Maybe this is yet another sign that—despite my wishes—I really should leave Utah. The Daily Herald reports:
Some local parents are leveling serious charges against Alpine School District and Brigham Young University.
Parents are saying district and university officials are participating in “a deliberate course of action to subvert the moral fabric of a society with the goal to eliminate the worship of deity and replace it with the worship of man.”
These parents acknowledge their argument is both complex and far-reaching. If true, the charge means the school district is either wittingly or unwittingly part of a nationwide socialist movement. Parents say it is the manifestation of a specific warning given by LDS Church President Ezra Taft Benson, who had named names in the warning.
Yes, you read that right. Brigham Young University, one of the most religious and conservative schools in the country, is somehow complicit in a godless socialist agenda. Confused? You’ll have to read the entire article.
This story just goes to demonstrate something I wrote about last week: that too many people (and Mormons, in particular) are under Glenn Beck’s spell.
The conservative insanity is officially out of control. BYU is the most unsocialist, pro-capitalistic school just about anywhere. Are these people going to next start attacking the church hierarchy because the LdS church provides some social services (i.e. in a small way supports *gasp* SOCIAL JUSTICE?!)
These people scare me. Not least of all because I AM a (gay, atheist) communist, i.e. the embodiment of their version of evil.
Some might say that Utah State University is in on this too.
http://news.hjnews.com/news/local_news/article_a3708c4a-4aa8-11df-b603-001cc4c002e0.html
While I don’t think USU has a “socialist agenda,” I was pretty disappointed to learn that Danny Glover would be speaking at my graduation.
I’ll be lucky enough to miss the Glover thing, but its a shame we can’t the Lethal Weapon team together here, if we’re going to not make sense with this stuff why not go all the way?
The comments on that link are hideous. I don’t mean to go off topic (well perhaps I do) but I’m fairly conservative and I’ve never had a grade knock for not agreeing with a teacher with argument. Has anyone ever been nearly failed because they didn’t “regurgitate their teacher’s brainwash leftist lies”? Its sure as hell not happened to me, and I once called a book about a family surviving Nazi Poland “boring”.
You can say the Humanist Manifesto is based on the Communist Manifesto only if you have read neither. I doubt very many of these people have read any of the materials they purport to cite. As for USU, and good little BYU drone will tell you it is and always has been a den of iniquity.
Noobs.
I find it disappointing that hardly anyone admits to being a liberal or socialist anymore. Those few who do are demonized today. Students today always seem to state an apologetic alligence to conservativism.
I fully admit to being a practical socialist and a liberal with underlying moral values. (I dislike ideological extremes so I do make apologies of my own.) As a practical socialist I embrace FDR’s New Deal governance (check your history books), which was a practical blend of socialism and captialism. It has been the basis for our modern explosion of middle class wealth and stable economy. The middle class has increasingly suffered under the Reagan Revolution of big-business-dominated capitalism. The New Deal policies favored and protected the middle class. These have been removed in favor of an ideological belief in unregulated ‘free markets’. Unfortunately, the lack of thoughtful government regulation only gives freedom of the powerful to manipulate markets exploit the working class.
The current conservative extremism is very ironic because it is supported by many in the middle class, but its policies are regressively pitted against the middle class.
Here is another irony. The only place where labor unions have any power is in professional athletics. It is also the only place where the working class has received a good portion of the profits of that industry. The unrelenting Republican destruction of labor unions in other industries has impoverished the workers and created unsafe working environments in many industries. Think coal miners, auto workers, Walmart employees, etc. etc. The current conservatism only benefits the wealthy class of power, so why do you middle-class students claim conservative allegiance?
I don’t see economics as a complete zero-sum situation, but wealth is finite so if an ideology is permitted to move to its logical end then the situation does become a zero-sum game. Total socialism destroys the wealthy class and total capitalism impoverishes the working class. Thus, I am a practical socialist who supports a well-regulated capitalist system designed to ensure that most of the wealth goes to the working middle class.
I welcome Danny Glover.
Great post, Vince. If you have not read Laborem Exercens, it is worth a read. John Paul II tries to find a middle way between Marxism and “rigid capitalism” (libertarian free market capitalism). I think it is very close to what you are expressing in your post.
Interestingly enough, he thinks both of those extremes (Marxism and rigid capitalism) make the same error: materialism. Our economic errors are really errors of philosophical anthropology. As Pope Benedict recently wrote in
Caritas in Veritate (a document where he controversially called for a “world political authority”), “the social question has become a radically anthropological question”.
Here is Laborem Exercens:
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091981_laborem-exercens_en.html
Here is Caritas in veritate:
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate_en.html
While both documents are certainly expressed from a Christian point of view, I would expect that there is a lot in both text that secular humanists would find attractive.
OK. These will take me some time to get through. I will take on JPII’s encyclical first.
“The unrelenting Republican destruction of labor unions in other industries has impoverished the workers and created unsafe working environments in many industries.”
I could hardly be accused of being a conservative, what with being a strong proponent for social contract theory and social mutualism, but labor unions seem to me to be the wrong answer to the problem. The abuse of the employees can really be attributed to supply and demand – the supply for a work force and the demand for it. When the supply is large and the demand small, employers have a very asymetric portion of power in that relationship and can readily abuse it, as is blindingly apparent in things like the coal mine wars of the east coast in the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. However unions move the abuse in the other direction, by creating a monopoly on the supply of workers so that the workforce has an asymetric amount of power over the employers, similarly ripe for abuse (for example, the lack of merit based analysis and pay in many school systems, or the artificially inflated pay of unskilled or lowskilled workers). That is a no better scenario.
It seems to me that as with other market based imbalances, the answer isn’t to legislate which side has the imbalance (unions or employers), but rather put regulations in place that moderate the affects of the imbalances. You don’t answer a monopoly (employers) with another monopoly (unions); you answer it with moderating regulations.
Though with that said, we likely agree far more than we disagree on the issue, in that I no more want to hand employers a free pass than you do. I just want to address the problem in a different way. (as an aside, it is really jacked up that my industry was the one industry left out of the california overtime laws. In california, an employer must pay overtime to a salaried employee if they work more than 40 hours a week, even though they are salaried… unless they are an IT professional, the profession that was most in need of some moderating effect on employer expectations for their time)