Sturm: Who’s imposing their values on whom?

The Aspen Times (CO) ^ | April, 10, 2014 | Melanie Sturm

[Aspenhuskerette]

Shouldn’t college students know as much American civics as they do pop culture?

MRCTV went to American University to find out, discovering few students who could name a single U.S. senator or the number of senators from each state, though most knew the Oscar-winning song “Let It Go.”

Equally surprising are polls showing that only one-quarter of Americans can identify the vice president or name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (religion, speech, press, assembly and petition), though over half knew at least two cartoon characters from “The Simpsons.”

Before suggesting Americans’ ignorance is bliss, Think Again. “Fear always springs from ignorance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said, which is why fear mongering and placating assurances have enabled a ruling elite to wield enormous power over the people — our founders’ worst nightmare.

False promises and controversial payoffs enabled the narrow passage of Obamacare, which grants unelected bureaucrats control over 16 percent of the economy, empowering them to impose costly and freedom-infringing regulations.

Perhaps their most liberty-assaulting decree — and cunning, given its election-year timing — was the unprecedented Health and Human Services mandate forcing employers to provide free contraception, including abortion-inducing methods, or face a $100 per day/per employee fine.

[Aspenhuskerette]

Read to the end for:

Throughout our liberty-loving history, Americans have endorsed Voltaire’s enlightened principle: “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” No more.

In abandoning this principle, we now assassinate the character of non conformists...

[MissTed]

Common sense coming out of Aspen??? I’m shocked! ;)

[Blood of Tyrants]

Liberalism is the only religion that will be allowed to survive.

[SES1066]

The Democrat post-reconstruction South used ‘literacy tests’ to disenfranchise the ‘Amish’ and that has, unfortunately, forever poisoned the well for knowledge tests prior to voting and I find this a loss. While I am in full agreement that democracy (small ‘d’) is the best of all bad governmental structures yet developed, it does not mean that we should not strive for better.

I have ruminated about a voting process where everyone gets a vote but the more knowledgable get an ‘extra’ vote or votes based upon answers to current issues and random questions to the Citizenship test. Set up a test of random 10 questions from a 500 pool would be interesting. At the very least I feel that we would not be worse off but possibly would it improve our governance?