Federal Judge Says Public Prayer by Police Officers Violates Law

How perverse!  I would greatly prefer a cop who prays to one who doesn't

The city council of Ocala, Florida, has decided to fight back after a federal judge ruled that the city and its police chief violated the Constitution by promoting and holding a prayer vigil.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan ruled in May that Police Chief Greg Graham and city leaders broke the Establishment Clause by organizing, promoting and holding a 2014 prayer vigil after a drive-by shooting injured several children.

“The government cannot initiate, organize, sponsor or conduct a community prayer vigil,” Judge Corrigan wrote in his order. “That is what happened here.”

The American Humanist Association represented several local residents who were allegedly triggered and suffered microaggressions as a result of the vigil.

The lawsuit claimed the police chief was “reckless and callously indifferent” because of his involvement in the planning and promotion of the event.

The chief and the city were ordered to pay $3 in damages plus attorney fees, Ocala.com reported.

The city council filed a motion to vacate the judgement.

Mayor Kent Guinn told Fox News about 600 people showed up to pray “for the children that got shot in the drive by shooting.”

Renowned evangelist Franklin Graham said prayer is a basic human right and public employees should be able to petition the Almighty.

“George Washington prayed, Abraham Lincoln prayed, and other presidents have called on God publicly in times of war or crisis,” the president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse tweeted.

“Atheists have the right not to believe and not to call on God,” he said. “People of faith have the right to pray, and it should not be taken away.”

But AHA legal director David Niose said prayer rallies should be run by churches, not police departments.

“Police departments shouldn’t be endorsing religion, yet that’s exactly what the Ocala Police Department did here by sponsoring and promoting a prayer vigil,” he said in a statement.

It really takes a perverted kind of reprobate to sue a police department for participating in a prayer vigil.

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Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder's name is REMOVED from top children's literature honor over her 'stereotypical attitudes' to blacks and Native Americans

Far-left librarians again. Frustrated old maids? That the award went to a black writer for the fourth straight year tells you about their politics.  Race is all.  Literature can take a back seat

The famed author of the Little House on the Prairie series has been put out to pasture.

In a unanimous vote on Saturday, the board of the Association for Library Service to Children agreed to remove Laura Ingalls Wilder's name from the group's top award honoring children's literature authors over her depiction of blacks and Native Americans in her work.

'This decision was made in consideration of the fact that Wilder’s legacy, as represented by her body of work, includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness,' said the group in a statement after the vote.

Rob Lowe mocked the controversy on Monday, tweeting: 'Wait.. Laura Ingalls Wilder was a racist author? How did I miss that?! Say it ain’t so, Halfpint!!!'

At the same time, Wendy McClure, who runs a parody account under Wilder's name, wrote: 'Not to be controversial (though of course I AM) but don't you think an award should be more about honoring the person who WINS IT than the person it's named for? Don't worry about my name and what award it is or isn't on, flutterbudgets. Kindly save your outrage for other things.'

Wilder's name had still not been removed from the organization's website as of Monday morning.

'Administered by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award honors an author or illustrator whose books, published in the United States, have made, over a period of years, a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children,' reads the page describing the honor.

Below that is a biography of Wilder, which consists of just two sentences, followed by three paragraphs under the heading: 'Wilder's Legacy, and the Award in Context.'

That section, which is three times longer than the one detailing Wilder's life, states: 'Wilder's body of work continues to be a focus of scholarship and literary analysis, which often brings to light anti-Native and anti-Black sentiments in her work.

'Her books continue to be published, read, and widely used with contemporary children. ALSC recognizes the author’s legacy is complex and Wilder’s work is not universally embraced.'

Later, the group stresses that while it will continue to preserve the works of Wilder, it has opted to not associate her name with a prize honoring a writer's lifetime achievements.

The decision was made as the honor, now awarded annually, went to a black writer for the fourth straight year.

Past honorees include E. B. White (1970), Beverly Cleary (1975), Maurice Sendak (1983) and perhaps the most famous children's writer of all, Theodor S. Geisel (1980).

Geisel, better know as Dr. Seuss, is now under investigation himself by the group's task force, along with British bookseller John Newbery, illustrator Randolph Caldecott, businessman Robert Sibert, Mildred Batchelder, and author May Hill Arbuthnot.

ALSC Blog Manager Mary Voors wrote on the group's website that the vote on Saturday was met with a standing ovation.

In Little House on the Prarie, Wilder writes early in the book that out west 'there were no people. Only Indians lived there.'

That line clearly reveals Wilder's belief that Native Americans were not 'people,' and was changed int he 1950s to read 'no settlers.'

These sentiments did not impact the success of her novels, which are still sold worldwide and were made into a hit television series starring Michael Landon and Melissa Gilbert.

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U.S. Army training will now focus on actual battlefield skills, not social issues

Actual fighting will now take precedence over dealing with transitioning transgender troops, drug abuse and other issues as the Army seeks to overhaul its training regimen to hone its soldiers’ battlefield skills.

In a series of recent service-wide memoranda approved by Army Secretary Mark Esper and Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and obtained by The Washington Times, service leaders are now making optional previously mandatory training on issues like transgender transition and drug abuse. The move, Army leaders argue, is designed to relieve stress on the already overburdened troop training regimen and refocus on soldiers ability to fight in combat.

“The Army’s regulations and policies that deal with training were pretty settled and there were not a lot of detractors to it. … It was all the other [training] requirements that we levied on ourselves, or we had levied from other places” that led to the increasingly cumbersome approach to combat readiness, said Col. John O’Grady, chief of the Army’s collective training division.

Those mandated training requirements “served as barriers to maximizing time … to build readiness and lethality” within combat units, he said in an interview. Aside from ending mandatory training programs on transgender troops and drug abuse, courses on media awareness and anti-human trafficking have also been eliminated from the mandatory curriculum, the service memoranda state.

Army officials are codifying the new marching orders into service-wide training guidelines and doctrine, which will bring the Army more in line with the Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy, Col. O’Grady said.

The strategy, which was one of Defense Secretary James Mattis’ earliest policy initiatives, shifted away from the George W. Bush and Obama-era strategies dominated by battling extremist groups like al Qaeda, the Taliban and Islamic State, and putting the priority on challenging traditional nation-state rivals such as China and Russia. It also placed a greater emphasis on increasing lethality in conventional combat operations.

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The Bad Hate the Good: The SPLC vs. Prager University

Dennis Prager

“Antifa” is to violence what the Southern Poverty Law Center is to words. In short, it is a hate group on the Left.

The SPLC smears individuals and groups it differs with by labeling them as some form of “hater”: “racist,” “white supremacist,” “extremist” and the like. That it is cited and even relied upon by The New York Times, Facebook, Amazon, Google, CNN and others, and that Apple gave the organization a million dollars, is testimony to the moral state of mainstream media and corporate culture in America today.

Were the SPLC not quoted and used as a source, there would be no reason to pay it any attention. All the SPLC does is politicize, and thereby trivialize, the fight against racism and other evils.

Any organization that labels Ayaan Hirsi Ali — the extraordinary Somali-American woman who devotes her life to fighting for oppressed women, especially in the Islamic world — an “extremist,” as the SPLC has done, is not a moral organization. No wonder it just agreed to pay Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz $3.4 million and issued a retraction for smearing him as an “anti-Muslim extremist.”

This kind of behavior should surprise no one. Since Stalin labeled Trotsky, the ideological leader of Soviet communism, a “fascist,” the Left (not liberals, to whom the Left is as opposed as it is conservatives) has libeled its opponents. Without lying about its opponents, there would be no Left.

Now the SPLC has placed an article about PragerU on its “Hatewatch” blog. It never actually accuses PragerU of “hate” because even it can’t substantiate such a charge. In over 300 videos, it could not find a single sentence countenancing hate or bigotry, so it simply describes two articles by outsiders about PragerU, knowing the dirty work will be accomplished via implication.

The article is about two PragerU critics, Kevin M. Kruse, a Princeton history professor who sought to rebut a PragerU video in a Twitter thread, and a self-described sociologist named Francesca Tripodi, who wrote an article examining PragerU’s reach.

Professor Kruse tweeted a series of disagreements with a PragerU video by former Princeton University and Vanderbilt University professor Dr. Carol Swain, a black scholar, on the subject of the Republican Party and the “Southern Strategy.”

Now, professor Kruse may be right, and professor Swain may be wrong. But that has nothing to do with hate. Nor does Kruse imply that it does. So, the SPLC citation of Kruse is just deceitful.

The SPLC article goes on to charge that “more than a few” PragerU videos “function as dog whistles to the extreme right.”

And how does PragerU blow these “dog whistles”?

The article uses Tripodi to make its case. Here is the essence of her argument, as described by the SPLC: “Tripodi says she discovered several elements tied to PragerU’s presenters and its online marketing that paint the brief videos watched more than a billion times in a troublesome light.”

And what are those “several elements?”

“To start with,” the article says, “when one visits the PragerU channel on YouTube, there is a column of ‘Related Channels’ with links to other outlets PragerU’s audience may find interesting: Fox News seems to be a no-brainer, as does The Daily Wire, given its founder Ben Shapiro’s relationship as a presenter for PragerU. But alongside those you also can find the channel of Stefan Molyneux, an extremist who espouses pseudo-scientific ‘race realism’ propaganda.

”‘[PragerU] … is very blatantly algorithmically connected’ to the extreme right content found on YouTube, Tripodi explains.“

Only a very careful reader will discern that PragerU has never had any connection whatsoever to Molyneux or any "extreme right content.” All Tripodi and the SPLC could write is that Google has “algorithmically connected” PragerU to such content.

Needless to say, PragerU has no power over how Google algorithmically connects anything.

Then the SPLC writes, “More troubling, Tripodi discovered, are the connections some PragerU presenters have with white nationalist thinkers.”

Again, only a very careful reader will realize PragerU has no connections whatsoever to white nationalist thinkers. Rather, “some PragerU presenters” do.

And who might they be?

Tripodi and the SPLC give one example: Dave Rubin. Dave Rubin made a video for PragerU titled “Why I Left the Left.” He is a very popular liberal video podcaster, and the fact that he is a gay Jewish liberal who left the Left disturbs the SPLC.

Now, do you know any gay Jewish liberals who support white nationalists? I doubt it.

So, on what grounds is Rubin smeared in this way? Not because of any views he espouses but because he has interviewed the aforementioned Stefan Molyneux.

As it happens, I differ with some of the admittedly little I have seen of Molyneux’s views (for example, I believe the entire race and IQ issue is utterly pointless and, on occasion, racist). But how does the fact that one PragerU presenter interviewed someone he disagrees with in any way impugn him — let alone PragerU?

Of course, it doesn’t. But that doesn’t stop the SPLC hate site from drawing such tenuous “connections” to smear fine people.

Would George Will, Bret Stephens, Charles Krauthammer — all Pulitzer Prize winners — Alan Dershowitz (a lifelong Democrat and Hillary Clinton supporter), Arthur Brooks, Jonah Goldberg, Bjorn Lomborg, UCLA psychiatrist Dr. Stephen Marmer, former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino and Rabbi Joseph Telushkin (one of the most prolific living writers on Judaism), to name just some of our presenters, participate in a white-supremacist endeavor? The implication is absurd — and libelous.

In addition to videos on current political issues, history and economics, PragerU brings goodness and kindness into millions of people’s lives. It produces videos on forgiveness, refraining from gossip, raising grateful and kind children, remaining attracted to one’s spouse, God and suffering, happiness and the importance of gratitude, along with many other life-enhancing subjects. And these have been viewed by tens of millions of people — most of them under age 35.

On any given day, PragerU increases goodness and kindness on Earth while the Southern Poverty Law Center increases anger and resentment.

That’s why the SPLC hates PragerU. The bad hate the good. It’s a rule of life.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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