Time for Some Reparations.........for Christians

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The infamous booing of the use of the word God

 I am warming to this whole idea of reparations.  I think there are three groups that I believe have a case for demanding reparations, or at least filing a lawsuit.  They are in order of victimhood.

1. Black folk. No other group in American history have been persecuted, abused and enslaved like African-Americans. The treatment was horrific and went on for many many years after the Civil War. This mistreatment was committed by an organized party of Americans who should be forced to pay reparations for their past crimes.
2. Illegal Immigrants. This group of people have been lured to the United States, shoved into villages of tar paper shacks without running water, electricity or sewerage (colonias). They have been employed to do menial hard labor and exploited mercilessly for ages. Again this system has been perpetrated for profit by an organized party of Americans who should be forced to pay reparations for this ongoing crime.
3. Christians. Bible-believing Christians have been the target of hate speech, loss of employment, marginalization and libel by media personalities and public figures. This has been perpetrated by a specific party of Americans in an attempt to oppress this American minority group

Chief Cochran

Case in Point:  Kelvin J. Cochran was fired from his job as fire chief of the city of Atlanta, Georgia. The reason? On his own time and not in any connection with the city, Cochran wrote a book that mentioned in a couple of paragraphs, the Biblical position on homosexuality. The chief was investigated and the panel found he had committed no acts of discrimination. Cochran had worked for President Obama as United States Fire Administrator, the highest fire-fighting position in the country. The man was the poster boy for tolerance. He started programs in every administration position in which he served to end racial and sexual intolerance, sexual harassment and discrimination on the basis of race and sexual preference.

Didn't matter; they fired him anyway.

Apparently if you are a Christian and you write a book for a Men's Bible Study group that mentions that homosexual behavior is considered a sin, you have committed the unpardonable sin in a Democrat run town like Atlanta. Chief Cochran's beliefs are, according to mayor Kasim Reed, unforgivable in a liberal Democrat-run city. Public officials who use political correctness as a bludgeon against conservatives (which this guy is not) and against Christians (which this guy is), cannot allow such ideas to creep in to society. The good old Washington Post claimed Cochran's actual sin was "distributing the book to employees" and offered vague "proof" that some employees of the Atlanta Fire Department had "seen" the book and complained. No mention was made as to whether those employees were Christians or in the Chief's off work men's Bible study group. Just the fact that some copies of the book found their way into the hands of some employees apparently was enough to get the chief accused of brainwashing his employees into.........what? Lynching some queer folk? Everything the chief did in his official capacity spoke against discrimination on any basis other than competence as a firefighter - not that requiring competence might not set off some social justice warriors, though. The courts have since ruled against the city in Cochran's favor.

To say homosexual behavior is a sin is unforgivable to the "progressive" left. It doesn't matter whether you discriminate against such people or not. Believing something the left wishes to promote in order to consolidate their power, is a thought crime. Apparently, the narrative is that one cannot believe homosexual behavior is wrong and just go out and suddenly want to lynch gay people. It matters not that we horrible Christians work alongside people every day who, according to the Bible, are sinning by committing adultery, being disrespectful to their parents, stealing, killing, lying, coveting, failing to keep the Sabbath, worshiping idols or kneeling to graven images, or claiming to be a Christian and thinking you can speak on his behalf (taking his name in vain). Evidently, only certain types of sin make us go crazy. Well that's a stupid idea with no basis in fact.

Hosing black folks on orders of which party do you suppose?

Do some despicable people mistreat others, lynch, murder and mistreat people on the basis of their race, religion or sexual orientation? Yes, of course they do. We call those people "bullies". They are an ongoing problem. If they aren't beating up black folks, they beat up on gay folks, or kids who go to church or Italians, or Irish, or Hispanics or old white people or whoever is the target du jour.  Right now, conservative Christians seem to be popular with bullies.

We, Christians, manage to get along with all kinds of sinners every day. We believe that Jesus tells us to treat others the way we want to be treated - no exceptions. If you can't do that, then you're going to hell. It's not negotiable. No unrepentant bullies allowed in heaven.  yet, the narrative that's being promoted is that unless you say LGBTQLSMFT or whatever, is okey dokey, you must be discriminating an you are an intolerant bigot. 

But progressives demands we all treat the alternative gender community as "special", rather like many of us treat developmentally disabled folk. That seems to me to be downright paternalistic. I know I'd get pretty sick of people running around telling people to mind their P's and Q's every time I stepped to within earshot. I'm not a child and neither are the people who engage in alternative sexual practices. If you wish to sin, do so. Don't stomp your feet like a child and demand that people pat you on the head and tell you what a good boy (or girl or transgender, lesbian, gay, queer, etc.) you are. If you want to demand something, demand to be treated like a fully functioning grownup with the right to commit any sort of sin you want to. It's a free country, or at least it is where the PC police aren't running things..

The Washington Post, a Democrat Party mouthpiece claims this never happened.

What I'm thinking is that we should start calling people bigots who discriminate against blacks, illegal immigrants, and Christians. We should all claim collective victimhood and sue the crap out of the Democrat party. To be fair, the Washington Post, good leftist newspaper that it is claims it really was Republicans more than Democrats who supported the Klan and Jim Crow laws. They go to great lengths in a recent article to absolve the Democrat party of all association with the 1924 Democrat Convention, nicknamed the Klanbake, in the media and among loyal Klan members who were rather proud of the impact they had on the convention. I grew up in the South where Republicans were called "nigger-lovers". And we were. I know I was. Jesus told me to love everybody. He never mentioned anything about skin color.

I really do think black folk in particular ought to sue the party responsible. So which party was responsible primarily for slavery, Jim Crow laws, separate bathrooms and fountains and rampant discrimination that continued for 100 years past the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Which party fought a bloody Civil War to protect its "right" to hold it's fellow human beings in bondage for fun and profit?  Who could it have been?
 In fact, anybody who has ever been discriminated against by officials of the Democrat part should all get together and sue the Democrat Party for reparations. I think that would be just a lovely idea!

© 2018 by Tom King

Is Scalia a Racist for Asking the Defense to Answer a Point Made by the Plaintiff if the Point is Politically Incorrect?

Justice Scalia

"Justice Scalia Suggests Blacks Belong at "Slower" Colleges" is the inflammatory headline at that bastion of liberal political correctness, Mother Jones.

Well, I read Scalia's comments and the judge's question did tread upon the sacred progressive principle that minorities should be given special help to get into more exclusive programs. What the article also says, reluctantly (this is Mother Jones, after all), is that the question grew out of data presented by the plaintiff's attorneys and the question was asked of the defense, thereby giving them a chance to respond and to better inform the judges.  Apparently, liberal journalists like those at Mother Jones and The Huffing and Puffington Post believe that Supreme Court Justices should already have their minds made up ahead of time so that they need not even consider such questions.

The comment (unedited):

• "There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well," Scalia said Wednesday during oral arguments in a case involving a race-conscious college admissions plan. The 79-year-old justice, speaking to a hushed courtroom, then referenced a friend-of-the-court brief filed in the case. "One of the briefs pointed out that most of the black scientists in this country don't come from schools like the University of Texas," he said, "they come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they're being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them."

At what point, do black students get held to the same standards as Asian, Hispanic and white students? Scalia asked if we're doing them a favor putting underachieving students in with overachievers. Do we then have to reduce the standards of the program to accommodate their less-than-stellar performance? If we do that, do we dumb down our advanced degree programs and thereby produce less competent graduates overall, in order satisfy some racial quota?

It's something to think about.

I think it is racist and insults black people to assume that blacks need to be held to lower standards because of their skin color. It seems to say, because you aren't as smart and capable, we have to reduce our standards for everyone. This is demonstrably untrue, especially when blacks like Dr. Ben Carson, Dr. Benjamin Banneker, Dr. George Washington Carver, Dr Daniel Hale Williams, Dr. Charles Richard Drew, Dr. Emmet Chapelle, Elijah McCoy, Madame CJ Walker, Patricia Bath, Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Airman have proven that a black man or woman can compete, not only on an even footing with whites, but also that, when the odds were against them, they could outperform white classmates.

Is it wise for us to tell black children that we need to dumb down our academic standards in order for them to compete with white students (or for that matter Asians and Hispanics)? 

The University of Texas does not discriminate against black students anymore. The only real discrimination at UT is against whites. They also discriminate against conservatives as a few of my friends can tell you. If you enter their journalism program, for instance, and aren't pretty much a card-carrying Marxist, you are not likely to do well. I experienced the same discrimination myself for being a Christian and family man at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. Despite having the highest grades in the toughest class in the program, the department chairman made it impossible for me to complete the program, having told me at one point that "If you are a good scientist and are asked, 'Is there a God?', the appropriate answer is 'NO' in all circumstances."  I was forced to resign from the program. No black students, liberal white students, Hispanic or gay males were asked to leave that program. Only the conservative, Christian white male and they had consistently gotten rid of the only white male that had been accepted into the program every year for the previous 10 years but one.  Lucky me, it was the year before I joined the program and they were loaded for bear when I came on.

That seems like discrimination to me, but then the Supreme Court long ago ruled that a university graduate program can toss out a person if they don't like the color of their hair or anything else if they want to and you have no right to sue them. I'm still paying off a school debt I can't afford to pay because they discriminated against me because of my religion and gender.

Scalia's comment was, in effect, that perhaps we shouldn't force a program to accept kids that haven't done the work necessary to meet the program's standards if there are schools available that aren't as challenging that they can meet the standards for? He never said blacks should be relegated to such schools because of their race. The defendants were arguing that, what is in essence, racial discrimination is appropriate because they can't get enough black applicants who can meet the high standards of certain advanced degree programs.

Dr. Ben Carson came out of Detroit, an educational cesspool if there ever was one and went to Yale, the only school he applied to. He did so, he says, because his Mama rode him to do well in school and wouldn't accept less than excellent work. Black students can excel, but not if we keep telling them they don't have to try as hard as their white classmates because they are "disadvantaged". They have the same textbooks as their white classmates and the same opportunities.

Are those who are outraged at Scalia's comments really saying that something is wrong with the black community that it can't educate its children properly - enough to get them into good schools without making the good schools less "good"?

I went to a little public school in Keene because I couldn't afford church school. It was me and the local heathens and the kids who got kicked out of church school. The local churchmen on the school board deliberately kept the school underfunded so it would be unattractive to local parents and would not compete with the church school. My family was one of the poorest in town. My stepfather made a dollar an hour. Mom didn't work outside home. The linoleum floors in our house rose and fell like they were breathing whenever there was a high wind. We ate mostly biscuits, rice and beans. Sandwiches were a delicacy. So the public school was the one I went to till tenth grade. I was bullied and battered. A significant number of my classmates did prison time. I had a couple of years of church school and worked my way through. My grades were pretty good.

I scored in the top 2% on my SATs at the end of high school and was salutatorian of my class. I overcame my less-than-privileged childhood because I had access to the same books and library books as everyone else. I just read them is all.

It's not poverty keeping kids down. It's expectations. I had the same thing going for me that Ben Carson did - a mom who expected me to work hard in school. Instead of asking schools to go easy on the poor little snowflakes, we need to work on the attitude of those who would make black children believe they are less capable than their white classmates and that people are going to have to make it easy for them because their skin color makes them less intelligent and less able to succeed.

To me that is racism of the worst sort. Booker T. Washington would agree with me too. It was W.E.B. Dubois who thought we ought to make it easier for black people because their parents had once been slaves.  Dubois was a card-carrying Communist and participated in the promotion of a different kind of slavery that included everyone.

I am against racism and discrimination by race - every race in every case.  All men created equal, with equal opportunity. There is no guarantee, however, as to what you will do with your equal shot. When you start trying to give government power to game the system in favor of one group or another, you set us all up for the kind of Image to the Beast power that Revelation has warned us against. For if they can discriminate against me, they can discriminate against you.

And a lot of the rhetoric is simply lies. If you listened to the "progressive" pundits you'd think most black males in the US go to prison, but According to government figures, more than twice as many young African American men are now enrolled in college than are imprisoned. Black graduation numbers are up. One would hope that's because the parents of those kids are riding their little butts to do their homework and to finish school rather than because the schools are making it easier for them.

Scalia's comments weren't so crazy and if you read the reports, even in the liberal press. Scalia was simply putting forth an idea to the defendant that the plaintiff's attorneys in the case had put forward, namely that statistics showed blacks were able to achieve advanced degrees in other universities, even if their academic standards on entering weren't up to the standards of some more demanding university programs. The defendant's lawyers were asked to answer a legitimate question put forward by the plaintiff's attorneys. Scalia simply had the misfortune of being the one to, rather than ignore the question because it was politically incorrect, give the defendant an opportunity to respond to the point.

Instead of talking about what the defendant answered (which might have been instructive), the media did what the liberal media does - it crucified Scalia for even asking the question. In essence, the media expects a Supreme Court justice to ignore evidence presented by the plaintiff because it might not be approved by the guardians of political correctness.

Scalia's question should have been asked in order to give the defense an opportunity to answer the charges of the plaintiff. It was a fair question. Even one of the pundits at CNN agrees.

If we're not allowed to talk about both sides of a debate, it's not the Supreme Court any longer. It's a kangaroo court (no offense intended to either Australia in general or to kangaroos specifically.

© 2015 by Tom King