Culture
Clips —
August 10, 2006
What’s the Matter with Kansas?
State school-board
elections don’t normally receive much national media attention.
Yet the school-board primary race in Kansas on Tuesday, representing
a key front in the Darwin wars, was an exception.
Will Darwinism be taught as unquestionable
dogma? That’s the question that voters decided. In Kansas, it
seems it will.
Kansas has been one of five states with biology curricula that
include instruction about the evidence both for and against neo-Darwinism,
requiring that students learn about the “critical analysis” of
evolutionary theory. Darwin advocates worked hard to defeat the
majority on the education board and eliminate this requirement.
On Tuesday they succeeded in this first objective, and the second
will follow in due course.
The current “controversial” Kansas Science Standards very clearly
do not mandate that students learn about intelligent design. On
the contrary, as the board explained, “We also emphasize that
the Science Curriculum Standards do not include Intelligent Design.”
Can’t get much clearer than, can you? Yet an outfit called Kansas
Citizens for Science argued exactly the reverse — that the Kansas
Science Standards do indeed mandate instruction about ID. It ended
up convincing the voters. Or rather, deceiving them.
David Klinghoffer
National Review Online
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=
OTA1Y2IzMTk1MDYzNzI5MGFhZmJjOWE3MWM0Y2ZkOGI=
--
Little Boy Lost
We have become so accustomed to terrible
things happening to kids that we tend to forget that we didn’t
always live in such fear. Until recently, we didn’t have child-sex
tourism, child prostitution, and pedophiles soliciting our kids
online. A few years ago, we would not have accepted a television
show like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, which
regularly chronicles, for our viewing pleasure, stories about
the torture, rape, and murder of America’s children.
The Adam Walsh law — which the National Center for Missing &
Exploited Children calls “the toughest and most important piece
of legislation in the past 25 years in helping to save children’s
lives,” goes on the offensive against child predators by expanding
the national sex offender registry — integrating the information
in state registries to make it harder for pedophiles to avoid
detection by moving to another state. It imposes tough mandatory
minimums for those who commit serious crimes against children
and increases penalties for sex traffickers and those who force
children into prostitution. The law also provides money to train
law enforcement in combating Internet crimes against children.
This law is a huge leap forward. But unfortunately, it only goes
after predators after they have victimized a child. We
also need to go after the people who inspire these crimes: pornographers.
According to the National Coalition Against Pornography, no single
characteristic of pedophilia is more pervasive than the obsession
with child pornography. The vast majority of child molesters admit
to the regular use of hard-core porn, and one study found that
states with the highest consumption of pornography also have the
highest rape rates. “Not everyone who reads porn acts out [against
children], but everyone who acts out does read child pornography,”
Roben Rodriguez of the International Center for Mission and Exploited
Children told USA Today.
Porn is a $10-billion-a-year industry, much of it related to organized
crime. Some 800 million adult videos and DVDs are rented every
month — many to people who live near our homes.
Why do we put up with this? Why do we put up with porn on the
candy aisle of the grocery store, Internet portals that allow
child-porn clubs on their websites, and cable contracts that force
us to subscribe to sleaze if we want Sesame Street?
You'd think parents, with Adam Walsh and our own children in mind,
would do everything they could to rid the world of the child porn
that drives pedophiles to commit crimes against children. Last
week's bill-signing is a sobering reminder of how many victims
are out there — and, tragically, how many more victims there
are to come.
Anne Morse
National Review Online
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=
NzczZTJjN2MzODVjOGNkZDdiOTBjYjFiZWQwNGVhZTM=
--
Jews Shot in Seattle, but Left Angry
at Mel Gibson
On July
28, 2006, a Muslim entered the building of the Seattle Jewish
Federation and shot every Jew he saw, murdering one woman and
wounding five others.
On the
same day, Mel Gibson was arrested on DUI charges and while intoxicated
let loose with anti-Semitic invective at the Jewish police officer
who arrested him.
Question:
Which story has most troubled the Left?
The answer
is known to any American who can hear or read.
So, the
real question is: Why? Why has the shooting and murder of Jews
elicited less angst from the Left than the anti-Semitic statements
made by Mel Gibson when drunk?
The answers
are very troubling. As Time magazine said about global
warming (but never about Islamic terror), "Be worried, very
worried."
… The antipathy toward Christian fundamentalists
and conservatives is why Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic statements trouble
the Left more than Naveed Haq and the genocidal anti-Semitism permeating
the Muslim world. And what is it about those Christians that most
disturbs the Left? That they talk in terms of good and evil and
believe the former must fight the latter, precisely the area of
the Left's greatest weakness.
Dennis Prager
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/DennisPrager
/2006/08/08/jews_shot_in_seattle,_left_angry_at_mel_gibson
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