CRUCIFYING THE KNIGHTS
It’s just wrong
The faith of a judicial nominee has again become the subject of recent questioning by Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In this case, it was U.S. district court nominee Brian C. Buescher, and the accusations came over his membership in Knights of Columbus, a Catholic charitable organization.
Sens. Kamala Harris, D-California, and Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, said the organization holds “extreme” — most would say traditional — positions on abortion and same-sex marriage and that the organization’s positions could impair the jurist’s judgment and make him unfit for his post in Nebraska.
Just as in 2017 when now-Judge Amy Coney Barrett was grilled by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, about her faith, imposing a religious litmus test is expressly forbidden by the Constitution, which, in Article VI, says the government cannot consider a person’s faith when appraising fitness to hold federal office.
“The sheer ignorance, not to mention injustice, in the senators’ describing the Knights as ‘extreme’ would be baffling — if it weren’t part of pattern of bigoted thinking already sanctified by other senators,” the archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles Joseph Chaput, wrote.
“A lot has changed in 50 years, some of it good, some of it not, and some of it involves a crippling loss of decency and common sense in some members of Congress around matters of religious faith,” he said. “It’s ugly, it’s vindictive, and it damages all of us.”
Naked in hypocrisy
Democrats appear to have no shame on the hypocrisy, but perhaps a few still-impressionable students learned a thing or two recently when Cabot Phillips of Campus Reform went to American University in Washington, D.C., to discuss the potential border wall.
Passing off several comments — “Illegal immigration is wrong, plain and simple”; “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented and unchecked” and “I voted numerous times … to spend money to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in.” — as having coming from President Trump, he later revealed to the students they actually came from U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, former President Barack Obama and former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, respectively.
After students called the quotes “divisive,” “hateful,” “negative,” “prejudice[d],” “jingoist” and “dehumanizing,” they at first were speechless after learning they came from liberal icons, then burbled things like “interesting” and “that is surprising.” One even disputed the fact they could have come from Democrats but, eventually, had to accept that, in fact, the emperors had no clothes.
Editing the president
A Seattle, Washington, television station, confronted with the evidence noted by a viewer, fired an editor who doctored a video of President Trump to make it appear he was sticking out his tongue languidly between sentences during his first prime time television address from the Oval Office last week.
The staffer at a local Fox affiliate, Q13, was fired, according to Newsbusters, “after the station aired a doctored (and insulting) video of President Donald Trump.”
The viewer originally sent the video to local radio station host Todd Herman.
In addition to the tongue lolling editing, the editor also made “the colors in the video look more saturated,” according to the Seattle Times, “leading the president’s skin and hair to appear more orange.”
A recent Monmouth University survey before the doctored video surfaced, according to Newsbusters, bore out what has been seen as uncategorically true — that the public is being fed “fake news” by the media. In the survey, a full 77 percent felt it was true, including 31 percent who said it happens regularly and 46 percent who said it happens occasionally.
Why Johnny can’t do math
The word “racist” lost its meaning some time back, but examples continue to surface showing exactly why. One of the most recent was the Data for Black Lives Conference at MIT last week, which included the topic how “mathematics classrooms are breeding grounds for racialized myths of superiority and deficiency.”
“Math,” the pamphlet describing the conference said, “is, more than any other subject, associated with notions of fixed intelligence.” It went on to describe how robots and automated jobs, in addition to math, also are racist because “black people bear the brunt of this automation.”
Then the information jumped the track in suggesting a solution. “We cannot achieve the goals of economic justice and equality without seriously reckoning with the history of slavery in the United State and the need for reparations,” it said. Now that’s some new math.
The conference also planned to teach attendees how to be aggrieved, suggesting they would be able to “find and address the root causes of disparities and inequities that exist” in criminal justice, health care, education and banking.