It Just Doesn’t Make Sense To Me – School Assignment Discrimination, Free Speech, and Global Warming

These days, there are lots of things in the public arena that just don’t make sense to me.  Here are some of them:

1.       School assignment discrimination? -- The same people who have been saying for the past forty or fifty years that we should not discriminate on the basis of race now are very upset that the Supreme Court has said it is unconstitutional for Louisville’s school district to discriminate on the basis of race when assigning students to schools.  Didn’t they just get what they wanted?  If so, why are they so upset?

          Now, Louisville’s school board is discussing the possibility of assigning students to schools on the basis of income levels rather than race, so they will discriminate and deny a child the school of his choice because his parents make too much or too little money.

          Why doesn’t the board just strive to provide an excellent education at all schools and allow families to choose the public school they think is best for their child?  Or have they decided that social engineering is more important than educating children?

2.       Free Speech? – Many folks who claim to believe in freedom of speech are very upset about two recent Supreme Court cases, one of which decided that a school could discipline a student who held up a poster promoting the use of illegal drugs, and another that decided the McCain-Feingold law was an unconstitutional violation of free speech insofar as it prohibited a group from airing its views on an issue shortly before an election.  If a person is so adamant about protecting the freedom of speech that he is willing to curtail a teacher’s ability to maintain discipline in the classroom in order to allow a student to speak freely, then how could that same person possibly oppose protecting political speech – the very type of speech the First Amendment was intended to protect? 

3.       Global Warming? – How can the same people who know that our computer models cannot begin to predict the weather one year in advance still believe that those same computer models are extremely accurate in predicting climate for the next fifty to one hundred years?  And how can Al Gore, who owns several energy-guzzling mansions and who flies around the world in energy-guzzling jets, be revered as the guru who demands that all the rest of us make huge lifestyle changes to greatly reduce our energy usage? Before being revered as a god, shouldn’t Al be required to earn some credibility by cutting back his own energy usage to something less than 40 times what the average person uses?

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