think kids would be more tempted to have sex if the school passed out birth control pills,” said a boy.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Because it’s like the school is saying it’s okay when they give students pills for it.”

I posed the question to several classes. Did they think middle school students were more likely to have sex if they got pills from the school? Overwhelmingly, they did think so. There were two or three in each group who didn’t, saying that kids who decided to have sex were going to do it anyway, no matter what the school did.

“This story is getting a lot of attention across the country,” I told them. “We haven’t heard the last on it. Keep watching the news, okay?”

Degree of Value?

Know any young people with college degrees working in restaurants, retail stores, or somewhere else for which their degree is worthless? Do they owe tens of thousands in student loans? There are lots of them out there. Perhaps they are reevaluating the worth of a college education. I’m not talking about people who want to be engineers, nurses, biologists, or something else in the hard sciences. I’m talking about some of the the so-called “soft sciences” like Women’s Studies or Art History, or some other useless course of study. Only people with huge trust funds should pursue these majors.

A man who graduated from the University of Iowa in the early forties told me three weeks of summer work could pay for a year’s tuition there at the time. I earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in the Massachusetts State College system in the sixties and seventies by paying my own way throughout - no loans, no parental assistance, no financial aid of any kind. I just worked. I wanted to be a teacher and I needed at least one degree for that. My courses of study didn’t actually prepare me for the classroom, but they did get me certified. Can young people do that today? It would be much more difficult, if not impossible.

The cost of college has risen faster than nearly everything else while the quality has declined drastically. Government is contributing more and more for “higher education” and getting less and less. The federal government has $448 billion out there in student loans and put out $74 billion in new aid for the 2004/5 school year alone. Are we getting better citizens with all that investment? Doesn’t look like it. According to an April, 2007 article in The Eagle Forum:

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute contracted with the University of Connecticut's Department of Public Policy to undertake the largest statistically valid survey ever conducted in order to find out what colleges and universities are teaching their students about U.S. history and institutions. They surveyed 14,000 randomly selected college freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges and universities. The students were tested with 60 multiple-choice questions to measure their knowledge in four subject areas: American history, American government, America and the world, and the market economy. Freshmen and seniors were given the same test, and here are the results. Seniors scored only 1.5 percent higher, on average, than freshmen, and at 16 schools, seniors scored lower than freshmen.

So, what are we getting for our investment? Looks like less for more. Which are the institutions where seniors know less than freshmen? They’re some of our “prestigious” universities like Yale, Brown, and Georgetown with tuitions nearing $40,000 per year. It’s not just tax money being wasted either. The big foundations like the Ford, Carnegie, Mott, Rockefeller and Mellon Foundations have invested tens of millions in Women’s Studies, African-American Studies as well as Gay and Lesbian Studies. What can a person with a degree in one of those majors do? Teach Women’s, African American, or Gay and Lesbian Studies courses, I guess. Nothing else comes to mind. According to a 1996 City Journal article by Heather MacDonald:

Not content with setting up separate departments of ethnic and gender studies, foundations have poured money into a powerful movement called “curriculum transformation,” which seeks to inject race, gender, and sexual consciousness into every department and discipline. A class in biology, for example, might consider feminine ways of analyzing cellular metabolism; a course in music history might study the hidden misogyny in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—actual examples. One accomplishment of the curricular transformationists is to distinguish bad, “masculine” forms of thinking (logic, mathematics, scientific research) from good, “feminine” forms, which subordinate the search for right answers to “inclusiveness” and “wholeness.”

Uh-huh. You can’t make this stuff up. Do you wonder what Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller would have say about how their money is being spent? Clearly, our colleges and universities suffer from a problem of too much money rather than not enough. Our young people will probably be able to live normal lives without searching for the “right” answers to “inclusiveness” and “wholeness,” much less incurring huge debt to do so. I know I have.

Prestigious University?

Am I the only one who is tired of hearing Columbia referred to as “prestigious”? I mean, what have they done lately? They used to employ and graduate talented people who went on to do great things for their country in various fields, but the institution hasn’t had much to brag about for a while and Columbia might more rightly be called a formerly-prestigious university. As we all know, they invited a racist, terrorist dictator, who is perhaps the biggest enemy of the United States, to speak there. The United Nations had to let him come, but Columbia chose to invite him. Is that what prestigious universities do? Not in my opinion, and it’s part of a decades-long pattern.

When criticism arose about the terrorist Ahmadinejad’s invitation, Lee Bollinger fell back on the “freedom of speech” excuse, as if that would explain his school’s latest quasi-treasonous action. Does Bollinger remember who preserves Columbia’s freedom of speech? Soldiers, that’s who, but Columbia won’t allow ROTC on his “prestigious” campus. He allows military recruiters at the law school only because the US Supreme Court upheld the Solomon Amendment recently and Columbia would lose federal funds if he continued to ban them. Even though students voted nearly 2-1 to ease restrictions on ROTC following the September 11th attacks, the administration still refuses to allow it. Columbia’s faculty and administration claim our government discriminates with its “Don’t ask; don’t tell” policy toward homosexuals in the military. Columbia claims to ban all forms of discrimination - unless it’s against patriotic Americans. That kind of discrimination is encouraged, nurtured even. Are the “adults” there to the left of students now? Seems like it.

In 2003, an assistant professor named Nicholas De Genova called for the death of American soldiers in Iraq, saying: "Peace is not patriotic. Peace is subversive, because peace anticipates a very different world than the one in which we live--a world where the U.S. would have no place. The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military. I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus." To those who considered such statements treasonous, President Lee Bollinger fell back on his usual explanation: "Assistant Professor Nicholas De Genova was speaking as an individual at a teach-in. He was exercising his right to free speech. His statement does not in any way represent the views of Columbia University,” he said.

Is that right, Mr. Bollinger? Then why does your university hire people like that? Why do you promote them? Until his recent death, Edward Said was a university professor - the highest rank for a professor at Columbia. Said believed that Yassir Arafat - the father of modern terrorism - was not aggressive enough toward Israel. Hijackings, murders, assassinations and suicide bombers are too gentle for Professor Said. “The stones and slings of young men [of the Palestinian Intifada] are now offering courageous resistance to a demeaning fate meted to them by Israeli soldiers armed by the United States, policed by Arafat's apparatus with U.S. military and financial aid," Said wrote. The Columbia professor was actually caught on film joining in the stone-throwing himself. His Palestinian allies were also filmed as they danced in the streets after hearing of the September 11th attack.

The Ahmadinejad fiasco is only the latest in a series of anti-American outrages at Columbia going back to 1968 when they let radical leftist students occupy their administration building for eight days so the media could fawn over them and their anti-war views. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough once asked a guest, Daniel Pipes, Director of the Middle East Forum, this question: “What's wrong with Columbia University where they let somebody like Said teach there and they celebrate his teachings and they also allow another professor to root against America in their war in Iraq?”

“They're too superior to feel patriotism for the United States,” Pipes answered. “These are internationalists who look at the world from, you know, a kind of lunar position, you know, far away, no allegiances. They feel genuinely distant from the United States. They don't like this country very much.”

Sounds like the kind of “unbiased” perspective we see in many of our mainstream media personalities. It’s not fashionable to wear American flag lapel pins or say “our” troops when reporting the War with Radical Islam. It makes me wonder how many of them are graduates of the Columbia School of Journalism. After studying curricula in which courses in western civilization have been dropped in favor of others purporting that heterosexual, capitalist, white men are responsible for most of the world’s problems, we shouldn’t wonder why they turn out that way.

They’ve been called prestigious so often that many who teach at Columbia, with its $6 billion endowment and $37,000 per year tuition rate, believe themselves way above other Americans who love their country and are willing to fight and die for it. It’s past time that Columbia be disabused of its pompous notions.

The Fair: Like It Or Not

Everybody knows when it’s Fryeburg Fair week. You can’t live in western Maine with being affected. Everyone’s routine changes because, even if you never go to the fair, you have to plan on leaving earlier to get someplace if you’re going anywhere near Fryeburg village. A week earlier, all the highways leading into western Maine are filled with unusual-looking vehicles carrying fried dough stands and carnival rides. Seeing all this strange-looking cargo, school kids get keyed up and by the time the fair opens, they’re wired. Some work there, especially if their parents run a small business and depend on the income they earn in a booth during that frenetic week. Some park cars for property-owners near the fairgrounds. Others just go and hang out there every day. Whatever their reasons, a lot of school kids are tired or wired, or both. Others are just absent.

When my children were young, I took them to the fair. Money was tight in those days and I had to say no to them often. If I had to pay at the entrance I don’t think I could have afforded it, but I usually knew someone who worked there and would let us in free. I couldn’t pay for them to go on the rides until the last night when bracelets were sold for about $5 or $10 apiece, allowing them to ride them all until closing time. I’d buy a bracelet for myself too and we’d all be pretty tired when we got home. By the time my kids were teenagers, however, they wouldn’t want to be seen with parents in a public place like that, so my duty was to drop them off and pick them up. Once they got old enough to drive themselves to the fair, I stopped going altogether.

There’s one thing at the Fryeburg Fair I’ve never seen, however, and would really like to, and that’s Woodsman’s Day. For about twenty-five years, I cut wood from my family’s wood lot in West Lovell and from my own property here on Christian Hill. I’d work up at least seven or eight cords every year until my life got so busy with other jobs that I heat with oil now. Back in those days I was interested in tractors and chain saws and trucks and I wanted to watch the guys who were really good at it show off their skills. Woodsman’s Day is held on the Monday of fair week when school is in session. I couldn’t call in sick and show up at the fair because too many people knew me. Guess I’ll have to wait until I retire from teaching before I can finally go.

When my own and the area kids went off to college and it wasn’t too far away, their first visit back home was usually during the long Columbus Day weekend - which was also fair week. It became almost obligatory for the new freshmen to flash their faces and meet old friends at the Fryeburg Fair. After a few more years, grandchildren started coming along. My first grandson wasn’t quite a year old when his mother and his two aunts wanted to be present for his first fair experience as he was pushed around in a stroller. It became a rite of passage to watch the first member of the newest generation to experience his first Fryeburg Fair. He’ll never remember it of course, but my daughters will, and we have the pictures.

Though I hadn’t attended for five years or so, I returned to the fair this year with my now seven-year-old grandson. It was fun to follow a boy his age around the grounds and see it all through his eyes. Though my legs got tired faster than his did, his enthusiasm was a balm for this late-middle-aged columnist as we checked out rides, gaming booths, food stands, animal barns, and grown-up toys like ATVs, snowmobiles and trucks. What he seemed to like most was the sheep dog competition.

Fairs have a long history going back several centuries - to middle-age Europe at least where they were important social, political and economic events. In Old England, fairs were commissioned by the king and lots of wealth changed hands just as it does today. Our local fair shows no signs of waning early in the twenty-first century either. Like it or not, we’re all going to have to enjoy it or endure it every year for the foreseeable future.

Students Discover Ahmadinejad

When they were done with their world map tests, I told them, they could use their laptops to go online and answer the question I had written on the board: “What does Mahmoud Ahmadinejad believe about the Twelfth Imam?” I told them Ahmadinejad was the President of Iran, and they had learned about where Iran and many other countries were for the test. It was Friday and I knew Ahmadinejad was coming to New York City over the weekend and that his name and face would be all over the news. “Use a search engine and those names for key words in your searches,” I instructed.

Ahmadinejad believes the Twelfth Imam, or the “Mahdi,” is a nine-year-old boy who has been living in an Iranian well for thirteen hundred years, kept alive by Allah. The Iranian president believes that if he can create enough chaos on earth, the Mahdi will emerge from the well and preside over the earth during a thousand-year period of justice and peace.

“Wow,” said a boy as he was reading his screen. “This guy says the Holocaust never happened. Is he crazy?” I looked around the room. Some students were finishing up their tests and others were intently reading from their screens. One girl had her hand up. When I walked to her desk she was pointing to the word “Mahdi” on her screen. “Is that the Twelfth Imam?” she asked.

“That’s him,” I said. “Read on.”

“I don’t have my computer with me,” said a boy as he brought his test up. “It lost its charge.”

I printed a two-year-old article from the London Daily Telegraph with the story of Ahmadinejad’s devotion to the Twelfth Imam. “All the information is in the article coming out of the printer now,” I told him. “Read it.”

“He wants to go to Ground Zero,” said another boy reading from his computer screen. “But the NYPD doesn’t want to protect him because they think he’s a terrorist.”

The following Monday, we were correcting the map tests in class. I had the television on as classes were changing and while I was taking attendance. All day long, the cable news shows were broadcasting heated debates between pundits over whether Columbia University should have invited Ahmadinejad to speak there. I’d let it run a minute or two, then shut off the TV and tell them: “President Ahmadinejad says the Holocaust never happened and that he is going to ‘wipe Israel off the map.’ Against international law, he’s trying to build nuclear weapons with which to do so, but he tells the world he’s only trying to make peaceful nuclear power plants. Nobody believes him. He trains and sends money to ‘Hizbollah’ - the Shiite terrorist group in Lebanon responsible for killing hundreds of US Marines two decades ago and which regularly shoots rockets into northern Israel. Ahmadinejad trains other Shiite terrorists to sneak into Iraq with weapons and explosive devices to kill American soldiers fighting there. Other than that, he’s a nice guy.”

As the last period of the day was beginning, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger was making a live speech to an auditorium full of students. President Ahmadinejad was seated on the stage listening and waiting his turn. I told students in that group that we would watch the speeches and correct tests the next day instead. Some were disappointed. Others watched and listened to the speeches intently. Bollinger excoriated Ahmadinejad for all the things I had been telling students at the beginning of each class earlier that day. It was a blistering speech.

When Ahmadinejad came to the podium, he invoked God and the Twelfth Imam: “Oh God, hasten the arrival of Imam al-Mahdi and grant him good health and victory and make us his followers and those who attest to his right fullness.” Then he responded to Bollinger’s verbal attack essentially by saying it was impolite to invite someone and then say nasty things about him before he speaks. Then Ahmadinejad went on at length about studying science and searching for truth.

“He’s talking in circles,” said a boy.

“He’s not making much sense,” said a girl. Class ended while Ahmadinejad was still speaking. Several students were shaking their heads as they walked past the TV. I watched and listened to the rest of the speech as busses were being called.

Interview With Senator Sam Brownback

Telephone interview with Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, Republican candidate for president. Recorded Saturday, September 15, 2007 at 5:45 PM eastern time by Tom McLaughlin for Family Security Matters.

Thank you for calling, Senator. I’m recording this if that’s all right with you.

That is fine.

Good. Have a busy day in Iowa?

Yes. Pulling into Newton right now. Got a little event here and two more yet tonight.

You were at an ice cream social and then you have a barbecue, huh?

Yeah. I’m getting the cart ahead of the horse. I should do the barbecue, then have the ice cream social. That’s all right. I like ice cream.

Okay. I think you got the questions I had prepared.

I got some outline of them, yes.

Okay. Number one: Why and when did you decide to run for president?

Made the official decision last August - not this one, but the year before.

Uh-huh.

Really felt I could and would be able to contribute to the race, and running on rebuilding the family and renewing the culture and reviving the economy, as core issues to focus on so we could grow and prosper and sustain ourselves in this generation-long fight we’re going to be in, and are in, with militant Islamists.

As a middle school history teacher, I can certainly relate to that - reforming the culture. Over my thirty-one year career, I’ve seen it run downhill in increments each year and it’s a sad thing to watch, but ah . . .

My oldest daughter is teaching seventh-grade math in the inner-city in Houston and boy, she’s experiencing some tough settings there.

I would imagine. Oh, yes. Number two: What is our biggest domestic problem?

I think it’s the breakdown of the family.

Um-hmm.

It’s the biggest domestic problem. It’s thirty-six percent now of the children born out of wedlock, it’s seventy percent in the inner cities. Sixty percent of the children will spend a significant part of their time growing up in a single-parent household. I really think it’s that breakdown of the family structure. Abortion in the country and the breakdown of marriage are the biggest set of problems that we have because it’s where you grow your next generation. I think it’s the biggest one that we have to tackle - the breakdown of the family.

Okay. What would you say is our biggest foreign policy problem?

The battle with militant Islamists. No question about that. China is a major issue and confronting the mercantilism from China, but I think far and away the biggest issue - and will be for a generation - the battle with militant Islamists.

A generation.

A generation. This has been going on for some time. 9-11 was the Pearl Harbor of the fight, but we’re in this for a long time, I believe.

Okay. In our struggle against radical Islam or militant Islam, as you refer to it, how important do you see the propaganda war?

Well, I think it’s very important, but I think the bigger piece for us is clarity of who it is we’re fighting against and why we’re fighting. I think our own moral clarity is the big need, particularly right now.

Our moral clarity?

Well yes, on our own part. I think a lot of people just - okay there’s our war on terrorism - but terrorism is a tactic. Who is it that we’re fighting?

Um-hmm.

We’re fighting this real, virulent, dedicated force within Islam. It’s not a majority of people who are Muslim, but a dedicated force that seeks to destroy Israel and come after us. It can be homegrown in our own country. It is in Europe, certainly. That’s what I mean by our own clarity - about who it is we’re fighting and why we’re fighting. This is a group that believes in establishing an Islamic caliphate, Islamic dictatorship, that the Koranic rule of law is the set rule of law. There’s no other option. That’s what I mean by clarity of what we’re fighting here.

Um-hmm - and what we have that we need to defend. I mean perhaps what you identified as our biggest domestic problem is identified by our enemy as a major weakness that they feel as though they can target and defeat - defeat us because if it.

Yes, I think that is part of it. But also, we have a view of democracy and freedom that is different from theirs - of a separation - that the government is separate from religion. We don’t remove religion from the public square, but religion does not run the government. They have a different view of that.

We have an immigration problem in this country - certainly an illegal immigration problem but it spills over into legal immigration because [those who come legally must think, why wait when so many just sneak in?] Here there was a several-second malfunction in the recording device. In brackets is the rest of the question I was reading from.

Senator Brownback’s answer was pretty much what is posted on his web site and I quote: “Securing our borders must be our top priority as a nation. Our Southern border is porous and must be secured. Secure borders make Americans safer.” Senator Brownback has voted to:
* Double the number of border patrol agents over the next five years;
* Increase detention space in order to end “catch-and-release”;
* Build 700 miles of border fencing and 350 miles of vehicle barriers along the Southern border;
* Fund 370 miles of triple-layered fencing and 461 miles of vehicle barriers along the nation's southwest border;
* Deploy cutting-edge technology including cameras, sensors, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to patrol the border for illegal border crossers ; and
* Implement a tough, smart border security strategy in order to gain operational control of the border.
He said something else though that I hadn’t heard before. He would ask the Social Security Administration to monitor use of false Social Security numbers and use them to pursue employers whose workers claim them. He would fine employers and deport the illegals thus identified.

I then read my next question from my list: “How do you understand the first part of our 14th Amendment: ‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.’ Would you challenge that justification for so-called anchor babies?”

At this point the recorder picked up the rest of the interview. Senator Brownback said: “The legal expertise that I’ve heard from believes that that is the law the way it is in the Constitution and it would take a Constitutional amendment to remove the ‘anchor baby’ issue. Most legal scholars that I have heard from believe it would take a Constitutional amendment to change that.”

All right. Would you require states or cities who consider themselves sanctuary states or sanctuary cities to restrict federally-subsidized social services to citizens only?

Well I think the better answer here is that we just enforce the law, and enforce it in those cities as well. If they are keeping people that are here illegally, that those people be deported. That’s the way to deal with that. It’s not to go at some sort of lengthy government program. Right now we have the laws and the cities cannot prevent the enforcement of that, and should not. That’s like the city saying, well we just don’t like this law so we’re not going to abide by it. We don’t allow that to take place in anything else and we shouldn’t on immigration either.

So you think it would take care of itself with aggressive enforcement of present laws.

I think we should aggressively enforce the present laws. This is the law. That’s how we’ve enforced it other times. Enforce the law.

Okay. What would victory in Iraq look like?

I think it would look like political stability on the ground to where there is not a civil war going on. I believe in a soft partition. I think we should, ah, the Kurds have their own state already. I think we should allow the Sunnis to have their own state and a weak federal government with most of your power concentrated out in the states. I think that’s a political solution that we can get stability around. It’s going to be very difficult, I think, to get a politically stable environment in the present governmental structure. We’re almost assured of a weak Shia government in Iraq with the current structure and I think you should devolve authority - the Kurds are running their region quite effectively. Anbar has become much more stable under the Sunnis. I think you should let them run their state in the Sunni region and then the Shia south is going to be, I think, more problematic . . .

Um-hmm.

. . . with Baghdad being a federal city.

Um-hmm. How about oil revenues? The Sunnis don’t have a lot of oil.

Shared equally per capita.

Okay. How would you propose that we get there?

I think we should do a political surge, now. Aggressive push. The president assigning a high-level envoy - if it’s a Jim Baker or parking Condoleeza Rice over in the region to cut the deal to get this done. We’ve done a political surge. The military’s done a great job. We need a political surge.

Hmm. Okay. How important do you think democracy is in the long-term solution, regional solution, for the Middle East.

I think democracy is central and it’s important, but I don’t we should let the perfect be the enemy of the good or better. These countries, particularly in the Middle East, have a long way to go. Their underlying philosophy, faith philosophy, is that there is not separation of the government from the religion. This is a tough concept of having a government that is separate from the faith.

The Turkish model.

So you end up, really, with the Turkish model where the securer of the democracy is the military.

Okay.

And I think it’s going to be a long, tough process.

A generation.

I think it could take quite some time.

That’s what I tell my students. Iran looms large in the region. How would you deal with Iran?

I think you have to be aggressive in a confrontation - very aggressive economic sanctions. I think we need to do a lot more, interior, in Iran on developing civil society, supporting labor union movement - getting some of the pieces of a free society - supporting them inside Iran. I think we have to do a lot more communicating to Iranians about what their government is denying them. The freedom is denied them to vote for the candidate of their choice. The candidates are all picked by the ruling mullahs, a committee that they put forward. The denial of women’s rights. I think we need to communicate a lot more of what Iranian society is being denied by their government. I think we have to build a very strong, international coalition against the Iranians. And I think we have to keep the military option as a possibility. This is a regime that is fighting us in the field, on the ground in Iraq, developing nuclear technology. I think we have to keep that military option on the table.

A credible one.

Yes.

What do you think of the old quote: “That government governs best which governs least.”

I like it. I think it goes to the basic notion of what the founders created - maximum personal liberty, limited government, but all that generally requires maximum personal responsibility. It brings you back to family and the development of character and virtues by the family. It brings you back to free faith institutions that push personal governance. I like that philosophy.

Would you try to shrink government?

Yes.

How would you do that?

A couple of ways that I put forward. The one, I think, that we really, really need to do soon is take the BRAC (Base Realignment And Closure) process and apply that to the rest of government. You would have an annual commission report that’s a required vote of Congress on whether or not a group of programs should be eliminated. With BRAC the military looked at which two hundred bases should be closed. It’s required to vote on by Congress - deal or no deal - close all two hundred - keep all two hundred - no amendment - limited time for debate. We need a culling process in the government. What we’re doing in Appropriations (his committee) does not work. That’s one that I would do. I think Republicans and Democrats alike should support it. Many want to free up money to do higher-value things but we can’t get rid of programs that are not working.

Hmm.

The second one is personal Social Security accounts, as an option. It’s not forcing anybody to do that. If you talk about shrinking the percentage that the government is of the economy, that’s probably the biggest step that you could do that would be cheered for across the country, particularly by young people, but would not threaten the solvency of the system for people what want to stay in the system.

So when you suggest the BRAC process for government, would that be all departments?

Yes.

Hmm. Interesting.

Yeah, we have a bill in that’s - I don’t know how many co-sponsors we have on it - but this is the only thing that we’ve shown can work to cull antiquated, wasteful government programs. Otherwise, the system’s just built to spend.

So everybody has to vote up or down, and therefore go on record, and have to be accountable for their vote. There wouldn’t be any more hiding.

Yep.

Hmm. Interesting process.

It worked for BRAC. We’ve never been - prior to BRAC we could never close a military base. All the horse trading would go on, but after BRAC we’ve closed a number of them.

A lot of them up here in my region of the country.

Yeah. A lot of people don’t like the process, but the military likes it from the standpoint that it puts more money in their high-priority areas.

Hmm. Yeah, and they would know best.

Yeah.

How do you interpret the Second Amendment?

Personal right that should be broadly interpreted, umm, as a personal right to bear arms.

So it isn’t for a National Guard. It’s not for hunting. It’s for people to bear arms personally.

Yes.

Okay. Pretty straightforward.

Well I’ve had a lot of votes for the last - I’ve been in Congress since 1995 and I’ve voted in favor of the Second Amendment. It baffles me how you can interpret pieces of the Constitution broadly and others narrowly.

Um-hmm.

I mean either you interpret all of it broadly or all of it narrowly, and the Second Amendment is equal to all other amendments. They’re pieces of the Constitution. I think it deserves a very strong interpretation as a personal right.

How would you handle efforts to resurrect the Fairness Doctrine?

Ah. I think that’s a bad idea. Because it’s going to limit radio that they can listen to and it’s against how the marketplace works. I think it’s against some basic rights. I’m opposed to the Fairness Doctrine. I don’t see much of anything fair about it.

Okay (laughing). Assuming that Democrats like Chuck Shumer who gained power in the US Senate maintain it after the 2008 elections and you find yourself president under those circumstances, you’ve indicated that you intend to appoint judges who would overturn Roe V Wade. What strategy would you use to try and get those judges confirmed in a Senate Judiciary Committee with Chuck Shumer as the chair?

Appoint high-quality individuals like a John Roberts or a Sam Alito that are strict-constructionist of the constitution. I think that’s the combination of how you would get them on through. High quality, but philosophically are strict-constructionist.

Hmm. Not worried about “Borking”?

Well, I think they’re going to try to do that. They tried to do that on Roberts and Alito. The quality of their ability and character what such that, at the end of the day when they went through the grinder of the Judiciary Committee, they shined.

Yeah, they did. I was proud.

I was too and I was there and predicting big, nasty fights and we had them, but at the end of the day the people just had to vote for them. There was no reason they really couldn’t vote for them.

Hmm. Well I hope it works. I certainly do. You’re a very strong pro-life candidate. Perhaps the strongest.

Thank you very much. Good to talk to you. God bless you. All the best.

Thank you very much Senator.

Maine's New Religion

Maine issues driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. Some people here think it’s a problem and some don’t. One of the former is Paula Silsby, US Attorney for the district of Maine. “Silsby says not having a residency requirement opens a major loophole in the system and criminals can get through it,” according to a report from Kara Matuszewski on the WCSH Newscenter6 web site. “A drivers license is, in many instances, the keys to the kingdom,” said Silsby.

Among those who don’t think it’s much of a problem is the person responsible for issuing Maine driver’s licenses. “There are reasons why someone may not be a resident, but wants a Maine driver's license, said Secretary of State Matt Dunlap to WCSH. “Students or people who do a lot of business in Maine may want a driver’s license from the state. The system isn’t perfect.” Thanks a lot, Mr. Secretary. You spoke without addressing the issue. Matt Dunlap: the artful dodger.

Another who doesn’t see it as a problem is Maine Governor John Baldacci, a liberal Democrat. He issued an executive order that state employees may not question the “immigration status” of anyone applying for anything in Maine, making this a sanctuary state for illegal aliens. That would include applying for a whole spectrum of welfare benefits which are more generous here than in many other states. It’s no wonder illegal aliens want to come to Maine. How many are coming? We don’t know, because state officials would be penalized if they even ask, so we don’t keep track.

Another who doesn’t seem to think it’s a problem is the executive editor of Maine’s largest newspaper, Jeannine Guttman at The Portland Press Herald. Like the rest of the unconcerned, she’s an evangelist for one of the fastest-growing religions in Maine: Worshipers of Diversity and Multiculturism. They think it’s a problem that Maine’s population is mostly white. “. . . Maine has been one of the whitest states in the country,” she wrote to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. “A decade ago, that statistic blocked serious endeavors to try to diversify our staff. A common misperception was that journalists of color wouldn’t feel comfortable living in Maine because it was too white, so why bother to recruit?” Well, recruit she did in spite of Maine’s “too many white people” problem. People “of color” are replacing people “of pallor” on her rolls. The Press Herald’s new rainbow staff devoutly publishes endless articles in praise of Diversity and Multiculturism.

Backing up this effort, the University of Maine’s coursework requires those training to become teachers, social workers, and others studying the humanities professions to read and discuss Peggy MacIntosh’s essay: “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” MacIntosh is a devout believer and evangelist for Maine’s new state religion. She tries to make the case that, just as men are are “overprivileged,” so are white people. “Having described it,” she writes of this alleged overprivilege people of pallor have, we each have to ask ourselves: “what will I do to lessen or end it?”

Lessening “white privilege” takes many forms which include recruiting on the basis of skin color as the Press Herald is so proud of doing, or an executive order by the governor that recruits illegal aliens (who are usually people “of color”) to Maine. Why limit ourselves to American citizens of color when we can recruit illegal aliens worldwide? This grand crusade is financed, of course, by confiscatory tax rates on overprivileged people of pallor. Worshipers of diversity and multiculturalism feel very good about themselves when they spend other people’s money to propagate their religion. Thanks to them, Maine has become the highest taxed state in the country while remaining one of the poorest. It’s also one of only two states whose economy stagnated in 2006, while the other forty-eight prospered. The other state whose economy languished was Louisiana, which suffered enormous damage from Hurricane Katrina. Maine didn’t have a hurricane.

As stated above, we don’t know how many illegals in Maine got driver’s licenses because state employees are forbidden to even ask about immigration status, much less keep records. We can get a hint, however, because according to WCSH, there’s an increasing number of people with the Social Security number 999-99-9999 holding Maine licenses. In 2006, there were 3788. As of May, 2007, there were 5372 - an increase of forty percent.

If any of this bothers you, you’re either racist or mean-spirited - probably both. Maine is getting much more diverse and multicultural and that is, after all, what is most important, right?

Power to the People

Control of media is power. There are many candidates for president in both major parties, for example, but Americans don’t know most of them. Why? Because they get little exposure in the media. When people asked me what I did over the summer, I told them I interviewed some presidential candidates. “Really?” they said. “Which ones?” When I went down the list, citing Republican Congressmen Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo as well as Democrats Senator Chris Dodd and Governor Bill Richardson, most replied: “Never heard of them.” Consequently, those candidates have little chance of getting elected. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Depends on your perspective.

Who controls media? Cogent observers would have to say The New York Times is the single media organ with the most power right now. Why? It has a huge circulation - and not just in New York City, but across the country. Also, the three major networks base their evening news broadcasts on whatever appears on the Times’ front page. The big weekly news magazines are strongly influenced by it too and that gives the Times a lot of clout. Since the Times has a pronounced leftist bias, its power a good thing for liberal Democrats. If you’re a conservative Republican, it’s not so good. The enormous power exercised by the Times for many decades is diminishing rapidly, however. Media is not only changing, it’s decentralizing in every way - from sourcing to dissemination.

Historically, people were influenced by spoken words and by symbols - buildings like temples or shrines, and images drawn or sculpted. People had to be physically present - next to them - to be influenced by them. Writing was invented early and could be passed around to influence people more widely, but only the elite could read. The masses still had to be assembled to look, listen, and be influenced by speeches and symbols. Whoever could speak well had power. The expression “The tongue is mightier than the blade” is attributed to Euripedes in the 5th century B.C. As more people became literate the written word gained power to the point where, twenty centuries later, Shakespeare wrote: “. . . Many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose quills.” In 1839, another English playwright named Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote: “The pen is mightier than the sword.” The Times’ power derived from this.

In the first half of the twentieth century radio, then television, threatened the primacy of the written word, but the Times retained its power. In the second half, however, came the internet. The Times is still on top in 2007, but its publisher isn’t sure he’ll be publishing a hard copy newspaper in five years. Young people aren’t reading newspapers much and circulation is not only declining, the decline is accelerating rapidly.

Maine Senator Ed Muskie was a shoe-in for the Democrat presidential nomination in 1972 until voters saw and heard him cry during a speech in Manchester, New Hampshire. A tape went around the country and his candidacy was over. Vermont Governor Howard Dean looked unbeatable until his famous scream in Iowa three years ago. That went around even faster and his candidacy was over too. Such things travel still faster over the internet and most Americans access it regularly now. When Red Sox rookie Clay Buchholz pitched a no-hitter last weekend, for example, his parents watched him on majorleaguebaseball.com instead of television. How will the new media change politics? Hard to say, but there are a few hints out there.

Someone got ahold of a two-minute clip showing John Edwards primping before a TV appearance, dubbed in Julie Andrews singing “I Feel Pretty,” and posted it in YouTube. After hearing about his $1200 haircuts and hearing Laura Ingraham refer to him as the “Silky Pony,” I thought the clip was hilarious. Widespread viewing could kill Edwards’s hopes of http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifbecoming commander-in-chief. Anyone can send it out as an email attachment to http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifrelatives and friends, who might each send it out again and so forth. It could go around the world in hours. People with digital video cameras record what candidates say in house parties or anywhere else on the stump. They can post videos on YouTube and be viewed around around the world. Students can record teachers in class and out go videos of lessons to whomever in cyberspace. People will be much more accountable for what we say and do in public.

NowPublic is a startup news agency with a different approach. A July 30th article said, “In part of a trend referred to as ‘citizen journalism,’ NowPublic lets anyone with digital cameras or a camera-enable mobile telephones upload images or news snippets for dissemination via the Internet.” They claim to have 120,000 “journalists” around the world.” Will NowPublic fly? Who knows? Will people visit its web site instead of turning on the Today Show or the CBS Evening News? Maybe. Some already do and it claims to be growing by 35% a month while traditional news broadcasts lose viewers. It it one of the little mammals scampering around the feet of the dinosaur media? How will the new media affect the next election, still over a year away? Hard to say, but it’s bound to be interesting.

Moving Pictures

Cameras interest me - always have. The first one I remember was a Polaroid black-and-white belonging to a friend of my father. I can still smell the preservative he swiped across the surface of the photo after it was ripped from the camera and peeled off. That an image was created a minute after the event amazed me. The following Christmas, I got a box camera with 620 film, a flash attachment, and a carton of flashbulbs. After reading the directions, I loaded it and shot the whole roll using up all the flashbulbs. I remember how they smelled too. My mother put the exposed film in a high cabinet over the stove until it could be developed. That took years and I worried that the film would go bad. I felt responsible for the images that might be lost because of my procrastination. Finally, I got on my bicycle and brought them to the drug store to be developed after I got a paper route and started earning my own money. I was relieved to see that the images were preserved with only a little deterioration on the edges, but I don’t know where those pictures are today, forty-five years hence. I’d love to see them again.

My next camera was a gift from my wife during our first Christmas together thirty-five years ago. It was a very nice 35 millimeter Minolta SRT-101 and I still have it. We couldn’t really afford it back then, but she bought it for me anyway. I’m glad she did because that camera recorded what I considered important, or beautiful, or both, for three decades of my life until I got a digital camera - another Minolta. With that, I’ve taken almost three thousand shots in only two years. Those I keep on my laptop and I back them up on CDs stored in a fire-proof safe.

Very few movies of my life exist because movie cameras were even more expensive and nobody thought ahead enough to make the sacrifice and buy one except my Uncle Joe. He bought an early eight millimeter and took a few movies of my family when we visited 40-50 years ago. They’re still expensive, but I broke down and bought a digital video camera earlier this summer. I also bought a new laptop which could edit movies and burn them into DVDs. Together, the items cost me about $1500 - probably the equivalent to what my Uncle Joe spent.

It took me two weeks to shoot the first hour, then two days to figure out how to convert that hour into a 96-minute DVD with a musical sound track, a few stills, text for chapters and a menu with scene selections. The finished product wouldn’t interest anyone but me and the people who are in it - four generatons of my extended family. For two days, I watched clips of our get-togethers over that period. Again, I shot only the people and the things important or beautiful to me - not the world, but to me. That meant family - people I love, who, I think, love me back. That came through in the video, so much so that I got emotional as I worked on it. Moving pictures of my family were exactly that: moving.

The camera has a microphone that picked up sound better than I thought it would and the computer’s video-editing software had room for two additional soundtracks. I selected some Van Morrison from my CD collection and went to iTunes for two pieces. For scenes at the homes of my two married daughters, I used music they chose for father/daughter dances at their weddings - “Tupelo Honey” by Van Morrison for Sarah and “Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong for Annie. There was a ten-minute clip of my son, Ryan, and daughter, Annie, talking with their grandfather, Ted, who turned eighty-five and was reflecting on what that feels like. Sinatra’s “My Way” seemed appropriate for that and the software could adjust relative volume of dialogue and music. There was room for a third sound track, but I don’t know what to do with that yet.

There are no smells associated with taking movies. The process is electrical and digital as opposed to mechanical and chemical as with older image-recording technology. Seeing my subjects move and hearing them at the same time is fascinating though. Watching my seven-year-old grandson, Riley, walk, run, swim and laugh - and then hearing it too is more profound than silent, still pictures. There’s more to composing a video than composing a static photo. My old cameras use one medium, but the video camera uses three. Or does it? There’s vision and sound, but is motion a medium? I think it is.

It’s only recently that I’ve learned to put still photos on my blog, but now I can put video on there too. I’m not sure when or even if that’ll happen, but the possibility intrigues me. Media is changing, and our lives are changing with it, for well or ill, but I’m optimistic. I think the changes will serve us because they decentralize media - and we humans are nothing of not creative.

Losing the Propaganda War III

Two previous columns in this series described Islamic propaganda in American public schools – middle schools, high schools and colleges – and some of the textbooks that are used, as related by Richard Thompson, president and general counsel for the Thomas More Law Center. This column looks at Thompson’s remarks on what he details as a double standard.

“Well, what you have here is a double standard, I think, where there is one standard for Christians and Jews and people of other faiths where you cannot promote religion in any fashion; and there seems to be a second standard for Muslims, who are allowed to get away with promoting their religion and their religious observances in the public schools, whether it be a university or a secondary school.

“And a part of this that concerns me is the overall agenda that a lot of these Islamic political action committees have: and that is, although they do not want to assimilate in America, they don’t want to be Americans – they want to maintain their Islamic culture – they are willing to use American politics, the Constitution and American law to seek accommodation and continue to force the majority to accept the religious propositions of the minority.

“You may have heard this quote from Omar Ahmad, who is the head of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Back in 1998, he said: ‘Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.’ This is an organization that promotes itself as a Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Its representatives have been used on a lot of mainstream media to talk about the Islamic affairs and what’s happening in our culture. They’re not there to be equal to us. They’re there to be dominant, and if you look at what history does – what history instructs us – is that when they do become dominant, that they then persecute every other religion.”

“You may have heard that they were planning to put foot baths at the University of Michigan, Dearborn campus,” Thompson continued. “When that became public, we [started] obtaining the facts to find out how those foot baths are going to be funded, and there is a good possibility that we may bring a lawsuit against the University of Michigan for utilizing, again, public taxpayer money for a specific religious purpose.

I asked if the university had any plans to put in holy water fonts alongside the foot baths. “Well, baptism fonts…I mean you can go on and on and on, but if the law in fact says that publicly-funded universities and schools cannot promote a particular religion, then that should apply to everybody.”

“It would seem pretty simple on its face,” I said. “But apparently it isn’t.”

“Well first of all, we’re dealing with universities and you probably know that the Saudi Arabian government or princes from Saudi Arabia are giving out a lot of money to these universities developing these Middle Eastern departments which then, you know, spout out their propaganda.

Some colleges and universities remove American flags because they may be “offensive” to foreign students. The College of William and Mary removed a cross from its chapel because it made students from other religious traditions “unwelcome.” Meanwhile, the Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) is pushing for “accommodations” for Muslims attending American schools both public and private. According to a July USA Today article: “At least 17 universities have foot baths built or under construction, including Boston University, George Washington University and Temple University, and at least nine universities have prayer rooms for ‘Muslim students only,’ including Stanford, Emory and the University of Virginia, according to the MSA's website. The association did not return calls seeking comment.”

Most of the September terrorists were Saudis, but an increasing number of terrorists planning and carrying out attacks in Western countries are home-grown. They get radicalized in mosques and madrassas in Europe, Canada and the United States. “Back in 2000,” said Thompson, “a sheik by the name of [Muhammad Isham] Kabbani said there were about 3000 mosques in the United States and 80% of the mosques are controlled by extremists. . . . [and] a great percentage of those mosques are being funded by Saudi Arabia.”

Should we be concerned? If only 10% were controlled by extremists, we should be concerned, very concerned. Two years ago, then-Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney suggested that we should be monitoring what is said in extremist mosques in the United States, even if it means wiretapping them. His suggestion was condemned by CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper in a Washington Post article: “It's irresponsible for the top elected official in any state to suggest blanket wiretapping of houses of worship.”

CAIR has since been named as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a Texas case where a CAIR affiliate, the “Holy Land Foundation,” is accused of funding the Radical Muslim terrorist group Hamas. Meanwhile, Romney has become a leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president of the United States.

American schools and other institutions are bending policies to accommodate Muslims while they purge accommodations associated with other religions. About this, Attorney Thompson said: “What is concerning me is that, in one of the states, it was ruled that a person could swear on the Koran rather than the Bible and make an affirmation. And then, I understand this congressman – the first congressman who is Muslim, swore on the Koran, right? Well, it’s interesting to note that the Koran itself approves of lying.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. There’s a word called “kitman” or “taqiyya” which means lying or deception. And it has been ruled by their theologians that it is appropriate for them to lie if it is in the interest of achieving an objective for Islam. That’s in their own, in the Koran.

“Unbelievable.”

“So, they’re taking an oath on a book that approves lying.”

The idea of “taqqiya” is indeed quite different from our own “Thou Shalt Not Lie”; and it is equally different from the attribution to George Washington, father of this country, “I cannot tell a lie; I chopped down the cherry tree.” So for those of us who are not in familiar territory when it comes to denial, deceit and dissimulation, we are at a distinct disadvantage in this propaganda war.

But just as others use our laws to harm us, we can use our laws to protect ourselves. Attorney Richard Thompson said: “We are a public interest law firm and I would hope – hopefully in your article someplace you will mention that we’re willing to look at cases and file lawsuits.”

If you see or hear anything suspicious where you live, contact Richard Thompson at Thomas More Law Center.

Losing the Propaganda War II

Islamist propaganda has a foothold in American schools at all levels. I didn’t realize how pervasive it was until I interviewed Richard Thompson, president and general counsel of the Thomas More Law Center. Last week’s column described inroads into middle schools in California and New York City (The NYC school principal has since resigned under pressure after distributing “Intifada in NYC” T-shirts). This week, I report Thompson’s comments about textbook publishers and universities.

When I asked how parents might monitor who teaches what in our schools, he said, “Well, right now there are several web sites out there [for information], but on a personal level, they have to look at the textbooks their children are bringing home. What do they say about Islam? About Christianity? . . . For instance, a textbook published by Houghton Mifflin, a reputable publisher, was talking about how tolerant Muslims were of women. If anything, they’re probably the most intolerant when it comes to women. And, in another place, they talk about how tolerant Muslims were toward Jews and Christians.”

I told him about my visit to the Holy Land last May where our Palestinian Christian tour guides told us how Palestinian Christians had been the majority in Bethlehem and in Nazareth for centuries, but that’s reversed in just the past few years. Palestinian Christians are persecuted by Palestinian Muslims and moving away from their ancestral homelands. Similar things are happening in several other Middle East venues as Radical Islam gains strength.

“It reveals what the long-range plans are,” Thompson said, “and although they may put a friendly face right now to their activities, their ultimate aim is to become dominant, and once they become dominant, they are going to persecute every other religion.”

As for how parents could monitor things, Thompson continued: “They have to write the school and say, ‘I think this book is inaccurate’ and show where. You can also put pressure on the publishers themselves. Teachers should do that too. Publishers will react. You can do is find out where teachers are getting their instruction. Check out training seminars for subjects such as Islamic History. Are these seminars being put on by organizations funded by some Saudi Arabian prince?”

That brought us to what is going on in American universities. “There was a study done,” said Thompson, “I think by someone from Fordham University - that showed how some of these Arab princes would fund public relations firms who then would get professors [to teach] seminars on . . . Islamic history. And these seminars were basically pro-Muslim and anti-Christian. So [parents can check on what qualifies a] teacher to teach Islamic history. Have they gone to any seminars? What seminar did they go to? Then they’d have to research the seminar to find out if it is funded by some Arab prince, or whether it is a legitimate seminar that is going to teach Islamic History in an objective fashion.”

“Is the US Department of Education involved in any of this?” I asked.

“That’s another ironic situation,” he said, “because the federal government developed these curriculum standards K-12 and the public school system tried to perform those standards . . . the federal government gave them money, gave them a stamp of approval, and university Middle East Study Centers would train teachers to teach Middle Eastern History. But they were, in fact, paid for by the Saudis.”

“Yikes,” I said.

“[Many] universities have compromised their objectivity because they are getting large sums of money from Saudi princes. There was an effort in Congress back in 2006 to have universities report the amount of money that they were getting from Saudi Arabia in their Title VI International Education bill - it was House bill 609 and it was sponsored, I believe, by Indiana Representative Dan Burton. It didn’t get passed and I don’t know there has been a similar bill introduced, but this would have been an easy way for Americans to [check up on universities]. I know there was one Saudi prince who donated $40 million to Harvard and Georgetown Universities - $20 million each.”

“Those are huge sums,” I said.

“Yeah. They’ve already tainted Harvard University with that money. Now Harvard goes out and taints a bunch of innocent school teachers [who are] thinking that they’re getting the best kind of information from a superior school and it’s basically promoting Saudi Arabia propaganda. A lot of universities are that way. It’s not just Harvard and Georgetown - there are lists of universities. . . . I know that there are some really good web sites out there, again, like ‘Campus Watch’ that monitor these studies.”

“Here’s the concern I have,” Thompson continued. “We have Americans fighting Islamic terrorists all across the world, yet we are inviting them into our schools and universities to taint our own students and to destroy our civilization and our culture from within.

“We’re not putting enough resources into the propaganda war,” I suggested.

“We’re winning the war on the battlefield,” said Thompson, “but we’re losing the war in Washington, DC and in the ivy halls of learning.”

Losing the Propaganda War

Imagine a public school teacher telling his/her students, “For the next few weeks, you’re all going to become Christians.” Imagine that students had to wear crosses, memorize Christian prayers and recite them, memorize Christian concepts of the Eucharist and celebrate them, fast during Lent and chant “Jesus is the Messiah!” How long would it take for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to file a lawsuit? A week? A day? A minute? As we’ve seen many times, it would be immediate and very expensive for the school district, which, when it lost, would have to pay huge legal fees to the ACLU.

In 2000, a seventh grade teacher in California’s Byron Union School District (about fifty miles east of San Francisco) forced her seventh-grade students to become Muslims for three weeks. Students wore a star and crescent, memorized Muslim prayers, verses and the five pillars of faith, fasted during lunch period as if it were Ramadan, chanted “Allah Akbar!” and played a dice game called “jihad” (defined as “struggle against oppression”). What did the ACLU have to say about this? Nothing. Not a peep. Christian parents were outraged and filed a lawsuit in federal court against the school with the assistance of the Thomas More Law Center.

I interviewed Richard Thompson, president and general counsel for the Thomas More Law Center last week. The lawsuit against Byron Union School District was one of the earliest to call attention to increasing Muslim influence in our public schools. He said, “[T]he judge dismissed the case saying, well, this was a typical educational program. The activities were not overtly religious, that would raise any ‘establishment clause’ concerns. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that dismissal in a non-published opinion.”

“Non-published?” I asked. “Is that typical?”

“No,” he said. “And this was a very neat trick that they pulled. Because it was non-published - at the time the rule was that any non-published opinion could not be used as precedent - so what they basically did was, give the Byron Union School District a pass on the fact that they were in fact involved in overtly religious education. But it would not be used as a precedent so that Christians could say, okay, well you’ve done it for the Muslims - now we’re going to be able do it for Christians. That was our first involvement in a school - a public school - overtly promoting the religious faith of Muslims.”

The case was appealed to the US Supreme Court which, last October, declined to intervene. I asked then if there were any other cases of this nature he knew of. “There are some very suspicious things going on in the city of New York,” he said, “with this new school [Khalil Gibran International Academy] - a charter school - that the city has approved. What is of concern is that it is really a cover for a madrassa, right there in Brooklyn where, under the guise of just being a charter school for Arabic-speaking students, it is really going to be cover to promote Islam, to inflame hatred towards Christians, Jews and other religions? And it’s going to be funded by the taxpayers of New York? And when you look at the people on the board of directors - you have, several of them, imams or Muslim clerics - you have a suspicion that this is going to have a religious taint to it. Now there’s nothing wrong - if you want a religious school in the United States, you can have a religious school - but you can’t pay for it with public funds and that is the constitutional issue there. . . . the New York public school system was very secretive about the programs of the school and one of the things that this parents’ group [Stop the Madrassa Coalition] is trying to find out is what are the objectives? What [will be taught in] the classes?”

The parents’ web site published a link to a Monday New York Post story which begins: “Activists with ties to the principal of the city's controversial new Arabic-themed school are hawking T- shirts that glorify Palestinian terror, The Post has learned. The inflammatory tees boldly declare ‘Intifada NYC’ - apparently a call for a Gaza-style uprising in the Big Apple. . . . [The school’s principal, Dhabah] Almontaser downplayed the significance of the T-shirts. ‘The word [intifada] basically means “shaking off.” That is the root word if you look it up in Arabic,’ she said.”

Parents are skeptical according the Post: “‘Intifada is a war. Isn't that what Arafat had?’ said Pamela Hall, a Manhattan mom opposed to the academy on the grounds that it violates separation of church and state.”

The Post article ended with: “A Department of Education spokeswoman defended Almontaser, saying her link to the T-shirt was tenuous.” Somehow I expected that.

Is this all part of a new front in Radical Islam’s propaganda war? Are we losing? Attorney Richard Thompson said: “[T]here are a lot of great questions [and] I don’t have all the answers, but we are a public interest law firm and I would hope - hopefully in your article someplace you will mention that we’re willing to look at cases and file lawsuits.”

My interview with Richard Thompson ranged further into Muslim propaganda in our secondary and post-secondary education system, public and private. More next week.

Interview with Congressman Tom Tancredo

Interview with Congressman Tom Tancredo, candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, recorded Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 5:00 pm by Tom McLaughlin for Family Security Matters.

Thank you for calling Congressman. I’ll be recording this interview if that’s all right.

Sure.

You were the first government official I ever heard raise the issue of illegal immigration, at least from where I live here in Maine . . .

Yeah.

. . . and you must be pretty gratified that ah . . .

I am. I am. It’s almost a - last night when we passed the amendment that I had proposed to the Justice Department funding bill, and it said that no funding from this bill can be used for the incarceration of Messrs. Ramos and Compian, I’m telling you - that alone is the most amazing thing I have ever seen here. First of all, it’s a unique undertaking that had never been tried before. And secondly, to have it pass with a voice vote because Democrats did not even want to have some of their members exposed by having to cast a recorded vote, so they could not require a recorded vote - they just passed it on voice . . .

Um-hmm.

That will mean that we’ll have to watch them carefully because they’re going to have to try and take it out during the Conference Committee that will occur after the Senate passes their version of the Commerce-State-Justice. But nonetheless, the point I’m trying to make is that it is an amazing change of attitude and atmosphere around here - something almost unbelievable to me.

They were pretty shook up last month when a [illegal alien amnesty] bill they thought was a sure thing went down.

That did it. That did it. It was a seismic shift there - I mean it was amazing. On Tuesday we had only thirty-six votes. On Thursday we had fifty-three and every one of them were senators who were up for reelection who changed their votes. It was only because of the massive outpouring of sentiment, and that made everybody understand what we’re really dealing with here. Until then, I don’t think people really believed that Americans paid attention to it or were concerned about it. They really believed they could finesse the issue, you know?

Yes. Yes.

. . . just slip it by - nobody will really care - no big issue with most Americans. Democrats looked at it as new votes coming in. Republicans looked at it as cheap labor.

Right. That about sums it up. It was quite a shift all right. Do you think the “new media” could take some of the credit for that?

You bet your life. Talk radio and the internet - those two things. The entire playing field is different here and it’s because of the fact that people are willing to participate in this process we call a democracy - or more accurately, a republic - and the fact that they are getting information they would not get through the traditional media. I announced my candidacy for president on talk radio and I did so because, as I told John Michaelson on his show in Iowa, I’m doing this, in a way, because you guys are the ones who brought me to the party. I’ve done now almost three thousand radio shows and that’s [only since] we started keeping count about five years ago. Talk radio has given me - and certainly others - given me a megaphone that I would never have had otherwise. Then what happens is you can pick it up in the blogosphere and all the rest of it. It’s amazing and I just can’t tell you how pleased I am about this and how important it is because, really, I must admit to you that I am fearful for the republic. When only 14% of the general public actually gives approval of the Congress - and twenty-something percent for the president - you know it’s not because I’m an incumbent. The fact is I would rate us poorly also - the fact that there are 85% of the people out there who are disconnected from their government, who don’t believe it works, and you know what? It doesn’t work. It doesn’t. And I mean people see it and they become disillusioned. That’s why it’s so neat that phones rang off the hook in the Senate and it changed the bill. It reaffirmed the belief that people’s voices can be heard. I will tell you, I did feel at certain points in time, and have mentioned this to others who have agreed - during the debate on that bill I had the feeling, recognizing the intensity of the debate out there in the country itself . . .

Um-hmm.

. . . that had it passed, I believe there would have been violence, in a very limited - don’t get me wrong - I’m not talking about a revolution with everybody in the streets with arms - but I’m talking about certain areas, small, maybe on the border, there would have been violence. It’s amazing how intensely people feel about this issue. And thank God there was a revolution of sorts, a small one just the ballot box at this stage - at the email and telephone stage - of stopping legislation.

Yes, indeed. Um, I want to stop right here for a minute so I can do a check. I hope that cell phone is working. (I checked my computer recording equipment because I was getting very weak audio from him. He was in the Capitol and he took the opportunity to cast a vote. I called him back on a land line but still the signal was weak. We continued anyway, but the audio was so weak I can’t make a podcast.)

I’m going to the twelve basic questions which I think Mr. Moore gave you?

Actually I don’t believe I have them but go ahead anyway.

Okay. When and why did you decide to run for president?

It was about four months ago and it was because I had talked to and listened to the other people who had expressed a desire to run. I spoke personally to Romney for instance and asked him about his position on immigration and it was not satisfactory. And when I recognized there was no one there, there was absolutely no one there who was going to take this issue on, I decided that I had to do it. I have to tell you there is no allure to the office of president. Of course it’s enormously powerful but there’s no allure to it. I do what I do because issues need to be advanced. I articulate them as best I can, and if I’m president of the United States I will implement them. I did not begin this by simply seeking the office of president, if you know what I mean. It wasn’t me saying: “What will I do today? I know. I’ll run for president.” I did it because I could find no one else who will address these issues in the way that I believe they need to be addressed.

Okay. What do you see as our biggest domestic problem? Probably the immigration issue as we just discussed.

Of course it is. The most serious domestic policy issue would have to be immigration.

What do you see as our biggest foreign policy problem?

The Middle East. Actually, the war on Radical Islam.

Um-hmm. I like the way you phrased that. In our struggle against Radical Islam, which is the way I phrased it here [also], how important is the propaganda aspect of it - the propaganda war?

There are two ways to fight any war: one is with the force of arms, and the other is with the force of ideas. They’re equally at issue.

I’m trying to ask all the candidates the same questions and the next one is about immigraton again, but let me rephrase it: As president, what is the first thing you would do?

I’d turn to my Attorney General and tell him that he should begin a vigorous enforcement of the law against hiring people who are here illegally. Employers who are violating the law I’d want to be one of the top priorities. Then I would turn to the Homeland Security Secretary and say, you are to secure that southern border and then start securing the northern border with, first of all, a triple-layer boundary fence, and secondly the human resources behind it that need to be there in order to secure it.

Okay. How do you understand the first part of our Fourteenth Amendment?

I’ll tell you what - it has absolutely nothing to do with illegal immigration. It was a response to the Dredd Scott Decision. It was made entirely for the purpose of assuring that children of slaves would have benefit of citizenship and it has nothing to do with illegal immigrants [anchor babies]. There’s specific wording in there which would indicate, ah, the case. I think the phrase is, ah, “people have be in the United States and under the jurisdiction thereof,” Umm . . .

Yup.

And, ah, that is an important phrase.

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof . . .”

Yeah.

Okay. Interesting little quote. I hadn’t looked at it that way before. Would you require states and/or cities to restrict federally-subsidized social services to citizens only?

I would if I could. The social services - if they’re not federally funded the federal government really doesn’t play a role in this, but any social services that have federal funds attached - absolutely. Now that’s almost everything to tell you the truth. I don’t know that there’s any county in the United States of America that doesn’t administer some sort of social service benefit that’s supplemented by federal funds, so yeah. Citizenship has got to mean something.

All right. What would victory in Iraq look like?

Well, it would look like a stabilized Iraq. It would not look, geopolitically like we see it today, but it would be a place of some degree of stability, and a place that is a buffer in a way between the Shia crescent and the Sunni crescent.

Okay, and how would you get there?

Ah, the first thing we would have to do is disengage as the police force in Iraq. It’s not the appropriate use of our military. It must be turned over to the Iraqis and I mean now. But we cannot withdraw from the area. We will be there for a long time and I don’t care who is president, there is no way we will not have troops in and around Iraq and in the Middle East - in that area - for a long time. There are national security interests that are at stake there - that keep us there - but we cannot continue to be the police force in Iraq. Impossible. That job has got to be taken over by the Iraqis - the patrolling of their streets in their own Humvees or in those we give them. I don’t care. The simple police, the constabulary activities in Iraq have to be done by Iraqis and there may be a great deal of violence, I know, but there’s a great deal of violence, of course, every day. And civil war? Well it could certainly be defined that way now. But one thing I do know is that civil war eventually - eventually ends in civil peace. It may be a long and ugly period of time, but we’re going to have to turn the keys to the house over to the Iraqis, and we should do so as soon as possible. I mean right away.

Okay. How important do you see democracy in the Middle East?

It may not be something we necessarily picture or define that develops over there, and I didn’t say democracy. I just said stability.

Um-hmm.

We have created an embryonic democracy. Whether it remains that way or not is still sort of, ah, something that is up in the air. What I want is stability. The idea of a democratic Iraq is not imperative. Preferable, but not imperative. What we want is a stable Iraq - not attached to either the Sunni or the Shia, and that dominates the world around them. That is preferable, but is it possible? Oh boy - another question entirely.

Okay. Next door - how would you deal with Iran?

Iran is a huge question mark because we don’t know exactly the extent to which the internal politics of Iran are playing out. There is hope. Oh, hang on a minute. Gotta vote . . . (I waited on the line until he came back) . . . Okay. What I was saying is, a great deal of information - mixed messages - a great deal of mixed messages are coming out of Iran that would suggest we have a possibility of a transition, a regime change, a modification of the regime, all because the population there is very mixed. It’s only 60% Persian. There are a lot of Sunnis even. There are a lot of Christians. There are a lot of Kurds, and it is a relatively well-educated population and, if you can believe polls taken there, Americans are thought of very well by a large percentage of the - especially the younger population - so the tricky thing is to bring about a modification of their government and not do so with boots on the ground which would be, certainly, a disaster and an embroilment in the conflict that I’m not sure we can be successful in. We have to, on the other hand, do what we can to make sure that a guy [Mahmoud Ahmadinijad] who believes he is the transition point for the return of the Twelfth Imam . . .

Um-hmm.

. . . you know in that case you’ll recall there are all kinds of catastrophic events that have to occur in order for the Twelfth Imam to return - and this guy thinks he’s going to bring them about. I just don’t think that it’s a good idea to give this guy a bomb or a nuclear weapon or let him obtain one. So it’s challenging - to say the least it is challenging, but you can work with the Iranian diaspora - there are a lot of people outside of the country and a lot of people inside of the country with whom you can work . . .

“You can work with the Iranian . . .”?

Diaspora. Uh, there are the . . .

Diaspora [Iranian nationals living abroad]. Oh, okay, yes right . . .

Because they want change, believe me.

Um-hmm.

So you have diplomatic, economic and military choices, and they are sometimes enormously challenging. For instance, we need to provide support - economic and moral, if you will - to the people inside of Iran who are working to overthrow the regime. But if we announced - if we actually said that - it puts a target on their back. I mean that’s exactly what the Iranian government wants to show the Iranian people - that any dissent whatsoever is like an American plot being paid for by the CIA.

Um-hmm.

So how do you get that done? You need to provide financial support, but you sure as heck cannot announce it. We’ve actually made this mistake. We just announced the other day we’re going to have $75 million that we’re putting into a variety of different accounts for “democracy in Iran” but, boy, that’s putting a very big target on the back of every Iranian dissident. And so it’s a tricky process, I’m going to tell you that.

Um-hmm. I’m glad you know who the Twelfth Imam is and how that’s a factor in what Ahmadinijad is trying to do over there.

Yeah.

You’re the first candidate who has voiced that and I’ve interviewed four of them. Ah, what do you think of the old quote: “That government governs best that governs least”?

That’s exactly right. I may have mentioned in our conversation - I can’t remember - our converation has gone back and forth. I may have mentioned that most people believe that, ah, the government is not working. And that’s because it isn’t.

Um-hmm.

And that’s because it’s too big. It can’t do all the things that people ask of it. Everybody has got to realize that. We cannot provide health care for every American; education for every American; social services for every American. The federal government was never designed for that. Never. The Constitution is clear about what our role is. We’re going to protect and defend. That’s it. If we just focused on that and let the states take care of the rest of the stuff, frankly, we would be able do a better job at what we can do. But, you know, demands are constant. Every time I speak, even in New Hampshire, Iowa, the heartland - where you think you are among the folks who - you know, New Hampshire, lets say. “Live Free or Die” right?

Yeah. I’m right next door.

[People are saying] “Live free or die? I don’t think I want to die, and I want to ask the federal government to make sure I don’t. You know, it’s going to protect me with a bubble. I don’t ever want to ever be ill, and if I do I want you to pay for it.” It’s astounding. We get what we demand and what we get is huge government and everybody complains about the deficit or the intrusive nature of government. Well, yeah! It’s take your pick. What do you want?

How would you shrink the federal bureaucracy?

Believe me. It’s called veto. It’s called a veto. I would veto appropriations bill for these departments until they shut down the government.

Hmm.

I have no qualms about that. I lived through it. I was in Reagan’s Administration when we actually - I used to send him faxes because didn’t have emails - I was a Reagan appointee and I worked in the US Department of Education. My task was to help bring that thing to a closure. We couldn’t close it individually but our task was to shrink it as much as possible because we couldn’t even get legislation passed - after only two years, we could not reverse it [establishment of the DOE under Carter]. So the task was, okay, we’re going to go in - we’re going to reduce it dramatically. I went from 222 people working there in a regional office to 60. It’s probably 500 now for all I know, but . . .

Um-hmm.

. . . and periodically the president would veto something, like a budget bill, and it would last over the weekend into Monday. I used to fax things like: “Mr. President: Please don’t open that door. Don’t give in. Keep it shut. Let’s see how long it is before anybody knows it’s closed.”

Interesting. How would you interpret our Second Amendment?

Quite literally. There are people in the country, of course, who should not be allowed to have a gun. They are in prison or they are felons or they are a danger to themselves or others - but other than that, every law-abiding American should be able to keep and bear arms. I have my own concealed-carry permit and I will feel much safer when the District of Columbia ban is thrown out - when that appeal is upheld, I mean when the appeal is thrown out. One court has already overturned the thing.

How would you handle efforts to resurrect the Fairness Doctrine?

I would kill it fast. Certainly nothing would get across my desk. I guarantee it.

Okay. Last question: Is it possible for the federal government to monitor and keep records of crimes committed by illegal aliens?

Of course we can do it. I mean, or we could ignore it just like we’ve ignored all the laws about immigration and continue to erode the whole concept of rules.

Thank you very much for your time, Congressman, and I apologize for the technical difficulties. I don’t think I’ll be able to make a podcast, but I got it clearly enough that I can hear it and transcribe it - which I’ll get onto right away.

Thank you very much.

You’re welcome. Good-bye.