Orlando: it is not a Second Amendment problem. It is a First Amendment problem. Specifically, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment has correctly prohibited our government from deciding which religion is acceptable and which is not. Until now.
Unfortunately, our constitutional guardians have failed us. The politicians sworn to support, preserve, or protect our constitution have now allowed the following to be our current state of affairs: that Islamic Jihad is not recognized as either a tenet or doctrine of Islam. All of a sudden, our politicians are now certified theological experts in the matter. Either that or somebody made Islam our officially sanctioned religion, a religion which nobody is allowed to debate. Officially, the terms “Islamic Jihad” are not allowed to appear in any official document.
My question is, just when was the establishment clause overturned to allow this? Did I miss it?
A government that declares any tenet, belief, or practice of a religion to be the “true” version of that religion, is therefore choosing a side in that religion and that is undeniably prohibited by our constitution. Even if a government denounces any other tenet, belief, or practice of that same religion and declares those adherents to be practicing the “high-jacked” or corrupted version of that religion, then such a government has indeed inserted itself and sanctioned an established official religion.
Consider that our government is supposed to be prohibited from declaring that all Baptists are true Christians because they baptize by immersion in water, while all Presbyterians are untrue Christians because they do not. Or that all Protestants are true Christians and all Catholics are unholy idolaters. Wars have been fought and many people have died throughout history over such ecumenical differences. The beauty of our enlightened Constitution is that it forbids the official taking of sides in these internecine battles. The prohibition against establishing an official religion – or even an official doctrine within a religion – has always been cemented firmly between unduly preferring any tenet or belief of say, Catholic over Protestant, Atheist over Nativist, Jew over Gentile, or whatever. Until now apparently.
For example: when Obama and his enablers and apologists in both political parties state that the Islamic State (ISIS) isn’t Islam, or that Al Qaeda or any other Jihadic terrorist groups are those who have “perverted Islam” then that official statement would be a distinct and undeniable theological assessment. It also means that Islamic Jihad as a tenet of Islam would no longer be recognized as Islamic. All of the Imams in Islam can go to hell. Obama will by golly tell them what is or is not their true religion.
Think about the implications.
Are we, as a country, going to allow our government to promote and approve a tenet of any religion as the only officially sanctioned version of that religion? The Establishment Clause of the Constitution says no. When was that changed?
The left only complains about “the lack of diversity” when no left-wing ideas are present. Their default position is; only left-wing views should be allowed. If conservative ideas are expressed, it’s time to call the “Diversity Police.”
One of the brightest lights on the right, (my youngest daughter absolutely adores him) Ben Shapiro was scheduled to speak at California State University Los Angeles (CSULA) on Thursday, but after weeks of protest from campus cry-bullies, his speech was cancelled.
His experience with CSULA could end up in a future edition of the book.
The campus president’s reason for shutting down Shapiro’s speech before the CSULA chapter of Young America’s Foundation, “When Diversity Becomes a Problem,” is about as glaring an example of doublespeak as you’ll ever see:
CSULA president William Covino announced Monday that the event would not be allowed to continue without opposing speakers: “After careful consideration, I have decided that it will be best for our campus community if we reschedule Ben Shapiro’s appearance for a later date, so that we can arrange for him to appear as part of a group of speakers with differing viewpoints on diversity. Such an event will better represent our university’s dedication to the free exchange of ideas and the value of considering multiple viewpoints.”
George Orwell could not be reached for comment.
…Shapiro and YAF point to the fact that left-wing activists like Cornel West and Angela Davis have been allowed to speak at student events without the need for a conservative response. “Did Covino go out of his way to ensure students attending any one of these events had the opportunity to ‘consider multiple viewpoints?’” YAF asks. “Has he ever canceled other events for failing to meet his standard of ‘inclusivity?’”
Shapiro told Breitbart News that he and YAF would take their event to campus anyway, without the school’s permission.
“The campus fascists have taken over,” Shapiro told Breitbart News. “I pay taxes in the state of California; I’m paying for these whiny children to be indoctrinated by radical leftists. For CSULA to pretend that they’re trying to provide balance isn’t just stupid, it’s insultingly stupid. I am the balance, and they’re too afraid to let me speak. These aren’t diversity warriors. They’re jackbooted thugs. If they want to call the men with guns to shut down free speech, they’ll demonstrate clearly just who they are. I’ll see them on Thursday.”
Below is an example of why the left fears Shapiro.
The timing of this latest Project Veritas video is perfect as it coincides with the resignation of Tim Wolfe, president of the University of Missouri, who caved into the demands of perpetually disgruntled and triggered black social justice warriors who were complaining that he wasn’t doing enough to stop alleged incidents of racism in Columbia Missouri – or something. No one is quite sure what he could have done differently.
(Meanwhile, not noticed by the SJWs is the rash of black on white violent assaults that have been happening around the university for many months.)
At issue here?The hateful, offensive, intolerable and triggering — U.S. Constitution:
I would think universities today would be a target rich environment for this type of journalism.
James O’Keefe got his start as a muckraker, in fact, at his alma mater Rutgers University, where he got the dining hall to ban Lucky Charmson the grounds that it was racist against Irish people.
In today’s lingo, I guess you could say he was pretending that Lucky Charms “triggered” him because he’s an Irish American.
The universities created these jacobin monsters with their idiotic PC policies. And we seem to have reached a tipping point.
Fortunately, there has been pushback to the mounting insanity coming from conservative corners.
Author Jonathan Haidt described two universities – “Coddling U.” and “Strengthening U” to a group of high school seniors and asked them to choose the one that would allow the most diversity.
More of this please. Conservatives need to reach kids before the cultural Marxists are able to get their foul meathooks on them.
As you might have heard, the state of Oregon has decreed that Sweet Cakes by Melissa must pay $135,000 to the lesbian couple whom they (apparently) “mentally raped” by refusing to bake their wedding cake.
The final judgment, which came last Thursday, came with another twist. Aaron and Melissa Klein have also been given a “cease and desist” order, which effectively decrees they must refrain from stating their continued intention to abide by their moral beliefs.
Let’s be clear on why this is so sinister. There are times when speech rights conflict with other legitimate social goods. The public’s right to know can conflict with individual privacy rights. Sometimes threats to public safety warrant keeping secrets. There can be interesting debates about intellectual property rights. These cases can get tricky, and we should all understand that speech rights necessarily do have certain pragmatic limits.
None of those concerns apply here. The Kleins did not threaten public safety. They violated no one’s privacy or property rights. Rather, the Oregon labor commissioner, Brad Avakian, wanted to silence them because the content of their speech. Presumably he was angry that the Kleins’ defiant stance had earned them a potentially profitable reputation as heroes for religious freedom. They were meant to be humiliated and cowed; instead there was a real chance they would land on their feet. So they had to be gagged to prevent that from happening.
If the First Amendment doesn’t apply to a case like this, it is meaningless.
This is spiteful, vindictive bullying — straight-up. The idea is to prevent them from getting public support like other victims of the Gaystapo have (in the form of donations and business and even words of encouragement.)
The good news is – the Kleins have decided to fight the gag order:
The order was signed by Brad Avakian, the commissioner of the BOLI and a vocal supporter of the LGBTQIA community.
“Within Oregon’s public accommodations law is the basic principle of human decency that every person, regardless of their sexual orientation, has the freedom to fully participate in society,” the ruling states. “The ability to enter public places, to shop and dine, to move about unfettered by bigotry.”
On a side note here – I predicted that once gay marriage was legalized, LGBTQIA supporters would attempt to silence all dissent.
Avakian has publicly stated his intentions to target Christian business owners who do not comply with his way of thinking. Here’s what he told The Oregonian about Sweet Cakes By Melissa in 2013:
“The goal is never to shut down a business. The goal is to rehabilitate.”
Here we have a government employee who wants to “rehabilitate” Christian business owners like the Kleins. How exactly does Avakian plan on purging their religious beliefs? Is the state of Oregon running a reeducation camp? Or maybe they prefer to use shock therapy.
I’m truly interested to know what sort of conversion therapy treatments Avakian uses. However, he won’t return my telephone calls.
The Kleins did not seem all that concerned about Avakian’s order to remain silent. The first thing they did after reading his edict was to call me.
“I don’t really care,” Mr. Klein told me. “This man has no power over me. He seems to think he can tell me to be quiet. That doesn’t sit well with me – and I refuse to comply.”
The Kleins tell me they have been ordered not to speak to any news organizations or speak publicly – an order they violated when they called me.
“They picked the wrong guy,” Mr. Klein said. “When my constitutional freedoms have been violated by the state, I’m going to speak out. That’s the way it is.”
So the country’s first Alinsky-trained, anti-First Amendment president decided to take some pot-shots at Fox News, Tuesday during a forum at George Washington University.
As I noted at PJ Media, Obama felt safe allowing his mask to slip in a college setting where hating Fox News is de rigueur. No one felt “triggered” by the president of the United States (*arguably the most powerful man in the world) singling out a major media outlet for special scorn – because apparently on college campuses, this sort of hateful derision is allowed.
“There’s always been a strain in American politics where you’ve got the middle class, and the question has been who are you mad at if you’re struggling, if you’re working, but you don’t seem to be getting ahead,” the president said.. “And over the last 40 years, sadly, I think there’s been an effort to either make folks mad at folks at the top, or to make be mad at folks at the bottom. And I think the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leeches, or don’t want to work, are lazy, you know, or undeserving, got traction. And look, it’s still being propagated. I mean, I have to say that if you watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a constant menu. They will find, like folks who make me mad, and I don’t know where they find them, right? They’re all like, like I don’t want to work. I just want a free Obama phone or whatever. And that becomes an entire narrative, right, that gets worked up. And very rarely do you hear an interview of a waitress, which is much more typical who’s raising a couple of kids, and is doing everything right, but still can’t pay the bills. And so if we’re going to change how John Boehner and Mitch McConnell think, (!) we’re going to have to change how our body politick thinks, which means we’re going to have to change how the media reports on these issues, (!!) and how people’s impressions of what it’s like to struggle in this economy looks like, and how budgets connect to that. And that’s a hard process, because that requires a much broader conversation than typically we have.”
What th – – Is he going to sic the FCC on just Fox now? A year ago, you may remember – the FCC was working on a pilot program in which it would have sent researchers into American newsrooms to grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decided on which stories to run. That scheme was shelvedafter two weeks of very negative media attention thanks to a Republican Chairman on FCC who wrote an oped at the WSJ about it.
Now the president’s making noises about “changing the way the news is reported?” Particularly Fox News?
Fox’s Megyn Kelly and James Rosen discussed Obama’s disturbing fixation with Fox News on The Kelly File, last night.
Rosen recalled an Obama White House “war on Fox News” years ago, and showed a montage of all the times the president has taken shots at the cable network (spoiler alert: it’s happened quite a bit).
Rosen figured that either the audience knows what Obama knows and “prefers to get its news from such a source,” or the White House believes the Fox audience isn’t “sophisticated enough to see what they see… effectively insulting the intelligence of the American people.”
Kelly pointed out that George W. Bush never complained about MSNBC because it would have been “beneath the dignity of the office.”
On the Hugh Hewitt radio show, Wednesday Dr. Charles Krauthammer analysis found Obama a little wanting in the sanity department.
Look, this is sort of a pathological Obama where you know, he picks up these memes. He doesn’t know a damn thing about what’s on Fox. The idea that Fox is constantly showing, you know, sponges and leeches, and never shows the waitress trying to make it, it’s just sort of the mythological world that he lives in. Or he may be cynical. I mean, he may know it’s all nonsense. I mean, I can’t tell. I mean, after all, you probably need a psychiatrist to figure that out. But it’s either cynical or just hopelessly deluded on this. I would prefer to think he’s cynical, because I’d like somebody in the White House who’s not delusional. And this is the usual Obama cynicism. It’s the media, it’s the press, they’re underreporting liberal successes. I mean, look, the fact is a war on poverty, the billions poured into helping the poor, which in my 20s I rather supported until in my 30s, the empirical social science evidence began to come out that not only was money poured down the drain, but it was undermining the traditional structures of even the poorest neighborhoods and leading to real terrible pathologies, including helping to accelerate the breakdown of the family. So these are, there’s just the empirical social science refuting the liberal nostrums about how to help the poor. But he never engages in an argument. It’s all ad hominin.”
During the Special Report round table, Tuesday evening, Krauthammer zinged Obama for his colossal arrogance.
“He’s letting us know that his arrogance knows no limits,” Krauthammer said. “Of course he wants a change in coverage, particularly the coverage of himself.”
“After all, he was considered a Greek god in 2008. And right now, people are actually judging him on [his] merits. He doesn’t like that.”
Krauthammer said that Obama has the arrogance to say – in one day – that not only does the media have to change, but John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Elizabeth Warren also have to change.
“There’s only one person on the firmament who doesn’t have to change and that’s Barack Obama,” Krauthammer stated.
“He seems impervious to empirical evidence. The same view he had of himself upon attaining the presidency, he has today.”
Greg Gutfeld shared his own unique take on The Five, Wednesday. He started out by sarcastically pointing out that Obama went after Fox News instead of, say, ISIS.
He dismissed Obama’s “absurd” criticism and argued Fox focusing on how Obama’s policies affect poverty is “scary to progressives like Obama who fear that their ideology will be exposed as the culprit behind so much present misery.”
The president’s belief, Gutfeld said, is “agree with me and we’ll be fine.” Kimberly Guilfoyle agreed that Obama’s just sore Fox highlights the truth, and it’s both “demeaning” and beneath the dignity of the office for the president to say such things.
*Arguably the most powerful man on the earth. That used to be empirical. Now it’s “arguable.” If that.
Kudos to Fox’s Judge Jeanine Pirro, who in her opening statement, Saturday night, was unconditional in her support for free speech in the face of Islamic supremacy.
“You know, free speech in America is non-negotiable no matter what the perceived consequences, no matter the worry about retribution from Islamic extremists – PERIOD – end of the story,” Pirro declared.
She went on to offer a “primer” to explain the reasoning behind her position, covering ground that has been well trod, this week.
She predicted renewed efforts by the Obama administration to limit the First Amendment to comply with blasphemy laws.
“For the first time I’m worried about whether or not the present so-called ‘politically correct’ climate will restrict our free speech in line with shariah requirements,” Pirro said.
She had a spirited discussion with Pamela Geller about the past week and the issue of free speech vs. shariah.
Pirro also had on the fiery Lt. Col. Ralph Peters (ret.) to discuss the latest terrorist threats on the home front.
Nice Deb 