The Press-Dispatch
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Opinion C-2 Wednesday, December 25, 2013 The Press-Dispatch Observations by Thomas Sowell Crocodile tears Editor's note: Thomas Sowell is off. The following column is by Erick Erickson. It is an odd fight. Such a weird little battle over meaningless and known outcomes. Conservatives, aware because of press reports and congressional leaks, knew what would be in the Paul Ryan-drafted budget plan. The conservative groups released statements in opposition to the plan based on what they had been told. But there was never any doubt about the Ryan plan passing. After the plan was publicly unveiled by the Republicans at 6 o'clock on a Tuesday night, conservative fears were realized. Those things they knew would be in the plan were, in fact, in the plan. The plan funded Obamacare. The plan raised taxes. The plan broke the sequestration spending lim- Looking Out the Office Window December 19, 1947 Editor's note: Many of our more "mature" readers will always remember the column "Looking Out The Office Window" by Publisher Frank Heuring's late grandfather A. J. Heuring. As in past years at Christmas time we are using one of his "Christmas" columns. By A. J. Heuring It was Christmas Eve night. Dr. Behring had met a number of happy children celebrating Christmas. A diphtheria epidemic was on. The doctor shrugged his shoulders but passed on, mentally commenting to let them enjoy themselves while they may for tomorrow, they too, may be dead, and uttered an additional thought out loud. "Oh—the base stupidity of the learned doctors. With my serum I might save the life of every child in this crowd, and without it many of them will die." When he reached the upstairs room of the sick child, the nurse was hovering over her charge, a little girl. A white-clad doctor gazed at his assistant, then shook his head sorrowfully. "The beautiful child, so young to die," he muttered. "It will be a sorrowful Christmas in the little cottage tomorrow." "But what of Dr. Behring's wonderful discovery," the assistant asked "It worked wonderful cures on monkeys, will the medical society permit him to use it on her?" The answer was that they would not. The little girl had planned to carol, but the assistant said there would be no caroling for her. As the assistant and the nurse talked, the door opened, and the black-clad figure of Dr. Behring strode toward the group around the little girl's bed. The crowd looked with questioning eyes as he lifted the little hand to feel the pulse. Without answering the question on all their faces, he merely shook his head and started for the door. The nurse gasped, knowing this was the last chance when Dr. Behring should walk out. She lay aside all conventions, ran to the doctor and grasp his coat sleeve. "She is dying Dr. Behring. You alone can save her." "You do not understand," the doctor said, "the Society will not permit it. If I should give her my serum and she should die I would be branded a murderer, hounded from the country, perhaps myself condemned to die." The nurse answered but her voice was barely audible when she said, "And can there be any happiness for you, living always with the memory that this tiny child died when your hand might have saved her? She is dying, Dr. Behring." "Dying!" Dr. Behring reaped the single word, and again repeated it. The black bag he carried was dropped upon a stand beside the child's bed. Without a word, the nurse picked up the bag, opened it, and withdrew a shiny brass and steel instrument and a tiny bottle. Dr. Behring took the material from her, smiled a grim approval as she washed a patch on the child's arm with alcohol. Then the doctor thrust the needle into the bottle, adjusted the contents of the Continued on page 3 No spin zone—by Bill O'Reilly The Christmas spirit Anyone offended by public displays of Christmas needs to see a psychiatrist. Are we clear on this? You are a loon if the sight of baby Jesus arouses anger or sadness in you. Get help. This brings us to the governor of Rhode Island, Lincoln Chafee. He recently told me on national television that the reason he will not use the word "Christmas" in describing the state Christmas tree is that the word might offend non-Christians. The governor calls the state-purchased symbol a "holiday tree." My reply to the governor was that by excluding the word "Christmas," he might be offending the 73 percent of Americans who describe themselves as Christian, not to mention the 2.2 billion Christians worldwide. Chafee chafed when he heard that but had no answer. And then the governor did a very interesting thing: He announced the lighting of the "holiday tree" in Providence a full 30 minutes before the cord was plugged in. Very few Rhode Islanders even knew about the tree lighting because it was done so surreptitiously. Chafee did that because he feared protestors would do what they did last year: sing Christmas carols at the lighting. And we can't have that, now, can we? Jon Stewart and his merry band of elves will tell you that the so-called "War on Christmas" is a figment of the imagination, perhaps a result of indigestion after eating too much holiday pudding. Stewart's posture is similar to what Ebenezer Scrooge put forth when the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come told him he was bound for hell. I am channeling Charles Dickens to see whether the ghost can visit Stewart on Christmas Eve. I'll let you know what happens. There is something to the argument that there are more important things to worry about than whether people like Christmas. But the assaults against the national holiday are annoying, unnecessary and often disrespectful. I mean, here's how bad it is in this country: A pastor in Arkansas canceled a play called "Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown" because some nutty atheist objected to public school kids seeing it on church grounds. So Charlie, Snoopy and Linus were thrown under the bus by a Christian cleric. Good grief! For all of you separation-of-churchand-state fans, here's the deal: Jesus of Nazareth was a man. In fact, he was the most influential person ever born. A third of the world's population has signed on to the Christian edicts: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. That sounds like a good thing. So, when President Grant honored Jesus by signing into law the national holiday of Christmas in 1870, the nation certified that a positive message of generosity and peace was worthy of a day off. Pretty much everybody was on board. But not today. In our current state, the Thomas More Law Center has to litigate against attacks on Christmas every year. Anti-religion zealots put up billboards in Times Square denouncing Christmas as a "myth." Rabid secularists bridle at any mention of Jesus or his nice mom and dad. To them I say: Peace on Earth and tough. You don't like the federal holiday? Try to rescind it. Start with our pal Lincoln Chafee. See how far you get with that. And by the way, Merry Christmas to all. Even you loons. Points to ponder—by Rev. Ford Bond That's What It's All About American culture has collapsed, and the reverberations are reaching into small town America; news items speak of lawsuits or civil actions, with schools and local government banning or limiting Christmas displays and programs. In Greene County, Indiana, a parent of a 4th grader became irate when the teacher read to her class "A Charlie Brown Christmas." The parent said they did not want their child indoctrinated—they would let the child decide religion when they got older. No more Christmas stories. In Amish country—Daviees County, Indiana, a school system was threatened with a lawsuit if they did a "traditional" Christmas program with songs about Jesus. This year not even the song, "We wish you a Merry Christmas," was used. A poem set to the "Night before Christmas" is making the rounds on the internet. It summarizes how effective political correctness A woman's perspective—by Mona Charen Daughters and sex Columnist Ross Douthat has stirred up a hornet's nest by commenting on a new study suggesting that being the parent of a girl may nudge people toward the Republican Party. Douthat speculated that watching daughters cope with a "social landscape in which sex has been decoupled from marriage" and in which young men cruise through the sexual marketplace, leaving broken hearts in their wake, may cause mothers and fathers to embrace more conservative mores regarding love and sex. Well, based on the sulfuric response, Douthat has transgressed gravely. Ann Friedman, writing in New York magazine, thunders: "Are we supposed to believe that the solution to a biological double-standard is a sexual double-standard? That women who want it all later in life must spend their youth prim and sexless, waiting for men to prove that they've got themselves together both professionally and emotionally? There's one little problem: We like sex. None of us are going back to a world in which we only put out once he's put a (promise/engagement/ wedding) ring on it." Every generation believes it has discovered sex. But Friedman's heated denials notwithstanding, women (on average) want different things from sexual relationships than men, and recent generations of women have been ill-served by feminism's embrace of the sexual revolution. Feminists posited that women and men were identical in their sexualities, and that only an absurd double standard had required men to treat women respectfully. its that, only a month before, Republican leaders had said would never be broken. Speaker Boehner then did something curious. He held two press conferences wherein he lashed out at conservative groups. He denounced them for making up their minds before the plan was publicly unveiled. Never mind that everyone knew what would be in the plan. Never mind that he only gave the public 36 hours to explore the text of the plan—a violation of a campaign promise to give at least 72 hours of examination. Speaker Boehner's statement sounded like former Speaker Pelosi claiming we had to pass the Ryan plan to find out what was in Continued on page 3 When modern feminism debuted in the 1960s, it didn't just urge women to be like men; it encouraged them to be like the worst men— carelessly promiscuous, vulgar and selfish. Some men treated women as disposable pleasure vessels. Feminists regarded this not as a disgrace but as a challenge. Women who behaved the same way toward men were hailed as feminist pioneers. How do we know that women are more interested in committed relationships than in casual sexual encounters? Only an age that has lost touch with common sense would ask, but as it happens, there is social science evidence. Consider the differences in behavior in which men outnumber women and vice versa, i.e., the sex ratio. As James Q. Wilson noted in "The Marriage Problem," at various times and places, when marriageable men greatly outnumber marriageable women, monogamy and sexual restraint prevail. That's because men are forced to compete on women's terms. The reverse is true as well. When men call the shots, because women greatly outnumber men, monogamy declines and promiscuity increases. These patterns have been observed from China to Louisiana to post-World War I Europe. Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, authors of "Premarital Sex in America found the same on college campuses. " . . . Virginity is more common on those campuses where women comprise a smaller share of the student body . . . By contrast, on campuses where women out- number men, they are more negative about campus men, hold more negative views of their relationships, go on fewer dates, are less likely to have a boyfriend, and receive less commitment in exchange for sex." Without permission from feminists, the hookup culture, which disserves both sexes but women more, would be impossible. A recent New York Times magazine piece about hooking up suggested that college women who arrive on campus hoping to find a boyfriend are quickly disappointed. They sometimes offer oral sex in a first encounter (not date) as much to "get it over with" as anything else. Feminism has brought this liberation to you, ladies. Both men and women express regret about casual sexual hookups, but women more. And the premise that women want exactly the same things as men in just the same way has created a booming industry of campus rape accusations, miscarriages of justice, Take Back the Night marches and mutual suspicion between the sexes. Why are there no men marching against female sexual harassment and vanishingly few charges? Did dramatically more men become rapists after the sexual revolution encouraged drunken bed hopping, or have the looser standards confused more young men about the (brace yourselves) greater vulnerability of women? And who taught men that women didn't need special consideration of any kind? Most women don't want what the worst men have always wanted—sex with no strings attached. Women are all about strings. They want intimacy, tenderness and commitment—all of which have been placed further out of reach by feminism's conquest of the culture. has been in changing Merry Christmas to the Winter Holiday. Allow me to present the poem with a little tweaking. Twas the month before Christmas when all through our land, Few Christians were praying or taking a stand. Many whispered the PC Police had taken away, The reason for Christmas, and many were scared to say. The Court had raised such a clatter, Congress conceded to eliminate Jesus as a public matter. The children were told by the courts not to sing, About Shepherds and Wise Men and Angels and things. It might hurt people's feelings, teachers were told to say December 25th must be observed as just a "Holiday" The media wrote not a word as they took away our faith Americans were forbidden to speak of God's saving grace. The media kept watch less the public got incensed, Because Christmas must become a secular event. Retailers were allowed to promote Hanukah and Kwanzaa, As they had hopes to sell books or a new Honda. Shoppers went wild with cash and credit Assaulting their fellow man, just to get it! Vulgarity from Miley, a new Galaxy and I-Pod Christmas was changing, into something quite odd! At Target, they hung the trees upside down At Lowe's, the word Christmas was nowhere to be found. At K-Mart and Staples and Penny's and Sears, You won't hear the word Christmas; it would hurt your ears. Retail with prodding had embraced di-ver-si-ty While Christ was erased because of sensitivity. The true Gift of Christmas was downplayed and discarded The reason for the season was stopped before it started. So as you celebrate the season under your "Dream Tree" Continued on page 3 The P Dispatch ress- MR. AND MRS. FRANK HEURING, PUBLISHERS ANDREW G. HEURING, EDITOR JOHN B. HEURING, ADVERTISING MANAGER Wednesday, December 25, 2013 Entered at the Post Office in Petersburg, Indiana for transmission through the mails as Periodical Mail, Postage paid at Petersburg, Indiana. Published weekly. Change of Address—Subscribers changing addresses will please give old address as well as new one along with phone number. We cannot guarantee prompt change unless this is done. Postmaster: send changes to Post Office Box 68, Petersburg, Indiana 47567-0068. Phone 354-8500 • FAX—354-2014 P.O. BOX 68, PETERSBURG, INDIANA 47567 E-mail—subscribe@pressdispatch.net (604-340)