Vice President Joe Biden makes at least one outrageous statement each week, and the media hardly notice. When Dan Quayle, vice president under George H. W. Bush, misspelled potato as “potatoe” (he must have been thinking of the plural), it became a media event. Here’s a Biden favorite of mine. Speaking about the mother of Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen, who is very much alive, Biden said:
“His mom lived in Long Island for ten years or so. God rest her soul. And — although, she’s — wait — your mom’s still — your mom’s still alive. Your dad passed. God bless her soul.” (Washington, D.C., March 17, 2010).
On Biden’s inability to count, check out this one:
“Look, John’s last-minute economic plan does nothing to tackle the number-one job facing the middle class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S, jobs.”
Biden has something of a mean streak when it comes to political gaffes. The latest Bidenism is the claim that if the president’s “jobs bill” does not pass, there will be more murders and rapes. Thirty-five million dollars of the “jobs bill” is to go to states so they can hire more policemen. When Republicans made the point that the funding would be temporary, Biden countered with this argument:
“Give me a break, ‘temporary.’ I wish these guys that thought it’s temporary, I wish they had some notion what it’s like to be on the other side of a gun. Or a 200-pound-man standing over you telling you to submit. Folks, it matters. It matters.”
The money is temporary. The states will have to pay the tab after the initial funding is spent. He knows this. He’s attempting to score political points by scaring people.
The hiring of police is a local matter. We don’t have a national police force. There is nothing in the Constitution that gives the Federal Government the authority to direct money from some states to other states to pay for hiring police and teachers. I know it’s done, but it’s unconstitutional.
If local governments need more policemen on the beat and teachers in the classroom because they fear that more people are going to get raped and murdered, then they should raise taxes on the people the police and teachers will serve.
Speaking to firefighters, Biden said: “Police departments, as I said, in some cases literally cut in half, like Camden, N.J., and Flint, Mich. In many cities, the result has been — and it’s not unique — murder rates are up, robberies are up, rapes are up.”
The majority of people in America do not rape and murder, and it has nothing to do with a lack of police and teachers. We don’t rape and murder because we believe it’s wrong to rape and murder. The problem is not with the number of police and teachers in a community, the problem is with people who choose to rape and murder. The same is true with gun crimes. Guns don’t kill people; some people with guns kill people. Most people don’t rape.
One thing that few people want to discuss is why there has been an increase in rape even though we have more police per capita than we’ve ever had. Could it be that what young people are being taught today has something to do with a change in behavior?
The moral climate today is different from the way it was 40 years ago. The survival of the fittest is taught as a biological and scientific fact justified by the major tenets of evolution. Again, not everyone succumbs to the logic of evolutionary theory, but some do, especially when the Christian religion is denigrated any time an atheist gets a chance. Our nation’s public schools teach evolution as gospel but rarely if ever deal with the moral consequences of the theory.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine shooters, justified their actions based on Natural Selection (see here). Harris was wearing “a white T-shirt with the inscription ‘Natural Selection’ on its front.” It was based on a video game of the same name. “The game’s World Wide Web site says it encompasses a ‘realm where anything can happen,’ a place for the ‘bravest of the brave and the fiercest of the fierce. . . . It’s a place where survival of the fittest takes a very literal meaning. . . . It’s the natural way, it’s Natural Selection.”[1]
I don’t know about you, but when I went to high school (I graduated in 1968), there were no policemen or metal detectors. They weren’t needed.
We think that the rise in violent crime is a uniquely American phenomenon. Sweden has a higher percentage of rapes per 100,000 than the United States (53 v. 28). Finland had its own mini-Columbine. “At least seven people were killed when a teenaged gunman opened fire at a school in southern Finland on November 7, 2007 hours after a video was posted on YouTube predicting a massacre there. The gunman was a pupil at Jokela High School, a teacher who witnessed the attack told Reuters, and had walked through the school firing into classroom after classroom. . . . The YouTube video, entitled ‘Jokela High School Massacre—11/7/2007,’ was posted by a user called ‘Sturmgeist89.’ ‘I am prepared to fight and die for my cause,’ read a posting by a user of the same name. ‘I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection.’ Sturmgeist means storm spirit in German.”[2] The shooter described himself as “a social Darwinist.”[3]
Of course, not all Darwinists rape and murder, but there is no doubt that a new worldview prevails around the world that cannot account for an internal moral brake on behavior. I’m not the only one who has seen a link between teaching evolution and an increase in certain crimes. An article appeared in USA TODAY that makes a similar case. It was written by Barbara Reynolds and is titled “If Your Kids Go Ape in School, You’ll Know Why.”[4]
Don’t be surprised if our little darlings go ape or get up to monkeyshines when they return to class.
Misbehavior tops the list of what parents and teachers worry about.
And that’s exactly where such concerns belong, considering what kids are not being taught in school.
In most schools, Johnetta and Johnny are being taught evolution, that humankind evolved from apes.[5]
The issue came to the forefront recently because a school district near San Diego had the good sense to adopt a policy of teaching creationism -much to the dismay of critics, including USA TODAY’s editorial page.
It is amazing that media institutions that virtually worship the First Amendment are the first to toss it when it comes to religious free speech. When both creationism and evolution are taught side by side, you don’t have the establishment of a religion, which the Constitution prohibits, but an opportunity to be protected from one-sided, narrow thinking, which the Constitution encourages.
Prohibiting the teaching of creationism in favor of evolution creates an
atheistic, belligerent tone that might explain why our kids sometimes perform like Godzilla instead of children made in the image of God.
While evolution teaches that we are accidents or freaks of nature, creationism shows humankind as the offspring of a divine Creator. There are rules to follow which govern not only our time on Earth, but also our afterlife.
One philosophy preaches happenstance with mayhem as a conclusion; the other, divine order. One suggests the survival of the fittest; the other, a commitment to serve the weakest and sickest among us. To me, there is no contest. Teaching evolution makes about as much sense as teaching our kids that humankind was grown in a cabbage patch or raised by wolves. Even in the dullest mind, a light bulb should go off: Who created the cabbage, and who made the wolves?
Under the rules of evolution, teachers are forced to answer to King Kong rather than to the King of Kings.
We are not human animals. We have written speech and higher intellect, but more important, we have souls fueled by a spirit of right or wrong.
Human action is determined by core beliefs. Creationism teaches that humans are wonderfully made with the promise of high expectations.
If evolution is forced on our kids, we shouldn’t be perplexed when they beat on their chests or, worse yet, beat on each other and their teachers.
An article published in The Sciences, a New York Academy of Science magazine, stated that “rape is a ‘natural, biological’ phenomenon, springing from men’s evolutionary urge to reproduce.” The authors argue that evolutionary principles explain rape as a “genetically developed strategy sustained over generations of human life because it is a kind of sexual selection—a successful reproductive strategy.” The authors later published a book with the title A Natural History of Rape: Biological Basis of Sexual Coercion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
Biden and his fellow liberals might want to look at the curricula of the public schools. Maybe we don’t need more teachers and police but a better worldview. It will be a lot cheaper and reap better results.
- Kevin Vaughan, “Judge Unseals Autopsy Report on Eric Harris,” Denver Rocky Mountain News (June 25, 1999). [↩]
- “Seven killed at Finland school after YouTube post,” Reuters (November 7, 2007): An almost identical article by “Sky News” does not include the “natural selector” and “natural selection” comments. [↩]
- David Williams, “Eight shot dead including principal in school massacre predicted in YouTube video,” Daily Mail online (November 7, 2007). [↩]
- This article originally appeared in USA TODAY (August 27, 1993), 11A. [↩]
- Actually, evolutionists teach that humans and apes evolved from a distant common ancestor. [↩]