Let’s get Wyoming education right

Wyoming Senate

Governor Gordon’s recent “State of the State” address urged legislators to address Wyoming’s education program in the long term. “This is far more than a budget issue,” he said, “and I want our stakeholders and our communities to be involved in establishing a plan and vision.” Wise words.

It was refreshing to hear the governor go beyond the worn-out bromides that the only way to serve Wyoming’s children is through budget increases. He noted that: “Education is changing.” No doubt, he was talking about the seismic effects that COVID-19 had in driving students online and masking them once they returned.

But changes in educational attitudes had been underway long before COVID-19 crushed funding sources, scattered communities, and muted voices. Increasingly, parents have been calling for reformed educational structures that are more responsive to local voices and family values. When Zoom brought classrooms under the watchful eye of parents everywhere, it only accelerated that trend.

“People want, and need, more opportunities and approaches,” Gordon said, “Wyoming needs to respond.” He is not the only one saying it. This year’s legislative session has a flood of education bills filed for introduction. Nearly 10 percent of more than 400 bills under consideration deal with education. 

As legislators begin the task of sorting through this stack of bills, let us reassert some basic pillars of education. These should be the drivers of educational reform, not mere afterthoughts.

First, the education of minor children is not the primary responsibility of the state, but of the parents. This is—and must remain—the bedrock principle of every decision that the legislature makes. To follow the governor’s call for the involvement of “stakeholders and communities,” in the law-making process means to recognize that the principal stake holders are the parents themselves.

This is not a departure from the Wyoming Constitution’s requirement that “The legislature shall provide for the establishment and maintenance of a complete and uniform system of public instruction.” Rather, it reminds the legislature that this constitutional provision was written by Wyoming parents and for Wyoming parents.

Wyoming’s school system should not serve the interest of the state—or any other actor that might coopt the education system to advance its own agenda. Our legislators must not be overawed by the slick slogans of monied lobbyists claiming to speak for the children. This is especially true when those voices would overpower the voices of parents themselves, as though lobbyists and bureaucrats are better equipped to love children than their own parents.

Second, policy makers and parents alike know that “there is no such thing as a free (school) lunch.” Money, whether received from a national education organization or bestowed from a government agency, will inevitably come with strings attached. Those strings must be disclosed with full transparency in order truly to count their cost.

On the other hand, parents and policy makers must remember always that this money did not come from the government, but from the parents and grandparents of Wyoming students. For legislators, that means faithful stewardship of hard-earned dollars that were taken from their students’ homes. For parents, it means demanding that your dollars be controlled locally. 

The third principle is subsidiarity. While acknowledging that community cooperation is necessary to accomplish some educational tasks, subsidiarity demands that such cooperation take place as close to the parents as is possible for the task. 

Sometimes, it means that education dollars should be put directly into the hands of the parents themselves. When parents find that their child needs something that the local school cannot provide, parents should be given the option to be refunded some of their tax dollars to compensate for the expenditure. 

It is simply unfair to expect parents to pay twice—once for an education product that they cannot use, and again for the education that their child truly needs. Legislators should not second-guess such a parent’s assessment of what is necessary for his child. To do so is arrogantly to deny the first principle of education. 

Of course, refunds of government money can easily be laden with strings that violate the principle enunciated above. Legislators should be careful to restrain themselves from the human tendency to use such money to manipulate parents. When possible, such refunds are better accomplished by tax credits than by refunded taxes.

Finally, it is important to acknowledge that conservation of the status quo is not the same as conservatism. Legislators and parents should take this watershed moment as an opportunity to reassess every aspect of Wyoming’s education policy. The principles of child-centered, parent-driven education are what need to be conserved, not past compromises. 

Parents, in cooperation with legislators should work to reject progressive harms that have become baked into current law. As the governor said, “Wyoming needs to respond.”

Family bonds, motherhood and contract law

The New York Times headline read: “Couple Forced to Adopt Their Own Children After a Surrogate Pregnancy.” It caught my attention. Such an indignity would be outrageous! 

But then I started asking questions. How could a mom and dad adopt their own children in the first place? Who would be so evil as to force anyone into adopting children that they did not want to raise?

Upon examination, it turns out that almost every word of the headline was either false or selected to hide the truth. To parse this twisted sentence, the reader must enter the world of Humpty Dumpty where a word “means exactly what I choose it to mean.”

Let’s start with the phrase, “forced to adopt.” Normally, it would mean that people who did not want to be parents where, forced into raising children. But this story is not about reluctant parents. The couple very much wants to acquire these children, but also wants to skirt the normal adoption process required by the state of Michigan.

Why? Because they assume that the children already belong to them. If that were the case, who wouldn’t be indignant? Any state that fails to recognize the bonds of mother, father, and child, is a failed state. States protect God-given parental rights for the sake of the children. They should not create new adult rights that trample the rights of children.

But the New York Times headline is engaged in the fallacy of “question begging.” By declaring that these are “Their own children” the NYT assumes the very point at issue. Both Michigan’s legislature and judiciary have already decided that they are not.

Family law has always recognized a child’s mother as that woman who gave her birth. Likewise, fathers are identified as the man who loved her so much that a child was conceived in her womb.

The New York Times wants to overturn settled family law. In its brave new world, mothers and fathers are not defined by love and birth. They are, rather, defined by contracts and ownership.

Lauren Vermilye, who mothered the twins for nine months, filed an affidavit that the twins did not belong to her. So did her husband, and so did the “fertility doctor” who transferred the boy and girl into her uterus when they were about a week old. 

Motherhood is a lifelong relationship. It is not contract work. It begins at conception and lasts into eternity. Even if the Gray Lady wants to nullify a sacred relationship by creating new definitions in contract law, the newborn twins have no say. 

They are not old enough to consent to a contract. So, they are at the mercy of others who are. Put yourself in their shoes and ask: If I were a newborn baby, whose entire life-experience knew Mrs. Vermilye to be my mother, would I want her to give me away in fulfillment of a contract with strangers? That is the fundamental question of surrogacy.

There are other questions, of course, which are discussed at length elsewhere. Questions about genetics and contracts arise. Extreme health risks to egg donors and surrogate mothers are at stake. Concerns about potential psychological harm and consent that is adequately informed are real. But the most life-altering burden of any party to the transaction is borne by the newborn baby who loses the only home he has ever known.

America fought a bloody Civil War that decisively ended the right of one human being to own another. And yet, here we are again. Ever since unregulated and unprincipled scientists started creating human beings outside of the mother’s womb (the first IVF baby was born in 1978), these homeless children have been treated under property laws, rather than under family law.

This is a grave injustice. 

Now a proposed law, HB 73 “Birth certificates-gestational agreements,” is under consideration in Wyoming. It would bring this brave new world into Wyoming Family Law. Current law treats an embryo conceived by IVF as property until the moment he or she is placed in the mother. After that, it is protected by Wyoming’s law for children, Title XIV.

HB 73 would strip this vital protection from the child. It would extend the injustice of treating embryos as property all the way through gestation and even after birth.

Nobody should be treated as property—not in a lab and not in a womb. It was an injustice when courts first started treating embryos this way. It would be a travesty to start treating newborns this way, as well. 

Errors should be corrected, not amplified. Nonconsenting embryonic children should not be treated as property and subjected to the contracts of others. They should, rather, be protected by Wyoming’s adoption laws. That would be a truly enlightened improvement to family law, not a deeper fall into the rabbit hole.

Also published in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, February 26, 2021.

We should all shun cancel culture

Gina Carano

“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”

The elitists who run the cancel culture say those words are offensive. For the crime of posting them on social media, Gina Carano, of Mandalorian fame, will never work at Disney again. For good measure, United Talent Agency also dropped her as a client.

Lucasfilm justified its vicious virtue signaling by saying that Carano’s “social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.” 

Ordinary people, like me, are flummoxed. Just like Carano, we have “liked” and “shared” and “retweeted” this very meme for months. Out of respect for the horrific sufferings of the Jews, we say their names. We are appalled that German civilization, at the apex of high culture, could so quickly fall to such depths of barbarism. 

We solemnly vow, “Never again,” with meaning and determination. We are not content merely to condemn dead villains who no longer have power to kill. We are, rather, intent on rooting out their evil ideas—ideas that perverted an entire culture. Only by critiquing their worldview can we be equipped to stand against totalitarianism even when its purveyors no longer wear jack boots and brown shirts.

How Lucasfilm and its cancel culture masters can pretend that this is somehow “denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities,” boggles the mind. In a search for answers, I turned to Wikipedia. That crowd-sourced repository of left-leaning information helpfully explained: “Many critics interpreted the post as comparing American conservatives to Jews in Nazi Germany.” (Wikipedia accessed: 2/17/21)

Apparently, comparing American conservatives to Jews denigrates Jews. Wow! To quote a meme I recently read, “How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?” 

Antifa operatives spent the summer bullying minorities, burning their businesses and pressuring police to abandon the innocent poor to the terrorism of lawless gangs. All the while, they called their opponents “Nazis”—and got away with it. Celebrities and politicians that fawned over their agenda and supported their riots were lionized, not canceled.

But when Gina Carano identifies with Jews who were brutalized and vandalized by their fellow citizens, the Twitter mob proves her right by mercilessly attacking her own person and career. This is “viewpoint discrimination” on full display. Some viewpoints are rewarded while others are bludgeoned into silence.

The central point of the meme that got Carano canceled is that the Nazi government did not begin with direct action against the Jews. It began by encouraging common citizens—even children—to do their dirty work for them. 

They did this with a combination of propaganda and a weaponized legal code. Propaganda convinced once-civilized Germans to turn against their neighbors. An unjust application of the law turned a blind eye to assaults on Jews, but prosecuted their attempts at self-defense.

We see these same dynamics at work today. It is up to common citizens to recognize when they are being propagandized by the gatekeepers of information. Media sources that incite citizens to hate each other should be turned off and tuned out. 

Likewise, it is incumbent on all of us to stand against unequal application of the law and every misuse of the justice system. “Liberty and justice for all” is not just an empty slogan. It flows from the proposition that all men are created equal. And, it is a bulwark against the evils of the cancel culture.

Also published in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle on 2/19/21.

Cheney must regain the consent of the governed

The Declaration of Independence was not an exercise of raw political power. It was, rather, an assertion of principles. It had no legal standing in a British court. Nor was there any standing army to enforce it. Its only power was the power of persuasion. Its authority depended entirely on whether its words were, in fact, true.

The American colonists could have taken up arms against Britain without a single word, as Japan infamously attacked Pearl Harbor. But that would have been wrong. It is not that some international law requires insurrectionists to justify themselves in writing. It is, rather, an internal law—written on the heart. They were motivated by “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” 

There is a common and universal sense of justice shared by every human being. This common sense reflects the judgment of “the Supreme Judge of the world.” The founders appealed to him to judge their actions. As Abraham Lincoln would put it decades later, “my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side.”

Universal truth, justice before the Supreme Judge, and respect for a common sense of these things—these are the fundamental principles of the American Republic. On this foundation America was built. 

Our founders’ “respect to the opinions of mankind” was not only for foreign countries. It was primarily about American citizens. After a brief introduction, the opening words of the Declaration assert three “self-evident” truths: 1) “that all men are created equal;” 2) “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights;” 3) that “Governments… [derive] their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.”

There are two kinds of right and wrong. The first is that which is self-evident. These are universal principles that are known by all through our shared humanity. The second are laws and customs that are necessary to the functioning of society but are neither universally true nor perceived by some common sense.

“Thou shalt not kill” is a principle of the first sort. “Drive on the right side of the road” is a law of the second sort. The consent of the governed bridges the gap between these two kinds of laws. 

This universal principle is necessary because “all men are created equal,” and no single person, or class of persons, has an inherent right to dictate laws of the second sort. Rather, equal citizens give consent to certain representatives to negotiate such necessary but variable rules.

Power exercised without the consent of the governed is tyranny. It doesn’t matter whether that person was duly elected, fraudulently elected, or seized power by force. Elections are the usual way to determine the consent of the governed. But an election is not a substitute for that consent. 

If those governed no longer consent—or never did—there may be laws that allow for a recall petition. Such is the case with Governor Newsom in California. In Wyoming there are no such laws. Is that the end of the story? Not in principle.

Principled representatives do not need to be coerced into the right thing. The right thing is to maintain the consent of the governed. This principle precedes elections and outweighs any subsequent question of policy.

Last Saturday, the GOP’s state central committee voted overwhelmingly to censure Representative Cheney and to petition her to resign. This unprecedented action seriously calls into question whether our duly elected representative still has the consent of the governed. 

If the question were answered purely by the power of man-made laws, and divorced from the principles of the Republic, Cheney would simply ignore the voters of Wyoming and continue to exercise the power of her congressional seat for two more years. 

But if the question is about principle, Cheney should then want to do everything in her power to ensure that Wyoming’s lone representative in Washington regains the consent of the governed. That, and only that, would constitute “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” This should be true of any representative of the people’s will—from the president on down to the precinct committeeman.

How can this principle be upheld? First, Cheney should come home and stand before her constituents. If the rightness of her stance is solid, she can confidently expect to regain the consent of her constituency. If not, resignation would be the only honorable thing to do. 

Resignation would allow her to stand by her own principles while also upholding an even higher principle. By it, she could reaffirm that the consent of the governed is a principle more fundamental to the Republic than any subsequent person or policy.

Without the consent of the governed, the Republic itself will cease to exist.

Also published in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle on 2/12/21.

...and in the Cowboy State Daily, 2/12/21.

Salt-of-the-earth people are getting wise to this cynical game

“History, faith and reason show the way, the way of unity. We can see each other, not as adversaries, but as neighbors. We can treat each other with dignity and respect. We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature. For without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury. No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos.” – President Joseph R. Biden, Inaugural Address.

Measuring by the nastiness of cable news and the party spirit of newspapers, America is more deeply divided than at any time in living memory. The division may run as deep as at any time in history.

Yet, for all the rancor, there remains a deep longing for unity. In fact, more than a mere longing, Americans are actually united on several key points. All people across the political spectrum long to see a resurgence of dignity, respect and neighborliness. I have never met anyone who wants the bitterness, fury and “exhausting outrage” that surrounds us. No lover of America can possibly be pleased with the incessant chaos that poisons our world.

Take a moment to reflect on this fact. Test it with your neighbors, families and friends. See if you can find someone who does not wish for universal recognition of each person’s dignity and respect. I don’t think you will find such an animal.

If I am right about my supposition, it should lead you to ask a follow-up question: If nobody wants the chaos and division we are experiencing, why can we not put an end to it? Who or what is hindering American unity?

Know this first, it is not the occupant of the Oval Office. Honest observers of the culture must admit that today’s rancor has been escalating across five administrations, at least. For three decades, every president has been vilified by political opponents as the incarnation of evil itself. 

While this is a great fundraising strategy that whips the base into a fury, it does nothing to help Americans either understand or resist the true forces of evil that are pushing America toward the cliff. This is by design. Enemies of the American people want us to fixate on personalities. In that way, they can distract good-hearted citizens from finding commonalities that build unity. 

The fact is that the forces dividing America have played us like well-tuned fiddles. They use caustic “identity politics” to set mom-and-pop Republicans, Democrats and Independents at one another’s throats so that they can advance an agenda against all Americans, regardless of who occupies the White House.

But salt-of-the-earth people are getting wise to this cynical game. More and more Americans see the real threat to America. It lies in armies of lawyers, advisors and agency officials scattered across Washington, D.C. who hem the president in on every side. They withhold information, dishonestly spin facts, slow-walk presidential orders, criminally leak to a compliant press, and generally abuse government power to manipulate the president into advancing their agenda, not ours.

While the occupant of the White House is not completely inconsequential, it is the worldview of unnamed bureaucrats—more than the man in office—that does the most damage to American ideals. As good neighbors from both parties awaken to this fact, it gives us an opportunity to unite against a common enemy.

The first step toward unity is to reject identity politics with a vengeance. This is not only necessary toward reducing the rancor of public discourse. It is also necessary so that we can get off the merry-go-round of personal vilification and start addressing the real problems.

If you think anyone who voted for Donald Trump is a threat to America, stop it! If you think insulting President Biden will help America, you are dead wrong. If you won’t listen to someone unless he first admits that the election was fairly won, or if you refuse to call Joe Biden your president, you will not be inviting honest engagement, but playing into the hands of your enemies.

Remember, the real enemies of America are enemies of Democrats as much as they are enemies of Republicans. They want nothing more than partisan simplification: “two legs bad, four legs good.” Such behavior only leads to a blanket condemnation of everything that one administration does and a blank check for whatever the other administration does. This fatally short-circuits debate, and naively ignores the forces manipulating both administrations.

America united to defeat fascism in World War II, and to defeat communism in the Cold War. Common Americans accomplished this despite the evil forces that were tearing us apart in the decadent 20s. Anti-God, anti-family, anti-freedom forces are on the move today. As in the past, common Americans can defeat them if we refuse to let them divide us. 

Also published in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, 2/5/21.

...and the Cowboy State Daily, 2/8/21.

...and the Kemmerer Gazette, 2/10/21.

Cheney rushed to judgement, Lummis finding the facts

Sen. Cynthia Lummis, Rep. Elizabeth Cheney

Both women of Wyoming’s congressional delegation are in the national news. Only weeks after Liz Cheney’s re-election as the GOP conference chair, she faces a removal petition signed by 107—over half—of her colleagues. Lummis, on the hand, was publicly criticized by 78 members of the Wyoming Bar who published an open letter claiming that the very first vote of Wyoming’s first female senator, Cynthia Lummis, was “wrong.”

Both the recall petition and the open letter are related to former President Donald Trump. But that is where the similarity ends. Cheney’s troubles stem from her decision to defy 70 percent of her constituency and vote to impeach Trump only seven days before the end of his term. Lummis, in effect, did the opposite. She voted against the certification of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes pending an investigation.

Much ink has been spilled on both sides of the issue. Was the election legitimate or illegitimate? Were President Trump’s actions in contesting it right or wrong? Kip Crofts, former U.S. Attorney for Wyoming, published a thorough and thoughtful article on the subject in the Cowboy State Daily. If his reasonable call for investigation ever comes to pass, America will learn the answers to these questions. If not, only the historians will know. Either way, time will tell.

My concern, however, is the present. Will we have the patience and self-discipline to find the facts that can allow us to rise above the frenzy? Or will we abandon rationality for mob rule.

The bloody streets of France’s reign of terror are the real-world consequences of mobs that ride the wave of emotion and rage. Such irrational destruction is denounced in the world’s best literature: Beauty and the Beast, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Rigoletto, to name a few. Harper Lee wrote of the injustice of the southern lynch mob in, To Kill a Mockingbird. All these warnings recall the hasty trial of Jesus and his unjust treatment in the courts of Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate.

Wise Solomon warned us, “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him” (Proverbs 18:17). Western jurisprudence has spent centuries developing procedures and traditions designed to slow the rush to judgment enough that truth might prevail. Look back on recent history and remember how many lives and livelihoods were destroyed by rioting mobs chanting slogans that were, too late, proved false in a court of law.

Against this measure, Cheney’s vote is indefensible. The articles of impeachment make numerous assertions about “facts” that are by no means proven. Take this portion, for instance: “…incited by President Trump, members of the crowd he had addressed, in an attempt to, among other objectives, interfere with the Joint Session’s solemn Constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 election…” In the space of a few lines, there are at least three unproved assertions.

First, breaches to Capitol security barriers began nearly a half-hour before—and two miles away from—where the President finished speaking at the Ellipse. Were these people motivated by words that they could not have heard? Second, these provocateurs were obviously not “members of the crowd he had addressed.” Third, do we know their objectives? Where they the same as—or even compatible with—the objectives of those who arrived later to find the security barriers already moved aside?

On the day that Cheney claimed to know these facts, the FBI was only seven days into its investigation. Since then, evidence to the contrary has mounted. It took a special counsel 30 months to disprove the “Russia collusion” theory. That, alone, should have cautioned Cheney from trusting the week-old accusations from her party’s opponents.

Cynthia Lummis, on the other hand, took a more careful posture. Her vote against the certification of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes judged them to be neither fraudulent nor legitimate. She voted for more investigation, not less. It was a vote for a 10-day emergency audit to establish facts and address the legitimate concerns of tens of millions of voters.

Those who signed the open letter invoked the rules of the Wyoming Bar in their criticism. Does the Wyoming State Bar agree with them? Is it true that Lummis has a duty to “publicly affirm the legitimacy” of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes before she hears any answer to the legitimate concerns raised by Pennsylvania’s own lawmakers? Or is Lummis right in saying, “Each of us has a solemn duty to ensure that the slate of presidential electors we certify is beyond reproach, respecting the people’s voice and upholding the Constitution.”

Cheney condemned before there was even the possibility of investigation. Lummis’ critics want her to “publicly affirm the legitimacy of the results of the 2020 Presidential election” without investigation. Both fall into the same frenetic rush to judgment.

Mob rule is based on snap judgments. Civilization requires time for the deliberative process to find out the truth. Only then can justice prevail.

Also published in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, 1/29/21.

...and the Cowboy State Daily, 2/2/21.

The Federalist: How The Supreme Court Made It Easier To Smear People As Racists And Scream The F-Word In Public

 

Instead of protecting true free speech, we’ve crushed the speech that matters most: the articulation and testing of the truth.

For the first time since Thomas Jefferson, Speaker Nancy Pelosi invited nonsensical and irrelevant ad hominem attacks to be both spoken on the floor of the House and to be entered into the permanent congressional record. Sadly, her invitation was eagerly accepted. Freshman Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., called President Trump “a white supremacist president,” and “white supremacist-in-chief,” while Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., called him “racist-in-chief.”

How did we get to this disgraceful state of affairs? The answer goes back to 1942.

Continue reading on the Federalist.