“Your child belongs to us already.”
— paraphrased form of line attributed to Adolf Hitler in the context of speeches about youth indoctrination in Nazi Germany.
On Microsoft Word, where I am writing this, the word “statism” gets a red underline indicating that it is not, in fact, a legitimate word. Maybe the version of Word I use hasn’t caught up yet. It could also be that the program’s administrators find the term politically loaded. Whatever the case may be, “statism” has been in common usage and seen in print for decades now and it will be with everyone alive today to the grave unless Big Brother can mandate Newspeak.
A true statist won’t use “statism.” It’s a word that evokes the Third Reich, the USSR, The People’s Republic of China, Estado Espanol, the DPRK, and other places where it was, or still is, a good idea to tiptoe, kiss ass, keep your head down and get out ASAP. That doesn’t mean we’re immune to misanthropocracy, we just haven’t gone so far — yet — as other stately entities.
What’s eerily mind-numbing is the number of legal brainiacs, like Elizabeth Bartholet, who draw beads on Christian doctrine without a word about what’s in Islamic ABC’s.
The trouble is that some people think the idea of a state counting more than any individual is sacred. Individual “rights” stand in the way of Elysian visions that those who really care have for you.
There’s an interesting anecdote from one of Robert C. Tucker’s Stalin bios. It goes like this: Soviet prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky is asked by Josef Stalin if he’s got a confession from a particular suspect yet. When Vyshinsky replies that the subject is a tough nut to crack, Stalin asks: “How much does the Soviet state weigh, comrade?” He gets confused when the question is repeated, and comes back, “That is in the realm of astronomical figures.” “Exactly,” Stalin responds, “and no man can stand up against that great weight. Do not report back to me again until you have his confession in that briefcase.” The story is branded as “mythical” today but it conforms with everything we know about Uncle Joe’s ruling style. It sounds a lot like what the comrades tell us nowadays.
The most effective vehicle for getting the whole population on board for the statist ride is public education. Selling the switch to a single European currency to the masses was a good example. Eurocrats and economic high priests began plugging the idea, which endured a lot of skepticism, in the 1960’s. It finally came about in 1999 after school children were suckled on the plan for over a generation and a half.
Who gets to tell the kids what for about five hours a day 180 times a year is a matter of enormous stakes. If junior makes it to high school graduation the state has had him for about 2,160 days.
Felix Frankfurter was the U.S. Supreme Court Justice who tried drawing a line between state “interest” and individual rights: “For a citizen to be made to forego even a part of so basic a liberty as his political autonomy, the subordinating interest of the State must be compelling.” In that case, the New Hampshire AG Louis Wyman was using the threat of jail time to pry private political thoughts and connections from economist Paul Sweezy, based on a college lecture he had delivered. The top cop of that state in 1957, that later mandated the motto “Live free or die,” demanded to know just how much of a Red Sweezy was. Wyman was concerned about the corruption of youth.
There are modern jurists just as concerned, but not about commies. The law professors today who think kids might be led astray during elementary education are worried about Christian propaganda. Catherine Ross, Professor Emirita of George Washington University Law, thinks thumpers undermine democracy. Her manifesto, “Fundamentalist Challenges to Core Democratic Principles: Exit and Homeschooling,” was published in The William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal in 2010.
Some of it lands pretty wide of reality: “For example, some data indicate that students in evangelical schools demonstrate less comfort with freedom of speech than their peers in public schools.” Then why does the legacy media always report the controversy the other way around? Are they in on the vast-Christ-wing-conspiracy? The note supporting this contention 111, is a wormhole: “Sikkink supra note 27, at 278.” A finding this far out should provide its original source. Citing a book, Conservative Protestants, Schooling, and Democracy, most readers will probably have difficulty accessing may be an intentional diversion.
It is news to most people that evangelicals oppose the Bill-of-Rights. My local Alexandria Va. coffee shop is inside the beltway. People with degrees from America’s best brand-named universities are plentiful there. At least half-a-dozen of them, I see several times a week, want government restrictions on every kind of mass media in existence. The number one threat to amendment one has been coming from Ivory Towers for over decade. Finding it elsewhere is psychotic grade fantasy.
The most widely quoted passage from Ross’ fundamentalist-phobic screed, not necessarily by people who see it her way, is:
Many liberal political theorists argue, however, that there are limits to tolerance. In order for the norm of tolerance to survive across generations, society need not and should not tolerate inculcation of absolutist views that undermine toleration of difference, respect for difference should not be confused with approval for approaches that would splinter us into countless warring groups. Hence an argument that tolerance for diverse views and values is a foundational principle does not conflict with the notion that the state can and should limit the ability of intolerant homeschoolers to inculcate hostility to difference in their children — at least during the portion of the day they claim to devote to satisfying the compulsory schooling requirement.
The entire tilt of argument in over 25 pages focuses on a fundamentalist threat. Only one paragraph in it describes anything “absolutist.” It doesn’t come from quarters professing that Jesus is God’s son. What “approaches” “would splinter us into countless warring groups”? Is it “thought crime” that needs limiting? Any “hostility to difference” on display is coming from the author.
Maybe Ross is thinking of someone like Julie Jaman, who was kicked out of the Port Townsend, Washington YMCA. This was an 83-year-old woman who saw facility employee Clementine Adams, a guy in a woman’s bathing suit with a telltale bulge, accompanying two young girls getting out of their clothes in the ladies shower room. Her complaint ended in an eviction. Do the lasses need conditioning to accept this kind of routine? Is Jaman’s grievance an example of the “intolerance” that Ross can’t tolerate? The lady never delivers on what, exactly, can’t be abided. What is intolerable is a paper loaded with this much baseless innuendo the editors of a scholarly publication, called a “Bill of Rights Journal,” find fit to stamp with its imprimatur.
If she’s going to go on for 25 pages, we need some description of what “victims” have endured. Ross and her ideological kinfolk appear to be begging for an example to surface. Recent revelations of the SPLC funding hate organizations, after advising federal agencies for years, gives us reason not to rule out that possibility.
Omar Mateen, who massacred 49 people he thought were gay in the Pulse nightclub June 16, 2016, wasn’t a born-again Christian. If he had been the Christ-o-phobes would seize on the incident like a gold miner hitting pay dirt.
The first person executed for heresy under a Christian regime was Priscillian in 380 AD. A few followers were taken with him. What’s noteworthy is that Pope Siricius opposed the killing and there wasn’t another one like it for 700 years. The last person executed for questioning the canon in a Western country was Cayetano Ripoll in Spain 1826. It’s where hereticide and the auto-de-fe were most common in Christianity for centuries. It’s also the only Western nation where Islam had a foothold lasting hundreds of years. Theocratic statism was built into Islam from its inception. It’s a deadly kind of intolerance that etches deeply into the places it has corrupted.
The media has yet to inform us of an American mass murdering maniac who wasn’t primarily, if not altogether, educated at public expense. There have probably been exceptions and it is a subject worth thorough examination … would the details support Ross? The “difference” Ross won’t tolerate is pealing between the lines. It’s the reluctance from people without ideological leverage to accept having an ersatz culture inflicted on them and their progeny. A crypto-politburo keeps reinventing our “dearest values” at warp speed. They exhibit no discretion about using the federal government to turn the screws.
What is meant by “absolutist views” is vague. The only actual lessons described came from a madrassa.
A private school operated by the Saudi government in Alexandria, Virginia, has been the subject of extended controversy concerning the messages contained in its Arabic textbooks. A review of 17 books by the U.S. Commission on International Freedom recommended that the county government close the school after finding statements in the texts including an interpretation of the Quran indicating that it was permissible to kill adulterers and persons who convert from Islam to other religions, accusations that Jews caused the split between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and that Muslims can seize the life and property of “polytheists,” including those who believe in all of the world’s other major religions.
Nothing vague here, but where is anything close coming out of the primary target of Ross’ vitriol? The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas shouts a lot of unpleasant things at people suffering loss at particularly sensitive moments. They have received huge amounts of well deserved negative press but survived a multi-million dollar lawsuit that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The Wikipedia article on their protests however, never mentions violence or threats of it. Ross fails to name the madrassa she refers to and may have meant the one formerly in nearby Fairfax County. But using this example to undermine Christian education is a polemic stoop. She is comparing it to teachings from Christian curricula. But without any citation from them. The piece does not pursue what goes on in places of Islamic instruction one word further in over 12,000. It’s a strangely placed example, public school is where students learn about so-called “cultural relativity.”
What’s eerily mind-numbing is the number of legal brainiacs, like Elizabeth Bartholet, who draw beads on Christian doctrine without a word about what’s in Islamic ABC’s. The Romeike family fled Germany to avoid state imposition of secular schooling there. Many academics and the Obama DOJ were outraged when they were granted temporary asylum in Tennessee. Were there any known negative consequences of Christian homeschooling in Deutschland? The law applied to prevent it was enacted in 1938 under the Nazi regime.
One of the fears both American and Federal Republic of Germany statists’ voice is that dodging their demands upon children’s upbringing will result in pockets of “parallel societies.” That reservation comes off mighty weak. The FRG sways pliantly to ideological tenets much further removed from Western norms and values for nearly anyone arriving there from places afar. The abundant examples only surface on “alternative” platforms. Somehow forgotten or seemingly irrelevant, is that Christianity is not “parallel” — whatever that means — it is one of the very foundations of Western society.
Meanwhile, seriously devout Christians are still persecuted, albeit to lesser degrees, as they were under Hitler. Those pontificating from Ivory Towers aren’t much interested in why Franz Jagaerstatter got the guillotine’s blade. If the intensity of Jagaerstatter’s commitment to Christian doctrine had been prevalent among German masses in 1939 WWII and the Holocaust would have stalled.
In the meantime, the madrassas there are supposedly well supervised by the German government. Islamic migrants to the country and on into second and third generations commit violent offenses at a rate often over ten times that of ethnic Germans. Do madrassas, that never receive the press Romeike’s got, play any role? Is looking into it is too hot a potato for Teutonic journalists as well as Ross and Bartholet? Do Merkelites keep as close tabs on Koranic classrooms as they do on people like the Romeike’s? Don’t we have ample reason to suspect, if not conclude, that statist cultural monitors in West Europe keep ancestral populations on tighter leashes than more recent arrivals?
Former University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann is cited: “[a] democratic government cannot possibly accommodate all conscientious beliefs, whatever they happen to be, and still remain democratic let alone committed to pursuing democratic justice.”
What are the examples? Henry Ward Beecher, Jonathon Edwards the younger, Samuel Hopkins, Elijah Lovejoy, and even John Brown were all fundamentalist Christians. They helped bring on the Civil War. Did they hold the kinds of “conscientious beliefs” that Gutmann warns of? Going by the absence of anything specific in their descriptions, this lawyerly movement must be desperately nexus-lexusing for a recent lynching or witch burning without getting hits.
Where this kind of accommodation is plaguing “democratic government” is in Europe. That’s where precise literal descriptions of the beliefs privileged groups hold have been outlawed. The Henry Nowak murder is relevant for all the wrong reasons. Sikhs’ are among the most law abiding communities in the world no matter where they go. It is still insane to allow them knives in public while depriving others that right. What won’t get mention in public debate is why their faith mandated the Kirpan in the first place. Islamic Mughal Emperor Jahangir had Guru Arjan Dev Ji executed under Sharia in 1606, predictably worse was to follow. Taking note of those facts publicly is likely to entail a visit from the Bobbies, who may cuff you while bleeding out, in jolly old England.
The “conscientious beliefs” obstructing “democratic justice” in Holland cost them the great-grand-nephew of the most famous Dutchman in history. The problem is rampant in Germany, France, Belgium, the UK, Spain, Italy, and Ireland. Rather than confront this monumental onslaught, EU and UK leaders insist on accommodating it to the point of piecemeal eradication of their own culture and any previous understanding of human decency.
If this professoriate is so hell-bent against Christianity in curricula, they are awfully parsimonious with examples. What is doing all the damage is the state itself. Ross’s essay says in its second sentence: “I am not primarily concerned here with the quality of academic achievement in the core curricular areas among homeschoolers, which has been the subject of much heated debate.”
Nor, however, is she in the least concerned with academic achievement in public schools. Nowhere does she mention students graduating high school that can barely read, have no clue of the vaguest historic timelines, or couldn’t find China on a map. We see the ones who can’t make change frequently when we use physical currency.
It becomes clearer with each line of the brief that this lady has no interest in the traditional function of a school. Her interest is in the institution’s value as an instrument of indoctrination. There are certain things an elite coterie of high academicians want the mass of people to believe or not believe. Elevated literacy and erudition they find better off in the hands of people like themselves. They know they can’t snare every young mind but will do their damndest blocking as many escape routes as possible.
READ MORE from Tim Hartnett:
The Populists Were Not Always Wrong
