I Radical

This is very cool!  I’m a radical again!  It’s been so long.  I miss the days, back in the sixties and early seventies, when I saturated myself in defiant nobility—“Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” “Woodstock,” “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” six nights in a row at the Redondo Fox, Nehru shirts, bell-bottoms and long hair (hair period).  Then I got a job, got married, got kids, got responsible and fell into the mainstream of normalcy—but not anymore.  I just received a political mailer informing me that I’m extreme again.  Move over Jerry Rubin—sit down Abbie Hoffman—I’m about to blow out the Anthem on my Fender Strat.

I usually grow weary of election propaganda.  But the mailer forming the genesis of my neo-epiphany has rejuvenated my otherwise sedentary political bloodstream.  Of course I’m not running for office, so the mailer, strictly speaking, wasn’t about me.  It was about Craig Huey and some of his (what I thought to be) old time blah-blah American convictions.  But, apparently, Craig and I are edgy—bad boys if you will.  From whence does this edgy-ness arise you ask? 

For one, it comes from those with whom Craig and I associate—our bro-hams.  “He communicates” the flyer exposes “with the knowledge, understanding and language of the Evangelical community.”  Busted!!!  The man, the heat, the fuzz, the cops—they’re always judging me cause of my hair!  My old man told me to quit hanging out with those evangelicals.  “They’re just gonna get you in trouble Paulie!”  It just made me want to hang out with them all the more—same with Craig I guess.  Craig communicates with religious people—extreme—I like it.  But there’s more.

Huey punches his recalcitrant Tommie Smith toward the clouds in mutinous defiance of Roe v Wade.  He thinks the judges were “out of order.”  Tastes like fodder for a sit-in.  Did Huey really say “We cannot ignore the unborn” as the flyer suggests?  Dude!  Crazy, how it all comes back in style.  For hundreds of years Huey’s take on politics was main-stream.  He was normal.  Put one of those white fluffy wigs on him and he could have been a signer.  But now he takes rank with those truculent youths smoking cigarettes behind the library.  But there’s more.

The “deep-throat” like flyer reveals that Huey also “communicates…with the ‘Institute for Creation Research’ which promotes teaching Creationism in public schools.”  Has he no boundaries?  Was he raised by wolves?  The last thing on earth this country needs is someone with the irresponsible conviction that there is an actual Creator—scandalous, sinister—there should be a movie—I’m there—six nights in a row.  Maybe a cameo by Thomas Jefferson explaining what he meant by “Nature’s God” and being “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”  Guess he was a radical too.

I’m stoked!  After all this time I’m a radical again.  Gotta split now; see if I can find my eight-track of “Easy Rider” and my old lady (she left, lookin’ a little nervous). 

 

Texas Cheerleader Madness

School officials at an East Texas high school give ample evidence of Joseph Goebbels maxim that if you tell a lie long enough and loud enough people will believe it. The evidence in question is their attempt to bar high school cheerleaders from displaying banners with Bible verses—District Judge Steve Thomas granted an injunction allowing the Scriptures verses to remain until the lawsuit is settled. In the meantime the cheerleaders hold our nation hostage with their reckless use of ancient literature.

It makes you wonder what other portions of Harvard’s Five Foot Shelf are to be banned from government funded education. No doubt The Confessions by Augustine are out and these cheerleaders will be chomping on detention slips if they dare quote The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a’ Kempes. Charles William Eliot should have been more selective. What fine prose would find its way into 21st century five foot shelf?

Would these girls find resistance quoting Vince Lombardi, Woody Hayes or Bobby Knight? Perhaps a more palatable bibliography would include Noam Chomsky, Whoopi Goldberg or Bill Maher. Just how benign must the verbiage be to make the menu of the public school? A menu with pictures always whets the appetite. Is there a clear thinking person with the remotest grasp of American history who actually believes that stifling cheerleaders from writing Bible verses is what the framers of the Constitution had in mind with the establishment clauses? If so, why do they open congress with prayer, why are there numerous allusions to a Creator in our government’s documentation and why are Bible verses carved in granite all over our nation’s capital? Were the fathers double-minded men?

Are we aware of what we are doing when we chastise young people for choosing inscriptions from the finest volumes in human history? Listening to the running media commentary on this issue was maddening. Otherwise clear thinking journalists—journalists who would, no doubt, fight tooth and nail for literary liberties have transitioned into a covey of match-wielding Terry Jones wannabees. They speak as if the public school is sacred ground—a pristine environment that these girls are seeking to stain with the pollution of apostolic indecency.

What is the lie everyone is believing? For one, it’s the notion that the establishment clause pertaining to religion was designed to protect the state from the influence of the immaterial convictions of private individuals—regardless of where those convictions might surface. No, the clause “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” was designed to protect the individual from government tyranny and a government run church—a government who tells teenager girls what classic literature is verboten. To quote Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Plain and simple, the Bible is out because it has something of impact to say. It is a life changing, culture transforming document which is the last thing on earth a monstrous government wants to deal with. A steady diet of The View will yield a much more malleable culture of young people than those who would deign to embark upon a trek through the Epistle to the Hebrews. But strong societies are not made of oatmeal. We should desire our young people set their face like flint to wisdom. Suing them for quoting Scripture will not yield that desired end.