It’s rare that elected officials of all ideological stripes agree on how to spend money, and it’s even rarer that elected officials agree regarding cutting taxes. What is clearly unanimous in the state of Alabama is widespread understanding, and literally everyone is in agreement that state coffers are overflowing.
Recently, API began a project to gather information from school board members from across the state in an effort to inform parents and the general public about how elected and appointed school board members felt about issues such as Critical Race Theory, Social Emotional Learning, school choice and education related equity.
Listen to 1819 News Contributor Stephanie Holden Smith on Midday Mobile with Sean Sullivan as they discuss the Respect for Marriage Act.
Listen to 1819 News Contributor Stephanie Holden Smith on News & Views with Joey Clark as they discuss the "test" recently sent out to Mountain Brook students, the continuous modifying of definitions being attempted by the Left, and the fact that Republicans don't always walk the talk.
As I’ve pointed out recently, members of Congress tend to name pieces of legislation the exact opposite of what the bill actually does. The “Respect for Marriage Act” is no different.
Listen to 1819 News Contributor Stephanie Holden Smith on Midday Mobile with Sean Sullivan as they discuss "action civics" and Doug Jones' involvement in pushing a proposed bill in the U.S. House of Representatives called the "Civics Secures Democracy Act."
Listen to 1819 News Contributor Stephanie Holden Smith on The Jeff Poor Show as they discuss the AEA professional association and its apparent focus on its members and not on education, as evidenced by abysmal student test scores.
Listen to 1819 News Contributor Stephanie Holden Smith on News & Views with Joey Clark as they discuss her op-ed on the Civics Secures Democracy Act, parents running for school board positions throughout the state in an effort to take back schools for their kids, and the Biden administration's radical decision to refuse school lunches for poor children unless schools cave to the administration's sexual agenda.
The Civics Secures Democracy Act is clearly a leftist attempt at a civics coup; it must be stopped.
The Alabama Department of Public Health and their unelected leader, Scott Harris, are back to pushing masks as a COVID mitigation strategy.
"The old canard says, ‘You can’t legislate morality.’ The truth is you can’t avoid legislating morality. Every law says, ‘It’s not okay to do this thing’ or ‘You must do this thing.’ Every law legislates morality. Morality will be legislated. The only question is, whose morality?” (God, Caesar, and Idols, by Rick D. Boyer)
Last week, the National Education Association’s (NEA) Representative Assembly met in Chicago. Kim Anderson, NEA Executive Director, made the claim that, “If we don’t achieve racial justice in our schools, we cannot expect to achieve it in our society. It begins with us.” In a speech to the assembly, she stated that, “students are organizing, marching, posting, and speaking up for the progress we must continue to make if the United States is to be a more perfect union.”
We’ve probably all heard the adage, “hope is not a strategy.” Books have been written on it, troops and teams have been motivated by it, parents and politicians have used it as a reason to create attainable goals and plan for the future. What we might not have seen or even imagined before is “hope” being used as both strategy and justification for a public health response to a worldwide pandemic.
Despite politically charged calls for packing the court, I don’t believe we’re witnessing a Constitutional crisis at all; recent SCOTUS rulings actually assert that our system works when judicial activism is left idling in the minority. That will work for people on both sides of the aisle if we have patience to let it. However, I do believe that what we’re witnessing is a crisis of a love of self and a love of statism.
It’s worth noting that it is extraordinarily unusual for any governmental entity to willingly yield power. The majority of the Court admitted that they wrongly took away power from the people and their legislators and gave it back. Admittedly, it took fifty years and the lives of 63 million innocents before it was returned; we should take note of that as well.
While politics are clearly and incontrovertibly relational, political campaigns have developed into something entirely different. In fact, the political campaign version of, “you can catch more flies with honey” must be, “you can catch more flies with money.”
Sadly, too many of us spend our lives looking for something other than God to fill our longing for meaning: business, family, entertainment, and politics come to mind. But in relentlessly pursuing secular things that hold little eternal value, we remain unfulfilled and wonder why our lives never reach a state of satisfaction. There is no doubt that many people pursuing things other than God achieve a measure of “happiness” for a time: Fame. Comfort. Status. Pleasure. Wealth.
People tend to make jokes and judgements about lawyers, politicians, and lobbyists being liars and/or living without personal scruples; politics does indeed seem to breed some more than capable fish-story-tellers.
Aren’t individual liberty and freedom two of our most valuable and foundational tenants? What happened to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Are they now antiquated notions in an increasingly global society? We better hope not and we better advocate otherwise. Our republican principles have enabled the greatest political experiment in the history of civilization to succeed and the entire world is better for it.
There is no such thing as a "culture war." That’s not to say that we’re not in a surface war with each other in our society, only that the specific term “culture war” is used by opportunists on both sides of the aisle to silence advocates for change.
