Take the Money and Run—Or Just Run

In a post linking to an article on the overwhelming problems we have with public schools (“Public Schools Are Cesspools of Debauchery. Get Your Kids Out Now, Before It's Too Late.” By Paula Bolyard), PJ Media asks, “At what point should it be considered parental malpractice to keep your kids in public school?” That’s actually a good question.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis promises parents that pressure
from media and woke corporations will not stop him from 
protecting students in schools. screenshot from here

For me, the answer came in 2000, when we talked it over as a family and pulled our children out of public schools—and never looked back. We weren’t looking at the debauchery, or even more than a rather subtle bias against religion; we pulled our kids out because the schools were doing a lousy job of meeting their particular educational needs. We could much better meet those needs outside of public schools.

That seemed like a good enough reason. Maybe it isn’t a reason every family has; maybe what their schools offer is a good fit for their children.

But now, a couple of decades later, there is no doubt that many schools offer even greater harm than merely failing to educate to a child’s potential. If you think your children’s school isn’t one of those bad ones, maybe you just haven’t looked carefully enough.

This story was linked in the PJ Media
article. There's more detail in the story. 
Some educator assumed 12-year-olds
were not only sexually active, but had
multiple sexual partners and would
 benefit from a pizza analogy.

That article gives a pretty hefty list of stories of school wrongdoing. I’ve written on this a number of times. Here, here, here, and here, for example.   

I shouldn’t have to spell this out, but I will. This is not to indict all teachers as bad, or even most. Many would thrive and do a much better job of educating, if the powers above them would set them free to do so.

The two main categories of evil indoctrination by schools are Critical Race Theory and the LGBT agenda, both of which are more closely related—through intersectionality—than a surface glance would make them appear.

The awakening of parents to what is being taught dawned during the COVID-19 shutdown. Classes were done online, often in the presence of parents, who had not been privy to actual classroom instruction in the past. They turned their heads and said, “What did I just hear?” And then, “No! No way! Not teaching that to my child.” Private schools, by the way, fought to open schools back up; public schools—because of teachers union—fought to keep them closed. So that online learning overheard by parents was their own doing, ironically.

In the spring and summer of 2021, the parental outcry in various school districts got the national attention.  Parents began showing up at school board meetings, where they’d been docile and quietly absent up until then. They began changing out their local school boards. And they began keeping a better watch.

So, right now we’re at a state of heightened awareness, but we have not yet seen the turn to believing that keeping children in failing public schools is “parental malpractice.” We don’t have a concrete definition for such a term, as we might for actual neglect or abuse. But maybe we should get one.

If you go to PragerU, you can find a long list of videos related to CRT and LGBT stuff being taught in schools, raising awareness, and sometimes adding what to do about it—often including pulling kids out of those environments.

Corey DeAngelis, screenshot from here

Today I saw a new PragerU video, “Fund the Children, Not the Schools,” talking about why it makes sense to attach the education dollars to the student. Corey DeAngelis, head of research at the American Federation for Children, points out multiple areas in which government money does not specify where the receiver spends the money:

·        Pell grant recipients choose their college.

·        GI Bill recipients choose their college.

·        Head Start recipients choose which preschool to send their children to.

·        Food stamp recipients choose which grocery store to shop at.

So why not allow that choice for parents of K-12 children?

There is this misconception—we might call it a lie—that allowing choice takes money away from the public schools. But we don’t say that allowing a food stamp recipient to choose a non-governmental grocery store takes money away from some other grocery store. We don’t say allowing a GI Bill recipient to choose their college takes money away from some government institutional college.

DeAngelis blames teachers unions for many of the misconceptions, like the money belonging to the schools. He says,

The truth is the opposite: public schools “steal” money from families. School choice initiatives just return the money to the hands of the intended beneficiaries of the funding—students and their parents.

What actually happens when public schools are faced with competition? The same thing you’d expect to happen with competition in other parts of life: better quality at lower costs.

When faced with competition, public schools do, in fact, up their game. DeAngelis says,

Twenty-five of 27 studies—and the latest peer-reviewed meta-analysis on the topic—find that private school choice competition leads to better outcomes in public schools.

For example, a study published in May 2021 reveals that increased competition from expanding private school choice in Florida improved academic and behavioral outcomes in nearby public schools.

That makes sense. Because, whenever the free market is allowed to flourish, we get better products and services at lower prices. Innovation happens. Demand is met.

So, if we demand better schools—by putting the money in the hands of the parents—we can have the outcomes we want.

DeAngelis also points out that current per student costs in public school is an average of $16,000 annually, while private school tuition is around $12,000. We could save $4,000 a year per student simply by turning over the responsibility to private schools.

During the COVID-19 lockdown year, support for
school choice went up 10%.
screenshot from here

Not realistic? Maybe not overnight. But consider the long waiting lists for charter schools—still a public school option, but with some innovation. The number of available seats in private schools almost meets that need. How many parents would be willing to take the private school option—rather than wait out the years of their child’s education hoping for a win in the charter school lottery? Not all, but many.

What about the question of government strings attached to the money? You think that’s not a problem now? How could giving accountability to parents increase the stranglehold government schools have now?

Maybe working for putting the money in the hands of the parents goes hand in hand with keeping government’s glommy[i] hands off our curriculum choices.

Do we risk damaging the public school system? Maybe that’s a risk we ought to be willing to take. If a collapse of that government institutional monopoly happened simultaneously with a free-market response, the only real losers are the teachers unions. And that includes the indoctrinators who think they have a right to control our children.

Whatever we do right now, it had better be bold and big. We can’t afford to lose a generation of kids. And if they’re your kids in school right now, can you afford for them to suffer any more indoctrination?

As Paula Bolyard says in that PJ Media article, “What’s it worth to you to protect your kids from what’s going on in public schools?”

Maybe the answer has been to turn over the school board and then watch closely. You might give that a year, two tops. If that doesn’t eliminate the problems, you need to cut and run.

If you’re not simultaneously lobbying the legislature to put the school money in the hands of parents, don’t be surprised if, when you need to pull your kids out, it’s going to be at your own expense—even though it shouldn’t be, and even though that solves nothing for all the other kids stuck in that strange indoctrination institution.

School choice—with plenty of free-market involvement—will mean better outcomes for all school children. In that case, take the money and run to better options. But if you can't wait for that huge win over the powerful teacher unions and their sycophants, just run. Whatever the cost, your kids are worth it.

 

---

[i] Online dictionary is telling me this is not a word, even though it was common in my household growing up, as in, “Keep your glommy hands off my candy; you’ve got your own.” Think “glom onto,” which does show up in the dictionary and means to cling to, the way a leech might glom onto a person. 

What’s Going On?

There’s a meme going around this week, picturing Forest Gump saying, “And just like that your social media friends change from infectious disease experts into international relations experts.”

I am neither. Just a curious person who reads and listens to a lot of different sources in my efforts to understand what’s going on. I think I’ve gotten better at understanding, the more I educate myself. Right now I’m just beginning to try to understand this Russian invasion of Ukraine.

I’m going to step back from that and look at some history, starting with a prophecy.

Doctrine and Covenants 87:1-2

1 Verily, thus saith the Lord concerning the wars that will shortly come to pass, beginning at the rebellion of South Carolina, which will eventually terminate in the death and misery of many souls;

2 And the time will come that war will be poured out upon all nations, beginning at this place.

That was given December 25, 1832. It was reiterated April 2, 1843:

Doctrine and Covenants 130:12

12 I prophesy, in the name of the Lord God, that the commencement of the difficulties which will cause much bloodshed previous to the coming of the Son of Man will be in South Carolina.

The Civil War indeed began in South Carolina, not quite 30 years after the 1832 prophecy was given. After that time, what has war looked like throughout the world? It may not look to us as if war has been continuous, but since that time, somewhere in the world there have been nation-entangling wars.

screenshot from the PragerU video "WWI: The War That Changed Everything"

This is more obvious when we get to World War I, in 1914. As historian Andrew Roberts explains in a Prager U video,

If there had been no World War I, there would have been no Russian Revolution, no World War II, no Holocaust, no Cold War.

And that doesn’t even consider the millions who died in the war itself.

It happened after a period of growth and prosperity brought on by the Industrial Revolution. As Roberts puts it, “The future of civilization never looked brighter. And then, suddenly, it all went up in flames.”

It was kind of a forest fire, with one tree lighting another. Roberts makes the connections for us:

The fuse was lit in June 1914, in a street in Sarajevo, Bosnia. It was there that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist. It should have been no more than a sad footnote in history. Instead, it changed history.

In its attempts at revenge for the murder, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. They got the blessing of their ally Germany to do so.

Small and vulnerable Serbia then reached out to its ally Russia for protection, which Russia agreed to do.

Russia sought support from France, in case war broke out. France was suspicious of Germany’s intentions and agreed.

Germany then thought it wise to move pre-emptively against France, invading through neutral Belgium. This invasion got Britain’s attention, and they stepped in to protect France from Germany.

And just like that an obscure murder led to the outbreak of war across a continent. Germany’s long-time Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, had designs on dominating Europe—and then the world. (As I read that description, I picture the mad laughter that must accompany such a declaration.)

Fighting raged on for three years, and then seemed to be at a stalemate, with appalling casualties heretofore unseen.

Andrew Roberts, screenshot from PragerU video
 "WWI: The War That Changed Everything"

Then the US got involved. Woodrow Wilson, who was elected on the promise that he would keep America out of the war, changed his mind. Canada, as part of the UK, was involved and pressuring their American neighbors, if I’m remembering right. But, as Roberts explains,

[Wilson’s] attitude changed when Germany attacked American merchant ships in the Atlantic.

The final straw was the infamous Zimmerman Telegram in which Germany promised to give Mexico, in exchange for its military support, much of the American southwest, including Texas.

A year later the war ended. There were massive casualties. And the outcomes did not really look like peace:

Russia was now in the hands of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. France and Britain were physically and morally shattered. Germany, forced into a humiliating surrender treaty at Versailles, would soon be further decimated by runaway inflation that destroyed what was left of its economy. Meanwhile, the United States retreated into isolationism.

It was pause, not a peace. The stage was being set for a new and very much worse disaster—a second World War, one that would lead to three times the deaths of the first one.

It would be instigated by a madman who fought for the Kaiser and shared the same dream of world domination.

Had it not been for WWI, we would have never heard of him.

But we did hear of him. A literary time-traveler question is, if you could go back in time and assassinate Hitler before he could come to power, should you do it?

You can’t change history after it has happened. And evil has a way of finding those willing to perpetrate it.

So, the years between WWI and WWII were really just a pause while pressure built up.

screenshot from PragerU video "What Was the Cold War?"

WWII ended without completely ending—which led to the Cold War. Andrew Roberts does another Prager U video about that. In describing it, he says,

It was cold only in the sense that the Russians and the Americans never came to direct blows.

But it was certainly not cold for the Cubans, Koreans, Vietnamese, and others who got caught up in the Communists' relentless drive to destabilize the free, democratic, capitalist world.

There were, to be sure, many morally complex moments during this long struggle, but the Cold War was, at its core, as clear a conflict of good versus evil as World War II had been. Just like that war, the Cold War was a death match between the forces representing freedom and the forces representing totalitarianism.

The instigator, Roberts asserts, was the mass-murdering Russian dictator Joseph Stalin. As he says,

Stalin knew that his Soviet armed forces could not take on the might of the free West. Instead, he decided to wage this fight through the use of proxies, and by a massive use of disinformation and misinformation.

screeenshot from "What Was the Cold War?"

Did we mention that he was mendacious? At the end of WWII, he had troops in Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. He promised President Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference that he would remove them, but he never had any intention of doing so. Instead, he easily took control of their governments, pulling them into the Russian-dominated Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

When he threatened Greece and Turkey, that’s when Pres. Truman stepped in and declared the Truman doctrine of containment. It was at this point that:

The Cold War was on.

For the next five decades, and across four continents—Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America—the US and the Soviet Union battled for influence—sometimes overtly, like in Korea and Vietnam; and sometimes covertly, through their various spy agencies. But the moral lines of this battle never changed: the freedom of the West versus the communist tyranny of the Soviet East.

Containment wasn’t really enough. Stalin and his successor made it clear then—and archival evidence now proves—that there was no appeasement possible. The intention was always to make Communism the worldwide preeminent ideology—which is tyranny.

It was thanks to three strong leaders—Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II—that liberty prevailed in the Cold War. The USSR at this point was defeated—and broken up. Roberts explains,

The Soviet Union was, at the close of the 1980s, to use historian Paul Johnson's description, “a bewildered giant”—economically bereft, militarily exhausted, no longer able or willing to enforce its will.

Communism, he reminds us, failed economically, politically, and morally—as it always has. All that suffering was for a “never-viable and now badly discredited cause.”

The Cold War ended. Take a breath, and almost immediately thereafter was the Gulf War. That ended with a treaty that was never kept, so ills just kept brewing.

Then in 2001 came 9/11, and that meant war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Relative peace was forfeited in Afghanistan just months ago. Now Russia has invaded Ukraine.

Wars and rumors of wars are mostly continuous now.

Are there reasons and intrigues that it would help to understand? Yes. But our understanding won’t prevent them.

Another scripture, about the approach of the Second Coming of Christ:

Matthew 24:6–7

6 And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.

7 For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.

8 All these are the beginning of sorrows.

I think this means the wars we’re seeing now are not temporary. Specific ones may end, but others are likely to rise up elsewhere.

If you want to understand what’s happening, study the scriptures and read about the last days. And then, instead of being in fear, stand against tyranny and savagery, and stand up for freedom and civilization. Stand on God’s side. Then watch, with personal peace, as His coming, for you, is the long-anticipated Great, rather than Dreadful, Day of the Lord (Malachi 4:5-6).

Politics Is Viral

The virus is political. It does exist. It does not discriminate based on political party. But the response to it has been totally politicized.

Yesterday, Houston’s Democrat Mayor Sylvester Turner decided to cancel the State GOP convention, which was rescheduled from May to July at the George R. Brown Convention Center. The main business starts on Thursday, July 16th, but the committees begin meeting Monday, July 13^th, just 5 days after Turner’s breaking of the contract. All parts of the state are represented on the committees. People have to get here from Brownsville and El Paso, not just Austin or Dallas or San Antonio. They need to set out for their week-long commitment early enough to be in place Monday morning.

As of today, State RPT (Republican Party of Texas) Chair James Dickey is seeking immediate legal redress, including forcing the city to keep its contractual agreement.

That's us, and the grandkids, at the 2018 State GOP Convention

Timing is urgent. Earlier today a district judge ruled against the RPT, so tomorrow an appellate court judge will rule. If that judge rules in favor of RPT being able to hold the convention, I am told it will happen in person on Monday. If not, it gets appealed to the Texas Supreme Court; it may be appealed either way. A ruling there would have to happen on Saturday in order for plans to go forward. I don’t know whether a ruling that quick is possible.

About 9 days ago the Mayor amended the contract to remove his ability to shut down the convention at the last moment. He had previously listed a number of requirements that would have to be met to make the meeting “safe.” All of those were met. Based on the Mayor’s removal of his own authority over the decision, the State Republican Executive Committee met last Thursday to decide whether to go ahead with an in-person convention or change to an online distant convention. There was debate both ways, but the vote went strongly in favor of in-person: 40-20.

There are several factors involved in the decision, beyond that it’s nice to see one another in person. We have business we’re required to do, no matter what. And in Texas we do it the grassroots way. Individual involvement is necessary.

For example, the platform—which I help work on. It starts at precinct conventions, where each precinct has the opportunity to meet and put forth resolutions. There is more input at the senatorial district level, including personal testimonies. Then that happens again at the state convention, in the subcommittees, in the committee-as-a-whole, and then when the platform is brought to the whole body. With thousands of people there, individuals have a voice.

Similar work, and similar floor discussions, happen for Rules and Legislative Priorities committees.

Is it possible (i.e., something other than impossible) to do this through Zoom meeting? Sort of. Floor discussion can use the “raise your hand” feature. But there’s no way to separate out points of order from points of information, or arguments in favor from arguments against whatever is being discussed. And, if there’s a vote, and you use “raise your hand” as a way to indicate, you no longer have a place in line for discussion.

In other words, it’s a lot harder to get grassroots input. I’m not sure yet how they’ll handle taking testimony in committee meetings.

There has been a plan B in the works for weeks, in case the Mayor or the County Judge tried to pull the rug out at the last minute. Ten thousand people can’t turn on a dime, so we had to have ways lined up. The convention will happen. Either in person, or online.

But, was this about safety, to keep the medical services in the state from being overwhelmed? No.

Consider this: we held our senatorial district conventions June 13th. Ours had a very high turnout, in one of the largest districts in the state. It was held in a large church, but with that many people it was fairly close quarters. I spent much of the day in a conference room. We had about 3 feet of separation, chair to chair, and were facing our computer screens, not the person next to us for the most part. It was a situation where I wouldn’t normally feel at risk of getting a cold, unless someone sneezed directly on me. But in a Covid-19 world, it was somewhat risky. So, I was looking for word that anyone got sick in the weeks following. Never heard. Then our SREC Chair verified that, out of that convention of some 600+ people (whose names we have a list of), we had zero cases of Covid-19. Zero.

And it turns out, the other SD conventions had the same outcome—no uptick in cases among those who attended the conventions.

A week or two earlier, the protests (and some riots) happened downtown. In fact, Mayor Turner got out there and marched with them—no social distancing.

One news story interviewed a woman who attended and then got Covid-19. This Houston resident told KRIV News that she took part in a march to Houston City Hall attended by an estimated 60,000 people around the beginning of June. She later tested positive, as did several friends who attended with her:

Despite the illness, she said she has no regrets about her decision to march.

“I actually got sick the day after the march… I could not move out of the bed. I was in the bed just sighing,” [she] said. “I definitely don’t regret getting the COVID, because I was out there doing the right thing for the right cause.” 

The story goes on to imply that maybe the disease wasn’t spread at the protests, because incubation periods are usually 2-14 days.

So, they’re saying, as ought to be obvious, this individual didn’t get the illness at the protest; but they fail to note, she spread it there.

She wasn’t risking getting the disease there, because she already had it. But she had bravely gone out there, risking getting it, “because I was out there doing the right thing for the right cause.” Spreading the illness. Not getting it there; spreading it there. The story includes her name, but I am not, because I don’t think I want to blame the subsequent uptick in cases that followed the protests on one person not bright enough to know the difference between 1 day and 2-14 days when she’s proclaiming her virtuous bravery to the media. She was certainly not the only one.

Despite our lack of cases coming out of the SD conventions, the RPT had arranged an amazing array of precautions at the George R. Brown Convention Center.

·         Limited entry points—and fever scanners at each one.

·         Touchless hand sanitizer convenient to everywhere.

·         Larger that usual rooms to allow social distancing.

·         Additional cleaning—deep cleaning of each room between uses.

·         Masks encouraged (not mandated by RPT, but by the county, and not disputed).

·         SWAT teams to protect attendees from protesters.

What we had the opportunity to do was show that a large gathering could happen safely in the time of the pandemic. All it takes is people being individually responsible.

But, as I said, Mayor Turner, among many others, has made this disease political. And he timed it to inflict the highest amount of damage. There’s a pandemic clause in the contract, but he will have to prove that the conditions were so much worse this week than last week that there was no way to provide the services. If he fails to do so, he has not only deprived the city of needed income and tax revenue that the convention would have brought, he has cost city taxpayers around half a million for broken contracts—for which the city and taxpayers gain nothing. But he doesn’t care about taxpayer money.

In case you’ve been hearing that Houston is the country’s new hot spot, note that new cases have been going down, now that the spike caused by the protests has run its course.

 

Data from Harris County Public Health July 9, 2020

Death rates, which lag one to three weeks behind a spike in cases, are up, but only slightly. We had 7-day rolling averages this high in mid-May. And the trend is moving back down, as the trend in new cases is doing.

What about hospital beds? That’s the important thing, right? The reason for any shutdown whatsoever? Despite what you’ve heard, no, our hospitals are not on the verge of running out of space or ICU beds.  They’re operating at about 97% capacity—which is their goal, and what they were at last year at this time. Hospitals are businesses. They try to fully use facilities. That does not mean we have suddenly filled them up with coronavirus cases. In fact, coronavirus cases are between 12-17% in the various hospitals. Most other beds are taken up by people in for a day or two because of a surgery or other issue and are likely to open up a bed soon. If things start looking dire, hospitals have ways of adjusting—postponing less urgent care, transferring to hospitals with more openings, opening up a mobile center if needed. There’s no cause for alarm—and the hospitals have apologized for not making that clear.

And more good news on the disease in general: recoveries are increasing and deaths rates are going down. 

Death rates are going down for a couple of reasons. One is that those getting it lately are younger; the average age of those contracting the disease this past month is 31. It is extremely rare for a healthy person in that age range to die of Covid-19. Another reason is that we have better treatments. Less ventilator; more hydroxychloroquine with z-pac and zinc, for example. 

Dr. Jeffrey Barke, left, and Will Will
screenshot from here

In a PragerU interview, Will Witt talks with Dr. Jeffrey Barke, about Covid-19. It’s about 22 minutes, and I suggest watching the whole thing. But one of the things they did was give Will a finger prick test that tests for memory antibodies, IGG, which means you have immunity; and also for antibodies showing your body is fighting off a current infection, IGM. He did it on camera, and showed us the results later in the interview. No sending it off to a lab. It takes ten minutes or less. (Witt tested negative for both, by the way.) I hope these become widespread soon—and I hope they’re accurate.

Dr. Barke said the risk for young people is so low, it’s hard to even put a number on it. I saw on a teacher’s thread this week a great deal of hand-wringing about starting school in the fall. “Think of how many children will die!” one teacher lamented. I have the answer. Zero. The odds of a single child falling to this virus by going to school is immeasurably low. Dr. Barke suggested their odds of getting hit by a car on the way to school are much much higher. And yet no one would consider stopping a child from attending school because of the risk of an accident on the way. (Should people this uninformed and risk averse be teaching young people anything? Yet another reason to homeschool.) Teachers who are of an age or health status to be at risk, he suggests could have their needs handled individually.

Another good piece of news is that the herd immunity threshold (HIT, the point at which enough people have immunity that the virus no longer has a new host to jump to) for this virus is much lower than previously thought. We were told that somewhere between 60-80% of the population needed to contract it before herd immunity was reached. Not so. Because we all have had so many coronaviruses—common colds—in our lifetimes, many of us have developed antibodies that make us immune to this one. So, you add in the already immune to those who develop antibodies by contracting the virus, and it turns out you only need about 20% of the population to contract the disease before HIT is reached.

An example of why we should have seen this was the Diamond cruise ship, early on. The enclosed population, facing this new virus, in an environment in which spreading was inevitable—only 17% got it. That means 83% already had enough immunity to protect them. Later studies show the number in the population as a whole is probably 81%.

Sweden has given us an example; they reached about 20% of the population, and now their death rates are plummeting. So, yes, for now their death numbers are higher than other countries that shut down to prevent the spread. But that just means it will take longer for those countries—whose death tolls aren’t that far behind—to reach the HIT of 20%. By the time they do, then you can compare death rates. In the meantime, Sweden did it with some personal responsibility and without economic devastation.

South Dakota has been doing that too. So, while they have higher rates for now than some other states (they’re 35^th), they’ve done it without suspending individual rights and without economic devastation. Please take note, Governor Abbott.

J. B. Handley, in a blog post on HIT—and full of data—shares this CDC chart of Covid-19 deaths in the US: 

CDC Official US Weekly COVID Deaths
from here

Even if we have slight rises here and there, the overall US trend is down.

Further into the article he recommends this video, particularly noting a part starting just before 11 minutes in. A scientist from Stanford, Dr. Michael Levitt, discusses the failures of science in this whole situation. It’s because scientists, who are not used to dealing with things in real time, were too scared of non-scientists breaking protocols to make informed decisions. They failed utterly to give adequate, accurate information on which policy could be based.

A vacuum will be filled. In a political climate such as we’ve been in, power mongers use the vacuum in good knowledge to exert their coercive powers.

We might all have been better off if our governments had simply provided information and protected our rights, instead of pretending they could protect us from a virus by taking away our liberty and property. Funny how just following the Constitution would have led to much better outcomes.

That's Not Freedom

I came across a talk by Sharon Eubank, given in 2014. She has been head of Latter-day Saint Charities since 2011, and since 2017 she has also been serving as a counselor in the Relief Society General Presidency. That is the worldwide women’s organization for our Church—in fact, possibly the largest women’s organization in the world, with about 7.1 million women. (Fun fact: Looking up bio information on her, I learned her dad was the weatherman while I was growing up. I remember him being very enthusiastic about upcoming snowstorms.)

Sharon Eubank
screenshot from here

She says,

There’s one thing that I’m going to personally reject, and that is the mistake of labeling promiscuity as, somehow, freedom.

This talk was given to fellow Latter-day Saints, so there is terminology that can be used in a religious setting that may not often be used elsewhere. She refers to a scripture in the Book of Mormon, following Christ’s visit to the people there. The scripture is 4 Nephi 1:16:

And there were no envyings, nor strifes, nor tumults, nor whoredoms, nor lyings, nor murders, nor any manner of lasciviousness. And surely there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God.

I’ll take a moment here to define a couple of terms not often used in our time.

Whoredoms: prostitution (sex in exchange for money), or, more simply, fornication of any sort, which means sex outside the commitment of marriage, including adultery.

Lasciviousness: characterized by expressing lust, lewdness, or wantonness, which means sexually loose or unrestrained.

In my religion, any sex outside of marriage—and any lasciviousness, which would include lustful contact of body parts usually kept covered—is a sin. That used to be the general understanding in the Christian world. But in today’s world, these basic definitions are mostly missing.

Back to Sharon Eubank. Considering that scripture verse led her to ask the question, “What would it be like if there were no whoredoms? What would that society be like?” And she came up with a list:

·       Teenage couples don’t get pregnant and have to get married to the wrong person.

·       Lives don’t get warped and stalled by sexual abuse.

·       There’s no fear of rape or violence.

·       There’s great security on the streets.

·       There’s no serial killers.

·       There’s no kidnappings.

·       There’s no market for prostitutes.

·       There’s no sex trade.

·       There’s no sexual slavery.

·       Spouses don’t have affairs and commit adultery.

·       Marriages stay intact, and children aren’t raised in the insecurity and the divided loyalties of divorce.

·       Cities don’t have seedy, creepy neighborhoods that are filled with adult theaters and deviant bookstores.

·       There’s no appetite for porn, and it doesn’t degrade the people who make it, or who watch it, and it doesn’t warp the sexual development of young people and rot the relationship between a husband and a wife.

·       There are no children being raised by a generation of women and painfully wondering where their fathers are.

·       And all of the energy and the money that goes into those activities above is available for something else.

A society that has no whoredoms has all those benefits. She adds, “How is that not more free and not more desirable? For women, for men, for children? How is that not?”

When you look at the ills in society, and you want a serious way to resolve, eliminate, or at least decrease many of them, having human beings make the conscious decision to limit sex to within marriage is nigh unto a magic cure.

Social science data agrees. We’ve known for a long time the formula for economic relief from poverty in the United States:

1.       Don’t have sex before age 20.

2.       Don’t have sex until after marriage.

3.       Stay married.

4.       Obtain at least a high school diploma.

There are more than economic societal goods that come from marriage. A good source is the Witherspoon Institute.  Back in 2006 I got their Marriage and the Public Good: Ten Principles. In the section “Evidence from the Social Sciences,” it summarizes,

In virtually every known human society, the institution of marriage has served and continues to serve three important public purposes. First, marriage is the institution through which societies seek to organize the bearing and rearing of children; it is particularly important in ensuring that children have the love and support of their father. Second, marriage provides direction, order, and stability to adult sexual unions and to their economic, social, and biological consequences. Third, marriage civilizes men, furnishing them with a sense of purpose, norms, and social status that orient their lives away from vice and toward virtue. Marriage achieves its myriad purposes through both social and biological means that are not easily replicated by the various alternatives to marriage. When marriage is strong, children and adults both tend to flourish; when marriage breaks down, every element of society suffers.

Women particularly are better off when society honors marriage and condemns sex outside of marriage. When you look at the list of societal ills, the reverse of Eubank's list above, you can see that women are more vulnerable to the large majority of them.

What if it could be made clear that the tradeoff to eliminate those societal ills would be chastity before marriage and complete fidelity after marriage? Because, if you’re not willing to make that tradeoff, you’re contributing to those problems.

But people can’t ever live chaste lives, you say? Not true. Scriptures tell us it’s possible. Those people in the Book of Mormon, mentioned above, plus there was an earlier generation, called the people of Ammon, who did it. And, in the Bible, there are the people in the city of Enoch. They all did it completely. Beyond that, every successful civilization in the history of the world has thrived only as long as they honored marriage.

Eubank says,

Yet we live in a world that says it’s not possible; you cannot expect those kinds of things from people. People will not react in those ways. This is just natural; it’s who we are. You can’t make those expectations. And yet our God has said, “I expect these things.”

Meanwhile, I came across a relatively new PragerU video with Lauren Chen, who does a podcast on The Blaze called Pseudo-Intellectual, aimed at millennials.

I’m sharing the 5-minute video in full, below. But I’d like to bring up a few of her points about marriage. She says:

I have no doubt the reason so many women get stuck in dead-end relationships is that it has become taboo—or, to be precise, not politically correct—for a woman to articulate what she really wants.

Which takes me back to marriage, and why women crave it. Here are three reasons:

Protection. Commitment. Love.

Nothing wrong with wanting those things. It is something women have wanted—and great societies have valued—for thousands of years. It is something men still want, too. Little wonder study after study shows that those in good marriages are happier, healthier, even wealthier than those who are not.

She suggests that women would be better off being clear about what they want, and then don’t waste time in a dating relationship that won’t lead to marriage.

While our society has done a lot to convince people that marriage isn’t worthwhile, she says we still all know better:

To someone who tells you that a marriage license is trivial, “just a piece of paper,” here’s a good response: If it’s just a piece of paper, why are you so reluctant to sign it? The answer, of course, is that no one believes that it’s trivial. Everyone knows it’s the most important decision you’ll ever make. So treat it that way.

As Sharon Eubank said, what the world has been calling freedom, isn’t freedom. It’s a recipe for societal ills. Self-control leads to freedom from all those societal ills. Who knew? Oh, yeah—every successful civilization in every millennium—including this one.

Over-Civilization

Back in early September, Candace Owens interviewed her fiancé—now husband—George Farmer on her weekly PragerU podcast. They answered questions from viewers as a way for us to get acquainted with him.

Candace Owens and George Farmer
screenshot from here

There’s a segment where they’re talking about one of the things she learned from him, which was about hunting—he does big game hunting—and which has been fascinating for her. He was talking about the difference between what liberal Westerners think compared to the Africans, who benefit from the hunting. It keeps predators down. When it’s an animal such as an antelope, which is mainly what George has hunted, the village cuts up the meat to share. So they get income from the hunters, and they get the food. It’s in their interest to keep the animal populations healthy so this can continue.

The conversation goes on to talk about how out of touch with nature some people are—maybe particularly in New York and California. Candace Owens suggests they should, “Go out and see the lions. Pet them. Talk to them about their feelings. And see what happens.”

George Farmer then brings something to the conversation I’ve been thinking about since: “Let’s put it like this; they’re not having a debate about which bathroom to use in Africa. Right? Because, at the moment, it’s about survival.” And this leads to more on this and related subjects. I’ll just share some of the transcript here:

CO: We’re so over-privileged… We talk about this a lot, the idea of over-civilization, where your society has become so civilized that it starts going backwards, and you start treading just towards stupidity. Like if you’re debating bathroom signs, you are way too privileged—way too civilized, if you are even talking about bathroom signs.

I mean, go to Africa. This is like one of you and I—we’re really big on just watching clips on the internet and just cracking up for hours. The best clip, I mean, the one that never gets old, is this African reporter who’s breaking a story, and interviewing someone, because they cannot grasp the concept of being gay or being a lesbian.

GF: Oh, yeah, that’s brilliant.

CO: And the interviewer is, “Welcome here to the show,” and he’s got this woman who’s a lesbian. She’s a girl and she’s a lesbian, and he just turns around to her, and his question, in this African voice is, “Why are you gay?”

"Why are you Gay"
screenshot from here

[I looked for the video. I think this is it. Being interviewed is a transgender male—i.e., a female who presents as a male, who is attracted to females. The interviewer doesn’t understand the motivation for making such choices.] 

GF: It’s the supposition, something that we’ve talked about. You’re absolutely right, the word over-civilization is a great word.

I’ve been to the Far East as well. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been— This is making me sound edgy and trendy. I’m not, as you well know—but, I went to Bhutan, which is this kingdom in the middle of the Himalayas. It’s the last Himalayan kingdom. And it’s a Buddhist kingdom. It’s basically sealed off to the world. It’s very difficult to get into. And they perform a—they are part of a Buddhist theology which involves tantric Buddhism, which is a form of sexual Buddhism. And, this was about six years ago—seven years ago. And I said to them, I said, “What’s the feeling about the gay rights movement in this part of the world?” And they looked at me as if I was an alien. They had never even heard of this. And I said, “Well, you know, relationships between men, and relationships between women.” And they just said, “Well, he’s my friend. Please explain,” kind of thing. 

And it was just bizarre. Because it was a case where, we’ve got to a point in the Western world where the debate’s become self-fulfilling. We start talking about these issues that become issues. The issues develop their own issues, etc., etc.

I’ve written here on this blog[i] quite a bit about LGBT issues. But this idea that, in some parts of the world these issues don’t even come up was surprising to me. I’m wondering what the social research would show, if the question of LGBT issues occurring in a society focused on survival were asked, or in a society that had never had the idea brought in.

In J. D. Unwin’s research[ii], in which he showed the power of what he calls absolute monogamy on a society—using data on every society in history he had any social data on—he had a sort of throwaway comment about homosexuality. He didn’t research it, but it appeared to him that it was a phenomenon that shows up in a society that is in decay. By decay, he means a society that does not embrace absolute monogamy.

I don’t know if we could get the right question studied today. For one thing, so much of the world is connected that the Hollywood culture has affected all but very few pockets. And you’d have to be able to do the study without introducing the idea where it hadn’t previously been thought of.

There are countries where homosexuality is illegal, and those societies eliminate the issue by executing any instances of it. Nazi Germany did that. Iran does that. But we’ve assumed that instances pop up about as often as average—about 2% of the population—and just stay hidden when the consequences are so dire.

But those examples aren’t survival societies or even fully separate-from-the-outside-world societies. If these things appear naturally (nature, not nurture), you’d expect the same natural incidence regardless of circumstances.

If (and this is what George Farmer is suggesting, but not something I have data on) the incidence is near zero in a society focused on survival, that’s interesting. Even more interesting is the near incidence in a society that simply hasn’t had the idea introduced by the outside world. If these zero-incidence places do exist, that leaves causation to something other than nature. Which I think we knew the umpteenth time it turned out there’s no gay gene[iii], according to DNA mapping.

But we don’t know exactly what part of nurture (possibly combined with some personality trait or combination of traits we’re not sure of) is causal. If we knew that, could we prevent it? Or find a way to heal from it? (Assuming the person wants healing; I’m not suggesting anything by coercion or even pressure.)

I don’t think we’d want to voluntarily become a subsistence society focused on survival. There are way too many advantages to thriving economically and socially. But it would be interesting to know what it is about a survival-focused society that leaves no room for wondering about LGBT issues. If you’re going to survive—as a species—you need to reproduce. We know how that happens, and LGBT behaviors obviously do not get us there. As the African interviewer said on the video, “Why are you gay?” Why would you make a lifestyle choice that offers no chance of procreation?

Those who have these issues often do not feel like they have a choice. But if, under the surface, there are psychological issues combined with life experiences that lead to these LGBT issues—many of which could be described as failure to accept the body one is born into—then it would be a kindness to learn how to help[iv].

About the assertion of over-civilization: I don’t think it’s possible to have too much civilization. But, then, I am defining it a specific way here at the Spherical Model[v]. When Candace and George use the term over-civilization, I think they mean that we are disconnected from what is essential. We over-complicate and over-emotionalize all kinds of things that, if we had a better perspective, would simply not be issues. The fact that we never seem to face life-threatening issues—our privilege of being so safe—leads us to weaken, and decay, and invent problems that aren’t relevant to thriving.

I believe if we actually lived fully civilized lives, without the decay that so much of the sexual revolution has characterized, some or all of the symptoms of decay would stop afflicting us.

The simple but not easy solution is for a critical mass of society to honor God, life, family, truth, and property ownership. It’s what we find in the Ten Commandments. It’s still true.

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[i] I compiled “The Defense of Marriage Collection” in 2013.  That’s a start, but these issues continue to come up regularly on this blog.

[ii] Joseph Daniel Unwin, Ph.D., “Sexual Regulations and Cultural Behavior," an address given to the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society in 1934, published in 1935 (Library of Congress No., HQ12.U52). I mentioned his work here and here.

[iii] I wrote about this in September, here. 

[iv] I’ve written here about the work of Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, Jr., who has developed what he calls reintegrative therapy, which is intended to deal with underlying issues from childhood that lead a person to dissociate from who they are, and to then heal that underlying issue. The therapy is to gain a person greater peace but has in cases led to decreased or apparently erased feelings of same-sex attraction. It is my supposition that reintegrative therapy is based on principles that could also help people with gender dysphoria, although I haven’t heard Dr. Nicolosi assert that.

[v] At the Spherical Model, I describe civilization this way:

   Families typically remain intact, and children are raised in loving homes, with caring parents who guide their education and training, dedicating somewhere between 18 and 25 years for that child to reach adulthood, and who then remain interested in their children’s success for the rest of their lives.

   Civilized people live peaceably among their neighbors, helping rather than taking advantage of one another, abiding by laws enacted to protect property and safety—with honesty and honor. Civilized people live in peace with other civilized people; countries and cultures coexist in appreciation, without fear.

   There is a thriving free-enterprise economy. Poverty is meaningless; even though there will always be a lowest earning 10% defined as poor, in a civilized society these lowest earners have comfortable shelter and adequate food and clothing—and there’s the possibility of rising, or at least for future generations to rise.

   Creativity abounds; enlightening arts and literature exceed expectations. Architecture and infrastructure improve; innovation and invention are the rule.

   People feel free to choose their work, their home, their family practices, their friendships and associations. And they generally self-restrain before they infringe on the rights and freedoms of others. Where there are questions about those limits, laws are in place to help clarify boundaries of civilized behavior. When someone willingly infringes on the rights or safety of another, the law functions to protect that victim as well as society from further uncivilized behavior from the offender.