"[Tyrannical] power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?" — French historian Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
The Joe McGinniss Sarah Palin book The Rogue is the left's latest hate letter to God-fearing patriotic Americans. Make no mistake about it, folks. The McGinniss attack along with the other numerous attacks on Sarah Palin are really about attacking you — mainstream Americans with traditional values.
Lloyd Marcus writes in the American Thinker:
“How dare Palin praise traditional marriage, motherhood, Christianity, and American exceptionalism, all of which are anathema to the left? Thus, the left's hatred of Palin is really hatred of mainstream America -- particularly Tea Party patriots.
That is it in a nutshell and explains why the left so desperately seeks to destroy Palin. They hate America and all who love our extraordinary country.
The left is indoctrinating our kids into believing America is the greatest source of all evil in the world; all other religions are superior to Christianity, and homosexuality is superior to heterosexuality. During the Gay Pride Day Celebration at a middle school, kids were taught to give things a try before deciding whether they like it or not. Apparently, Obama agrees.
Palin in the White House would be a major fly-in-the-ointment toward furthering the left's secular/progressive agenda.
In typical left-wing fashion, McGinniss attacks Palin for her Christian faith and then accuses her of not being Christian enough. Thus, trying to portray Palin to be a hypocrite. It is pretty obnoxious when godless liberal progressive zealots accuse godly people of falling short of Christ's standards. This tactic is satanic.”
Mr. Marcus continues:
“As I have stated on numerous occasions, the political battle in America today goes beyond Republican vs Democrat. It is a spiritual battle of good vs. evil, right vs. wrong.
The left is repulsed by all things decent, godly, and patriotic. Palin, like all of us, is far from perfect. However, she still symbolizes goodness and embodies wholesome traditional American principles and values. Thus, the light which emanates from this American icon is as repulsive to the left as the cross is to Dracula.”
During the summer of 2008, the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith led a research team that conducted in-depth interviews with 230 young adults from across America. The interviews were part of a larger study that Smith, Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, Patricia Snell Herzog and others have been conducting on the state of America’s youth.
Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing.
It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.
David Brooks writes in the New York Times that American youth have been taught, If it feels right, do it:
“The interviewers asked open-ended questions about right and wrong, moral dilemmas and the meaning of life. In the rambling answers, which Smith and company recount in a new book, “Lost in Transition,” you see the young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don’t have the categories or vocabulary to do so.
When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.
“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.
The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”
The decline of moral values among today’s youth is the expected consequence of a government education system that has been taken over by the progressive left, academic elitists (many who profess atheism), teachers unions, and the ACLU. Schools no longer teach moral values. The Ten Commandments are banned in all government schools. Students wishing to study the Bible are forbidden from having Bible study classes on school property due to some fantasy about separation of church and state. No mention of God is allowed and school prayer was abolished years ago. Abortion, homosexuality, and sexual techniques are taught, but creationism is a taboo subject. It’s no wonder we are graduating a generation of youth that have no roots in morality.
People who profess a belief in creationism are considered stupid because they do not agree with the theories of Charles Darwin. Even physicists and astronomers will fail to explain what came before the so called “Big Bang” and will turn to the hand of a creator for an explanation. The Bible was written for a people who were enslaved and uneducated by and there is no explanation of how long a day was. It is sequence in Genesis that is important not the definition of the word “day”
George Washington stated in his farewell address as he left the Presidency in 1796 and retired to his farm:
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice ? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?”
This misconception of the so called separation of church and state stems from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson, in 1802, to the Danbury Baptist Association in response to their letter to Jefferson where they complained that in their state, the religious liberties they enjoyed were not seen as immutable rights, but as privileges granted by the legislature — as "favors granted." Jefferson replied:
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. [Congress thus inhibited from acts respecting religion, and the Executive authorized only to execute their acts, I have refrained from prescribing even those occasional performances of devotion, practiced indeed by the Executive of another nation as the legal head of its church, but subject here, as religious exercises only to the voluntary regulations and discipline of each respective sect.] Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.
I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection & blessing of the common father and creator of man, and tender you for yourselves & your religious association assurances of my high respect & esteem.”
You can view Jefferson’s original letter stored at the Library of Congress by clicking here.
This letter from Thomas Jefferson has been used by the United States Supreme Court to set president for case law that has led to the banning of the Ten Commandments form public buildings and the banning of nativity scenes in the public square. Like the Court’s ruling in Roe v Wade a decision made of whole cloth.
Is it any wonder today’s youth are lacking in moral values and are addicted to moral relevance. Unless you send your child to a parochial school or home school them they will learn more about the homosexual life style than the Ten Commandments. They will learn more about feelings than morality. They will learn to sympathize with the perpetrator rather than the victim.
Not only are our government schools trashing morality they are failing in the basic subjects of reading, math, history, English, and science. After trillions of dollars being dumped down the rat hole of public education by federal, state and local governments test scores have declined.
John Stossel writes in an opinion piece for Fox News entitled Stupid in America:
“School spending has gone through the roof and test scores are flat.
While most every other service in life has gotten faster, better, and cheaper, one of the most important things we buy -- education -- has remained completely stagnant, unchanged since we started measuring it in 1970.
Why no improvement?
Because K-12 education is a government monopoly and monopolies don't improve.
The government-school monopoly claims: Education is too important to leave to the free market. At a teachers' union rally, even actor Matt Damon showed up to deride market competition as "MBA style thinking."
"Competition may be okay for selling movies and cell phones, but education is different," says the establishment. Learning is complex. Parents aren't real "customers" because they don't have the expertise to know which school is best. They don't know enough about curricula, teachers' credentials, etc. That's why public education must be centrally planned by government "experts".
Those experts have been in charge for years. They are what school reformers call the "Blob." Jeanne Allen from the Center for Education Reform says for years attempts at reform have run, "smack into federations, alliances, departments, councils, boards, commissions, panels, herds, flocks and convoys, that make up the education industrial complex, or the Blob.
Taken individually they were frustrating enough, each with its own bureaucracy, but taken as a whole they were (and are) maddening in their resistance to change. Not really a wall -- they always talk about change -- but more like quicksand, or a tar pit where ideas slowly sink.
And the most powerful part of the Blob is the teachers' union.
This Saturday, I interview Nathan Saunders, the President of the Washington, D.C. Teachers' Union, and Joseph Del Grosso, President of the Newark Teachers' Union. They say things like, "the unions have a pretty strong history of advocating for high-quality public education... We have progress as a result of unions."
Their predecessors were more candid. When the Washington Post asked George Parker, when he headed the Washington, D.C. teachers union, why he fought a voucher program that let some kids escape failing government schools, he said, "As kids continue leaving the system, we will lose teachers. Our very survival depends on having kids in D.C. schools so we'll have teachers to represent."
Albert Shanker, the teachers' union president who, years ago, first turned teachers unions into a national political force, was even more honest. Shanker callously said, "When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children."
One of the ten pillars of Communism as proposed by Karl Marx is:
“Free education for all children in government schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.”
The operative words in Marx’s thinking is “government schools” What this really means is people are being taxed to support what we call “public” schools, which train the young to work for the communal debt system. We also call it the Department of Education, the NEA, Outcome Based Education, and No Child Left Behind.
Brooks concludes:
“Allan Bloom and Gertrude Himmelfarb warned that sturdy virtues are being diluted into shallow values. Alasdair MacIntyre has written about emotivism, the idea that it’s impossible to secure moral agreement in our culture because all judgments are based on how we feel at the moment.
Charles Taylor has argued that morals have become separated from moral sources. People are less likely to feel embedded on a moral landscape that transcends self. James Davison Hunter wrote a book called “The Death of Character.” Smith’s interviewees are living, breathing examples of the trends these writers have described.
In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit. Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.”
Our founding fathers were men who believed in a God and his commandments. They were Deists, Christians, and Jews. While not subscribing to any official religion as was the case in England and Europe they did, however, subscribe to a moral code based on the Bible, both Old and New Testaments.
John Adams praised Jews on many occasions in his personal correspondence.
America’s second president called the Jews “the most glorious nation that ever inhabited the earth.”
Adams, challenging the anti-Semitism of French Enlightenment luminaries like Voltaire, argued that Jews “have influenced the affairs of mankind more and happily than any other nation, ancient or modern.”
God, Adams exclaimed in a letter of 1809, had “ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing nations.”
Our founders knew that without a firm base in a moral code based on religious principles this nation would be doomed.
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