Progressives Are Still Winning Elections
We conservatives often seem to assume that the general public is on our side, that a “moral majority” once awakened will sweep away the reality-denying woke progressives in the upcoming elections. I’m not so sure.
In the Chicago mayoral election, the main issue was the soaring crime rate, with another being the abysmal state of Chicago schools. Dissatisfaction was such that the incumbent mayor, Lori Lightfoot, couldn’t even win place in the preliminary election to narrow the field. The two who did, both Democrats, were Paul Vallas, a former school superintendant with a record of taking on the teachers’ union, who campaigned on a tough-on-crime platform that won the support of the police union; and Brandon Johnson, a former teachers’ union organizer who accepts much of the “defund the police” agenda in supporting “non-police” interventions and opposing hiring more officers. And yet Chicago voters elected Johnson, even though he is further to the left than Lightfoot.
Meanwhile, in the classic “purple” swing state of Wisconsin, which often votes for the Democrat in presidential elections but has a near super-majority of Republicans in the state legislature, the election for the state Supreme Court featured a race between the Republican former state Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly, and the Democratic ultra-progressive Circuit Judge Janet Protasiewicz. In the race, which attracted tons of out-of-state-money, making it the most expensive judiciary race in American history, Protasiewicz–who raised five times as much money as her opponent–won, flipping the balance of the court to the progressive side.
Take note, Republicans: The midterm elections may not have been a fluke. The public may not be as conservative as you think it is.
Math Is Racist
Having all but ruined the Humanities and the Social Sciences, post-Marxist critical theory is now targeting the ostensibly objective disciplines of science and mathematics. A controversy has broken out in Canada over education reforms that maintain that math is racist.
Jason To, president of the Ontario Mathematics Coordinators Association (OMCA), gave a presentation on “White Supremacy in Math Education,” stirring up critics. In response, the OMCA explained, “What is concerning is how math facts are juxtaposed with rigid views of race and gender to legitimize racism and the erasure of transgender people.”
As reported by the Toronto Sun,
The statement, signed by To and the executive of the OMCA, goes on to say that their issue is not with a math fact, “but rather how a math fact along with its inherent social privilege of objectivity can be taken and weaponized to uphold bigotry and white supremacy ideology.”
So math facts carry an “inherent” social privilege? And the problem is “objectivity”? What is left of mathematics without facts and objectivity? And how is emphasizing facts and objectivity “white supremacy”? Are they saying that black Canadians and non-Europeans have no capacity for facts and objectivity? That sounds like racism to me. And it would come as a surprise–and an insult–to black mathematicians and mathematicians of China, India, and other non-European nations that routinely trounce North American students in “objective” test scores.
Outlawing the “Seal of Confession”
In the practice of pastoral care, when ministers give spiritual counsel to sinners, the promise of confidentiality is crucial. And in confession and absolution, as practiced by Catholics and also Lutherans, Anglicans, and Orthodox, the “seal of the confessional” is absolute.
But Delaware and Vermont are both considering bills that would, in the words of an article on the subject, “prohibit any clergy member from asserting the right to a privileged conversation during confessions if information about child abuse or neglect is revealed.”
What do you think about this? Children do need to be protected. And Catholic priests, who are objecting to these bills the most strenuously, do not have the best record on the issue. But we also have the First Amendment guarantees of religious liberty. And for the state to interfere and even criminalize a pastor’s “cure of souls” is surely an assault on religion.
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