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Tuesday, October 21, 2008
‘Liberals hate real Americans’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Folks, there’s a real America, and liberals hate real Americans that work, and accomplish, and achieve, and believe in God.” — U.S. Rep. Robin Hayes, R-N.C., warming up a crowd for a McCain rally
Hayes claims he has no memory of saying that, even though the comments were recorded on tape. I believe it’s probably true that he doesn’t recall. Such sentiments are so engrained in certain people that they recite it without thinking about it, as they were rattling off their phone number or directions to their house.
And people who have been indoctrinated to think that way will naturally get angry at the thought that their “real America” might get taken over by “liberals who hate real Americans,” especially if that takeover of their country is led by a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama.
As a poster in another AJC blog put it recently, “I can only hope Hussien likes to ride around with the top down.”
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Using the Bible to keep girls in “their place”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As you can see from the video above, 14-year-old Kacy Stuart has some serious game. That’s an impressive performance by a young high school freshman of any gender. I coached girls’ soccer for a lot of years, and you don’t see that kind of talent often.
Unfortunately, Kacy has become famous not for her leg but her gender. Initially, she was barred from playing in the Georgia Football League, comprising teams of home-schoolers and small Christian academies, because she’s a girl. She was reinstated by the league only after the threat of a lawsuit.
That part of the story is fairly familiar, repeated elsewhere around the country in recent years in schools both public and private. But it took a twist last weekend when Kacy returned to the field for her first game with her New Creation team only to meet objections by her opponents.
“The East Atlanta Mustangs didn’t play us under protest but they were allowed to read a statement on their beliefs about female football players,” according to New Creation coach, Coach Ken Townley. “They used biblical verses from the book of Romans. I was very stunned by that.”
I read through Romans looking for anything about female football kickers and found nothing. My best guess is that the Mustangs cited Romans 1:26, “For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature.”
The next team on New Creation’s schedule, the Bartow Generals, have bowed out for unspecified reasons.
Some may see this as a story about Christian intolerance, but that’s a gross and unfair generalization. There are Christians on both sides of the issue, and in fact I suspect that most Christians would support letting young Kacy play.
But the story does illustrate how easily Scripture can be abused by those seeking justification for their own narrow personal beliefs. Because as you can see below in this interview with Ellen DeGeneres, there is nothing “unnatural” — whatever that means — about young Kacy.
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How to fix the U.S. election system
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Richard Hasen, an expert in election law and a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, surveys the U.S. electoral process and sees a crisis in public confidence that undermines our system’s legitimacy and poses “a small, but serious, risk of election meltdown in the case of a close election.”
His recommendations are sound:
“We can start with a uniform ballot for federal elections, applicable in all elections. To eliminate voter registration fraud and incompetence, we can move to a national, universal voter registration model. More ambitiously, too, states should consider creating the conditions for nonpartisan election administration, and cleaning up ambiguities and holes in the rules for running our elections.
The swings in voter confidence in the electoral process are troubling, and present a real national crisis. Once this election is over, we need to move to fix the process. Unfortunately, once the election is over, the press will doubtless stop paying attention to our election problems, only to return to election experts, just before the 2012 election, to ask us why things haven’t been cleaned up yet. Part of our reply should and will surely be that coverage of these problems shouldn’t follow the election cycle; it should persist until they are fixed.”
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Iraq to U.S.: Go! No, stay. No, go! Stay!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Iraqi government needs U.S. forces to stay, at least for a while longer, for military reasons.
But for political reasons, it can’t admit that fact to its own people.
As a result, Iraqi approval of a new status-of-forces agreement has been postponed and may not happen at all, a possibility that is making U.S. officials nervous. With no agreement, U.S. forces would legally be required to leave by Jan. 1.
Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned Iraqi leaders Tuesday that “we are clearly running out of time.”
“It’s time for the Iraqis to make a decision,” he said.
As written, the draft agreement calls for US forces to withdraw from Iraqi cities and towns by June — that’s just eight months from now — and be gone altogether by the end of 2011. But apparently many Iraqis want even that timetable pushed up.
However the short term problem is resolved, it’s pretty clear that in the long run the U.S. will not attain permanent bases in Iraq, which had been the hope of many top American officials in launching the invasion.
John McCain was clearly among that group. He had been pushing for the removal of Saddam Hussein long before before Sept. 11, and like others he seized upon the attacks on New York and Washington as a pretext for that strategy. His later infamous statement that he was willing to stay in Iraq for 100 years was not a commitment to a 100-year war, as Barack Obama suggested, but it did reflect McCain’s plan to keep US forces in Iraq long-term, just as they have been stationed in Germany, Italy, Japan and other nations since the end of World War II.
That had been the plan from the beginning. In launching the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration and its supporters believed they were also permanently expanding U.S. military power in the Middle East, to the point that they would be able to impose military solutions to the region’s many problems. In one of the more ludicrous statements of the time, it was even argued that the road to peace in the Middle East ran through Baghdad, with Iraq becoming a pro-Israel ally in the Arab world.
We’ve spent a lot of lives and resources learning the folly of that line of thinking.
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