Gene Edward Veith Jr.'s Blog, page 253
April 23, 2015
Support for gun rights grows
Reversing the trends of the last few decades, a majority of Americans (52%) now say that protecting the right to own a firearm is more important than controlling gun ownership. The question now is why that is. From Andrew Kohut, Despite lower crime rates, support for gun rights increases | Pew Research Center: For most [Read More...]
Economic discrimination
Apple, Angie’s List, and other companies were threatening to boycott the state of Indiana, thinking its Religious Freedom statute would allow businesses to discriminate against gays. In doing so, these companies were saying that they have the right to act on their managers’ sincerely held beliefs that they should not do business with those they [Read More...]
April 22, 2015
What Sunday means
What does it mean that we worship on Sunday, the first day of the week? Bart Day, national mission director for the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, says that Sunday isn’t just a Christian sabbath, nor even just a “little Easter.” It’s the first day of creation, when God called light into existence. It’s the eighth [Read More...]
U. S. History as oppression studies
The National Association of Scholars, an organization of conservative academics, has put out an FAQ page on what is wrong with the new Advanced Placement U. S. History exam. It sums up well the problems also with the Common Core, contemporary text books, and the state of the history profession in general. The point is [Read More...]
Ignorance of the law
“Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” according to one legal maxim. And yet, in order for people to obey the law, there must be a “presumption of knowledge of the law.” Today, though, we not only have laws passed by legislatures, we have regulations passed by bureaucrats. These have the force of law, and [Read More...]
April 21, 2015
Access to the Bible
So what percentage of the world’s 6,101 languages do you think have translations of the Bible? WRONG (probably)! The Barna Group has conducted a study of Americans’ perceptions of how accessible the Bible is globally. Most Americans think the Bible is more available than it really is. See the findings–as well as the correct statistics–after [Read More...]
Today is the safest time to be a kid?
We’ve blogged about the Maryland parents who have been charged with child neglect for letting their children walk home by themselves. There are similar cases in Texas, Florida, and South Carolina. The government is cracking down on “free range parents” in order to protect children from crime and other hazards. And yet, according to the [Read More...]
FBI’s bogus forensics
The public loves the television cop shows about crime-solving by means of forensic science. But we might want to reconsider the popularity of all of those CSI series. The FBI is now admitting that over 95% of the forensic evidence from human hair over two decades was mistaken. These revelations affect hundreds of cases, including [Read More...]
April 20, 2015
Environmentalism as a fundamentalist religion
We have blogged about the National Association of Scholars’ study Sustaintability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism. In a review of that document, George Will explains the sense in which this particular kind of environmentalism is, in fact, a fundamentalism. From George Will, ‘Sustainability’ gone mad on college campuses – The Washington Post: Like many religions’ premises, [Read More...]
Tolerance vs. other liberties?
The University of Michigan was going to screen the Academy-Award-nominated American Sniper, but then cancelled it when students launched a petition claiming the movie was intolerant of Muslims. But then other students launched a counter-petition saying that the university should show the movie in the name of artistic liberty and the freedom of expression. Whereupon [Read More...]
