Hmmm. I find the lawyer offensive. I wonder if we can sue to get HIM removed from sight? He is, after all, a symbol of something that offends me greatly.
It occurs to me that this sort of thing is what we were warned about ages ago - Burke, Cooper and Tocqueville warned of the impulsion in democratic societies to smooth out all differences, to make everything and everyone the same everywhere.
Its a patent absurdity that anyone can actually be offended by a cross on a hill, or a carved stone in a rotunda. But the people who make cases about these things are of that set of the population who simply cannot stand the wellspring of liberty - which is particularism.
These same people, amazingly, also tell us to celebrate our diversity - but, then again, hypocrisy is a old human trait. It is, however, in our diversity - real diversity - that you find our greatest strength and that which makes us actually free. Real diversity is despised be people such as that lawyer.
In my State of Nevada, we have legal gambling and prostitution. In the neighboring State of Utah, they have neither. I, as a Nevadan, do not feel threatened in my liberty because Utah doesn't have gambling and neither to the Utahans (?) feel threatened in their liberty because I do have gambling. We are, in our two States, equally American and if someone were to attempt to usurp the liberty of the people of Utah, I would rise in their defense - even though what they consider proper liberty might not be (probably is not) what I consider proper liberty...and they would do the same for me, even though they might feel my definition of liberty to be absurd.
If we are to remain a free and creative people - a civilized people - then we must prevent the levellers from getting their way. Our liberties, our real liberties, are at stake in cases like these - unless the good people of Ventura are free to decide for themselves whether or not this cross shall remain, then I cannot be sure that me and my people of Las Vegas will remain free to do the things we consider right and proper.
Obviously, we cannot have localities doing whatever they want - but on balance we must always insist upon local particularism unless there is a clear and present danger to the general liberties of Americans involved. A cross on a hill does not rise to the level of a clear and present danger to anyone's liberty, thus unless the people of Ventura decide to remove it, it should remain.
Alas, the Ventura City Council has decided not to risk the cost of a long court battle and passed a resolution to sell the land and the cross through sealed bids.
Now, the attorney is threatening that if the land does not go to the highest bidder, with no provisions for preserving the cross, they will sue the city for that.
We just can't win. This has made their objective crystal clear. It isn't about separation of church and state. It is about obliterating all public symbols of Christianity.
Seems that in order to protect our liberties for another 200 years, we're going to have to re-spell it out for them. The Bill of Rights did a good job, it did take nearly 200 years before lawyers and judges twisted the meaning of it all out of connection with reality - so, we must do a bit of addendum:
Some proposed amendments:
Establishment shall only be construed to mean direct State aid which excludes all but one religion.
The right of the jury to be in possession of all relevant facts being fundamental to justice, no evidence in civil or criminal proceedings may be excluded from presentation to a jury.
Jury trial being the fundamental protection of individual liberties, juries are not to be instructed in any way, shape or form as to how they shall rule on the evidence presented.
A Jury shall consist of the first 12 citizens presenting themselves for jury service at the request of the court. Only mental or physical incapacity shall excuse a person from jury service.
A person incarcerated for felony offenses has no right to living conditions superior to that provided for members of the Armed Forces of the United States (ed note; ever been on a naval ship? To our wonderful lawyers, had we not been free men serving our nation, we'd be having our rights violated on a daily basis).
The right of parents to raise their children is incontestable save for grave, proven felonies.
No State or local jurisdiction may be required to obey instructions from the federal government in return for federal monetary aid.
...That should do it. Get these, and we'll have 200 more years of liberty before the lawyers manage to chip away at it all.
Mark, I have a briefer amendment, cheerfully stolen from the Bard:
"First, we kill all the lawyers!"
Heh.
One of the other nastier outcomes of current poltical correctness is to rewrite the words of our forefathers (er... foreparents I suppose I should say!), so that now, Neil Armstrong is misquoted as saying "That's one small step for humans, and on giant leap for humanity."
David,
Don't believe the Anti-Catholic propaganda about the missionaries brutally enslaving the Native Americans. The situation in California was much more complicated
There were abuses against the Native Americans at the hands of the Spanish government. The Franciscans were almost aways at odds with the soldiers and Spanish governors over this.
Many tribes were eager to convert and the rapid decline in the native population was due largely to small pox and generational tribal conflicts.
I am very familiar with the history of the Mission San Buenaventura. It was not built by slave labor.
Father Serra has never been associated with brutality. In fact, he pressed for a system of law to protect California's Native Americans against the abuses of Spanish soldiers.
DR. MICHAEL MATHES, Professor of history at the University of San Francisco has written:
"Serra was the founder and the pioneer of California. The poor man has had no privacy for years. Everybody has picked at every little aspect that could be known about this man's life."
"Serra fought with the military and with the governors a lot. He was unusual in that regard. . . So we have, in a lot of correspondence of these governors, criticism of Serra, lots of criticism. But this criticism of Serra revolves around the fact that he was too much involved in the care and treatment of the Indians, that he would not allow soldiers to mingle with the Indians. He didn't want these people (the Indians) to be tainted with any possible immoral activities that the soldiers might be involved with.
"First came the Indians in his missions. Then, if there was anything left over, the soldiers could have it. These were the complaints of the government, of the civil governors: that Serra was such a fanatical missionary that he really didn't want to cooperate with the civilian government, that his first concern was the taking care of his mission. Criticism of Serra is really a boomerang against anybody that would say Serra was a 'bad person ,' because the criticism of him supports the theory that he was a dedicated missionary, He may not have been much of a diplomat or civil servant, but he was one fine missionary."
I have read many of Serra's letters and they always speak highly of the Native Americans. He did not want to destroy their unique cultures and admired them in many ways.
Why bother, the anti-Catholics (secular and religious) will never be swayed by facts or logic - the indisputable fact that the Franciscans and the Jesuits were always in stark contrast to the slave-driving regular colonists is something resolutely ignored...after all, it doesn't feed anti-Catholic fires if you point things like that out.
But, appropos this debate, even if Serra was the worst brute in human history, it would still be for the people of Ventura to decide what to do about that cross; we are only free if we are free to be different - and differences must be more than skin deep to be real differences.
Like Solzhenitsyn, I no longer demand proof that something happened but, rather, insist upon proof that it cannot happen - this is especially true as regards the forces of PC...after all, they are the same people who are insisting that when we do build that statue of the WTC firefighters that we make one of them a woman and one of them a non-white...even though the three guys who happened to be there were all white men.
I completely believe that they are even changing direct historical quotes to fit in with PC - it makes sense in the world-view of PC; truth is not as important as, well, lies - if the lies are in the service of some abstract bit of utopian thought the PC people are aiming for.
Hmmm. I find the lawyer offensive. I wonder if we can sue to get HIM removed from sight? He is, after all, a symbol of something that offends me greatly.
Day by day
I stand behind this as well.
It occurs to me that this sort of thing is what we were warned about ages ago - Burke, Cooper and Tocqueville warned of the impulsion in democratic societies to smooth out all differences, to make everything and everyone the same everywhere.
Its a patent absurdity that anyone can actually be offended by a cross on a hill, or a carved stone in a rotunda. But the people who make cases about these things are of that set of the population who simply cannot stand the wellspring of liberty - which is particularism.
These same people, amazingly, also tell us to celebrate our diversity - but, then again, hypocrisy is a old human trait. It is, however, in our diversity - real diversity - that you find our greatest strength and that which makes us actually free. Real diversity is despised be people such as that lawyer.
In my State of Nevada, we have legal gambling and prostitution. In the neighboring State of Utah, they have neither. I, as a Nevadan, do not feel threatened in my liberty because Utah doesn't have gambling and neither to the Utahans (?) feel threatened in their liberty because I do have gambling. We are, in our two States, equally American and if someone were to attempt to usurp the liberty of the people of Utah, I would rise in their defense - even though what they consider proper liberty might not be (probably is not) what I consider proper liberty...and they would do the same for me, even though they might feel my definition of liberty to be absurd.
If we are to remain a free and creative people - a civilized people - then we must prevent the levellers from getting their way. Our liberties, our real liberties, are at stake in cases like these - unless the good people of Ventura are free to decide for themselves whether or not this cross shall remain, then I cannot be sure that me and my people of Las Vegas will remain free to do the things we consider right and proper.
Obviously, we cannot have localities doing whatever they want - but on balance we must always insist upon local particularism unless there is a clear and present danger to the general liberties of Americans involved. A cross on a hill does not rise to the level of a clear and present danger to anyone's liberty, thus unless the people of Ventura decide to remove it, it should remain.
Alas, the Ventura City Council has decided not to risk the cost of a long court battle and passed a resolution to sell the land and the cross through sealed bids.
Now, the attorney is threatening that if the land does not go to the highest bidder, with no provisions for preserving the cross, they will sue the city for that.
We just can't win. This has made their objective crystal clear. It isn't about separation of church and state. It is about obliterating all public symbols of Christianity.
This is a threat to all of our freedoms, folks.
Fritz,
Seems that in order to protect our liberties for another 200 years, we're going to have to re-spell it out for them. The Bill of Rights did a good job, it did take nearly 200 years before lawyers and judges twisted the meaning of it all out of connection with reality - so, we must do a bit of addendum:
Some proposed amendments:
Establishment shall only be construed to mean direct State aid which excludes all but one religion.
The right of the jury to be in possession of all relevant facts being fundamental to justice, no evidence in civil or criminal proceedings may be excluded from presentation to a jury.
Jury trial being the fundamental protection of individual liberties, juries are not to be instructed in any way, shape or form as to how they shall rule on the evidence presented.
A Jury shall consist of the first 12 citizens presenting themselves for jury service at the request of the court. Only mental or physical incapacity shall excuse a person from jury service.
A person incarcerated for felony offenses has no right to living conditions superior to that provided for members of the Armed Forces of the United States (ed note; ever been on a naval ship? To our wonderful lawyers, had we not been free men serving our nation, we'd be having our rights violated on a daily basis).
The right of parents to raise their children is incontestable save for grave, proven felonies.
No State or local jurisdiction may be required to obey instructions from the federal government in return for federal monetary aid.
...That should do it. Get these, and we'll have 200 more years of liberty before the lawyers manage to chip away at it all.
Mark, I have a briefer amendment, cheerfully stolen from the Bard:
"First, we kill all the lawyers!"
Heh.
One of the other nastier outcomes of current poltical correctness is to rewrite the words of our forefathers (er... foreparents I suppose I should say!), so that now, Neil Armstrong is misquoted as saying "That's one small step for humans, and on giant leap for humanity."
I'm not making this up.
Ah, sacred monuments to slavery!
You know that that's how that, and most other, missions were built, don't you?
Serra, Kino, and the rest of that lot were brutal, nasty bastards, but it was to 'save the Indians souls', so that made it all ok.
The funniest part to me is that the ancestors of the brutalized and forcibly converted Indians are now good Catholics.
Uhm, yes, and we all know there was nothing brutal or oppresssive about the societies in that region that came before the missionaries, right?
David,
Don't believe the Anti-Catholic propaganda about the missionaries brutally enslaving the Native Americans. The situation in California was much more complicated
There were abuses against the Native Americans at the hands of the Spanish government. The Franciscans were almost aways at odds with the soldiers and Spanish governors over this.
Many tribes were eager to convert and the rapid decline in the native population was due largely to small pox and generational tribal conflicts.
I am very familiar with the history of the Mission San Buenaventura. It was not built by slave labor.
Father Serra has never been associated with brutality. In fact, he pressed for a system of law to protect California's Native Americans against the abuses of Spanish soldiers.
DR. MICHAEL MATHES, Professor of history at the University of San Francisco has written:
"Serra was the founder and the pioneer of California. The poor man has had no privacy for years. Everybody has picked at every little aspect that could be known about this man's life."
"Serra fought with the military and with the governors a lot. He was unusual in that regard. . . So we have, in a lot of correspondence of these governors, criticism of Serra, lots of criticism. But this criticism of Serra revolves around the fact that he was too much involved in the care and treatment of the Indians, that he would not allow soldiers to mingle with the Indians. He didn't want these people (the Indians) to be tainted with any possible immoral activities that the soldiers might be involved with.
"First came the Indians in his missions. Then, if there was anything left over, the soldiers could have it. These were the complaints of the government, of the civil governors: that Serra was such a fanatical missionary that he really didn't want to cooperate with the civilian government, that his first concern was the taking care of his mission. Criticism of Serra is really a boomerang against anybody that would say Serra was a 'bad person ,' because the criticism of him supports the theory that he was a dedicated missionary, He may not have been much of a diplomat or civil servant, but he was one fine missionary."
I have read many of Serra's letters and they always speak highly of the Native Americans. He did not want to destroy their unique cultures and admired them in many ways.
Fritz,
Why bother, the anti-Catholics (secular and religious) will never be swayed by facts or logic - the indisputable fact that the Franciscans and the Jesuits were always in stark contrast to the slave-driving regular colonists is something resolutely ignored...after all, it doesn't feed anti-Catholic fires if you point things like that out.
But, appropos this debate, even if Serra was the worst brute in human history, it would still be for the people of Ventura to decide what to do about that cross; we are only free if we are free to be different - and differences must be more than skin deep to be real differences.
Casey,
Like Solzhenitsyn, I no longer demand proof that something happened but, rather, insist upon proof that it cannot happen - this is especially true as regards the forces of PC...after all, they are the same people who are insisting that when we do build that statue of the WTC firefighters that we make one of them a woman and one of them a non-white...even though the three guys who happened to be there were all white men.
I completely believe that they are even changing direct historical quotes to fit in with PC - it makes sense in the world-view of PC; truth is not as important as, well, lies - if the lies are in the service of some abstract bit of utopian thought the PC people are aiming for.