By Selwyn Duke
It has become apparent that most Americans simply don’t take voting very seriously. This is especially true of those who encourage voting. They’ll tell us that walking into a polling place and pulling a lever is our civic duty, but this isn’t true. Our civic duty is to cultivate wisdom in ourselves and become conversant with the issues; the walking and pulling part is just a natural by-product of that.
By Selwyn Duke
Really, I must be a glutton for punishment. During the past couple of weeks, I wrote two articles on libertarianism and made the point that for a law to be just, it must have a basis in morality. These commentaries evoked quite a response, ranging from lauding me as brilliant to lambasting me for not having two brain cells to rub together. And the negative responses were most notable. For daring to mention morality and law in the same breath, some implied I was like the Taliban, one respondent called me a “neoconservative” and a blogger said I was a socialist (yes, really, yours truly!). Pretty funny that, when talking about a man who proposed the Defense against Tyranny Amendment.
By Selwyn Duke
This past Saturday, Barbara Billingsley passed away at the age of 94. For those of you scratching your heads but acquainted with 1950s television, Billingsley played the ever-gracious and loving, hearth-and-home mother June Cleaver in the classic sitcom "Leave It to Beaver."
The show, a hit that ran from 1957 to 1963, is a true slice of Americana. It entertained audiences with the innocent mischief-making and misadventures of its main character, Theodore Cleaver (played by Jerry Mathers), an endearing boy who went by the nickname “Beaver.” With his mother, June; his brother, Wally (Tony Dow); and his father, Ward (Hugh Beaumont), they were the ideal American family.
Read the rest here.
By Selwyn Duke
Last year I wrote about a Tucson Unified School District social engineering plan that had the effect of meting out punishment based on racial quota. The school board had insisted, reported Arizona Republic’s Doug MacEachern, “that its schools reduce its suspensions and/or expulsions of minority students to the point that the data reflect ‘no ethnic/racial disparities.’” (It wasn’t reported whether the students cooperated and started committing infractions based on racial quota.) It’s the kind of thing that, though outrageous, you might expect from a fairly large city with a leftist government.
But now, with a big Windy City leftist in the White House, this plan is going national. As University of Illinois-Urbana Professor of Political Science-Emeritus Robert Weissberg writes:
Read the rest here.
By Selwyn Duke
In a piece I recently wrote about the dangers inherent in libertarianism, I pointed out that libertarians, by applying their live-and-let-live philosophy to the moral sphere as well as the governmental, do nothing to maintain the societal moral framework that enables people to govern themselves from within and that ensures Big Brother won’t have to do so from without (I recommend you read the piece). Not surprisingly, this provoked some angry responses and fallacious counter-arguments. This article is my response to them.
By Selwyn Duke
In this time of Tea Parties and tanking Democrat poll numbers, people are, depending on their point of view, hailing or howling about an apparent conservative groundswell. More traditional folks anxiously anticipate a GOP landslide in November, while many liberals warn of the perils of our current rightward shift.
What are they concerned about? I’m not sure. I wasn’t aware that the federal Department of Education had been eliminated, the income tax repealed and IRS abolished, Roe v. Wade overturned, hate-crime laws rescinded, and the NEA and public broadcasting defunded. I also haven’t heard about a huge influx of traditionalists into academia, the media, and Hollywood and a robust upswing in church attendance among the young. Perhaps I’m out of the loop.
Read the rest here.
By Selwyn Duke
While there was a time when I might have described myself as a libertarian, those days are long gone. In fact, I don’t even call myself a conservative anymore. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I agree with libertarians on many issues, and their governmental model is vastly preferable to what liberals have visited upon us. Yet there is a problem: However valid their vision of government may be, their vision of society renders it unattainable.
By Selwyn Duke
Boys will be boys … or, at least, that’s how it used to be. Now a few boys will be — or would be — girls, and there are plenty of adults willing to play along. And some of these adults occupy the Maine Human Rights Commission, which just ruled that a Pine Tree State middle school engaged in discrimination when it refused to allow a boy who wants to live as a female to use the girls’ bathroom. Reporting on the story, Heather Steeves of the Bangor Daily News writes:
[The Commission found that] Orono Middle School unlawfully discriminated against a sixth-grader during the 2008-2009 school year by not letting the male-to-female "transgender" student use the girls' bathroom.
This is the same student whose parents filed a similar discrimination complaint against Asa Adams Elementary School in Orono when their child was a fifth grader there during the 2007-2008 school year. That case resulted in the same ruling against the school district in June 2009.
Read the rest here.
By Selwyn Duke
Unlike for most Americans, the Delaware senatorial primary was not my first introduction to Christine O’Donnell. I remembered her from as far back as approximately 15 years ago, making appearances on shows such as “Politically Incorrect.” So when I heard about her supposed “extremist views,” I had to wonder if I was overlooking something. It’s hard to forget such a pretty face, but did I fail to recollect some strange aspect of her ideology?
