Defense of Truth

Italy has a new emerging Leftist superstar they're calling the Italian Obama. He's gay, he's Catholic, and he's the governor of the southern region of Puglia. Despite all this, Nichola Vendola only caught my attention because of a short quote the BBC captured to give a sense of the flavor of his popular appeal: "Today we have a globalisation of oligarchic and financial interests, but no globalisation of human rights and social rights. "We have to fight for a globalisation of the people." Of course, anyone with any sense of the history of human rights and social rights would find this statement completely ludicrous. Since the beginning of the American experiment of limited government where all are equal under the law, slavery has been abolished, almost all of the world's states have moved to democratic models for the selection of leaders, and the standard of living of even the poor in industrialized countries has been immeasurably advanced. Italy ...

Inevitably we are all going to "friend" someone on Facebook who posts lots of bolstering material for their chosen political ideology on their wall. I don't like to respond there. The wall is for person to person contact, and it's public. I'm not going to start a big ole word fight over things there, unless I feel compelled by the nature of the post. But it would be fruitful to think some of them through here. Latest case in point: the Tea Party and the supposed hypocrisy of some of its candidates, Joe Miller of AK to be specific in this article (I haven't read the Rolling Stone in AGES--ever since they knocked Metallica for writing "Don't Tread on Me" because it didn't fit their idea of how anti-war the band was somehow supposed to be). Fair warning the article is mildly salacious and is not opposed to harsh language and imagery. Can I enjoy the wit in an opponent's sarcasm? Absolutely. But he's still fallacious. First off, Ca...

Pres. Monson on Choice : "Although in our journey we will encounter forks and turnings in the road, we simply cannot afford the luxury of a detour from which we may never return." "I plead with you to make a determination right here, right now, not to deviate from the path which will lead to our goal: eternal life with our Father in Heaven." "Ye shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left. Ye shall walk in all the ways which the Lord your God hath commanded you." (citing Moses in Deuteronomy) Detours, deviations, turning to the right or left. The metaphor of the path chosen, and the consequences which inevitably accompany the choice can't be stressed enough. You pick up one end of a stick, you've also got the other end. The problem is that with the veil in place (LDS terminology for necessary forgetting an immortal spirit goes through as part of the process of its coming to a test in mortality) all paths are necessarily blind ones. ...

Part of my creed as a faithful member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (nicknamed the Mormons ) came as a response of founding prophet Joseph Smith to a journalist who was essentially asking what made us different. The text goes as follows: "We claim the privilege of worshipping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men [sic] the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may." I've had this eleventh verse in a series now known as the thirteen Articles of Faith memorized since I was about 10 years old, and still regard it as a profound and profoundly tolerant moral code for how I should regard the deeply held beliefs of others. This does not mean that I should not use all the persuasive powers I can muster to bring those with false beliefs into a knowledge of a true basis for judgment--this was the essence of my reason for volunteering to serve a two-year mission in the Côte d'Ivoire as I did--bu...

At the base of the Statue of Liberty, symbol of arrival on the shores of freedom for immigrants from Europe for more than a century now, is inscribed a sonnet describing the statue and its symbolic function penned by Emma Lazarus, a Jew from a prominent long-established American family, entitled The New Colossus. In Lazarus's immortalized words, the statue beckons: "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore; Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" (read the whole sonnet here ) In the close of John Ashcroft's speech, he referenced this poem in connection with his own feeling of pride as a youth in the superiority of the US in almost all areas of human activity. Why are we so much better than every other country out there, he thought? The arrogance of the very question is striking to those who presuppose American hubris. Is it not hypocritical for a...

Former US Attorney General , US senator and Governor from Missouri, John Ashcroft , really got me thinking this week. Near the end of a 40 minute speech he made to the Young America Foundation, which was dated 19 Apr 2007 in the podcast on which I listened to it, he made two points about liberty in the US that I found to have profound implications. The first now, the second later… On the idea of a balance between liberty and security: First of all, as Michele Malkin rightly notes in her insightful post here , the Ben Franklin quote so often cited linking these two ideas is often cited wrong: Here's the paraphrase the left uses: Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither Here's the actual Ben Franklin Quote: Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. Did you note that Franklin conceived of some liberties as non-essential? I suppose it is a God-given human right to button your shirts fr...

We pause our current series on "The Mormons" to write briefly about a truth and a core principle based in religious thought, but bearing more directly on the political. It's time to make some quick notes on liberty. The American founding fathers conceived that all men (and I will not hesitate to correct: all human beings ) are created equal. When you consider the diversity of talents, abilities, height, weight, growth, intelligences (While there are obvious problems with Gardner's theory and taxonomy of "multiple intelligences" per this , it makes intuitive conceptual sense to use the concept as a tool as explained briefly here ), socio-historical economic circumstances, etc. it's patently absurd to believe this equality is an equality of result, or even an equality of opportunity (since the very diversity of natures and contexts we're discussing here constrain the nature of each opportunity differently), but rather an equality of treatment before an...