Denial of Reality and of Womanhood

A week ago Andrew Klavan spent much of his weekly video talking about bodies, their importance in experiencing life and relationships. And there’s some good stuff there, for deep thinking, as he tends to do. In there he shows and talks about a short clip of a woman on TikTok. He admits that, of course, you can find crazy people out there. But the craziness of what she says is worth discussing.

Andrew Klavan, screenshot from here

As an intro, he mentions a piece in the Wall Street Journal by diagnostic radiologist Grazie Pozo Christie, talking, as Klavan says,

about how the science behind Roe v. Wade, which is about to come up, to be challenged before the Supreme Court—the science behind Roe v. Wade is out of date. With the tools that we now have, we can see that a baby at 15 weeks is a human being. It’s alive. It’s kicking, scratching himself. And it is in this mother’s body, being nurtured, being kept alive.

In the wake of that mounting scientific evidence, here’s what this crazy TikTok woman says:

screenshot from here

At no point ever has it mattered whether it’s just a clump of cells or a fully fledged person already accepted to Harvard University. It has never ever mattered when life begins. The point is that a person cannot use another person’s body without their permission. By forcing women to share their bodies with fetuses to keep them alive, you’re actually suggesting that fetuses should have more rights than any other person in the world, and that people with uteruses should have less rights. If you want a fetus to have the same rights as other people, I hate to break it to you, but you’d be pro-choice.

So, all those decades when the pro-abortion crowd claimed it was just a clump of cells, or that viability mattered—those were lies all along. But looking at this woman’s now bold claim, there’s a lot in there that seems obtusely unaware of how babies are made. I shouldn’t have to point out this biological fact, but, except in cases of rape, there’s a voluntary act that results in pregnancy. It isn’t, as Andrew Klavan points out, someone coming along and forcing a human being up inside of you. It’s a procreative act. We know what it is that results in pregnancy.

So the flaw in her argument is “a person cannot use another person’s body without their permission.” Engaging in the procreative act is granting permission. It’s more than that; it’s an invitation.

Metaphorically speaking, you can’t invite someone over to your house for dinner and then shoot them for trespassing on your property.

Even more metaphorically accurate, you can’t invite them—and hire the Uber driver to bring them to your house—and then kill them for trespassing on your property.

Except in the very rare instances when a pregnant mother’s life is on the line—which more than likely means the baby’s life is at risk as well—the baby’s presence in the womb is not a threat to the mother’s life. And in those rare cases, the medical community and doctors agree that you save both when possible; when that is not possible, you prioritize saving the mother.

So the castle doctrine doesn’t really apply here.

image found here

You don’t get to invite people to your house, bring them inside with the promise of feeding them dinner, and then kill them for trespassing because of the inconvenience of having to feed them when you failed to note the invitation on your calendar.

You don’t invite them inside and then kill them—and announce to the world that you had the right to do that—so they wouldn’t interfere with your career or travel plans. You don’t invite someone to your house for dinner and then get to indulge in resentment for their showing up. You don’t invite them unless you plan to provide. (This is why abstinence before marriage and complete fidelity within marriage has been such a good idea for so many millennia.)

If you invite the guest, and then, once they’ve arrived, you suddenly find your plumbing has gone out, or your stove doesn’t turn on, and it’s going to be a hardship—you still just do your best to get through dinner. You don’t at any point kill the invited guest for showing up at what isn’t a good time for you.

It’s not like you can tell the invited guest already in your living room that this isn’t a good evening for dinner after all, so they should leave and come again some other evening. Because “going,” in the case of pregnancy, involves snuffing out the life of the guest—so there cannot be a next time for that person.

The crazy TikTok woman speaks as though some cabal of cruel conservative humans is forcing her to host another person in her body. But that “cabal” is God, who made us in a way so that we can miraculously participate in procreating—in bringing new life into the world. If the woman doesn’t believe in God (and that’s a safe assumption), then it’s the nature that arranged for procreation to happen in similar manner in pretty much all mammalian species.

The pro-abortion opinion is premised on a denial of reality. The denial that women are different from men is the denial of nature. And the significant difference between men and women is the ability to get pregnant and bear a child. Denying that fact erases women as important for being women. Everything about the “right” to kill an unborn child says that bearing the child is unimportant—the unique difference about women is unimportant. But going to school, having a career, indulging in sex without consequence, or whatever other life pursuit—those are important. Everything supersedes womanhood. It says there is more fulfillment in having a career like a man. It says indulging in sex without worrying about getting pregnant—like a man in a decaying society—is what a woman should want. She “shouldn’t be punished with a baby” for being a woman; we should pretend she is more like a man and manipulate reality, even dispose of a baby, to make it seem so.

There is nothing about abortion that is empowering to women. Everything about it denies the unique value of being a woman.

The crazy TokTok woman might be evil. Or she might just be self-centered and duped. She did not come up with the argument she is giving here. She is parroting an argument fed to her by people more entrenched in evil.

In Michael Knowles book Speechless, he says, “No social relation influences the ‘human essence’ more than sex, which sits at the center of every creation account.” He lists a few such accounts to illustrate. And then adds,

Sex also plays a role in the construction and destruction of society’s fundamental institution: the family. Culture-minded Marxists have long understood that any successful “march through the institutions” must overcome the family.

The denial of family, favoring the individual, plays into the hands of those who devalue the individual and value only the collective. That’s why you don’t find pro-life Marxists, only pro-abortion Marxists.

There’s a selfishness that’s obvious. But refusing to become a family doesn’t lead to “being able to do whatever you want”; it actually leads to doing whatever the tyrannical ruler allows.

It’s a trap. It’s the same trap the adversary has used since the beginning: “I’ll take care of you; you just have to surrender your free will so I can make you do what I command.”

We’re getting down to the bottom of something here.

At the Spherical Model, we often point out that civilization requires two foundational things: a religious people who honor God, life, family, truth, and property ownership (that’s a summary of the Ten Commandments); and the family must be supported as the basic unit of civilization.

If you want to destroy civilization, you attack the foundation. Abortion dishonors God and His creations; it dishonors life; it dishonors truth; and most particularly it dishonors family.

And what do you get when you destroy civilization? Savagery. We rightly think it’s savage for a culture to sacrifice children to their idols. It’s pagan and horrifying. But that is what we’re looking at in our modern pro-abortion culture. People like this woman spouting off on a social media platform are trying to frame baby killing as the logical and right thing—calling evil good. She is so smug as she says, “I hate to break it to you,” as though we were too stupid to see the rightness of her position before, but now that she’s explained things to us, we should simply acquiesce—when she was too stupid to know how pregnancy happens.

Texas Heartbeat law illustration found here

The savage crowd are weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth about the recent Texas abortion law, outlawing abortion after a heartbeat can be detected. During September and October, since the Heartbeat Bill took effect, abortions in the state dropped by 50%. That’s an estimated 2,149 babies not aborted. It’s hard to say whether women went elsewhere, or whether they rethought abortion and reconsidered giving birth. If that represents the 50% not aborted, that still leaves another 2,149 babies who were killed during that two months.

The separation between savagery and civilization is indicated by those who regret not getting another 2,149 babies killed (savagery) and those who regret that, even with the law, there were still 2,149 babies killed (on the way to civilization).

What kind of a person invites an innocent human being into their life and then kills them? A savage. What kind of a person convinces a woman that her ability to bring life into the world is a punishment put upon people with a uterus by an unfair society? An uglier savage. And probably a Marxist. Definitely an anti-free-will tyrant.

We Won Some Battles in the Ongoing Idea War

We Won Our School Board Races

It’s a day for celebration. Here in Northwest Houston we took back three seats on our school board from Critical Race Theory supporters: one racist-and-race-baiting instigator and another couple of go-along-to-get-along-ers. It took a lot of work. More from me as a precinct chair than I’m used to, and far more from a number of concerned citizens/parents.

image from campaign materials

My friend Bill, the organizer of the block walking, went every weekend for the past three months (after the time spent vetting and choosing candidates to get behind). And then the past 2-3 weeks, he and recruits have done block walking every day.

As of last Thursday, they had touched 20,102 homes—and then you add whatever they did Thursday evening through Monday of that final weekend.

I’m a miserable failure at block walking. But I did contact by phone, email, or both, close to the number of Republican voters who came out from my precinct. I haven’t yet done a deep enough dive to see whether the very ones I contacted were the ones who voted, but I know at least some of them are. Of course I don’t know how they voted, but I hope that was time well spent. I also did some persuading beyond our precinct, with this blog (here, here, and here) and social media and just talking to friends. And I put up yard signs. I always felt like there was more to do, but I maxed out and ended up sick (not COVID) for the final couple of weeks.

Nevertheless, our outcome was good enough.

Back in July, when we were planning how things might go, we were hoping to consolidate behind one candidate for each of the three races. Our district has no runoff. Whoever wins, even by a single vote, is the winner. That favors the incumbent, with name recognition and connection to the teachers. Maybe that’s why the incumbents have all been in office for nearly two decades.

The consolidating happened for two of the positions. There were actually four candidates for each of those races, but they consisted of Democrat or Independent candidates, in addition to the nominal Republican incumbents that we wanted out. So we weren’t dividing any conservative votes. (Note: the school board is nonpartisan on the ballot, but knowing party affiliation is informative for people who want to get rid of the Critical Race Theory and LGBT agendas.)

The worrisome race was the one we most wanted to win, because the incumbent was the writer of the pro-CRT resolution the board had all signed last year. And, despite being a pastor, he’s a pretty despicable human being. That race had six candidates (the report chart below from ABC 13 News leaves out Todd LeCompte; I don’t know why; the county’s official count shows him getting 659 votes, or 1.85%). The incumbent and one other were Democrats; the others all proclaimed to be Republican/conservative, but one stood out among the others. We went with Natalie Blasingame.

An additional good candidate actually bowed out before the drop-out deadline, but the others stayed in the race. That made strategy, originally based on a two-or-three-person race, more challenging, because the conservative vote could be divided. But the logical answer seemed to be, “Just campaign harder.” It helped that the Harris County Republican Party decided to endorse our candidates. (They did endorsements for other school districts as well.) We had to do some persuading in that position 5 race, but to not endorse would have been a real detriment to anyone trying to beat that awful incumbent.

It also helped that a conservative group in our part of town independently interviewed the candidates and had them respond in length to a questionnaire, which they published. That group only endorses when a supermajority independently go for a particular candidate; in this case, they all went with our candidate, 100%.

Other endorsements came in as well. Every time people went through the trouble to learn about the candidates, they would see how well prepared our candidates were. As for those position 5 candidates who didn’t win this time, I hope some of them will consider that we have four more positions on the ballot two years from now—and all the incumbents signed that CRT resolution.

As for numbers, here’s the report from our local ABC 13 News:

When I got home, around 10:30 Tuesday night, after working the polls and turning in our materials after a long line wait at NRG stadium, I checked online for results, and at that point it was obvious we had won positions 6 and 7. But Dr. Blasingame was behind the incumbent by 118 votes. However, that was when only about 26% of votes had been counted. By the time I got to bed, Blasingame was in the lead by 169 with 36% of the vote counted. It seemed to me that she was trending by the early morning hour that I got to bed. By Wednesday morning, when 100% were counted, all three had won and we could fully celebrate.

Here’s my conclusion: it takes a lot of time, attention, and work to get a school board you can trust. But when it comes to threats to our children, people do finally wake up and take action. It took some monumental effort on the part of some. But that effort spread to others, who influenced their friends and neighbors. People want to be able to trust their schools. If they can’t, they will act rather than succumb.

While it starts with parents and children, community really does tend to choose The Good when they can see clearly what that is. And people’s eyes are beginning to open.

 

Other Battles Won

Texas House Seat

Meanwhile, in San Antonio, another upset was taking place. A 75% Hispanic district was just won by a Republican in a special election. Congratulations to John Luhan. Maybe Dems have been premature in their calculations to turn Texas blue:

·       “Texas District, Roughly 75% Hispanic, Turns Red For GOP” Hank Berrien for The Daily Wire, November 3, 2021. 

 

Virginia Governor

And nationally it was a bigger day than you would expect for an off-year election.

In Virginia—where Loudon County schools have been a big issue lately—Glenn Youngkin succeeded in winning the governorship over incumbent Terry McAuliffe, who had recently said we shouldn’t be allowing parents to decide what their kids are taught in schools. Ben Shapiro summed it up in a couple of tweets:

tweet images found here

As VP Harris said, possibly accurately, the way this November election goes, so goes the nation in 2022 and 2024:

·       “Kamala Harris warns McAuliffe loss could doom Dems in 2022, 2024” Steven Nelson for New York Post, October 29, 2021. 

 

Virginia Lieutenant Governor

Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor was also a big win: Winsome Sears, who is a pro-Second-Amendment woman, who happens to be black, is confusing the media, who want to label all that has happened this election on “white supremacy”; she doesn’t fit their narrative. Maybe they need a new narrative. Her acceptance speech is uplifting and oh, so American!

Newly elected VA Lt. Governor Winsome Sears
gives her acceptance speech.
screenshot from here

·       “Watch: Here's the Speech from Virginia's First Black Lt. Governor CNN And MSNBC Didn't Show. She's Republican” Brodigan for Louder with Crowder, November 3, 2021. 

·       “Marine vet Winsome Sears celebrates win in Virginia lieutenant governor race with 'USA' chant, says she's 'living proof' of American dream in patriotic speech” Chris Pandolfo for The Blaze, November 3, 2021. 

·       “Winsome Sears, Virginia’s Next LieutenantGovernor, Makes History as First Black Woman to Win Statewide” Fred Lucas for The Daily Signal, November 3, 2021. 

·       “Lt. Gov of Virginia Winsome Sears challenges Joy Reid to have her on MSNBC if she's 'woman enough'” Libby Emmons for American News, November 3, 2021. 

New Jersey Truck Driver Wins Senate

Other wins include a New Jersey truck driver who spent only $153 on his campaign for state Senate, taking out the sitting Senate president:

·       “New Jersey truck driver Edward Durr defeats state Senate president, longtime Dem” Houston Keene for Fox News, November 4, 2021. 

·       “Republican truck driver Edward Durr defeats powerful Democratic NJ state Senate president; historic victory called 'stunning and shocking'” Dave Urbanski for The Blaze, November 4, 2021. 

·       “UPDATE: The GOP trucker who spent $153 on his campaign just unseated the NJ senate president” Joel Abbott for Not the Bee, November 4, 2021.

 

Massachusetts School Board

And former teacher in Massachusetts, ousted because he had attended the January 6 rally and was subsequently slandered as a domestic terrorist, made it onto the school board:

·       “Teacher forced out after January 6 photo wins seat on school board in Massachusetts” by Hannah Nightingale for American News, November 3, 2021. 

 

Newark City Council

In the New Jersey city of Newark, Republicans took over the entire city council:

·       “Republicans sweep Newark elections, eliminate Democrats from council” Kent Mallett for Newark Advocate, November 3, 2021. 

 

Minneapolis Keeps Police Department

Minneapolis went against the advice of their Rep. Ilan Omar and decided not to defund their police department and replace it with some social workers:

·       “Minneapolis voters reject ballot measure to dismantle police and replace with new agency” Clare Hymes for CBS News, November 3, 2021. 

 

The Celebration

There’s a lot of celebrating going on. But the satire site The Babylon Bee has been having way too much fun. Here is some of their post-election hilarity:

·       “Dems Announce Plan To Call People Racist Even Harder” The Babylon Bee, November 4, 2021. 

·       “McAuliffe Blames Loss On Low 3AM Ballot Turnout” The Babylon Bee, November 4, 2021. 

·       “McAuliffe: ‘I’ll Be Back And I’ll Get Your Children If It’s The Last Thing I Do!’” The Babylon Bee, November 3, 2021. 

·       “'Racism! COVID! Trump!' Screams McAuliffe Over And Over In Desperate Last-Minute Appeal” The Babylon Bee, November 2, 2021. 

·       “Terry McAuliffe Baffled That Telling Parents The State Owns Their Children Wasn't A Winning Strategy” The Babylon Bee, November 2, 2021.  This one contained a surprisingly accurate quote (still satire):

o   "It's so weird," a crestfallen McAuliffe told reporters. "We pulled out all the stops: we told parents that we own their children's minds, that they're wards of the state, and that their children should read horrific LGBTQ+ pornography in their school libraries, and it just didn't seem to connect with the people for some reason."

 

Others are enjoying the celebration without even needing to turn to satire:

·       “Watch how depressed all the ‘objective’ CNN hosts were as the Virginia results rolled in” Not the Bee, November 3, 2021. 

·       This tweet thread from Dinesh D’Souza and Gad Saad:

 

The war, of course, is never over. But it’s nice to celebrate some wins—and relish some good cheer in the hope that the tide might be turning.

 

 

 

Speaking Up for the Family

A week ago the administration put out the news, quietly, on a Friday, that they were doing something earth shaking and historic. Which they didn’t want to call undue attention to? It was “the first ever national gender strategy to advance the full participation of all people, including women and girls, in the United States and the world.”

You can read the fact sheet here, which includes a link to the full Gender Strategy Report.

This was brought to my attention a few days ago in commentary by Glenn Beck. He read from the report, and then made some comments. And I’ll get to his. But first I want to cover a couple of things I notice—which may not be anything beyond an editor’s eye.

Glenn Beck talks about the new National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality,
screenshot from here

There is a high saturation of abstract words: fundamental, essential, ensuring, opportunity, potential, imperative, inflection, exacerbated, underscored, systematic, interconnected, priority. It’s not wrong to use such words—unless you’re using them to hide plain meaning. I’ll leave that issue for another time.

Another thing that caught my attention is a list of priorities:

The strategy identifies ten interconnected priorities: 1) economic security; 2) gender-based violence; 3) health; 4) education; 5) justice and immigration; 6) human rights and equality under the law; 7) security and humanitarian relief; 8) climate change; 9) science and technology; and 10) democracy, participation, and leadership. These priorities are inherently linked and must be tackled in concert.

The first one that jumped out at me was 2) gender-based violence. Certainly that’s something we don’t want. But number 1 was something I’m assuming we’re supposed to want—as are the remaining 8. Why is there a priority to avoid among a list of priorities to aim for? Without clarification? It appears, then, that it is a priority to achieve greater gender-based violence. No, I don’t think that’s what they literally intend; but I think that unclear writing shows unclear thinking. So there’s that.

Then there are the priorities containing “and.” Why is “justice and immigration” a single item; why is there not a separate priority for justice and for whatever it is you want related to immigration? Or, if it’s something about immigration that ought to have justice and doesn’t, why not “immigration justice,” whatever that might be? How do "justice and immigration" fit together as one thing?

I don’t really have a problem with “human rights and equality under the law,” other than that, for clear-thinking people, equality under the law is a human right already, so it’s redundant.

Then there’s “security and humanitarian relief.” Security, in government terms, is like border security, and protection from our foreign enemies (military defense), and protection from domestic enemies to the people of the nation (FBI, or lawbreaking involving multiple states). Humanitarian relief is not a bona fide enumerated power, but as it happens we give aid to foreign nations, ostensibly to improve our relationships with them. But the connection of those two things as a single item is odd—unless they’re doing some conflation of security and economic stability and assuming that’s a government responsibility instead of the natural outgrowth of appropriate limited government.

“Science and technology” probably do go together, no problem there. But then there’s a three-part item: “democracy, participation, and leadership.” Why those three words together? All three abstractions sort of relate to self-government of the people, but what are the separate aspects of them requiring all three to be mentioned, and the common elements that make them together one item? I don’t know. And I suspect whoever wrote this doesn’t know either; they just thought it sounded weightier.

The real issue with this statement hidden on a Friday afternoon release is what Glenn Beck identifies: it attacks the family.

Here at the Spherical Model, we identify the essentials of civilization: 1. Civilization requires a religious people—including honoring God, life, family, truth, and property ownership; 2. Family is the basic unit of civilization. You see family come up twice—because it’s such a big deal. Family is what enables the perpetuation of both the species and the civilization. The Spherical Model has three overlapping spheres: political, economic, and social. And we have a long article identifying the principles in each, leading respectively to freedom, prosperity, and civilization—and away from tyranny, poverty, and savagery. In the section on civilization, we have a large sub-article on family, and why it’s essential to civilization.

So I’m on the same page with Glenn Beck. Beyond that, I recognize the words he’s using—because he’s referencing, and doing a lot of quoting from, “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” signed and sent out to the world September 23, 1995. I wrote about it for the 20^th anniversary. In that I tell the story of the late Richard Wilkins, who helped institute the World Congress on Families, when he attended his first international conference on families:

He told me that he spoke about the Proclamation on the Family, issued shortly before that by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to which he was a devout member (as I am). At the time it came out, the issues in the Proclamation were such standard doctrine to us that he said he wondered at the reasoning. Since that time, he says he sees it as prophetic; every line in it is challenged in the world today. But in 1996 he happened to take a brochure of the Proclamation with him and had it in his pocket. When he shared those ideas, the opponents to the family (the previous speakers) hissed their disapproval, but the room at large gave him a standing ovation. They came up to him afterward to thank him for speaking what so many of them believed, and they formed long-standing alliances to work toward protecting the natural family from the international onslaught.

I remember that feeling at the time it was given, of “Why are we being told this? Isn’t this all obvious?” It was obvious then. But I look at it now, and it seems even more prophetic than it did six years ago. The family, sex and its purpose, procreation, gender, marriage—all of it. It’s all still true, but you might get yourself booted from social media, or fired from your job, for saying what was so obvious in 1995 that we didn’t even know it needed to be said. And it will put you at direct opposition to our current government.

So, as Glenn Beck speaks the words, they sound very bold. They need to be said—again. I’ve transcribed the last 6 minutes of his clip and include that in full: 

I want to share with you the fact that the family is under attack. That the sacredness of being a man, and the sacredness of being a woman, is under attack. And it’s under attack to do one thing: destroy the family. That’s it. This is the most evil plan I have ever encountered—to destroy the family.

Some organizations, like BLM, have that in their manifesto—to destroy the family. This is now going to be implemented by the federal government, through our banking systems and ESG [Environmental, social, and governance]. And through everything else. It will touch every aspect of your life.

screenshot of the BLM beliefs page, August 24, 2020
since removed from their website.

 

So I’m gonna go through a few things that are true. And, if you disagree with them, well, then we can still be friends, but I don’t think we’re on the same side. You may be fighting for the wrong side. And I want to share what I hold to be self-evident truth.

I’ll give you 90%, 95% Agree 95%? Great. Let’s fight together. If not, we should part ways.

Now, if one of your objections to what I’m about to tell you is that there is no God, see if you can work around that objection. I truly believe there is one, and we need to implore Him for His help. But if that is your objection, see if you can’t get around that to go with all of the other truths that I’m’ about to speak.

All human beings, male and female, were created in the image of God. They were created for a purpose male and female. Each—each has a divine nature and a destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of that eternal identity and its purpose. You were born a male or a female for a reason. And there are only two genders. God commanded, at the beginning, to multiply and replenish the earth. And that still should be our goal. It still is in effect. And procreation, and the powers that it takes to procreate should only happen between a man and a woman who are lawfully wedded as husband and wife. 

The beginning of The Proclamation on the Family

[sigh] Have I gone too far now?

Which means that, because that is a sacred power, to procreate, and it should be happening between a man and woman lawfully wedded as husband and wife, it means that that life that you create is divinely appointed. And thus all life is sacred, and abortion is murder. 

Husband and wife together have a responsibility to love and care for each other and their children. Parents together have a sacred duty to rear their children in love and righteousness, to provide for the physical and spiritual needs, and to teach them to love and serve one another; to observe the commandments of God and to be law-abiding citizens wherever they live. That is the responsibility of mothers and fathers, and they will be held accountable if they fail to discharge those obligations.

The family is sacred. It is the basic, fundamental building block. Thus, a marriage between a man and a woman is essential to, not only God’s plan, but to the universe.

Children are entitled to be born within the bounds of matrimony, to be reared by a father and a mother who honor their marital vows with complete fidelity. And happiness in family life is found most likely in the followings of the Judeo-Christian values and principles.

Successful marriages are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreation. 

from The Proclamation on the Family

As a dad, I am responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection of my family. My wife is primarily responsible for the nurture of our children. But we help each other on both of those things as equal partners. Now, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t special cases. Of course there is. And extended families should lend support when needed.

But the disintegration of the family—the destruction of the family—will bring upon us as individuals, our communities, and our entire world calamities beyond your imagination. That’s why I believe: family first. You must stand up for these principles first.

 

The warning near the end of 
The Proclamation on the Family

 

A lot has changed in our world in the relatively brief 26 years since that proclamation was written. But every word of it is still true. And we do face calamities in our world, in our communities, when these words are abrogated. 

Sometimes I use big, less familiar, possibly abstract words too.
But I try to do that when it's the right word for meaning.

Conversely, many of the ills in the world would be relieved if we valued family so much that a critical mass of intact functional families civilized our savage world.

I stand for the family. When necessary, I declare opposition to the government in order to stand for the family. I hope at least some of us can avoid the calamities.

Redistricting Report

At our Tea Party meeting this past Saturday, we heard from local House Rep. Mike Schofield, who was on the Redistricting Committee, and also Tom Nobis, our SREC (State Republican Executive Committee) Chair, to talk about the outcome of the legislature’s redistricting process.

Rep. Mike Schofield at the Cypress Texas
Tea Party on October 23, 2021.
We meet at a BBQ place, and we work
around the stuff they store in that room.

Rep. Schofield is a good storyteller. He gets up to talk—he talks fast—and an hour and a half later he takes a breath. Before we get to redistricting, I’ll just share one of his stories, for anyone out there who thinks there’s no voter fraud. For background, during early voting, we can vote at any voting location. There were, I’m trying to recall, 40-60 voting locations. There were many more in 2020. He says, 

You may remember back in 2018 they actually beat me by 113 votes. Now, I’m sure I had more actual voters than my opponent did, but after they stuffed the ballot box in some places, we came up 113 short.

Now, by the way, they tried that again this time [2020]. There were 60 votes a day being cast in a precinct over here [SE Harris County] during my race. You may recall there was a pandemic. People were afraid to get out from under their bed. But somehow 60 people a day would drive from here [west end of Harris County] through the fourth largest city in America, out the other side, and vote in the same precinct in my race.

What was happening was, they were stuffing the ballot box. And they knew they had won by 113 votes last time, so they figured the 600-and-some votes they stole this time would be enough to win. What they didn’t know was that I was trying to beat my opponent so badly that, even with the 600 votes, we still beat her by 3500.

So, that kind of stuff goes on. And it goes on more now that the elections are being controlled by the Democratic Party. So, I figured, I’d better get on Redistricting and defend my district.

We didn't have literal ballot boxes to stuff. What he means, I think, is that someone got a list of names from his district and then voted for them. It would have to be someone with access to the machines. That's why it's important to have workers from both parties, as well as poll watchers.

House Districts and General Redistricting Info

I’m assuming similar discussions are going on across the country.

Rep. Schofield says he refers to redistricting as pushing the reset button. Populations move around. There’s growth in some places, not in others. He says,

Now, the very first principle of redistricting, no matter what part of the country you’re in, no matter what year it is, is population. That’s why we do it. People—they get so caught up in the partisan, and the racial and Voting Rights Act and all this, they forget what this is actually for.

The Constitution requires that we redistrict every 10 years to more or less make everything equal again. And the reason is, if you’re in a district like mine, we were the fourth largest district in Texas. And when they started, ten years ago, they were all roughly—we don’t require exact equality in Texas, but they were roughly equal. And then growth happens. Right? And some places shrink in population. Other places grow.

Of the 150 districts in Texas, in the House, the first largest growth and the fourth largest growth were both in Katy [west of Houston, west end of Harris County, and some in Ft. Bend County; Schofield’s was fourth] We’re supposed to have grown from about 167,000 people at the beginning of the decade to about 194,303. Exactly…. That’s supposed to be what we’re all supposed to get to: 194,303. My district had 282,000 people. So, if you lived in my district, your vote counted less, because you’re a lower percentage, than in someplace where they had 187,000 people in their district. Your vote counts on a proportional basis for less than theirs does.

Redistricting has to happen before primary elections, which happen early in the year of even-numbered years. Getting the numbers into the hands of legislators was delayed, so it couldn’t be done during the regular legislative session last January-through-May (in Texas, during odd-numbered years). It couldn’t even be handled during our first two 30-day special sessions.

We were concerned it wouldn’t get done in this third session either. The Dems had walked out of the first special session, saying they were preserving voting rights from the horrendous new legislation designed to make it easier to vote but harder to cheat. They ran out the clock while they were getting Covid and otherwise hanging out in DC. And they have fled the state before during redistricting legislation. This year, I guess they gauged, accurately, that people were already annoyed with them enough over their shenanigans, so they stayed in Austin during the third special session, which was dedicated to redistricting.

Even though the redistricting legislation has now passed, there’s always the possibility that someone will challenge it in court and delay our primary. But for now, we think our primary will happen on the first Tuesday of March, as scheduled.

Redistricting didn’t start from scratch at the beginning of this special session a month ago. Rep. Schofield, along with the committee, was working on map redrawing all through the legislative session, based on estimated numbers.

The numbers come from a snapshot in time: April 1, 2020. However many people, and wherever they were living on that date, that’s what counts. Schofield’s district, HD 132, grew by 30,000 in just one year, and may have grown another 20,000 in the time since the census date. That meant he needed to lose about 88,000 out of his district based on growth since the last census. Controlling how that went was why he wanted to be on the committee that got to decide. He’s puzzled by representatives who called him the last couple of weeks, worried about what was happening to their district. They could have called him any time since February, rather than waiting until it was being voted on.

There are rules determining how redistricting must be done. The purpose is to make all districts approximately equal in size. When they work on US Congressional districts, that has to be literally equal, down to the individual voter, but things aren’t quite that exact in the state House and Senate. There is a rule for the House that they can’t cross county lines. On at least two sides of Schofield’s district, that’s a constraint. Then there are efforts to use natural boundaries, such as highways, waterways, reservoirs, etc.

When you see contorted, oddly shaped districts, the ones that people use to describe gerrymandering, those are shaped that way in order to meet the requirements of the Voting Rights Act, to allow for minority representation. In Harris County, he pointed out one of these that is Hispanic, and another that is Black. The assumption, for those who set up those lines, is that they will vote Democrat, so it’s actually in the law that districts must be set up in a way to favor Democrats.

Oddly, the reason for the Voting Rights Act is to counter previous gerrymandering intent on preventing minority representation. That was done by Democrats. Every time. So, the Democrats gerrymandered to make districts the way they wanted them—based on race. And that caused a law to be put into place for the Democrats to make districts the way they want them—based on race. The solution? Somehow overcome the lie that the Republicans were the racists. It’s a slow process.

Anyway, while my House district , HD 138, shifted somewhat to the west, I’m still in the same district. I was moved in 2010, so I’m glad I don’t have to deal with another new House district.

Current and new House district maps
images available at District Viewer, here

Senate Districts

The Senate has 31 districts in the state. By comparison, there are about to be 38 congressional districts. So the state senators have more constituents than US Congressmen have.

Like the House, they start with the districts they had and make adjustments from there. They need to each have 940,178 more or less.  They don’t get to deviate as much as House districts do, because they don’t have a county line rule. But they can be off by a small handful.

Rep. Schofield gave us some behind-the-scenes play in the legislature. The Senate originates its own map and then sends it to the House, and vice versa. In most legislation, when a bill passes the originating chamber, it gets passed on to the other one, where it can undergo a fair amount of amending before getting back to the originators, who then can either concur with the amendments or get a reconciliation committee, made up of members of both chambers, to come to an agreement on what ought to be in the bill.

Redistricting bills, however, are expected to be left alone by the other chamber. As some Democrat House member once put it, “The Republicans are the opposition; the real enemy is the Senate.” If they don’t want they other chamber messing with their map, it behooves them both not to mess with the other chamber’s maps.

In order to avoid getting each other’s bills messed with, they have an arrangement where they will gavel down at exactly the same moment. If one chamber gaveled down (approved the other chamber’s map with a vote) first, the remaining chamber could then mess with its map at will, and there would be no leverage to stop it. So the two chambers, located at opposite ends of the building, open up all doors between the two, and coordinate so that both can gavel down at the exact same moment. Because, you know, trust is everything—but you can’t trust anybody.

Current and new Senate district maps
images available at District Viewer, here

Tom Nobis summarized for us the SD changes in Harris County and affecting Montgomery County, just to the north, with this graphic:

 

Congressional Districts

Congress is totally different in many ways. Mainly, they don’t draw their own districts. The state legislature does it. In Texas, that originates in the Senate, but it seemed to me they worked together on this map quite a lot.

Some people suggest putting together a non-partisan commission, to take politics out of redistricting. In theory that may sound good, but it’s not possible in reality. Rep. Schofield says,

No such thing as a non-partisan angel gonna drift down from heaven and make sure everything is fair.

He says, when the legislature goes through their process, everybody fights for their area. They tug and they pull, and they go, “I want these guys on the other side of the reservoir,” and so forth. There are a lot of complicated issues. You deal with the minority areas first—and that’s why they come out looking so oddly shaped. Then you deal with all the other things that the constituents and the representatives might care about.

But when you have these nonpartisan groups, say 7 of each of the two major parties, plus an impartial judge, what you get is, one side wins 8-7 and takes everything. That judge belongs to one of the parties, and may have been appointed by the governor. So that’s the tie breaker. There’s nothing non-partisan about it, except the label to fool the people.

Anyway, so you’ve got growth. In Texas, we’ve had growth—and added congressional seats—every census since statehood, I think he said. Wherever those new districts go, it’s like dropping two giant boulders in the middle of existing districts. And they have to have exactly the same number of people in them as every other district, when everything is said and done. Around 875,000. If you can’t get it right, you have to split up precincts, or blocks, or maybe just cut a house or two, until you get it exactly right. That is, according to how it was on April 1, 2020; you could be off by thousands by the time redistricting goes into effect, but it’s the count on that date that matters.

There were various places around the state that were suggested for the new districts. The decision finally came down to Harris County, where Houston is, and the Austin area.

The splat of the Harris County boulder came down on my district. I was in District 2, with Rep. Dan Crenshaw. He got pushed further north (not sure he’s actually still living in that district). And I’m now in the new CD 38. Wesley Hunt has declared as a candidate; he ran against Lizzie Fletcher in CD 7 two years ago. I imagine others will run as well. But he’s former special forces, a friend of Crenshaw. He’s conservative.  And happens to be black, which makes him bulletproof against certain criticisms. I’m looking forward to learning more about him.

What I’ve heard is that both Crenshaw’s district and the new district are likely to go safely Republican, and CD 7 will be sacrificed to the Democrats for the foreseeable future.

Rep. Schofield talked about the philosophy behind safe versus competitive districts. He said people complain when they’re in a district where their representative doesn’t agree with them on various issues—likely because they’re in a different party. If you’re in a competitive district, 49% or so of the district is going to feel like that—dissatisfied, unrepresented. But in a “safe” district, a higher percentage of constituents will be satisfied with their representative. So he’s changed his opinion over the years and now favors safe districts when possible.

That’s great if you’re in agreement with your representative, but what if you’re not? We’ve had sympathy for conservatives in Sheila Jackson Lee’s area for ages (she wins with over 80% of the vote; it’s  too much to be attributable to voter fraud). Rep. Schofield says, it’s not that you’re without representation. It’s like, when you’re in a group and order out for pizza, who gets to decide what kind of pizza? The guy who wants only cheese so everyone is OK with it? The one who wants meat lovers? The vegetarian? Whoever wins, the others still get their slice of pizza (the representation); they just may have to pick things off or go without what they would have preferred.

Current and new US Congressional district maps
images available at District Viewer, here

 

Other Districts

We talked only briefly about SBOE (State Board of Education) districts. The legislature sets those up as well. There were 15 before redistricting; there are 15 after. These are the largest in the state. It’s an unpaid position, without a bunch of constituents financially supporting a candidate. So getting to visit every part of the district is practically impossible.

We also talked about the Harris County Commissioner Precinct redistricting. This isn’t a legislative issue; it’s being done at the county level. But it’s on our minds. Harris County is, I think, the second largest non-state government jurisdiction in the US. It’s run by someone on her first job out of college, since 2018. It’s run badly. And it’s run according to whatever “progressive” (i.e., Marxist) strategies of the pushiest commissioner (one Rodney Ellis) wants. There are five commissioners: 3 Dems, 2 Republicans. These two intrepid Republicans go up against this wall of hypocrisy and graft daily. (The list of their faults and failings is too long for this late in a post.)  The Dems don’t like the opposition, the calling to account, the occasional public calling them out so the public knows what they’re up to. What they want to do is get rid of one of the Republican commissioners. They’ve chosen Tom Ramsey (mine is Jack Cagle). The plan is to pile as many Republicans into Cagle’s district as they can manage—taking them out of Ramsey’s. The hope is that they can then oust Ramsey and wreak havoc with a 4-1 Commissioner’s Court, plus Hidalgo the County Judge (executive). That would be the setup for a decade.

They may handle the redistricting at their regular Commissioners’ Court Meeting tomorrow (October 26) at 10:00 AM, hoping to slide it in before anyone notices. If you live here and would like to take a stand against local tyranny, you need to sign up by 8:00 AM to speak virtually (sign up and info here). 

If not, they will have a public hearing on Thursday (October 28) of this week, 12:30 PM. The County GOP was sending out announcements today, calling for a large voice from the people.

 

So, in summary, statewide we’re doing OK as conservatives. Locally, in Harris County, some of us are OK and some not. By law, redistricting has to be done. I’m glad this decade it was done with conservatives in the driver’s seat.

Some Are More Equal Than Others

Newly released footage of the surveillance cameras in the Capitol building on January 6^th were recently released. Law vlogger Robert Gruler’s video from October 18 talks about  it.

Gruler shows several clips of the 40 minutes released, of the same doorway; he shows on top the view looking out and on the bottom the view looking in, simultaneously. He shows several consecutive segments. These start around 2:30 PM on January 6, 2021. In the first, the hallway between an exterior door and an interior door is mostly empty, although some people, who look like they could have concluded or walked away from a tour, go from the interior door, through the hallway, and exit the building. And other people calmly enter the building. People are coming and going at will, with police present but not in any way hindering them.

Robert Gruler shows clips of surveillance footage
from the Upper West Terrace of the Capitol, exterior and interior doors.
At this point, people are allowed to come and go through this hallway.
screenshot from here

In the next segment, about ten minutes later on the time stamp than on the empty hallway video, you see police move toward the exterior door and stop people from continuing to come inside. So more people wait at the exterior door. A few police officers stand in the entrance and talk with some of the people at the front of the crowd. The people are standing and waiting, and the crowd builds but remains calm. You see one man, not an officer, walk from the interior and pass through the police and exit the building. The police do not seem at all alarmed by him. He simply exits. Another couple of times a person will begin to enter the hallway from the interior, see the police, and turn around and go back through the interior door. Police do not seem bothered about the people already inside the Capitol.

The same doorway, ten minutes later, police stop allowing
entry, and the crowd obeys, waiting outside.
screenshot from here

In a segment about four minutes later, one of the police officers speaks in the ear of another (we do not have audio), then taps another officer on the shoulder. Then the officers—it looks like a total of six, when we see them in lower frame—back up and enter through the interior door, allowing the crowd to follow them and enter the building, which they do, calmly, without any restraint from or conflict with the officers. It looks as if the police got orders to allow the people in now.

Gruler has drawn red arrows indicating the three visible officers;
the one in the center speaks to the one at his left, then taps the
one on the right, and then they allow the crowd to enter.
screenshot from here

So, what are we seeing? An orderly crowd allowed into the Capitol building by police officers. In this particular doorway—and we've seen both people in the interior and exterior of the building—we do not see rioting. We do not see shouting or agitation in the crowd. We see calm and restraint, and obedience to the officers. And then these restrained members of the crowd enter the building with permission.

Does that mean that no violence happened elsewhere? No. But we were told this was—Biden’s words in April—the worst assault on our democracy since the Civil War. Something supposedly started around 1:30, before President Trump finished his speech, before the crowd listening to him could have moved to the Capitol. But by 2:30 people are peacefully entering and existing the building with the permission of the Capitol police.

If it was worse than Pearl Harbor or 9/11, there must have been massive death, right? No. One woman, an unarmed veteran, was shot at close range by a Capitol police officer when clearly there was no need of deadly force. (By the way, she was denied a veteran’s military funeral.) That was the only gunshot at the Capitol that day. Not a single gun was found or confiscated from any protestor at the January 6 event. The only other deaths were deemed to be natural causes, including the death off Officer Brian Sicknick, who it was falsely reported had been bludgeoned by a fire extinguisher. Not only did that not happen to him, but there doesn’t appear to be evidence of anyone using a fire extinguisher as a weapon.

No insurrection charges have been made against those arrested and detained—many of them still await being charged. Most charges have been for trespassing, a minor offense. Some have been charged with “disrupting an official proceeding,” which is a law intended for acts such as shredding documents needed in a Congressional inquiry, not for a ceremonial proceeding such as was happening on January 6^th, and which continued unheeded after a few hours’ delay.

Despite the 6^th Amendment right to a speedy trial, some are still being held, unable to talk with family or counsel, kept in solitary confinement until eventually being brought to trial. The video surveillance released this week is part of the evidence. It is only now, in part, being provided, even though defense counsel is entitled to all of it from the moment it is to be used in the case—and it was available on or immediately after January 6^th. That’s ten months ago. Prosecutors claimed they had to go through the 14,000 hours of footage to get it in the right format for the defense. But that convenience service is not what is required of the prosecution; providing the raw footage is. That is what they should have done immediately. So it appears they have held off to avoid showing the benign nature of the vast majority of attendees at the Capitol. It appears they were afraid we would see footage such as Robert Gruler shared.

Roger Kimball
image from Imprimis

This month’s Imprimis newsletter is a piece by Roger Kimball, adapted from a speech he gave at Hillsdale College September 20^th. He lays out the case that the “hoax,” the hype surrounding the mostly banal event at the Capitol, is part of a larger picture, beginning with the Russian collusion hoax, in order to paint their opponent as the dangerous enemy. He says,

Of course, it is absolutely critical to the Democratic Party narrative that the January 6 incident be made to seem as violent and crazed as possible. Hence the comparisons to 9/11, pearl Harbor, and the Civil War. Only thus can pro-Trump Americans be excluded from “our democracy” by being branded as “domestic extremists” if not, indeed, “domestic terrorists.”

Kimball says that when Biden and others have referred to Trump and the 74 million people who voted for him as a threat to “our democracy,” what they mean is a threat to “their oligarchy.” He takes us back a bit further, to 2015,  

when the resources of the federal government were first mobilized to spy on the Trump campaign, to frame various people close to Trump, and eventually to launch a full-throated criminal investigation of the Trump administration.

What we know is that the Steele dossier, which was the sole pretext for the FISA warrants to spy on Carter Page and other American citizens, was false, known to be false, and was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC—its source kept unknown from the judges signing off on the warrants. We know, then, that the DNC knew, the Clinton campaign knew, and James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and Rep. Adam Schiff knew, along with other Democrat House Intelligence Committee members and the upper levels of the FBI. Whatever they claimed in public, under oath, behind closed doors, they admitted they knew there was no evidence to merit spying on a presidential candidate.

They attempted to impeach President Trump beginning mere minutes after his inauguration; riots followed, with damage to property and injury to multiple police officers. As Kimball points out, “You will search in vain for media or other ruling class denunciations of the violent riots in Washington, DC, following President Trump’s inauguration.” Those rioters got off. The rioters who began in May 2020, following the death of George Floyd were praised and supported—our current VP actually funded some of their legal fees. As one commentator quipped, in a reference to Animal Farm, “some riots are more equal than others.”

When they did finally impeach Trump (but of course failed to remove him from office), it was on false charges that were not even an impeachable offense, and which they simply couldn’t support with any evidence beyond their over-puffed indignation. Then they impeached him a second time—after he left office—without any charges, because of January 6^th, even though he had clearly called for people to “peacefully and patriotically” walk to the Capitol and let their voices be heard—something that sounds an awful lot more like a 1^st Amendment right than an incitement to insurrection.

Kimball expresses something true about this whole thing:

Another lesson was perfectly expressed by Donald Trump when he reflected on the unremitting tsunami of hostility that he faced as President. “They’re after you,” he more than once told his supporters. “I’m just in the way.”

There’s a part of Kimball’s piece where he contests a quote from philosopher David Hume: “It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” Kimball points out just how very quickly we have been losing our liberty. Maybe it's like the saying about bankruptcy: it happens slowly, slowly, and then suddenly. Of the sudden loss of freedom, Kimball uses as an example, one Joseph Hackett:

[Hackett] is a 51-year-old Trump supporter and member of an organization called the Oath Keepers, a group whose members have pledged to “defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.” The FBI does not like the Oath Keepers—agents arrested its leader in January and have picked up many other members in the months since. Hackett traveled to Washington from his home in Florida to join the January 6 rally. According to court documents, he entered the Capitol at 2:45 that afternoon and left some nine minutes later, at 2:54. [According to the video mentioned above, police were allowing entrance at this time.] The next day, he went home. On May 28, he was apprehended by the FBI and indicted on a long list of charges, including conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, destruction of government property, and illegally entering a restricted building.

As far as I have been able to determine, no evidence of Hackett destroying property has come to light. According to his wife, it is not even clear that he entered the Capitol. But he certainly was in the environs. He was a member of the Oath Keepers. He was a supporter of Donald Trump. Therefore, he must be neutralized.

Joseph Hackett is only one of hundreds of citizens who have been branded as “domestic terrorists” trying to “overthrow the government” and who are now languishing, in appalling conditions, jailed as political prisoners of an angry state apparat.

The clearly biased congressional committee looking into the January 6 event—set up because it didn’t like the findings of the official investigation, which found there was no collusion—is on a fishing expedition, requesting every communication Trump or his advisors may have had. That means, ten months after the event, they don’t have a single statement or copy of a communication—like a tweet—that shows Trump or anyone surrounding him was involved in planning any sort of insurrection, violence, or illegal action of any kind. And note, they ought to have had that evidence before they impeached him (after his term). The former President is rightly taking them to court over their overbroad subpoenas into his private communications protected by executive privilege. Meanwhile, the current occupant of the White House, Biden, says he is waiving the former President’s right to executive privilege. It doesn’t work that way. (Robert Gruler discusses this in another video, here, at about 45 minutes in.) 

The Biden crowd seems rather disappointed that there wasn’t more violence on January 6^th. (Maybe they had paid for there to be more, and feel swindled.) They acted then, and continue to act, as if it were something much worse than it was. As Kimball says,

Turning Washington into an armed camp was mostly theater. There was no threat that the Washington police could not have handled. But it was also a show of force and an act of intimidation. The message was: “We’re in charge now, rubes, and don’t you forget it.” In truth, there is little threat of domestic terror in this country. But there is plenty of domestic conservatism. And that conservatism is the real focus of the establishment’s ire.

This current administration, more than past administrations, has proved that they cannot be trusted. They are lying about what happened on January 6^th entirely. They are holding political prisoners—in the way Cuba would, or the old Soviet Union, or North Korea—but totally anathema to the laws of the United States of America. They are separating and dividing us, weakening us on the international scene, causing a border crisis, and an economic crisis that’s beginning to show in supply chain problems—what we might one day view as a modern famine, where there’s plenty of food grown, but it can’t get into the hands of the hungry. They continue to foment fear of a treatable illness, censoring and mandating at every turn. It’s hard to believe this administration has our health in mind, when it’s obvious that control over us, and our compliance in thought and deed, is what they demand.

Kimball says a sad lesson learned from the January 6^th hoax is:

that America is fast mutating from a republic, in which individual liberty is paramount, into an oligarchy, in which conformity is increasingly demanded and enforced.

Miracle Max and wife Valerie, from The Princess Bride
image found here

In a reference to Benjamin Franklin, after the drafting of the Constitution and announcing it as a republic, can we keep it? We haven’t been fully keeping it for a very long time. But previously it always seemed to be just a matter of getting a little more power in Washington, and then we could straighten things out. What we need now, though, is a wholesale upending of the tyranny and a return to our constitutional republic. That’s a tall order.

I’m not without hope. But, to quote Miracle Max (The Princess Bride) after telling the heroes to “Have fun storming the castle!” he whispers to his wife, “It’ll take a miracle.” I hope a miracle rescue of our Constitution—and freedom for other good people in the world—has been in God’s plans all along, and we’re about to witness it.