Barr: America's Religious Foundation Is Crumbling

The attorney general makes the case for morality while panning the "religion" of government.  

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other,” said John Adams in 1798. Some things don’t change, even after 221 years, and Attorney General William Barr quoted Adams to say so in a stellar speech at Notre Dame about American politics and our crumbling moral foundation.

Barr, a devout Catholic, made the case that modern Americans have replaced dependency on God with dependency on government. He also argued that modern secularists are not merely non-religious; they are outright hostile to religion.

“The campaign to destroy the traditional moral order has coincided [with] — and I believe has brought with it — immense suffering and misery,” Barr asserted. “And yet the forces of secularism, ignoring these tragic results, press on with even greater militancy.”

He wondered, “Among the militant secularists are many so-called progressives. But where is the progress?” Worse, he implied regression: “The secular project has itself become a religion, pursued with religious fervor. It is taking on all the trappings of religion, including inquisitions and excommunication. Those who defy the creed risk a figurative burning at the stake — social, educational, and professional ostracism and exclusion waged through lawsuits and savage social-media campaigns.”

In any case, says Barr, the government is a poor substitute for true religion. “Today, in the face of all the increasing pathologies, instead of addressing the underlying cause, we have cast the state in the role of the Alleviator of Bad Consequences,” he said. “We call on the state to mitigate the social costs of personal misconduct and irresponsibility.”

“So, the reaction to growing illegitimacy is not sexual responsibility, but abortion. The reaction to drug addiction is safe injection sites. The solution to the breakdown of the family is for the state to set itself up as an ersatz husband for the single mother and an ersatz father for the children. The call comes for more and more social programs to deal with this wreckage. And while we think we’re solving problems, we are underwriting them. We start with an untrammeled freedom and we end up as dependents of a coercive state on whom we depend.”

Humans were created to worship our Creator. When we refuse to do so, we don’t worship nothing; we worship something else. That explains the contentiousness over who controls the levers of power in Big Government. If it’s not the leftists’ man in power, their very religion has been infiltrated. Hence their crusade to burn the heretics

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How Elizabeth Warren’s child-care plan would leave strangers to bring up America’s children

This writer says family members, friends, and neighbors play an important role in providing care to kids, and the Senator’s plans to subsidize day-care centers would discourage that

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN argues for her sweeping new government child-care program in personal terms. Invoking her days as a young working mom struggling to find reliable, quality child care for her two children, she explains that she wants to spare today’s young families similar stress.

Her story does reveal the stakes of the child-care debate—but not in the way she thinks.

Warren’s tale of unappealing day-care centers and unreliable babysitters has a happy ending. In a recent interview with the lifestyle website Romper, she described how she broke down on the phone while talking to her widowed Aunt Bee from Oklahoma about the challenges of balancing work and family life. Bee gave a life-changing response. “She said, ‘Well, I can’t get there tomorrow. But I can come on Thursday,’” recalls the presidential candidate. “And she arrived with seven suitcases and a Pekingese named Buddy, and stayed for 16 years.”

Not everyone has a family member like Aunt Bee who can step up, move across the country, and fill child-care needs for more than a decade. But extended families, friends, and neighbors do play a tremendous role in providing care to children around the country. Unfortunately, that’s a fact that Senator Warren’s child-care plan not only overlooks but would change, by discouraging the use of family caregivers.

Warren proposes equal child-care options at qualified day-care centers for all families regardless of income. Those families with higher incomes would pay a subsidized fee, and those with household incomes below about $50,000 would be covered by the federal government. Her plan also would provide subsidies, so that no family spent more than 7 percent of its income on child care.

The costs of this proposal are considerable: Economists for Moody’s Analytics estimated that it would require $70 billion per year, a sum Warren plans to cover by imposing a wealth tax on households with assets exceeding $50 million. It’s tempting to criticize the economics: Enormous subsidies for child care would encourage day-care centers to jack up their prices, such that the burden on taxpayers would continue to grow; a wealth tax would have far-reaching economic impacts as those affected by it moved their assets overseas, depriving the economy of capital; and the effects of less investment would trickle down to harm businesses, customers, and everyday workers.

Yet the economic problems aren’t the main reason to oppose the plan. Far more important would be its harmful impact on families and communities.

By making day-care centers free or very low-cost, Warren’s plan would induce more families to rely on formal child-care providers. Currently, while most families with young children have child-care needs, only a minority of them use formal daycare centers. As of 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 60 percent of mothers with children under age six worked outside the home. But Pew Social Trends reported that just shy of half (48 percent) of children under age six with working parents were enrolled in preschool or day care as of 2015. Nearly as many (45 percent) depended on family members other than parents to take care of them, and a nanny or babysitter looked after 16 percent.

Many of these extended-family caregivers were likely living in the same home as the young children they were helping to raise. That’s an under discussed reality of today’s family life: Pew Research Center reports that just 12 percent of households were multigenerational in 1980, but that number has risen across all racial groups. Today, an estimated one in five Americans live in a multigenerational household.

There are many reasons that different generations end up living in the same household, and not all are positive: a parent’s addiction problem that leaves grandparents caring for young children; adult children’s inability to find employment that enables them to leave home; an elderly family member’s disability that requires extensive care. But Warren ought to know firsthand that these multigenerational living situations can also be beneficial, both for young families that benefit from having more caregivers and for the older caregivers, who remain more engaged and engrained in family life than they would be on their own.

Such relationships would be undermined by a government program that enabled families to replace family caregivers, whether stay-at-home parents or other relatives, at no cost. If government foots the bill for a day-care program, especially one that’s been stamped “high quality” by a federal agency, then there is no clear reason for Aunt Bee to help out, for Mom or Dad to stay home, or for a grandparent to watch the new baby. Government will have taken over that responsibility from the family

Multigenerational living situations can be beneficial, both for young families that benefit from having more caregivers and for the older caregivers, who remain more engaged and engrained in family life.

Currently, parents don’t rely on family members for child care just because they offer free labor. While cost is certainly a factor, most parents also believe that their children are better off when they are cared for by someone who has a lasting interest in their well-being.

In 2014, Pew Research Center found that 60 percent of Americans think it is best for children if at least one parent stays home. The research organization Public Agenda surveyed parents with children five and younger in 2000 and found that nearly two out of three (63 percent) disagreed with the statement “A top-notch day care center can provide care as good as what a child would get from a stay-at-home parent.” That same research found that four out of five young mothers (ages 18–29) said they would rather stay home to care for their children than work full-time.

But even if many parents believe that kids are generally better off when cared for at home by a loved one, it will be hard for many to resist the temptation to take advantage of a taxpayer-funded childcare service once the government has established it.

In Quebec’s experience with government child care provides a useful example of what we could expect under Warren’s proposal. In 2000, Quebec introduced $5-a-day child care for all children. This dramatic shift in policy—which led to an increase in child-care use of more than one-third—provides researchers with rich data to explore.

As Steven Rhoads, professor emeritus of politics at the University of Virginia, and I detailed in National Affairs earlier this year, over more than a decade, several well-respected studies have found that Quebec’s child-care policy has led to a host of negative outcomes, including increased family stress, increased aggressiveness and anxiety and worse health outcomes among children, worse parenting, reduced mental health and relationship satisfaction among adults, and even a rise in criminality

These studies challenge the popular idea that day care is good for children’s social, educational, and other outcomes. In making such claims, media tend to cherry-pick favorable findings while overlooking other research—much of it more intensive— suggesting that day care, especially when used long-term and for the youngest children, is associated with negative outcomes. Academics should continue to explore the impact of day care on individual children, families, and communities. Yet the available findings, along with parents’ stated preferences, ought to discourage lawmakers from enacting policies—such as the one advanced by Senator Warren—that would create a tremendous financial incentive to replace family-based care with day care.

Opposing Senator Warren’s plan to heavily subsidize day-care centers doesn’t mean that nothing should be done for families with young children, including those that use day care.

Currently, day-care centers are very expensive, and they are often more expensive than they need to be. According to Care.com in 2018, a third of families spent 20 percent or more of their total household income on child care. Infant care in a day-care center routinely costs more than $1,000 a month, and in some major cities it can be nearly twice that.

One factor contributing to day care’s high costs is government regulation. Economists at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center conducted an analysis of how regulations affect daycare cost and quality. They found that regulations favored by many governments because compliance is easy to monitor— such as limiting child–staff ratios and group sizes—have failed to improve quality of care but significantly raised costs. The study concludes, “Eliminating regulatory standards that do not affect the quality of care while focusing on those that do . . . will improve the quality of child care while making it more affordable to low-income families.”

Senator Warren should keep this in mind. She refers to “high quality” daycare centers, but the government has a poor record of adopting rulesthat actually lead to high-quality environments for children. Rather than layering on regulations, policymakers should eliminate those that aren’t useful and that needlessly raise costs.

The 2017 tax cut increased child tax credits, but policymakers concerned about the burden on young families could consider increasing them still more. Lawmakers could also target increases for families with children ages five and younger, since those families tend to face the biggest financial strains. Such relief would help all families, regardless of the kind and amount of child care they use.

Senator Warren doesn’t sound like she regrets that her aunt played such an important role in her family. And I’d bet that Aunt Bee, like so many family members who have stepped up to help loved ones with young children, took pride in that contribution and experienced joy in her close relationship with her grand niece and nephew. That’s something that government can’t replace and shouldn’t discourage.

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Leftists Still Attacking Columbus Day

Those who have proven they can't learn from history, much less honor it, are busy rewriting it.

In another episode of “As the Offended, Politically Correct World Turns,” we’re greeted with a calendar conflict that’s emblematic of a segment of our population that has abandoned reason and the ability to strive, survive, and succeed in reality. Today, according to some, is Indigenous Peoples’ Day, not the commemorative date to celebrate the historical figure who ventured to a new land and found America, Christopher Columbus, or Cristoforo Columbo.

On your “smart” device, your calendar might read, “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” or even “Columbus Day (regional holiday).” Originally, the special day aimed to recognize the landing in the Americas of the Italian-born explorer who approached Spanish King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella after rejection from the royalty of England, Portugal, and France, thinking a westward exploration would result in reaching the Indies and Asia. But, in recent years, those who have proven they can’t learn from history, much less honor it, are busy rewriting it in efforts to prove themselves and their anti-American narrative correct and have encouraged the toppling of statues of Christopher Columbus and ignoring the times, the context, and the truth in their efforts.

If you’re celebrating Columbus Day, you’re honoring a man who came from a simple raising in the home of a wool weaver in the seaport, Genoa, Italy. Cristoforo Columbo had no formal education or schooling. He was self-taught. His Italian heritage and his Catholic faith drove his passion along with much of his devotion to exploration.

The mapmaker and sailor lived in a day when the Turkish Empire controlled northern Africa and blocked the fastest trade routes to the Orient, or India and China. Most educated folks, and those who referenced Holy Scripture (see Isaiah 40:22 among other verses), believed the Earth to be round, but the disagreement was on the size of the planet. Columbus believed some of the earliest calculations were too large and argued that the westward route would lead to their trading partners without the hassle and fight of the Muslim enemies.

So, in September 1492, Columbus set sail. His journey was fraught with problems, but he landed, despite near mutiny of crews aboard the vessels in his charge, on Oct. 12, 1492, on modern-day San Salvador. Believing he had arrived at his intended destination of the Indies the natives of the island were deemed “Indians.” His travels continued through the Caribbean with several subsequent journeys to and from Spain to this land he believed to be Asia.

Now, here’s where the revision of history is greatest. Academia and those devoted to a narrative of oppression have declared that Columbus introduced slavery and was a murderous tyrant. He is depicted by those desiring to lift the alleged victims, the “Indians” or Indigenous Peoples, to the place of commemoration, not the inspired explorer.

Columbus is painted as greedy — typical for a guy of white privilege. He also believed in God and His Son Jesus Christ … uh oh. You see, the crew cried, “Blessed be the hour of our Savior’s birth, blessed be the Virgin Mary who bore him and blessed be John the Baptist who baptized him” as they turned the half-hour glass, along with other observances of the Christian faith. He named one of his ships the Santa Maria — Holy Mary. He even dared (get ready for the head explosions of the godless groupies) to set up the standard of the Cross when he first touched land and named it, San Salvador — Holy Savior.

But Columbus sought gold not for personal wealth but for the purpose of evangelism and to, in his own words penned in his journal, liberate Jerusalem from the Muslim captivity: “Thus, I protest to your Highness that all the profits of this my enterprise may be sent in conquest of Jerusalem.”

And, about that slavery of the Indians, you see, Columbus wrote that there were individuals in his crew who “did not deserve water in the sight of God” for selling native girls into slavery. He can’t stand blameless for the cultural acceptance of slavery at the time, but it was also practiced among the natives, as was cannibalism.

Among the Carib tribes, indigenous to the lands that Columbus first touched, not only was slavery practiced, but also mutilation and forced reproduction of children for the purpose of cannibalism.

But that doesn’t fit the narrative that, in the pre-Columbian world slavery, exploitation, evil nor any other type of oppression ever existed. Only once a white male motivated by wealth and raw power was able to establish dominance over a minority people was America born — hence everything about these United States is morally wrong and must be destroyed as part of the restitution to victims that span the line of time.

Currently, there are over 100 cities that have banned the observance of Columbus Day to now herald the Indigenous Peoples instead. Washington, DC, is the latest to join these municipal malcontents through its passage of “emergency legislation.” But shhhhhh, don’t tell — the District of Columbia, a territory that holds the seat of the government of our United States, is the feminine form of Columbus. The original 13 colonies were even referred to as Columbia.

Let’s let “progressive” leftists continue in their embarrassment of honoring Elizabeth Warren as a Cherokee with high cheekbones dishing out her Pow Wow Chow while trying to take over the District of Columbia, which was named for Columbus, while making a mockery of everything great about America — her freedoms, our faith, and our families. While they’re busy rewriting history, let’s ensure that we write our future by defending America’s greatness and the truth.

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Frenzy of shark activity in Northern Australia

LIFESAVERS blame a surge of shark sightings and beach closures in north Queensland on the ill-fated decision to remove baited drum lines. Local identities fear the latest spike in shark activity poses a threat to human safety and the tourism industry.

"They need to put those drumlines back in right now," Cairns councillor Brett Olds, a volunteer lifesaver, said. "It's not panic, it's common sense. "Why dice with death?" Eight patrolled beaches have been closed because of sharks at Port Douglas, Cairns, Townsville and Magnetic Island since the removal of drum lines just over 20 days ago. It compares with a total of 15 closures last year in Great Barrier Reef Marine Park waters between Hervey Bay and Port Douglas.

There were a total of 56 beach closures due to shark sightings along the length of the Queens-land coast in 2018. On Sunday, a giant hammerhead shark swam about 10m off the beach through a patrolled area at Yorkeys Knob. About 28 swimmers, most of them. children, had to be called from the water and the beach shut for an hour.

The same day, an almost 3m-long shark was caught by fishers off Palm Cove jetty. Palm Cove Surf Life Saving Club vice-president Rob Pattinson said there was heightened anxiety about the looming shark threat. "We didn't expect to see this increase in shark numbers so quickly," Mr Pattinson said. "We've rarely had to close beaches up here before because of sharks.

"Now we've got big signs up on the lifeguard huts warning of stingers, crocodiles and sharks. Soon, no one will go in the water. "Why not continue with a shark control program that has worked for more than 60 years?"

Last month, a greens group won a court order to stop the lethal shark-control program in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

State Government workers were not trained to deal with live sharks, so the drum lines were pulled. Since baited drum lines were introduced in 1962, there's been only one fatal shark attack at a protected Queensland beach. Before that, there were 36 recorded cases of shark attack, and 19 deaths, dating back to 1912.

A Surf Life Saving Queensland spokeswoman said they had no evidence of a direct link between drum line removal and shark sightings.

From the Brisbane "Courier Mail" 16/10/2019

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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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