Out of Fashion?

This is the unabridged version of a speech I’m delivering for a luncheon at the Eagle Mountain House in Jackson, New Hampshire later today. An abridged version will run in newspapers tomorrow. Young women from area high schools whose essays were selected by the Daughters of the American Revolution will receive awards and possible scholarships.

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen.

By greeting you in such a manner, I have identified myself as someone who views the human race as binary. That means I know and publicly state that every human is born male or female and remains so throughout his or her natural life. There are two sexes, and I reject attempts by academia and many in government to refute that basic truth. We are not “assigned a gender” at birth. We are created male and female.

It’s likely that, holding these beliefs and being inclined to profess them, I would not be permitted to speak at whatever university you ladies attend next year. If you joined student government — which is likely, given each of your records in high school — and you were to suggest inviting me to speak, you would be criticized. You would be opposed, and if the invitation were issued anyway and I showed up, I might be shouted down. That’s how it has become on campuses across our great country. Colleges and universities preach diversity, but only the diversity of skin color. Most disdain intellectual diversity and censor opposing views.

Many faculty in our colleges and universities today have been strongly influenced by movements like post-modernism, critical theory, and other neo-marxist-freudian ideas which may read like so much gobbledygook if you were to look up definitions for them. If you have courage enough to admit confusion and question professors who propound them, you’ll likely be told that they’re “dialectical,” as if that would explain everything. If you remain courageous and ask what dialectical means, you’ll be given still more of what sounds like gobbledygook. If you reach this point, trust your instincts. Remember the axiom: “If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck.”

Deliberate gobbledygook accepted and published in "academic" gender studies journal

Realize that many college faculty today do not believe there is any such thing as objective truth. considering that idea only a social construct. In other words, they don’t believe it exists so they do not seek it. Their view of the world can be summed up by the old Beatles tune Strawberry Fields: “Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about.” So, don’t let them take you down to Strawberry Fields of nihilism. Objective Truth is real. Seek it, always.

Perhaps you noted that I believe we were created, you and I. That’s what our Founding Fathers believed as well, and proclaimed in our founding document — The Declaration of Independence, and I quote: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…”

That concept has also become unpopular among our academic and political elites. When President Obama spoke during his first term before a group of Hispanic Americans, he stumbled over the passage I just quoted you. As he read from his teleprompter “…we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal” — here he paused and fluttered his eyelids nervously before continuing: “endowed with certain inalienable rights, life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness…” He conspicuously left out the phrase, “…by our Creator.”

Belief in a Creator has declined among those who govern us and who teach our children in government schools. They believe our rights come from government, which would imply that the government which grants those rights could also infringe on them or even take them away entirely. They’re enumerated in our Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to our Constitution, which each of you praised in your qualifying essay.

Our academic and government elite believe that most important of documents to be malleable — something that can be changed in ways that were not intended by the men who wrote it, that is, changed by judicial fiat in our courts and not through the amendment process outlined in Article Five. The Constitution allowed for change but only through a deliberately long and difficult process. It’s much easier to “legislate from the bench” with the votes of only five Justices on the Supreme Court. Whatever opinions they might render, however, can be overturned just as easily by five votes on a subsequent court. That’s an unstable process and not what our Founders intended.

The men who wrote our Constitution were nearly all godly men and assumed American citizens would be as well. As John Adams stated, and I quote: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

There are still religious people on college campuses but they’re increasingly closeted. Religion is considered naive, childish, even moronic — certainly not fashionable. The pervasive idea now is that God did not create man but that man created God. “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to create Him,” goes the aphorism. Some claim that new Gods have been created by those who believe the Judeo/Christian God to be dead, as philosopher Frederich Neitzche declared more than a hundred years ago. Those gods include the newer religions of environmentalism and big government.

Speaking of big government, this year, 2017, marks the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Josef Stalin birthed an 80-year experiment called the Soviet Union — the ultimate state of atheistic, big government that mandated equality (for everyone but Communist Party members) and brutally persecuted dissenters. Historians estimate that somewhere between 40 and 60 million were exterminated by the Party in the name of preserving “The Revolution.” Documentation of this tragedy is so thin due to the absence of a free press that we cannot know if it’s 40 million or 60 million. Twenty million are simply unaccounted for. Consider that. Twenty million people were “disappeared” from the historical record.

President Reagan called it “The Evil Empire” and he is credited with winning the Cold War that brought it down shortly before you were born. The killing was even worse to the southeast during the Cultural Revolution in Communist China. Some historians estimate that 80 million died there under Mao Tse Tung. Then there was the communist regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia where three million more were murdered. It’s a sordid history of which your generation seems largely unaware. An article last week in the Sacrament Bee contended, and I quote: “Ask a millennial if they would rather live under a socialist or capitalist country, and they’re likely to give an answer much different than their parents or grandparents would.”

“That’s according to a new YouGov study commissioned by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an anti-communist organization, which found that 44 percent of millennials would prefer to live in a socialist country, with another 7 percent saying the same about communism.” Remember, the Founders wrote a Constitution designed to restrict government, not grow it into the behemoth it has sadly become.

How many of you were born in the 20th century? One could say the struggle between capitalism and communism defined that century. Did capitalism prevail? For now it has, but your generation may see communism’s revival. Right now you seem to believe the US Constitution to be the most brilliant governing document ever written.

Well, you’re right. It is. Never forget that.

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

Let's all stand with Charlie Hebdo

I don't believe I'd agree with much that is published by Charlie Hebdo. Just a glance at their magazine covers online tells me they've gone beyond the bounds of decency running offensive cartoons about Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

After what happened this morning, however, I stand with them. So here are the cartoons they were attacked for publishing:

I don't know what the balloon says in French, but the caricature is Mohammed. Notice I don't say "The Prophet" Mohammed. Why do our media and our president continue to call him "The Prophet" unless they believe he was the one and only prophet of God?

He wasn't my prophet but I know he existed 1400 years ago, so I'll just call him Mohammed. Here's another caricature of him for good measure:

If you radical Muslims out there don't like this, tough. I call on every other American out there who believes in freedom to publish these things too. Do it for the dead staff people at Charlie Hebdo. Do it for yourself. Do it for western civilization.

Bong Hits 4 Jesus

When high school student Joseph Frederick unfurled his 14-foot banner declaring: “Bong Hits 4 Jesus,” at a school-sanctioned event in Juneau, Alaska, was he exercising his First Amendment right to free speech? Principal Deborah Morse suspended him. With the help of the ACLU (of course), he sued her in federal district court and lost, but they appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and won. Now the US Supreme Court will make the final decision.

For those who may not know, “bong hits” are inhalations of marijuana smoke from a large pipe called a “bong.” The principal suspended him because of the pro-drug message on his banner, not the insult to Christians. Frederick, now twenty-three years old, claimed in an interview with the Associated Press published last Sunday:

What the banner said was, ‘Look here, I have the right to free speech, and I’m asserting it.’ I wasn’t trying to say anything religious, anything about drugs.

Uh-huh. Did you take any bong hits before your AP interview, Mr. Frederick?

The First Amendment record of the Ninth Circuit (called “The Ninth Circus” by some) is sketchy. Just two weeks ago, it ruled against two Oakland employees in another free speech case. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported it:

The city of Oakland did not violate two employees’ freedom of speech when it removed a flyer they posted promoting the ‘natural family’ after other workers had founded a Gay and Lesbian Employees Association, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.

The flyer was taken down by supervisors after complaints by lesbian employees. It read:

Good News Employee Association is a forum for people of Faith to express their views on the contemporary issues of the day. With respect for the Natural Family, Marriage and Family values. If you would like to be a part of preserving integrity in the Workplace call Regina Rederford @xxx-xxxx or Robin Christy @xxx-xxxx

The two women thought they should have the same free speech rights as gays and lesbians, but US District Court Judge Vaughn Walker dismissed their lawsuit in 2005 and the Ninth Circuit upheld his ruling. Evidently the “Good News Employee’s Association” isn’t protected by the First Amendment because the “Gay and Lesbian Employee’s Association” has special rights under the city’s “anti-discrimination and harassment” statute. When homosexual activists in Maine passed a similar statute last year, they insisted they wanted only equal rights, not special rights. Uh-huh. Tell that to Robin Christy and Regina Rutherford.

One consolation the women might take is that the Ninth Circuit is the most-overruled appeals court in the country. That’s easy to understand when they rule that “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” is protected speech, but “Natural Family” is “hate speech”. I wonder what their ruling would have been if Frederick’s banner read “Bong Hits 4 Muhammad”?

In another student free speech case last April, the Ninth Circuit ruled a student’s rights were not violated when his school gave him an in-school suspension for refusing to take off a T-shirt proclaiming “Be Ashamed, Our School Embraced What God Has Condemned” and “Homosexuality is Shameful.” He wore it on a day when gay and lesbian students wore T-shirts supporting homosexuality during a school-sanctioned “Day of Silence.” The student asked for a preliminary injunction that would allow him to wear his T-shirt. The Supreme Court heard his case too but dodged a decision, claiming on March 5th that the case was moot since the student had graduated.

In still another student free speech case, the Associated Press reported this month that:

When a few classmates razzed Rebekah Rice about her Mormon upbringing with questions such as, "Do you have 10 moms?" she shot back: "That’s so gay."
Those three words landed the high school freshman in the principal’s office . . . [where she] got a warning and a notation in her file . . . [H]er parents sued, claiming officials at Santa Rosa’s Maria Carillo High violated their daughter’s First Amendment rights when they disciplined her for uttering a phrase that "enjoys widespread currency in youth culture." . . . Testifying last week about the 2002 incident, Rice, now 18, said that when she uttered those words, she was not referring to anyone’s sexual orientation. She said the phrase meant "that’s so stupid, that’s so silly, that’s so dumb."

Her parents contend the school didn’t protect Rebecca from harassment because of her religion, but instead disciplined her for using a word in a way they didn’t like when she defended herself. She could use “gay” to mean “happy” or “homosexual,” but not “stupid, silly, or dumb.” The word is protected, but not Rebecca. Should the “Ninth Circus” ever get this one - and they may since it’s a California case - want to guess how they’ll rule?