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The Thursday Eudemon: Melvins, Juans, and Brucies

Possibly the best opening line of all news stories this week: A high school principal received a six-day suspension and a letter of reprimand for giving one of his students a wedgie. The rest of the story isn't that great. I was hoping it was a form of corporal punishment, "Now, walk around like that the rest of the day, Bobby." But it's not. The principal was merely being a juvenile.

The current issue of The University Bookman came this week. I haven't had a chance to read much of it, but I checked out its brief review of Bill Kauffman's Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists. It looks pretty good:

[I]n Kauffman's America, there are no grand 'isms' that serve to justify taking children away from parents and to destroy communities in the name of democracy or progress. There are no great causes other than raising families, developing your individual talents and souls (if so inclined), being kind to your neighbor, and having work that is both fulfilling and not all consuming, in surroundings that are scaled for men and women.

Here's hope that the Catechism will get revised to provide that smoking dope isn't a grave sin: Jamaica's Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller will meet with Pope Benedict XVI.

President Bush is authorizing 700 miles of fencing along the Mexican border. If it's effective, I'm for it. If illegal immigration is, you know, illegal, we ought to take effective steps to stop it. We can discuss all day whether we allow too few or too many legal immigrants. I have no opinion. But if we've imposed a cap, we can't tolerate activity that makes it a mockery. It simply makes no sense.

And I assume everyone knows that another set of judges has taken it upon themselves to legislate their morality and world views on homosexuality. This time in New Jersey. It doesn't warrant comment. Everyone knows the stakes by now: The people vote or the judges will rule.

But for a moral recap: The gay activists say it's a matter of civil rights and not letting people push their morality on others. I say it's a matter of common sense and not letting judges push their immorality on others. I don't want judges telling me what is morally permissible, especially when most of my fellow Americans oppose gay unions. And my objections to homosexuality aren't religiously based. They're "taste" based: the whole idea of homosexual activity churns my stomach, and I can't fathom that it's "natural" in a healthy, husband/wife, life-giving way. I think it's natural in a debased sense (chimps do it!), but common sense indicates that it's twisted and ought not be encouraged. Common sense does not indicate that it's twisted to sit down and have a cup of coffee with a black man in a coffee shop, hence the inappropriateness of their comparisons to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

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