Month: July 2022

Gideon Levy: “Hey, Israel. Let’s Become a Normal Country”

As Israeli citizens are suffering voting burn-out due to their fractious, unstable parliamentary system of government, the journalist Gideon Levy urges his nation to become “a normal country.”

In light of Russia’s recent threats to evict the Jewish Agency from Russian society, many are wondering, “What’s so bad about the Jewish Agency? Is this more antisemitism from Putin?”

Good questions. Why is Putin doing this? And what would it mean for Israel to become “normal”?

Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy

Check out Levy’s editorial below. It may surprise you (all emphasis is mine):

To be a normal country – that, too, is an option. We could start, for example, with a normal immigration policy, as is customary in any normal country. Railing against Russian President Vladimir Putin over his intention to put a stop to Israel’s subversive activities against his country – intentions that are immeasurably justified – demonstrate that the path toward normality is still long and arduous. As long as Israel continues to hold the mentality that “we are allowed to do anything” and that “we’re not like other countries,” the path toward normality will be endlessly longer.

And here’s more proof that there’s no difference between one Israeli government and the next: An issue that is untouchable no matter what government is in power is the sanctity of Israel’s immigration policy. And if the Law of Return [a law granting all Jews everywhere in the world automatic citizenship] is accorded primacy among laws, immigration policy is the last of the issues that would be debated.

In seeking to shut down the operations of the Jewish Agency for Israel in his country, Putin has sought to put an end to a foreign country’s intervention in Russia’s domestic affairs. It’s not difficult to guess what would have happened if Warsaw had openly attempted to have emissaries from the Polish establishment stationed in Israel to encourage former Polish Jews and their descendants to return to Poland. But when it comes to Israel’s efforts, it’s all right.

Putin will clearly have to back down on his demand, because the Jewish establishment is stronger, but we don’t need Putin to ask not only by what right but for what purpose Israel is pursuing its activities there. Why does Israel have to meddle in other countries in an attempt to recruit, to coax, bribe or convince Jews, half-Jews or quarter-Jews to immigrate here?

What is the purpose of this entire bloated network of emissaries around the world? What’s the purpose of all those ridiculous Birthright and Masa programs when it’s clear that there’s no more room here?

Israel is a country bursting at the seams, but it still wants more and more immigrants. Its passion for aliyah is insatiable – in a country that already has a population of 9.5 million living on an extremely narrow strip of land. The Jews of the world should therefore have been told: Come here only if you have no alternative. It’s crowded here, even in the sea, and there’s not a parking spot to be had.

Jews are secure and prospering almost everywhere in the world. Israel is less secure than anywhere else, but Jews are being called upon to come and save themselves here of all places, in this crowded and troubled land. And the problem isn’t only that it’s out of space, since Israel can always conquer additional land. The problem is also in the justification for its immigration policy.
It is necessarily based on a racist outlook. It was right in its time. One could understand and even admire the unceasing efforts to bring large numbers of Jews here to build a country here – and to rescue them from the horrors in their countries of origin. But both of these efforts have long been completed.

The country was established and has become a world power and at the present, Jews aren’t facing horrors anywhere in the world. The flags should have been folded up and the second phase of Zionism – which never happened – should have been initiated. And that involves making Israel a normal country.

A normal country has an immigration policy based on its needs and principles. Israel’s immigration policy needs to take the needs and rights of all of its citizens into account. For example, saving relatives in distress – in Ethiopia and Ukraine, as well as in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Syria.

Consider the name Birthright. Israel is encouraging young Americans to visit the country on a propaganda trip, in the company of armed guards to demonstrate the dangers, to coax them to immigrate here solely based on their origin. And sometimes they’ve even been required to undergo DNA testing to verify that they’re Jewish.

But what about the natives of the country who have no birthright? Why wasn’t an elderly Palestinian woman from Haifa living in exile in Syria not permitted to return to the city of her birth in her old age when a civil war was raging in Syria? Find one convincing reason. And why doesn’t her brother, an Israeli citizen, have the standing to save her? Jeremy from New York and Leonid from Kyiv can come here to live but not Sa’adia from Yarmouk.

It’s a Jewish state. So be it, but why entirely Jewish? Why only Jewish? And why Jewish by force? How is it Jewish if half of its subjects, those under Israel’s authority, aren’t Jewish? And what would happen if we would dismantle all the moldy and fossilized aliyah institutions?

Israel would begin turning into a normal country. That’s all.

More Evidence For the Practical Importance of Critical Race Theory

Colin Gordon is a history professor at the University of Iowa who specializes in the history and long-term effects of American public policy.

Professor Colin Gordon

Professor Gordon recently wrote a highly informative article for Dissent Magazine which asks the question, “Who Segregated America?”

In this article he demonstrates the pernicious role played by private business interests in pioneering the highly discriminatory methods that would eventually be used by public, government policies to permanently entrench racial segregation through America’s neighborhoods.

Here is one more example of why an understanding of American racism and its dissection though tools like Critical Race Theory are so important to our educational system.

Frankly, it is impossible to understand either our history or our current racial predicament without it.

Below is an excerpt of “Who Segregated America?”:

Federal housing policies contributed to the segregation of American cities in the twentieth century. But it was private interests that led the way.

Recent scholarship and reporting on racial disparities in the United States have emphasized the role of public policy—especially federal policy—in the creation of what the 1968 Kerner Commission famously dubbed “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” This is especially true of housing policy. Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White (2005) skewers the stark exclusion of African-American veterans from the benefits of the GI Bill. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law (2017) offers a damning synthesis on how the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) embraced Jim Crow. More recently, the digitization of the infamous “residential security” redlining maps prepared by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the late 1930s has spurred academic interest in the connections between the HOLC’s bluntly racial assessments and contemporary disparities.

This condemnation of federal policy is certainly warranted. Even the constraints of the New Deal coalition (in which the Democratic majority was, as Katznelson observes, a “strange marriage of Sweden and South Africa”) cannot excuse the FHA’s slavish deference to racial prejudice in private realty. One can and should expect more of a public agency, wielding billions in housing subsidies in one hand and the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause in the other, than a set of underwriting guidelines that “could well have been culled from the Nuremberg Laws,” as housing activist Charles Abrams observed in 1955.

But is it true, as Rothstein’s subtitle suggests, that “government segregated America”? Not really. As new work on the scope of private racial restrictions underscores, racial segregation in American cities (especially Northern and border cities) was largely accomplished by private interests and private action long before the FHA spent a dime or the HOLC opened its first bottle of red ink.

Race-restrictive deed covenants and agreements reserved the occupancy of individual lots or entire residential subdivisions to those (in the phrasing preferred by developers in St. Louis County) “wholly of the Caucasian Race.” The result was a sort of pointillist apartheid, filled in parcel by parcel, block by block, and subdivision by subdivision, on a scale sufficient to quarantine existing pockets of African-American residency and mark new developments as largely off limits. . .

(Observe in the following graphic how “Race-restrictive deed covenants and agreements reserved the occupancy of individual lots or entire residential subdivisions to those (in the phrasing preferred by developers in St. Louis County) ‘wholly of the Caucasian Race.'” In other words, private racial regulators orchestrated the creation of black ghettos and white suburbs with all the damaging consequences.)

. . . More to the point, the FHA and other federal housing policies were always—and remain—little more than a poorly regulated trough for private housing interests. They exist not to secure homeownership but to sustain the residential construction and home finance industries with direct subsidies, socialized risk, and tax breaks. In that role, they have always parroted the goals, motives, and prejudices of private interests and deferred to their assessment of what boosted—or threatened—the value of private property.

The segregation of the American city was conceived, accomplished, and justified largely by private action in response to the demographic upheaval of the Great Migration. Federal housing policies unconscionably doubled down on both segregation and its assumptions, but the damage was already done.

Read the entire article here.

Aziz Rana, “Left Internationalism in the Heart of Empire”

Dissent magazine recently published a fascinating article by Aziz Rana, a professor of Constitutional law and political development at Cornell Law School.

The article is titled, “Left Internationalism in the Heart of Empire.”

Looking at this present moment in world history, professor Rana says that no one on the American political spectrum, neither the right nor the left, Republicans nor Democrats, is prepared for a looming future where the US will inevitably lose its unipolar power over world affairs.

The problem is that both the Right and the Left have been equally invested in the maintenance and expansion of American Empire, to the detriment of the rest of the world.

Both ends of the political spectrum have been equally blind to the policy constraints of America’s cookie-cutter approach to foreign policy, built around the long-entrenched, Manichean bromides of (1) Exceptional America is always working benevolently for the good, and (2) Anyone opposing America’s policies abroad must be on the side of evil.

What is needed now, Rana argues, is a genuinely Leftist International order, which frankly strikes me as a far more “Christian” way to view world affairs than anything the US has done in the past.

Below are a few excerpts from the article, though I recommend reading it all:

American leftists need an internationalist vision that universally and effectively joins anti-imperial and anti-authoritarian ethics.

The global international order seems to have entered what political theorist George Shulman has called an “interregnum.” The post–Second World War framework organized around U.S. international leadership is unraveling, but it remains unclear what will come next. As Shulman put it last year, channeling Gramsci, “the old gods are dying, the new ones have yet to be born.” To a significant degree, this unraveling is a product of American policymaking failures—whether destructive wars of choice in the Middle East, neoliberal practices that have promoted financial instability alongside extremes in wealth and immiseration, or internal political dysfunctions that have undermined any coherent strategy for dealing with a global pandemic. . .

. . . Across most of the political spectrum, policymakers and commentators largely embrace the essential goodness of the security state as it is currently constituted. The idea that the U.S. government is a benevolent historical agent with the potential to establish a pacific and stable world community is a central feature of establishment foreign policy—including among American liberals. As this view would have it, whatever the flaws within U.S. society—whether racism, sexism, or class inequality—at root American institutions are more or less just, and are organized around principles of liberty and self-government. American liberalism thus offers a clear vision of internationalism: the security interests pursued by bipartisan policymakers are coterminous with the world’s interests.

All of this justifies a presumptive political exceptionalism about how the United States operates on the world stage. Most liberals today would be hesitant to sign on to a strong account of such exceptionalism—that Reaganite cultural argument about the unique greatness of the country. Regardless, they would by and large agree that in a world of coequal nation-states in which no one has the real ability to enforce existing arrangements, it often falls on the United States to serve as the ultimate backstop of global security. It is therefore acceptable for the state to step inside and outside of established legal constraints if doing so helps ensure that the system functions and survives. American liberal internationalists acknowledge that the United States sometimes gets things wrong, even disastrously so—as with Vietnam or the second Iraq War—but these episodes are treated as particular follies of an otherwise legitimate and moral security project.

In response, many democratic socialists offer a general critique of U.S. primacy and faith in the objectives of the national security state. Such left activists question a rosy story of the postwar order. They note that U.S. violations of foreign self-determination were the overarching reality of the Cold War era. The period saw direct involvement or complicity in truly staggering forms of mass violence across large swathes of the world, including countless coups, political assassinations, and small-scale interventions. Rather than generating a stable and prosperous community of liberal democracies, U.S. power often encouraged economic exploitation and illiberal authoritarianism (as in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Greece, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia, and South Africa, to name just a handful of client states). . .

. . . The U.S. promotion of privatization and the starving of state institutions in Europe and elsewhere, alongside policies like NATO expansion, not only funneled money into a corporate-military framework but also fed a mix of economic oligarchy and belligerent ethno-nationalism—conditions ripe for a takeover by a despot like Putin. Yet none of that historical analysis answers the question of what should be done now.

The national security establishment, liberals included, has a straightforward answer: the U.S. security state should intervene through its classic toolkit, with some combination of aggressive sanctions and militarized confrontation. For defenders of American primacy, the inevitable global fact of bad actors means that each outbreak of overseas instability is new proof of the necessity of U.S. exceptionalism. In the immediate wake of previous strategic blunders—in Vietnam, in Central America, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya—there may be handwringing about past misbehavior. But faith in the unique responsibility of the United States means that with every new threat history essentially starts afresh. Rebooting the security apparatus takes precedence over thinking systematically about why the recent past has been littered with so much failure. . 

You can read the entire article here.

A Bizarre Christian Nationalist Pledge of Allegiance

I came across this very odd video clip recently filmed at a 7 Mountains of Influence conference. (I don’t know where or when). If you have never heard of this movement before, check out these websites (here, here, here).

The 7 mountains folks are part of what is called the “dominionist”

The 7 mountains of influence to be conquered for the kingdom of God

movement with the (primarily Pentecostal-fundamentalist) wing of the Christian church. They mistakenly imagine that the kingdom of God is expanded as Christians gain power and influence in worldly affairs, e.g., the 7 mountains of influence.

My book, I Pledge Allegiance: A Believer’s Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21st Century America (Eerdmans, 2018) demonstrates just how misguided and destructive is this way of thinking.

If you haven’t read my book yet, you really should.

Below is a segment filmed at a 7 Mountains conference. It includes something I can only describe as a “Christian Nationalist Pledge of Allegiance.”

I won’t apologize for saying that its identification of God’s kingdom with the United States is pure blasphemy.

Not only is this public exercise extremely bizarre, it breaks my heart to see how easily these false leaders (who call themselves “apostles”!) mislead large segments of the church into false teaching.

If you know anyone who is involved with this blasphemous malarky, please point out the error of their ways.

The video title, “Christofascists Want to Overthrow U.S. Democracy to Install a Theocracy,” is an accurate description of this movement’s objectives.

Also, forgive the host’s profanity. I can’t blame him for being shocked. But, really, profanity is not an inappropriate response to the 8 and 1/2 minutes of collective profanity spewed throughout the auditorium on screen.

Focus on the segment beginning at the 5:30 minute mark continuing through to 14:00.

Imperialist Biden Reverses Trump’s Policy on Somalia

Did you know that we have US troops fighting and dying in the African country of Somalia? Well, we do.

President Trump had begun the process of withdrawing those troops and

US Marines in Mogadishu, Somalia

bringing them home. One of his foreign policy decisions that I supported.

But president Biden has reversed that decision and is redeploying US troops to the African country, just as a good imperialist country should. And the US is nothing if not an imperialistic beast with an endless appetite for dominating and interfering in other nations whenever, wherever we choose.

Below is an article from the GrayZone by T. J. Coles. It is titled “A History of Naked Imperialism Continues as Biden Approves Somalia Redeployment.”

Below is an excerpt:

Biden has reversed Donald Trump’s withdrawal of US forces from Somalia and will redeploy Special Operations Forces. It is just the latest move in a long history of destructive US-UK meddling in the Horn of Africa.

Almost as soon as the administration of President Joseph Biden announced a redeployment of US Special Operations Forces to Somalia on May 16, the Western media began to spin the intervention.

As the BBC framed it, Biden’s deployment would “support the fight against militant group al-Shabab” (sic). The intervention coincides with the re-election of former Somalian President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who governed between 2012 and ‘17.

Similarly, the New York Times (NYT) reported that “Biden has approved a Pentagon request for standing authority to target about a dozen suspected leaders of Al Shabab, the Somali terrorist group that is affiliated with Al Qaeda.”

But are these motives true? Does Washington really want merely to defeat al-Shabab? Is al-Shabab actually linked to al-Qaeda and, if so, to what degree? As usual, the mainstream state-corporate media reportage is missing context and reference to international law.

As we shall see, the context behind the US redeployment is naked imperialism using counterterrorism as the latest in a long line of excuses to interfere in the politics of the strategically-significant country on the Horn of Africa. In terms of international law, signatories of the UN Charter have legal responsibilities to gain authorization from the Security Council before launching military operations –– something the Biden administration and its predecessors have never done in Somalia, or anywhere else, for that matter.

Click here to read the entire piece.

“The United States and Europe are Lost as Far as the Palestinians are Concerned”

It is mind-numbingly absurd to hear the president of the United States seriously referring to “the two state solution” as the best hope for the Palestinian people.

The supposed “two state solution” died years ago, asphyxiated beneath the weight of 700,000 illegal Jewish settlers occupying hundreds of illegal,  Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank; buried beneath the unending

U.S. President Joe Biden signs the visitors book as Israeli President Isaac Herzog looks on at his residence in Jerusalem, July 14, 2022. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Israeli land grabs, government annexations of “military zones,” illegal home demolitions, unremitting crop destruction, orchards butchered, olive trees and vineyards uprooted, not to mention the brutal, suffocating military occupation now entering its 75th year.

As Israeli journalist Gideon Levy explains, Biden’s appeal to the future prospects of a two-state solution, one for Israel and one for Palestinians, expresses America’s surrender to Israel’s stone-cold hard-heartedness, inflexibility, and Zionism’s blinding belief in Jewish, ethnic entitlement.

Posing as a neutral mediator, while never — no never — acting as anything of the sort, the US has encouraged decades of false hope and wasted effort in supposed “Peace Talks” between Israel and the Palestinian leadership.

Granted, Yasser Arafat was a foolish negotiator — but never the intransigent deceiver that Israel and the USA always made him out to be — and the PLO made plenty of irresponsible mistakes while betraying their own people.

But as Israel’s greatest political supporter, financier, and supplier of military hardware and technology, the US never intended to assist the Palestinians in their efforts to escape Israeli’s colonial domination.

For instance, when dealing with the Likud negotiators under Begin and Netanyahu, the US never — never — challenged the Likud party platform proclaiming that Israel would never permit the creation of a Palestinian state.

If that’s not reprehensible collusion, I don’t know what is.

After all, what are 4.5 million Palestinian refugees when compared to two colonial, nuclear armed super-powers pledged to watch each other’s backs? The strategic interests of neither America nor Israel has ever included the moral imperative of justice for oppressed, brown-skinned, Arab human beings.

Why has anyone ever been foolish enough to imagine otherwise?

Mr. Levy’s latest article in Haaretz newspaper is titled “Biden Signs the Palestinians’ Death Certificate.”

Read Levy’s analysis below (all emphasis mine):

At Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem, of all places, U.S. President Joe Biden signed a death certificate. The two-state solution died a long time ago, and now so has the Palestinians’ strategic choice of relying on the West in their struggle for their national rights.

This hope drew its last breath at Augusta Victoria. In his speech Biden mused at great length about his and his family’s time in the hospital; he remembered the intensive care ward. A flat line on the monitor meant death, he learned there. About an hour later, in Bethlehem, the monitor flatlined. The path the Palestinians embarked on 50 years ago has come to an end. They have reached a dead end.
At the beginning of the ‘70s, a new star appeared in the political skies: the cardiologist Issam Sartawi, a refugee from Acre, a student in Iraq, an exile in Paris and an architect of the plane hijackings. He underwent a complete change. He became the Palestinians’ trailblazer to the West’s heart; until then they had relied on nonaligned countries. Sartawi led the Palestinians to Bonn, Vienna, Paris and Stockholm instead of Moscow, Jakarta, Delhi and Kuala Lumpur.

This was depicted as an excellent choice. The protégé and even the darling of Western Europe’s social democratic stars of those days – Willy Brandt, Bruno Kreisky, Olof Palme and François Mitterrand – continued on to the Israelis’ hearts. Sartawi began with meetings with representatives of the Israeli left. Yasser Arafat enthusiastically joined the path his adviser had blazed. It seemed much more promising than winning support from Karachi.

Fifty years later this road has reached its end, with the Palestinians bleeding on the ground. An American president only gives them a few hours – on a visit that gives new meaning to the terms doing the minimum and lip service. So the time has come to awaken from the dream that Europe and America will ever do something for the Palestinians that won’t be to the satisfaction of their unassailable cherished one, Israel.

It’s a president who doesn’t bother to correctly pronounce the name of Shireen Abu Akleh, [Biden mispronounced her name as Abu Al-Qaeda!] the journalist killed almost certainly by Israel, becoming a national and international symbol. Jamal Khashoggi he knows how to pronounce. The Palestinians no longer have anything to look for in this arena. When Biden quoted from a poem that says how “hope and history rhyme” and threw them $100 million for Augusta Victoria, it was clear that it’s lost with the United States.

With an American president who promises them a two-state solution, but “not in the near term,” you get to the end of the story. You feel like asking Biden: “What will happen ‘not in the long term’ that will achieve this solution? Will the Israelis decide on their own? Will the settlers return on their own? When there are a million of them instead of 700,000, will that satisfy them?

Will America ever think differently? Why should this happen? With the laws against BDS and the new and distorted definitions of antisemitism, the United States and Europe are lost as far as the Palestinians are concerned. The battle has been decided, Israel has all but beaten them, and their fate might be the same as that of the indigenous peoples in the United States.

It’s enough to look at the picture of the meeting in Bethlehem: Twelve grim Palestinian men in ties around the two leaders in a group photo of despair. It’s enough to recall Biden’s words in 1986 to the secretary of state at the time, George Shultz: “I hate to hear an administration … refusing to act on a morally important point. … I’m ashamed that this country puts out a policy like this, that says nothing, nothing.”

Biden was referring to U.S. policy on the previous apartheid country, South Africa. Amazingly similar remarks can be hurled now at Biden because of his approach to the second apartheid country. But there’s no Biden to hurl them.

“The Appallingly Bad History Taught at Fundamentalist Schools”

Among the several blogs that I follow is William Trollinger’s Righting America: A Forum for Scholarly Conversation About Christianity, Culture, and Politics in the US.

His most recent post, titled “The Appallingly Bad History Taught at Fundamentalist Schools,” is a review including brief excerpts of a new book  by Kathleen Wellman titled Hijacking History: How the Christian Right Teaches History and Why It Matters (Oxford, 2021).

Here is a brief excerpt, but I encourage you to look at the blog — or, better yet,  buy the book — to see the long list of shocking, Right-Wing punditry that passes for “objective” American history in far too many private, Christian schools:

If you know anything about history, this post will make you laugh and/or cry.

And/or make you angry. 

And the latter emotion is particularly appropriate.

In her book, Hijacking History: How the Christian Right Teaches History and Why It Matters, Kathleen Wellman (Professor of History at Southern Methodist University) reports on world history textbooks produced by Abeka Books (published by Pensacola Christian College), Accelerated Christian Education [ACE], and Bob Jones University Press [BJU]. These textbooks are popular among fundamentalist homeschoolers and are often adopted at fundamentalist Christian schools. 

For example, the Answers in Genesis K-12 school, Twelve Stones Academy, uses the BJU text.

Wellman heroically examines these texts in great detail. Why did she subject herself to such a painful task? As she notes in her introduction, these fundamentalist textbooks

have an influence that has extended far beyond the confines of fundamentalism . . .  Their views, as indeed the textbooks insist, increasingly define American Christianity. These curricula’s narrative of Christian history has been grafted onto right-wing political and economic positions. And right-wing political interests have promoted these views. (2)

Here are just a few examples from Hijacking History:

  • “These textbooks label [ancient] Africa the Dark Continent . . . ‘the fear, idolatry, and witchcraft associated with animism’ [Abeka text] prevented African economic and cultural development” (74).
  • “The Abeka curriculum claims the Greeks made no progress in science, even though Greek scientific works set the standard for virtually every science for over fifteen hundred years . . . [More generally, Greek] civilization was fundamentally flawed, and their efforts ultimately produced no benefits.” (83)

Click here to see the entire post.

The continued replication of the repulsive racist, colonialist, imperialist trope describing Africa as “the Dark Continent” illustrates both the longevity and the currency of a western imperialist mindset in certain sectors of American society.

Furthermore, aside from the fact that the African continent was once populated by thriving, complex, urban-centered civilizations, I am stunned to discover that there are history textbooks asserting that the ancient Greeks never produced anything of “any benefit”?!

My, oh my.

No wonder Donald Trump has hoodwinked so many conservative Christians in

Raphael’s “The School of Athens” depicting Plato and Aristotle in debate

this country (many of whom are heavily invested in the Christian school and home schooling movements).

No wonder many parents are raising a ruckus and protesting at local school board meetings against Critical Race Theory and multiculturalism in the classroom.  These are the families fleeing public schools for the same Christian academies and home school networks now using horrible history texts.

And the dumbing down of America, particularly American evangelical-fundamentalism, continues unabated.

We are well into the dark ages of American cultural history.

Thucydides could teach them all a thing or two about history, while a little time with Aristotle could help them learn how to use their minds.

A Proposed 28th Amendment for Gun Control. I’d Vote For It

The film maker and famed political commentator, Michael Moore, has composed a 28th Amendment to the Constitution. He presented the Amendment to Congress on July 11, 2022.

The 28th Amendment would repeal and replace the 2nd Amendment.

As lifelong hunter and gun owner, I would vote YES.

You can check it out here at Moore’s blog. I have also reproduced the entire Amendment below:

XXVIII AMENDMENT

SECTION 1.
The inalienable right of a free people to be kept safe from gun violence and the fear thereof must not be infringed and shall be protected by the Congress and the States. This Amendment thus repeals and replaces the Second Amendment.

SECTION 2.
Congress shall create a mandatory system of firearm registration and licensing for the following limited purposes: (a) licensed hunters of game; (b) licensed ranges for the sport of target shooting; and (c) for the few who can demonstrate a special need for personal protection. 

All who seek a firearm will undergo a strict vetting process with a thorough background check, including the written and confidential approval of family members, spouses and ex-spouses and/or partners and ex-partners, co-workers and neighbors. A mental health check will also be required. There will be a waiting period of one month to complete the full background check. 

SECTION 3.
Those who meet all the requirements for the restricted gun owners groups and successfully pass the background check must take a firearms safety class and pass a written test on an annual basis. 

SECTION 4.
The minimum age for the restricted groups who can own a firearm is 25 years old. Renewal and review of the firearms license will occur on an annual basis. 


SECTION 5.
Congress will stipulate and continually update the limited list of approved firearms for civilian use, including weapons in the future that are not yet invented. The following firearms are heretofore banned:

  • All automatic and semi-automatic weapons and all devices which can enable a single-shot gun to fire automatically or semi-automatically;

   • Any weapon that can hold more than six bullets or rounds at a time or any magazine that holds more than six bullets;

   • All guns made of plastic or any homemade equipment and machinery or a 3D printer that can make a gun or weapon that can take a human life.

SECTION 6.
Congress shall regulate all ammunition, capacity of ammunition, the storage of guns, gun locks, gun sights, body armor and the sale and distribution of such items. No weapons of any kind whose sole intention is the premeditated elimination of human life are considered legal. Congress may create future restrictions as this amendment specifically does not grant any American the “right” to own any weapon.  

SECTION 7.
Police who are trained and vetted to use firearms shall be subject to comprehensive and continuous monitoring and shall be dismissed if found to exhibit any racist or violent behavior. 

SECTION 8.
Persons already owning any of the above banned firearms, and who do not fall into the legal groups of restricted firearms owners, will have one month from the ratification of this Amendment to turn in their firearms for destruction by local law enforcement. These local authorities may organize a gun buy-back program to assist in this effort.

Listen to Three Privileged, Christian White Guys Scold the Black Community

I would say that the news clip below is “unbelievable” except that it appeared on the Christian Broadcast Network. A network that conforms its opinion pieces so closely to the conservative, Republican obsession with “law and order” that you’d be forgiven for assuming its commentators all had day jobs as prison guards.

This editorial discussion is supposedly highlighting the importance of the

Jayland Walker

public “having all the facts” about a situation before drawing conclusions or making objections to the work of the authorities.

But then, conservative Christianity has always highlighted the importance of “obeying the authorities,” no matter how abusive they may be.

The matter at hand is the police murder of Jayland Walker in Akron, Ohio and the quick display of community outrage that followed.

The initial police reports, the details of which have not been changed, explained that Mr. Walker was going to be stopped for some unspecified sort of traffic violation.

Mr. Walker then took the police on a high speed chase which ended with him leaping from his car and running away. Police allege that Walker fired a gun out his car window during the chase.

As Walker ran away, his was chased by 8 – 9 policemen who fired 90+ rounds at his back. Mr. Walker never returned fire because, as the police later discovered, he was unarmed. (Duh, the fact that he never turned to fire back while unsuccessfully dodging a hail-storm of gunfire, hadn’t tipped them off to this already?)

Walker’s body was hit by 60+ bullets. He died at the scene.

These were the original facts. They are still the facts.

Mr. Walker is another unarmed black man gunned down for the crime of running from the police who consistently insult, abuse, assault, and murder unarmed black men.

As an African-American friend asked me not long ago, “David, why can’t white people understand why we are afraid of the police? We have good reason to be.”

Nevertheless, these CBN commentators object. They insist that most, perhaps all?, media reports have not mentioned the (alleged) gunshot out of Walker’s car window during the car chase.

However, EVERY report that I have read and watched HAS either shown the relevant video or mentioned the alleged gun fire from Walker on the highway.

In other words, CBN is ginning up an illegitimate, irrelevant concern for their own rhetorical purposes. Can anyone say, MANIPULATION? or PROPAGANDA?

But they all say these things oh so unctuously with such apparent concern…

They also fail to mention the many, many times that the police have been caught LYING to the public in their initial police reports in order to protect themselves and hide their own wrongdoing.

Naturally, the local black community responded with a large, peaceful, public protest demanding answers and accountability.

The very next day these three CBN Christian stooges, doing the half-step shuffle for white privilege, self-righteousness, hard-heartedness, foolishness and stupidity, scold the black community (!) for expressing their grief and anger, while exercising their first amendment right to cry out in the streets for justice.

I am sorry, but I find the entire diatribe to be absolutely infuriating!

Here we see three comfortable, extremely well paid, audacious examples of the poisonous fruit of white privilege dripping with the decay of dead men’s bones, all white-washed and dressed up pretty for broadcast TV.

I am sorry, but this report is nothing but pious hackery, blindingly oblivious to the persistent and pernicious racial/racist dynamic playing itself out over and over and over again in our city streets.

It is also painfully obvious — AGAIN– that something has gone horribly wrong with the way police officers are being trained to handle both people and their weapons.

It’s not a few “bad apples,” folks. It’s the entire system that appears to be rotten.

I could go on, but I will stop now. Watch for yourself. Especially notice the mini-sermon about “unrighteous responses” given in coordination with the film of African-American protesters walking through the streets.

Really?!?!

I have asked in the past. I am asking again. If anyone has a video clip of an unarmed white man being shot or chocked to death by police, please send it to me.

Legal Conundrums Raised by Both the Rights of a Fetus and “Bodily Autonomy”

A friend of mine sent me the link to a fascinating article yesterday in reaction to my last post about the moral implications of believing that life begins at conception (see here).

This article investigates the legal issues that have arisen in America’s courts by consistently applying the principles of fetal life and individual bodily autonomy.

The piece is titled “The Rights of the Fetus and the Principle of Bodily Autonomy” and is published on the website of the Anastasis Center for Christian Education and Ministry. It is written by David Gill, Professor Emeritus of Ethics, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

Below is an excerpt:

The fetus is treated very inconsistently by U.S. law today, and not just in abortion situations.  For example, the fetus can inherit property.  If a pregnant mother dies before or in childbirth, but the fetus survives and is born alive, courts have decided that the child can inherit property along with other living siblings, and the state will appoint guardians for the child if needed.[1]

The fetus can be the victim of personal injuries in assaults in thirty-eight states.  For example, in November 2014, in California, Scott Peterson was convicted of the first degree murder of his wife Laci and the second degree murder of their unborn son Connor.[2]  In November 2017, in Texas, Devin Patrick Kelley committed a gun massacre at First Baptist Church in Sutherland, Texas, murdering 26 people, including Crystal Holcombe and her unborn child, who was at eight months of gestation and was counted as a person among the victims.[3]  The federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004 makes a motorist guilty of two homicides in motor vehicle accidents when both a pregnant mother and the fetus in her womb die, even if that woman was on her way to abort her fetus.

The fetus’s life legally overrides its mother’s “religious freedom” interest in refusing blood transfusions if she is a Jehovah’s Witness.  In 1964, the New Jersey court, in Fitkin Memorial Hospital v. Anderson, decreed that a pregnant woman who was a Jehovah’s Witness did not have the right to refuse a blood transfusion when doctors believed that the procedure would preserve the life of the fetus she carried.  The 1985 In re Jamaica Hospital case in New York’s State Supreme Court decided the same.  The New York court recognized the mother’s right to an abortion at that stage in her pregnancy, but maintained that in the circumstance where the mother was in need of a blood transfusion for another emergency reason, the state’s significant interest in protecting a midterm fetus’s life outweighed her religious beliefs against blood transfusions.

Under such laws, fetuses could have their interests defended against poisoning from lead in drinking water, biotoxin exposure, etc. as much as alcohol and other substances.  In a helpful law journal article, Robin Trindel highlights numerous examples of courts that have even upheld children’s legal suits against a defendant “for prenatal injuries where the defendant’s negligence occurred prior to the child’s conception.”[4]  For example, in Renslow v. Mennonite Hospital (1977), a minor daughter who was also incompetent, represented by her mother, successfully sued a hospital for administering an improper blood transfusion to the mother eight years prior to her getting pregnant.  The Rh incompatibility in the mother’s blood caused brain, nervous system, and organ damage to her daughter.[5]  A similar case occurred in Bergstreser v. Mitchell (8th Cir. 1978), concerning a child being adversely affected by the doctors who administered a Caesarian section improperly to her mother for her previous child.   In Jorgensen v. Meade Johnson Laboratories, Inc. (10th Cir. 1973), deformed twin infants, represented by their parents, successfully sued a birth control drug manufacturer for their condition, which included mental retardation, physical deformity, pain, and suffering.[6] 

The Curlender v. Bio-Science Laboratories (1980) case in California surprised many because a child successfully sued for a “wrongful life” cause.  She was in constant pain from Tay-Sachs disease.  She had been conceived because her parents had relied on the company’s assurances that their genetic tests were accurate and that their child would not have genetic complications.  Whereas parents had been able to sue on the grounds of a wrongful birth cause, this was the first time in U.S. legal history where a child won a case on the grounds that she should not exist—that is, of a wrongful life.  Observers in many fields registered their alarm at what Curlender meant for the legal jeopardy of science and medical professionals.[7]  Taking that one step further, can a child sue the society into which it was born because it was born into poverty?

You can read the entire article and find the footnotes here.