Ann, if you're lurking, Merry Christmas and keep up the good work!
Posted on 12/24/2003 2:45:47 PM PST by RaceBannon
When blue states attack
Posted: December 24, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2003 Universal Press Syndicate
Uttering the standard liberal cliche a few years ago, Richard Reeves described "representatives of the new South" as "Republicans of old puritan definition, righteous folk afraid that someone, somewhere, is having fun." (I'll skip the context of Reeves' insight, except to note that apparently aging liberals view sodomy with a chubby intern in the back office as "having fun.")
Like all beliefs universally held by liberals, Reeves' aphorism is the precise opposite of the truth.
It's the blue states that are constantly sending lawyers to the red states to bother everyone. Americans in the red states look at a place like New York City – where, this year, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade featured a gay transvestite as Mrs. Claus – and say, Well, I guess some people like it, but it's not for me.
Meanwhile, liberals in New York and Washington are consumed with what people are doing in Alabama and Nebraska. Nadine Strossen and Barry Lynn cannot sleep at night knowing that someone, somewhere, is gazing upon something that could be construed as a religious symbol.
It's never Jerry Falwell flying to Manhattan to review high-school graduation speeches, or James Dobson making sure New York City schools give as much time to God as to Mother Earth, or Pat Robertson demanding a creche next to the schools' Kwanzaa displays. (Is it just me, or is Kwanzaa becoming way too commercialized?)
But when four schools in southern Ohio have displays of the Ten Commandments, sirens go off in Nadine Strossen's Upper West Side apartment. It will surprise no one to learn that the American Civil Liberties Union promptly sued and the schools are now Ten Commandments-free. (At least students in the Ten Commandments schools, as opposed to schools in New York, Washington and Los Angeles, might reasonably be expected to know how to count up to 10.)
From the Chelsea section of Manhattan, the gay, Bronx-born Puerto Rican executive director of the ACLU, Anthony Romero, tossed and turned all night thinking about the Ten Commandments display on the Elkhart, Ind., municipal building, which had been there, without incident, since 1958. The ACLU sued and the monument was hauled off.
In Ohio, Richland County Common Pleas Judge James DeWeese had a framed poster of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom. The ACLU sued and the Ten Commandments came down. Compare that to the late New York judge Elliott Wilk, who famously displayed a portrait of communist revolutionary Che Guevara on his office wall. (Che, Castro, Hussein – evidently the only bearded revolutionary these people don't like is Jesus Christ.) And yet, no one from Ohio ever sued Wilk.
The ACLU got word of a Ten Commandments monument in a public park in Plattsmouth, Neb. (pop. 7,000), and immediately swooped in to demand that the offensive symbol be removed. Not being from New York, Plattsmouth didn't want to litigate. Soon cranes were in the park ripping out a monument that had sat there, not bothering anyone, for 40 years.
ACLU busybodies sued Johnson County, Iowa, demanding that it remove a Ten Commandments monument that had been in a public courtyard a since 1964. Within a year, the 2,500-pound granite monument was gone.
Mail-order minister Barry Lynn's Americans United for Separation of Church and State – a group curiously devoid of both Americans and churchgoers – sued little Chester County, Pa., demanding that it remove a Ten Commandments plaque that has hung on the courthouse wall since 1920.
"The Upper West Side and Malibu United" also sued the city of Everett, Wash., demanding the removal of a Ten Commandments monument in front of the police station. AU legal director Ayesha Khan explained they had nothing like that back in Pakistan and look how well things turned out there.
(Perhaps in addition to the usual processing requirements for new immigrants, there should be a form that says: Welcome to America! You will no longer have to live in a mud hut, earn 32 cents a year, and have members of your family periodically dragged off and shot. However, you may, on occasion, have to see people praying.)
The alleged legal basis for removing all of these Ten Commandments monuments is the establishment clause of the First Amendment. That clause provides: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." The vigilant observer will note instantly that none of the monuments cases involves Congress, a law or an establishment of religion.
Monuments are not "laws," the Plattsmouth, Neb., public park is not "Congress," and the Ten Commandments are not a religion. To the contrary, all three major religions believe in Moses and the Ten Commandments. Liberals might as well say the establishment clause prohibits Republicans from breathing, as that it prohibits a Ten Commandments display. But over the past few years, courts have ordered the removal of dozens and dozens of Ten Commandments displays.
How a local judge acknowledging a higher power with a symbol used by all three major religions is the same as Congress establishing a national religion remains a legal mystery – like, how the University of Michigan can use one admissions standard for blacks and another for whites and yet it's not race discrimination.
How about a truce? The intolerant religious fanatics in the red states will continue not complaining about high taxes, secular education and gay-rights parades in the blue states, and the proponents of tolerance in the blue states will stop bothering everyone in the red states.
They've almost ruined Christmas this year and I don't have that many left. I think we all ought to get together and file a class action suit against the ACLU.
It bothered me too until I realized that the red represents the blood of the fathers who died for us. The red states are full of people who remember, the blues would rather forget, hoping we will too. I'm through talking to them. When the time comes we'll be the ones with the guns, like always.
The problem is that people believe in the RULE OF LAW. They will follow the rulings of the Judicial Activists failing to recognize that they are not basing their rulings on the RULE OF LAW, but rather on the RULE OF MEN.
IF they were basing their rulings on the RULE OF LAW, the second part of the establishment clause, ". . . or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. . .", would be given equal if not greater weight than the first clause, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . ."
It is amazing how BLIND justice can become between the first and second commas!
I never could quite figure out why people were getting so exercised about the color choices after the 2000 election. I recall that different networks had differing colors for the (R)s and the (D)s in the same election.
their enterprise is getting redistributed wealth from the rest of us.
keep hillary clinton and her neosocialist redistributor law benders out of the south and west.
Memo to someone...anyone to do an EXPOSE on BARRY LYNN!! And Morris Dees!!
By next year at this time those "red states" will be far fewer in number. In fact, if this election is a repeat of '84, the whole nation will be a sea of red (except for one state). That's why I don't like to label whole states as "the enemy." Way too collectivist for my taste. Enemies of freedom are individuals, not states or counties. In fact, I'd bet that the majority of Freepers hail from "blue" (in election 2000) states.
But anyway, my point was that election map colors change - and sometimes drastically - with every election, and the GOP will most likely have total dominance of that map after the next election. So it's wise not to get too caught up in color labels.
The whole basis for the oath to tell the truth comes from the Holy Bible in Genesis 20:16 as Commandment Number Nine: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor", yet that particular verse is prohibited from the courtroom.
"To tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God" has no relevance unless we attach some significance to what is written in that book, and, particularly, what is written in the Ninth Commandment.
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