Here is a scary story from the USA Today.

One in three U.S. high school students say the press ought to be more restricted, and even more say the government should approve newspaper stories before readers see them, according to a survey being released today.

The survey of 112,003 students finds that 36% believe newspapers should get “government approval” of stories before publishing; 51% say they should be able to publish freely; 13% have no opinion.

UPDATE: More on this from CNN.

… when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.

I read somewhere today, and I can’t remember where, a blogger suggesting that these kids get locked up for having spoken out freely on this issue, and see if that impacts their thinking.

Sent this picture in to GOP Bloggers in support of Shelby’s campaign, and democracy in Iraq.

UPDATE: I see that GOP Bloggers has now posted a “no digitally altered images allowed.” Guess that throws my picture out, since I didn’t actually dip his finger in ink. :-)

UPDATE 2: This blue finger thing is catching on around the web.

Ok this story is six months old, but the picture is too good not to post.

And the funniest thing is that the driver “jumped down from the vehicle and ran to catch a bus.”

Now this is some real tolerance.

“I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for, but I admire their discipline and their organization”

- Howard Dean

Dave at Garfield Ridge pointed out via a comment on Ace of Spades that you could replace “Republican” with “Hitler” here and the quote holds up.

UPDATE: Screamin’ Dean, who “hates Republicans [the people] and everything they stand for” is now “in a strong position to win the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee.”

The party of inclusion and tolerance is nominating as its leader someone who is openly proclaiming to hate others of a different ideology. It seems that should be shocking to me, for some reason, it’s not.

UPDATE 2: Captain Ed weighs in with:

Dean and his followers demonstrate the illness that has infected the American Left since the 1960s. They don’t just oppose — they hate. They hate Republicans, they hate suburbia, they hate just about everything America has done. They also hate it when people point out this rather obvious fact, claiming that their critics engage in censorship and McCarthyism. However, it’s pretty damned difficult to maintain that facade when Dean gets up on a stump and says, “I hate Republicans and everything they stand for.”

Will the Democrats elect Dean chair of the DNC? Are they prepared to endorse his platform of hate? If they do, they just confirm that the party has completely lost its mind, and the leadership has consigned themselves to a generation of diminishing minorities.

Ann Coulter’s latest column, Where’s That Religious Fanatic We Elected?, jumps all over Bush’s comment in his Roe v. Wade anniversary speech.

Maybe he is an idiot. On the 32nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade this past Monday — I was going to say “birthday of Roe v. Wade,” but that would be too grimly ironic even for me — President Bush told a pro-life rally in Washington that a “culture of life cannot be sustained solely by changing laws. We need, most of all, to change hearts.”

HT: Ace

Interesting observation from The Command Post:

Immediately after polls closed, the New York Times grudgingly released their big story: “Amid Attacks, A Party Atmosphere on Baghdad’s Closed Streets.” You almost had to admire the Times’ pluck: they so wanted tragedy, but they were grudgingly admitting the truth.

But then, barely four hours after polls closed, they changed the headline on the exact same story to this: Insurgent Attacks in Baghdad and Elsewhere Kill at Least 24

The 2004 Presidential elections in the US had a 60.7% turnout rate. The Iraqi elections has had an estimated 72% turnout rate.

This is what the World Socialist website had to say:

Initial reports on voter turnout were driven by the political imperative to put the best possible face on the election and influence public opinion in the United States, which is increasingly turning against the war. The turnout figure began at 90 percent plus—numbers reported, naturally enough, on Fox News. Then an Iraqi election official put the figure at 72 percent nationwide. This was subsequently lowered to 60 percent nationwide, then to 60 percent “in some areas.”

Can you imagine? Only 60% voter turnout in the first election in a country which has had an oppressive dictatorial regime for generations? What a miserable failure.

Oh, but it’s not just the World Socialist website, see what Peter Jennings had to say.

ABC News anchorman Peter Jennings insisted that for Iraq’s Sunni population, the vote was still “illegitimate.”

“I don’t want to seem unnecessarily skeptical,” Jennings told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on ABC’s “This Week.” “But in fact the Iraqis seemed to turn out in some places and not turn out in others.”

Though ecstatic Iraqi elections officials said Sunday that turnout nationwide was 72 percent - and may top 90 percent in Shiite areas - Jennings wasn’t satisfied.

“Just today one of the leading Sunni secular leaders said he was worried about the degree of the turnout,” he told Dr. Rice. “And it is similarly true that many Sunnis are not turning out because they think this is an illegitimate election in the presence of a U.S. occupation.”

And regarding the comparison of turnout rates, a commenter on this post points something of further interest out.

The 70% figure compared to US voter turnout understates the the true Iraqi commitment to Democracy. 70% of eligible Iraqi voters will vote. 61% of registered voters in the US voted and this is much more like 50% of eligible US voters as many don’t even register.

UPDATE: Poliblogger has the turnout at 57%. Some comments from Roger Simon:

let’s remind ourselves that turnout in recent US Presidential elections is barely over 50% of eligible voters and that in the nascent days of our democracy, 1824, it was 26.9%.

Cigars in the Sand writes in from Iraq:

I’ve been reading the coverage, and watching the pundits. This appears to be the new line of dissent:

“Yes, Iraqis voted today in massive numbers. But voting isn’t democracy.”

I agree. But that’s also like saying that the best college basketball team didn’t win the NCAA championship. It may be true, but they ARE wearing the rings. Wanna see my purple finger?

And there’s a funny picture in the “Sorry Everybody” theme from Wizbang.

UPDATE 2: Wizbang also has some commentary on the Daily Kos‘ link to the Vietnam voter turnout story, concluding with:

If history is really repeating itself as the loony left would have you believe, does that mean John Kerry will soon be offering to surrender to Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi at secret meetings in France?

After posting about the new Illinois law which bars discrimination based on sexual orientation and does not exempt churches or religious organizations - I decided to a bit of research to figure out how one defines, legally, who “is gay” or who “is heterosexual.”

The law itself tells us how to to define sexual orientation: “actual or perceived heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality or gender-related identity, whether or not traditionally associated with the person’s designated sex at birth.”

As a side note, a search for homosexual orientation protected class generates some interesting related reading.

Also, as another side note, I found this, which applies to the state of Maryland, and presumably would similarly apply to other states who have included anti-discrimination laws that include sexual orientation as a protected class.

Sexual Orientation- refers to which gender an individual is attracted to and has affection for. A person’s Sexual Orientation refers to his or her feelings, not their behavior.

[Of course, the same page also references the Kinsey report as if it were serious science, so the validity of the entire page is in question in my mind, since anyone who has researched it knows that most of Kinsey’s research was based on fraud.]

But assuming for a moment that the definition above is similar to the one referenced by most states barring discrimination against “gays,” how is it even possible to prosecute, defend, or even keep from violating?

Logically, it seems to me, that in order to discriminate, one has to know that the protected class status exists in the first place. So, if the subject never comes up, say, in a hiring interview process, it would be impossible to discriminate. What if the interviewee makes it fairly obvious, but the interviewer is clueless and doesn’t perceive it? The law says actual OR perceived. So maybe potential employers should add this to their interview questions?

“I don’t perceive you to ‘be’ homosexual, but in the interest of compliance with SB3186, I must ask: ‘Are you?’”

or

“You appear to me to participate in the gay lifestyle, but in order to ensure that my perception lines up with what is actual, do you consider yourself to ‘be’ heterosexual, homosexual, bi-sexual or transgender?”

But the even bigger question I have is how does one go about proving in a court of law that they are attracted to members of the same sex? Or proving that that is the reason they did not get a job? It seems simply unprosecutable to me. Bad lawmaking.

I came across this letter to the editor in the Illinois Times, which sums up the question fairly well.

The question needing an answer is, what “evidence” will employers and landlords need from homosexuals, bisexuals, and transsexuals to back up who they are? It may seem bizarre to ask that, but given that such orientation is not always readily visible, shouldn’t some “proof” be provided in such instances?

Now, let’s bring it around to the issue as it relates to churches or mosques or other religious organizations (or even non-religious organizations, such as the Boy Scouts) that may have a religious or moral conviction that homosexual behaviour is wrong, because one of the things that makes the Illinois law big news is that it specifically and intentionally does NOT exempt churches.

If a church has a vacancy on its staff, it will look for someone who has religious beliefs aligning with its own. Let’s pick a hypothetical (fictitious) example. There is a church in downtown Chicago that believes it is a sin to drink Kool-Aid. Why? It doesn’t matter, it is their religious conviction (and right to believe, speak, assemble, and practice), and those that attend their church adhere to this belief. Their pastor has recently left for greener pastures, and they need to hire a new one. In the hiring and interview process, one of the questions that is (understandably) asked is whether or not this new candidate adheres to their beliefs, both in thought and action, that Kool-Aid drinking is morally wrong. If he does not, they would not hire him because he does not adhere to their religious convictions and would not be the best person to lead this group of people in their religious services and practices. If we take the same logic and apply it to a church that believes that homosexual acts are wrong, and the church has a candidate who not only is attracted to the opposite sex but also engages in homosexual sex, the church (as I understand it) would be in violation of SB3186 if they did not hire him for the job on that basis.

Why is there no uproar about this? Where is the defense of the first ammendment? Since when has a person’s self proclamation of their status of protected class (because that is really what defines the sexual orientation here) overridden the first ammendment’s religious freedom protections?

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A note of personal disclosure: My personal conviction (religious belief) is that sexual activity outside of the constraints of marriage between a man and a woman is morally wrong. This means that to me, any sex before marriage, heterosexual sex with someone other than a marriage partner, and homosexual sex are all equally wrong. I also do not believe that God holds someone responsible for that which they are tempted by, rather how they respond to that temptation, so someone who has “feelings and attractions for the same sex” and therefore is defined as “homosexual” in the eyes of some states, is not in fact doing anything morally wrong until they dwell on or act on those feelings or attractions (one might say, temptations). The same goes for a ‘heterosexual person’ who has feelings and attractions for someone besides their spouse. When those thoughts come to their mind, they should replace them with other thoughts and not act upon them. Everyone is tempted. It is how we respond to temptation that is our responsibility. And, one final point: no matter how someone responds to their particular temptations, they should be loved and respected as a person.