My Twitter feed has been peppered with many references to last week’s incident involving a flotilla. Admittedly, I do not know much about all that has been said about the incident since my eyes have been (mostly) glued to my Bar Review books.  From what I’ve read, though, at least nine people were killed, the United Nations has already called for an independent inquiry & its Human Rights Council has condemned it, and there have been many protests against and in support of Israel’s actions. Is that a good summary?

My only question is: where the hell is the outrage over the sinking of a South Korean navy corvette* which killed 46 soldiers?  South Korea and the United States has already announced that the attack probably came from North Korea.  Probably. We don’t know for sure.  Why? Because no one wants to piss off North Korea.

South Korea had to send a letter to the U.N. Security Council, petitioning that they do something.  The country that was attacked had to ask the United Nations to do something. After a MONTH!  It took the U.N. how long to respond to Israel’s actions?  Less than a week.

I guess what gripes me about this situation is that South Korea remains at war with North Korea.  You would think if anything got the attention of the UN Security Council, it would be an act of aggression by a war party against its rival.  But no. They can’t be bothered.  Rather, they’re dealing with a situation where activists set sail for a place with a blockade on it, armed with weapons, and got into a fight.

We all jump on Israel’s back for what happened, while North Korea (the zit of East Asia) gets to imprison people for 12 years for crossing over the border requiring a former President to come and get those prisoners, who threaten to test nuclear weapons (that hopefully they don’t have), who puts people in concentration camps for having different political views, manned by a guy who kidnaps people so they can make him movies & spends more money on booze than feeding the people under his command,  essentially act like a baby whenever it wants something, AND gets to sink ships & kill people.

Yeah.

I know better than to hold my breath for the proper outrage.

* Edited. Original draft said a South Korean submarine was hit; it was a corvette.  It’s said that a North Korean submarine was the culprit.  h/t Akin.

Yesterday, I posted a lesson on the First Amendment.  It seems that the Mexican American students and their supporters took the advice of adding speech on top of more speech to heart.  On Thursday, 200 students walked out of the classrooms of Live Oak High School and marched to the school district headquarters.

All I can say is: Go you!

Aren’t you happy that the First Amendment (kinda*) allows you to do that?!

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One thing bugs me about the news article and what it reported about the motives about the marchers:

“The students say they want people to know they’re proud of their heritage and they believe wearing red, white and blue on Cinco de Mayo is disrespectful.”

I get how wearing red, white, and blue could be construed as disrespectful.  But, the school district cannot force people to change just because it’s disrespectful.  If that was true, I’d petition the school districts to ban Spandex from being worn. (Spandex-wearers are disrespecting my vision!  But I digress.)

I applaud you for how you’re trying to get respect, though.  You’re marching, you’re using the First Amendment for good.  You get many props for that.  There’s honor in the way you chose to get your message out.  My only message to you would be: allow others to do the same.

* What’s with the “kinda”?  Again, Tinker allows school officials to limit free speech if that speech disrupts school operations.  Walking out of the classroom (and essentially skipping class) is a major disruption – more so than a “fight”.  The school officials could punish these kids for their walk-out without violating the First Amendment.  Furthermore, each of those students could be detained by a police officer for skipping school, since they are breaking the compulsory education laws of California.  But, given the state of things surrounding this entire controversy, I doubt any of these students will be punished.

Really think about that.  Now, compare that to the shirts.   Regardless of what you may think about wearing the American flag on Cinco de Mayo, what happened to the Live Oak Five was just wrong.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof[.]“

It’s First Amendment Day. Not only because of the fall-out from the Live Oak Five, but because today is the “National Day of Prayer”.   All we need now is government censoring of the press …

The National Day of Prayer is established by statute:

The President shall issue each year a proclamation designating the first Thursday in May as a National Day of Prayer on which the people of the United States may turn to God in prayer and meditation at churches, in groups, and as individuals. 36 U.S.C. § 199.

In my opinion, this statute does not pass the Lemon Establishment Clause test (Prong 1: “The statute must have a secular legislative purpose”).  This is not to say that the government is establishing a religion.  At most, this statute assumes there is an underlying belief in “God” (or other supernatural deity) who people “turn to in prayer”.

From my perspective of the world, belief in God does not equal a religion.  Yes, belief in God is a fundamental belief in many religions, but it’s not religion in and of itself.  (If it were, why haven’t the world’s religions merged already?)  I can believe that God exists and has brothers and sisters that are in charge of their own universes.  Is that belief a religion?  Religion, to me, is more than that.

But I understand that there are those in the world who do equate the acknowledgment that God exists as being religious, thus, the government should have nothing to say on the matter.

It’s been a constant struggle between two sets of people:  those advocating for complete separation of church and state and those who don’t mind religion being mentioned, as long as one religion isn’t favored over the other.  From the cases I’ve read regarding the Establishment Clause, it really is a toss-up on who wins on a certain issue.

Continued…

On May 5, 2010, five students were asked to either change their attire or go home.  These students had the audacity to wear the American flag on Cinco de Mayo.

On any other day at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Daniel Galli and his four friends would not even be noticed for wearing T-shirts with the American flag. But Cinco de Mayo is not any typical day especially on a campus with a large Mexican American student population.

Galli says he and his friends were sitting at a table during brunch break when the vice principal asked two of the boys to remove American flag bandannas that they wearing on their heads and for the others to turn their American flag T-shirts inside out. When they refused, the boys were ordered to go to the principal’s office.

“They said we could wear it on any other day,” Daniel Galli said, “but today is sensitive to Mexican-Americans because it’s supposed to be their holiday so we were not allowed to wear it today.”

The vice principal said the image of the America flag could be incendiary; some students were offended.  On any other day, it would be incendiary.  On any other day, students would not be offended.  On any other day, the five teens would have failed to garner attention.  But, the actions of the vice principal catapulted these students into the national spotlight.  Now it’s the First Amendment versus Respect of Other Cultures.

“Students do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” | Tinker v. Des Moines

The Tinker case is akin to what happened to the Live Oak Five.  Instead of American flags, the students wore black armbands in protest to the Viet Nam War.  Not knowing the motivation behind the students’ decisions to wear the American flag on Cinco de Mayo, it is still safe to say that wearing the flag, in general, is speech meant to impart patriotism.

Going by Tinker, school officials must reasonably foresee that the speech would  cause a “substantial disruption” or “material interference” with school activities or would “invade the rights of others” before censoring.   This is why the vice principal said the American flag shirts were incendiary.  The vice principal only wanted to avoid a fight.  The vice principal only wanted to protect those students who were offended.

Obviously, the vice principal is failing at teaching children the basic lessons of living in the United States.  Here’s the lesson: there is no right to be not offended.  We cannot protect children from everything that may hurt their feelings.  That is not the way the world works.  Teach children that they will be offended, then teach children how to deal with it.  Teach children that instead of literally fighting the offense, they should add more speech on top of it – drown it out.  That’s the beauty of free speech.

Continued…

All I know about secular humanism and the Zinn Education Project, I’ve read in blogs.  Thus, not knowing much about the content of ZEP or other works/statements/anything made by Howard Zinn, I have no opinion as to the accuracy of the blogs.  If you’re interested, then I would suggest researching more into it.  My interest in this topic was sparked by a Twitter conversation I had between a few intelligent people, spurred by Ben Shapiro’s blog entitled, “Religious Fanaticism and Illegal Indoctrination of Your Children.”  It mentioned the Establishment Clause and the Lemon test, so obviously, I was instantly drawn in by the promise of discussing Constitutional law.

Continued…

You ever find yourself stumped as to what word to use when describing someone? Is it African American or black? Is it Oriental or Asian or Asian American?  Can I call this person short or is it ‘vertically challenged’ now?

In situations like these, you find yourself between a rock and a hard place – you don’t want to offend (and you certainly don’t want to get your ass kicked for pissing off the wrong person) but you can’t accurately describe someone without using racial or gendered modifiers.  You can’t tell that joke you that made you laugh because it’s not “PC”.*  You can’t speak your mind because you’re straight-jacketed by this social contract.

I dislike “political correctness” because it reaffirms the assumption that if it is racial then it is racist.  If it is gendered, it is sexist.  It doesn’t matter that someone is just using an adjective to describe a characteristic; the mere acknowledgment of the characteristic, the pointing out of “difference”, is racism/sexism/homophobia/whatever-ism.

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For certain crimes, there is an element called mens rea which looks into the state of mind of the actor.  Was the act intentional or negligent?  Was it planned and malicious or was it just an accident?  Mens rea is important as it can decide whether someone is convicted of first degree murder or involuntary manslaughter.

I mention mens rea because it provides the best analogy of how I approach racism.  It helps me distinguish between a fight worth fighting from one that is merely cosmetic.  I look at a situation and ask myself, essentially, “Is this something I should be concerned about?”

Take for example last month’s uproar about Senator Harry Reid’s comment that Obama has “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” After reading a few articles about it, I brushed it off as negligent (well, actually stupid).  I did not see a malicious intent in Reid’s comment.  I didn’t read it as Reid purposely being racist against blacks or then-candidate Obama.  I realize there is an interpretation of the comment that leads to the conclusion that Reid implicitly believes that the “Negro dialect” is uncouth and would hinder a Presidential candidate from winning the Presidency.  But hey – I believe it’s true that not all manners of speech are treated equal.  I do not expect a candidate that only speaks in Hawaiian pidgin to win many votes.   But I digress.  I didn’t see a racial intent behind Reid’s words, I just saw him saying “Obama appeals to all audiences”, much like news anchors.

The problem with political correctness is that it treats this kind of negligent statement the same as fire-hosing Civil Rights protesters.  The former makes me face-palm at the inanity, the latter makes me want to actually do something to change it.  Doling out the death penalty for a two-buck crime just takes away from actual progress.  Keep your cosmetic hang-ups to yourself, I rather work towards a real solution, kthxbai. Continued…

When I was in high school, my friends and I had a joke that we had to avoid the following topics in order to remain friends: race, religion, and politics. What I did not realize then that this is not a joke for some people – this is an active (or is it passive?) way of dealing with others in the world. Rather than it being a joke, it really is a rule. Up until five years ago, I would have been more than compliant of this implicit standard of social relationships. I liked having friends; it seemed antithetical to be able to talk about “race, religion or politics” and still have friends.

But after five years of talking politics with people much smarter than me, I am curious as to why the stakes are so high. Why was it assumed that relationships would be better off not discussing certain topics? Is it because we knew it would only end in a fight?

What I have learned that it is possible to get into these high stakes discussions without fighting, even end in a way where both parties have higher respect for their “adversaries”.  Mind you, I have had my fair share of heated discussions, but nothing to the point where I wanted to end the friendship (or acquaintanceship if that was the case).  Of course, to be truly honest, some of those discussions have resulted in me losing some respect; not because I disagreed with the other person but because of the manner in which the discussion took place.

I am a glutton for intellectual stimulation. I like learning new things and seeing if it fits into the vision of how I see the world. I like seeing things from both sides (or all sides because nothing is that black and white). I like to be confronted with facts and logical arguments. I like seeing things from different perspectives because it just one more way of figuring out this big puzzle that I call life.  But most of all, I just like being able to discuss issues without it getting personal.

What I don’t like or appreciate is the feeling of being attacked for what I believe. Or the feeling that the other person thinks I’m just a lost soul wandering around without a clue as to what is going on. Or the feeling like they are trying to convert me to the “right” (or “left”) way of thinking. Most of all, I absolutely abhor being talked down to or being disrespected.

Continued…