Category Archives: Uncategorized

The praying coach story gets even more surreal

“As soon as the school district says ‘Hey, come back,’ I am there, first flight,” he said.

So the school district has been flummoxed about what’s happened since. They complied by offering to reinstate him, they say, and now the football season is in full swing. But Kennedy is nowhere near the sidelines.

“He’s had the paperwork for his reinstatement since August 8th, and we haven’t gotten so much as a phone call,” says Karen Bevers, spokesperson for Bremerton schools.

Instead, as the Bremerton Knights were prepping for the season in August, Kennedy was up in Alaska, meeting with former Vice President Mike Pence and evangelist Franklin Graham. On the eve of the first game, which the Knights won, Kennedy was in Milwaukee being presented with an engraved .22-caliber rifle at an American Legion convention.

The weekend of the second game, which the Knights also won, Kennedy appeared with former President Donald Trump at the Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey. He saw Trump get a religious award from a group called the American Cornerstone Institute.

Coming up this month, Kennedy’s scheduled to give a talk as part of a lectureship series at a Christian university in Arkansas.

“Place a PR/Publicity Request,” invites his personal website, where he’s known as Coach Joe.

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“The record is clear that Coach Kennedy was fired for that midfield prayer,” lawyer Paul Clement told the nine justices in the first 15 seconds of the oral arguments of the case in April. The words “fired,” “fire” or “firing” were used 16 times in the hour and a half session.

It wasn’t true though. The district’s lawyers tried to correct the record, to no avail.

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“You can’t sue them for failing to rehire you if you didn’t apply,” one lawyer, Mercer Island’s Michael Tierney, argued during a lower court session. “The District didn’t get an application from him, had four positions to fill and filled them with people who had applied. It didn’t fail to rehire him.”

The Supreme Court simply ignored this inconvenient fact — along with a host of others. At one point during oral arguments, as a different school district attorney was saying the narrative that had been spun didn’t fit with the facts — that the coach’s prayers were neither silent nor solitary, nor was he fired — Justice Samuel Alito interrupted him, saying “I know that you want to make this very complicated.”

Parable

wild stuff treating people like humans
byu/kevinowdziej inWhitePeopleTwitter

I'm not a Christian, but I do find value in some of the teachings of Jesus. I read this parable again, and it is not only fitting for this situation, it is very powerful.

In reply Jesus said: "A man was going from Guatamala, fleeing a drug cartel that wanted to kill him and seize his daughters as sex slaves, when he found himself on the brink of starvation, having crossed a desert, a river, and another desert with limited supplies and no money. He went to a prosperity gospel preacher for help, but they had just had the carpets cleaned so the preacher refused him shelter. He went to the Christian governor for help, but the governor shipped him to Martha's Vineyard with no support or direction so he could own the libs. But a pinko, commie libtard saw him and took pity on him. He clothed him, and fed him, and sheltered him. He brought him to an immigration lawyer and said 'Look after him. When I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.'

“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell victim to drug cartels and gangs?”

The expert in the law replied, “The bleeding heart, pinko commie libtard who had mercy on him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

Doing Violence To The Language

Jeremy David Hanson, 34, of Rossmoor, Calif., pleaded guilty to one count of interstate communication of threatening communications to commit violence against the employees of Merriam-Webster, and to another count charging the same offense, initially filed in the Eastern District of Texas, targeting the President of the University of North Texas. In a written statement of facts accompanying his plea agreement, Hanson also admitted to sending threatening communications to various corporations, politicians, and others, including the Walt Disney Co., the Governor of California and the Mayor of New York City, a New York rabbi and professors at Loyola Marymount University. Hanson also admitted that he frequently selected the object of his threatening communications because of the gender, gender identity and/or sexual orientation of various persons.

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Between Oct. 2 and Oct. 8, 2021, Springfield-based Merriam-Webster, Inc. received various threatening messages and comments demonstrating bias against specific gender identities submitted through its website’s “Contact Us” page and in the comments section on its webpages that corresponded to the word entries for “Girl” and “Woman.” Authorities later identified the user as Hanson.

Specifically, on Oct. 2, 2021, Hanson used the handle “@anonYmous” to post the following comment on the dictionary’s website definition of “female:” “It is absolutely sickening that Merriam-Webster now tells blatant lies and promotes anti-science propaganda. There is no such thing as ‘gender identity.’ The imbecile who wrote this entry should be hunted down and shot.”

Hanson also sent the following threatening message via the website’s “Contact Us” page: “You [sic] headquarters should be shot up and bombed. It is sickening that you have caved to the cultural Marxist, anti-science tranny [sic] agenda and altered the definition of ‘female’ as part of the Left’s efforts to corrupt and degrade the English language and deny reality. You evil Marxists should all be killed. It would be poetic justice to have someone storm your offices and shoot up the place, leaving none of you commies alive.”

On one foot...

The American sneaker manufacturer New Balance has gotten itself into a thorny situation.In a turn of events the company clearly did not anticipate, a statement it made in support of US president-elect Donald Trump’s policy on an international trade agreement has snowballed into a neo-Nazi blogger declaring New Balance the “official shoes of white people.”

...New Balance certainly isn't responsible for what people who like their shoes claim.

On the other foot...

They Want Your Child!

Rick Perlstein:

Public schools are where young people encounter ways of being and thinking that may directly contradict those they were raised to believe; there really is no way around it. Schools are where future adults receive tools to decide which ideas and practices to embrace and which to reject for themselves. Schooling, done properly, is the opposite of conservatism. So is it any wonder it frequently drives conservatives berserk?

The panics have unfolded like clockwork, in just about every decade of the twentieth and twenty-first century. You can see it in the titles of books and pamphlets going back a hundred years: Hell and the High School (1923); They Want Your Child! (1948); Brainwashing in the High Schools: An Examination of Eleven American History Textbooks (1958); What They Are Doing to Your Children (1964); Is the Schoolhouse the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex? (1968). Even the dry bureaucratic version propounded by Ronald Reagan’s most conservative cabinet member, Education Secretary William Bennett, sounded the same high-pitched culture alarms when it declared in a report on school performance that the United States was A Nation at Risk (1983).

Really, the only thing mysterious about this long tradition of backlash is why, every time it has happened in our own lifetimes, does it feel as though liberals are responding like it’s the very first time, with no effective playbook to draw on to fight back? They tend to respond, well, like liberals, with open minds: maybe these conservatives sort of have a point? So perhaps some good-faith negotiations are in order: maybe if we accept certain of their proposed reforms that seem sound, society and its schools will emerge even stronger, and then some of the acrid divisions will abate . . .

To understand the problem with this reasonable-seeming solution, consider a case study from more than forty years ago, with the cultural earthquake of the 1960s still visible in the rearview mirror and the Reagan presidency just over the horizon. It can help us understand how reasonable reform is never the goal of these crusades. Give them an inch, and they will take a mile. Because ultimately, what they’re after is crushing the power of their children—and all of ours—to choose their own life: to, in other words, acquire the ability to become free.

I Believe You Should Suffer

Can a believer truly be free if he can't force others to die for his beliefs?

Under the banner of religion, an employer is asserting a right to deny its workers insurance coverage for drugs that prevent HIV— an argument that just Wednesday found favor in federal court. Religiously affiliated schools posit a right to fire unmarried pregnant women. And taxpayer-funded child placement agencies turn away families seeking to foster or adopt because they are Jewish, Catholic or a same-sex couple.