Control the children and you control the future.

—THE ART OF CULTURE WAR, O’REILLY TZU

It was just another day in the San Juan Islands village of Friday Harbor, Washington (population: 2,000) when Sheriff Bill Cumming got a call that an elderly woman had been mugged. Apparently, two young men had knocked the lady to the ground, grabbed her purse, and run off. Since Friday Harbor is not exactly South Central Los Angeles, the sheriff had a good idea that a local troublemaker named Oliver Christensen may have been involved. There were only a few hellions in the little town and Christensen immediately became a suspect.

Sheriff Cumming also knew that Christensen, seventeen, was dating fourteen-year-old Lacey Dixon, a troubled young girl who lived at home with her single mother, Carmen Dixon. Doing what any good law-enforcement official would do, the sheriff called Mrs. Dixon and asked her to find out if her daughter had any knowledge of the crime.

The next time Oliver Christensen called the Dixon house, Lacey took her cordless phone into her bedroom and shut the door. But, unbeknownst to the girl, her mother snapped on the speakerphone in the kitchen and was taking notes. Sure enough, Christensen bragged to the fourteen-year-old that he had hidden the elderly woman’s purse in some bushes.

Based partially upon the information Carmen Dixon subsequently provided authorities and her testimony in court, Christensen was convicted by a jury of second-degree robbery and sentenced to a couple of years in state prison. Subsequently, his conviction was upheld by a Washington State Appeals Court, but then the big guns of the secular army were brought in.

The ACLU, ignoring the actual crime, mounted an intense campaign to free Oliver Christensen based on the theory that Carmen Dixon had “violated” her daughter’s privacy by listening to her phone conversation. ACLU lead attorney Douglas Kunder was blunt: “I don’t think the state should be in the position of encouraging parents to act surreptitiously and eavesdrop on their children.”

Disturbingly, the very liberal and secular Washington Supreme Court eventually sided with the ACLU and Christensen’s conviction was overturned. The court ruled that the fourteen-year-old’s privacy had, indeed, been violated and her mother had no legal right to the information she had gleaned from her daughter’s conversation with the assailant. Carmen Dixon was stunned and told the media: “It’s ridiculous! Kids have more rights than parents these days. My daughter was out of control, and that was the only way I could get information and keep track of her.”

The prosecutor, Randall Gaylord, was also outraged: “I’m concerned that a fourteen-year-old’s right to privacy now trumps the parent’s right to be a parent.”

Even the Associated Press, no bastion of traditional thought, began its news story on the court’s decision this way: “In a victory for rebellious teenagers, the state Supreme Court ruled that a mother violated Washington’s privacy law by eavesdropping on her daughter’s phone conversation.”

The state of Washington did retry Christensen, this time without Carmen Dixon’s testimony. A jury again found him guilty, but he walked free after nine months in prison because the judge, Vickie Churchill, declined to give him more jail time. All of this skirmishing cost the taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars, and what did it really accomplish? Well, if you’re in the S-P corps, it accomplished a lot for your side.

Remember, the ACLU is not an organization that does anything in a vacuum. The S-P spearhead knew exactly what it wanted to achieve when it marched into Carmen Dixon’s life: that is, a court ruling demonstrating that a parent has no right to supervise a child surreptitiously. For the secular-progressive movement to achieve its goals in America, it must undermine traditional parental authority and convince children there’s a brave new world out there that does not include being raised in the traditional way. The S-P goal is to diminish parental authority that, in the past, had been unquestioned.

This is a strategy—mentally separate children from their parents—that has been practiced by totalitarian governments all throughout history. In Nazi Germany, there was the Hitler Youth. Chairman Mao created the Children’s Corps in Red China. Stalin and Castro rewarded children who spied on their parents. That’s the blueprint. If you want to change a country’s culture and traditions, children must first abandon them and embrace a new vision. Hello, secular-progressivism in the USA. I’m not saying these people are little Adolfs; I am saying they have adopted some totalitarian tactics in their strategies.

Another factor in the S-P vision for our kids is the development of sexual awareness at an early age. This strategy encourages children to mimic adult behavior and forge relationships outside the home. Thus, children separate themselves from parental influence earlier in life and are less likely to embrace the old-school values of their parents.

Here’s a pretty amazing example of what I’m talking about. A few years ago in Los Angeles County, the Palmdale School District came up with an “educational” survey for students ages seven to ten. As part of that survey, the kids were asked to rate the following activities according to how often they experienced the thought or emotion:

         

• Touching my private parts too much.

• Thinking about having sex.

• Thinking about touching other people’s private parts.

• Thinking about sex when I don’t want to.

• Washing myself because I feel dirty inside.

         

Remember, these questions were put to kids as young as seven years old! Do you think about having sex? What the heck is going on?

Outraged, a group of Palmdale parents asked that exact question. But because school officials dodged and weaved, they couldn’t get any answers. So the parents sued the district in federal court. The issue went all the way up to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most liberal federal court in U.S. history. Predictably, the court ruled against the parents.

Judge Stephen Reinhardt, whose wife, Ramona Ripston, is the executive director of the ACLU in Southern California (can you believe this?), wrote the unanimous opinion, which stated that parents of public school children have no fundamental right to be the exclusive provider of sexual information to their children. Reinhardt was direct: “Parents are possessed of no constitutional right to prevent the public schools from providing information on that subject to their students in any forum or manner they select.”

Consider the implications. By that reasoning, a school could conceivably bring in a dominatrix to describe the glories of S&M to first-graders and parents would have no recourse. But Reinhardt wasn’t through. This incredible pinhead went on to write: “No such specific (parental) right can be found in the deep roots of the nation’s history and tradition or implied in the concept of ordered liberty.”

This kind of intellectual gibberish is part of the S-P manifesto, which even denies that, throughout American history, parents have traditionally had full discretion in matters of sexual disclosure to their children. Think about it: The S-Ps are now saying that the government should be allowed to introduce your kid to sexual matters even if you, the parent, object! Whatever the authorities choose, in whatever form, and in pursuit of whichever point of view is acceptable to the courts! Benjamin Franklin would have had these people caned.

Obviously, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is firmly in the secular camp. You may remember that it was this very crew that ruled the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance were un-Constitutional. That ruling, thank God, was thrown out and, indeed, the Ninth has been overturned about 75 percent of the time by the U.S. Supreme Court, according to Cal Law, California’s legal news source. Even so, the fact that a powerful judicial body like this believes parents should have virtually no say in what their young children see and hear about sex in the public school system is beyond chilling.

Of course, parents who do not want their seven-year-olds asked if they “thought about having sex” were shocked. Their lawsuit against the school district was based on the belief that they had been “deprived of their right to control the upbringing of their children by introducing them to matters of and relating to sex in accordance with their personal and religious values and beliefs.” Silly them, thinking parents have a right to bring up their own kids according to a specific belief system.

You will not be surprised to learn that the initial sex survey ruling propelled waves of joy throughout the S-P ranks. Parental authority had been radically diminished by a federal court, and as noted, that is a primary secular-progressive goal. Our S-P pal George Lakoff puts it bluntly: “Children are shaped by their communities.” The emphasis on the word “communities” is provided by Lakoff, himself, on page 90 of his Elephant book.

The S-P strategy with respect to children is not subtle. You can’t achieve a brave new world without tearing down the bad old world. In order to change the thinking of America, you have to sweep out traditional Judeo-Christian values and replace them with radical secular-progressive values. If the public schools buy into the S-P agenda, which many of them do, then children will be exposed to another way of thinking apart from what their parents believe. Thus, the public schools have become a major battleground in the culture war, and hostilities are heating up.

Professor Lakoff has reinforced his S-P vision of education with this definition on how the government should set up the learning apparatus: “A vibrant, well-funded, and expanding public education system, with the highest standards for every child and school, where teachers nurture children’s minds and often the children themselves, and where children are taught the truth about their nation—its wonders and its blemishes.”

This pointed advice underscores my point: The S-P movement wants more authority for teachers and administrators and less for parents. Since most colleges are now firmly in the S-P camp, and colleges train the teachers of your children, just do the math. In addition (sorry), the secular-progressives are adamantly against vouchers for poor kids that would allow them the option of attending private schools. Why? Easy question. Most private schools would never even consider a sex survey for second-graders because that would be an intrusion on parental authority. In general, moreover, private schools pose a grave threat to the S-Ps because many of them reject secularism and teach traditional values. Public schools, however, are quite a different story. As mentioned, more and more of them are becoming S-P friendly.

It is fascinating, if a bit scary, to watch the S-P game plan to target American children in action. S-P indoctrination of kids is the goal, but the strategy is largely hidden behind the touchy-feely “nurturing” description of education. However, if you cut through all the bull, the key question is clear: If S-Ps are sincerely looking out for the kids, what is the secular-progressive philosophy on criminal justice, especially when children are directly affected? A brutal criminal case in Vermont and a civil lawsuit in Massachusetts shed some powerful light on that question.

                  

                  

At six years old, Susie (not her real name) was by all accounts an adorable child. Cute and generally nice to be around, Susie enjoyed the rural outdoor life in northern Vermont. But then, oddly, Susie began to change. She became withdrawn, sometimes sullen, and she didn’t want to leave her house all that much. The innocent smiles of her toddler days become only a memory to those who knew her.

Susie lived with her uneducated mother and stepfather in a trailer home. Every Sunday, beginning when the girl was six years old, her mother’s friend from high school, a laborer by the name of Mark Hulett, then thirty, would babysit for a few hours. This arrangement went on for about four years, until Susie was ten. And during that time, Hulett repeatedly raped the little girl.

Finally, Susie told her parents the story. Hulett was charged with a variety of sexual felonies and pled guilty. In a shocking statement, he explicitly told authorities what he had done to the little girl. I cannot recount what Hulett confessed to doing in these pages. The confession is simply too monstrous.

Presiding over the case was Judge Edward Cashman, a Vietnam vet with a rather eccentric sentencing record. In some cases, Cashman handed down tough penalties, but at other times he was inexplicably inappropriate. For example, the Burlington Free Press reported that he told a rape victim she had experienced “one of the harsh realities of life.” After the young woman burst out crying, Cashman apologized. Onlookers in the courtroom were aghast.

As the confessed child rapist, Mark Hulett, stood before Judge Edward Cashman, some in the courtroom were expecting the criminal to get the maximum sentence: life. Instead, Cashman handed down a sentence of sixty days to ten years in state prison—and all but sixty days of the sentence was suspended. Why? So that the rapist could get “treatment” outside of prison. “The one message I want to get through is that anger doesn’t solve anything,” the judge explained. “It just corrodes your soul.”

Vermont Judge Edward Cashman ignited a firestorm when he sentenced a convicted child rapist to a mere sixty days in jail.

Susie’s family was stunned. A man who had brutally and methodically violated an innocent child over a four-year period would be serving less time in prison than Martha Stewart had. How could this happen in America? Surely, the civil liberties groups, the press, and the public would not stand for it.

Wrong. Most of the Vermont media, generally very liberal, actually supported the judge! In a shocking display of journalistic irresponsibility, the media portrayed him as a courageous man bent on reforming the justice system. Noah Hoffenburg, editorial director of the Bennington Banner, summarized the Vermont media position when he wrote: “We can see sexual predation as the disease itself; and make every attempt, as Judge Cashman did, to get to the source of the illness, thereby preventing the devastation of sexual assault in the future.”

So, according to many in the Vermont media, child rape is an illness—not to be punished, but to be treated. Believe me, this kind of insane thinking is very, very common in the secular-progressive movement. In fact, there’s even a name for it: “restorative justice.”

During my investigation of Judge Cashman, I found that he actually taught a course on “restorative justice” at the National Judicial College, which advertises itself as “the nation’s top judicial training institution.” In other words, Cashman is a huge proponent of this madness, which encourages the legal system to find a way to “reintegrate offenders into society.” The “restorative” crowd does not believe in retribution for crimes; they believe in “repairing harm” for both the victim and the offender. That is to say, society has a responsibility not only to the person who is harmed but also to the person doing the harm. Criminals need to be “nurtured.” The S-Ps strike again.

Don’t believe me? Well, guess who else has poured millions into getting “restorative justice” into the minds of those in the U.S. legal system? Does the name George Soros ring a bell?

Here’s how bad this Vermont situation really was. Shortly after Judge Cashman sentenced the child rapist Hulett to sixty days, a man named Ralph Page ambled into the courtroom of another Vermont judge, Patricia Zimmerman. Page was there to answer charges that he had punched a woman in the face. Upon hearing the evidence against him, Page screamed at Judge Zimmerman: “That’s f——bull—.” The judge promptly ruled Page in contempt of court and sentenced him to—you guessed it—sixty days in jail.

So there you have it. In Vermont you can get the same amount of jail time for systematically raping a little child over a four-year period as you can for cursing before a judge.

As for Judge Cashman, he remained defiantly steadfast. Before issuing his atrocious sentence, Cashman listened to the plea of the little girl’s aunt, June Benway, who broke down sobbing in the courtroom while saying:

         

The thought of my niece enduring years of sexual abuse sickens me. For four years she was a prisoner in her own home. For four years she had to fear going to bed at night.

She’s already developed behavioral problems that help to alienate herself from her peers…. When she is an adult, she won’t be able to reminisce about her first kiss and experience the laughter and joy that should come with that memory. For her, the thought of her first kiss will probably evoke pain and anger. Her first kiss should not have been shared with some pervert….

         

But Cashman was unmoved by the words of Ms. Benway. After she finished her statement, the judge began his explanation of the “justice” he was dispensing:

         

I feel very strongly about retribution. And why? I didn’t come to that easy. It isn’t something that I started at. I started out as a just-dessert sentencer. I liked it. Cross the line, pop them. Then I discovered it accomplishes nothing of value. It doesn’t make anything better.

And I keep telling prosecutors, and they won’t hear me, that punishment is not enough. You can’t be satisfied with punishment.

         

So in the mind of Vermont judge Edward Cashman, harshly punishing a child rapist is not the answer; “restorative justice” is. This abdication of common sense is truly shocking in a nation built on the bedrock concept of “equal justice for all” and “the punishment must fit the crime.” But Vermont, it seems, has left the United States. Asked about Cashman’s deplorable decision, retired Vermont chief justice Jeffrey Amestoy described Cashman as a “competent, caring, and conservative” trial judge.

Maybe in the Land of Oz, he would be.

Cashman’s outrageous behavior, and the Vermont media’s acceptance of it, made me furious. I was personally outraged and figured the national media would feel the same way I did. So I vigorously reported the story and asked the national press barons to get behind me and support the little girl and her family.

They didn’t. Once again, I was the naïve culture warrior. Please call me Dopey Tzu. The network news organizations and CNN totally ignored the story, as did the major urban newspapers. Even though millions of Americans were deeply concerned and angered, the elite media passed.

Perhaps encouraged by the national media’s apathy, some Vermont newspapers picked up the pace and actually began attacking me for my anti-Cashman stance: The Brattleboro Reformer called Cashman “One Tough Judge” in its headline and implied that I was a “demagogue.”

The Rutland Herald editorialized: “Cashman issued the sentence precisely to protect children. It was the only way to provide Hulett the treatment he needs in a timely manner in order to deter him from committing a similar offense in the future.”

Uh, the only way? I believe life in prison would deter Hulett from raping another child, would it not?

In fact, the only newspaper in Vermont to initially criticize Cashman was the Burlington Free Press (which also skewered me so it could have it both ways). But most Vermont media fell in with the S-P troops, a disgraceful exhibition that is not easy to digest. The plight of, and justice for, little Susie was obviously secondary to the “needs” of the rapist. And the Vermont media had no problem with that.

Yet the more I thought about the situation, the more it came to make sense. Vermont is the land of Howard Dean, who was five times elected governor. It is a state split between traditionalists and secular-progressives, with the S-Ps obviously controlling much of the media. The public outcry in Vermont was also muted. To be sure, thousands of Vermonters were angry, but many of them told Factor producers they were afraid to stand up for fear of criticism. Everyone agreed there is a powerful and intimidating S-P presence in the state of Vermont.

But the Factor culture warriors wouldn’t let go. My staff and I pounded the story night after night, with revelations about Vermont’s weak leaders and chaotic legislature. Thousands of Americans besieged the Vermont governor with e-mails. Finally, the state wobbled. Judge Cashman, realizing his career was sliding down the drain, issued a new sentence for the child rapist Hulett: three to ten years. And Hulett would get “treatment” in the Big House.

This case is one of the most vivid examples of the culture war ever on display. A guy rapes a little girl over a four-year period and it takes an intensely fought national battle just to see he spends three years in prison. Most legal experts in Vermont believe he’ll be paroled after doing the minimum.

There is no question the little girl’s human rights were violated. But not one person from the S-P groups Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, or the National Organization for Women stepped up to protect her. Likewise, liberal Vermont politicians, who are supposedly looking out for the downtrodden, like Senators Jeffords and Leahy, Governor Dean, and Congressman Bernie Sanders, said not a word. All the S-P warriors sat it out. And that’s a fact.

Now, the logical question is: Why would the S-P movement want to stand behind an insane sentence for a child rapist? What’s in it for them?

Well, we’ve explored the “restorative justice” link, but there’s also something else. In the S-P world, few judgments are made about personal behavior; the old “if it feels good, do it” adage from the sixties is commonly accepted. But, usually, even the ACLU draws the line at violent criminal behavior. However, the restorative justice concept is picking up steam in the S-P ranks—the “disease” excuse is featured prominently in S-P criminal philosophy. We shouldn’t prosecute street-level dope dealers, for example, we should give them “treatment,” because substance abuse is a disease that needs to be cured, not punished. And it is the “illness,” not the person, that is the cause of the harm people might do. It’s really not their fault, you see. In the words of Judge Edward Cashman: “Punishment is not the answer.”

Many of us would like to kill a person who raped our child. That is a natural reaction, a genuine emotional response to a crime that is so heinous it is off the chart. But in the brave new world of the S-P movement, even child rape is not enough to condemn the criminal to spend much of his or her life behind bars. Even though the child is devastated for life, the criminal must be “healed” in order for true justice to take place. This is what America will come to if the secular-progressives ever take over—and if you think I’m exaggerating, you’re wrong. The states of Minnesota and Vermont have been heavily influenced by secular-progressive thought. It is no accident that those two states are the only ones in the Union that officially sanction the philosophy of “restorative justice.”

The final part of this miserable story deals with our pals at the New York Times, the “all the news that’s fit to print” newspaper. Apparently, the plight of the little Vermont girl was not “fit to print,” because the Times totally ignored the story. Now, I thought that rather strange. You’ll remember the vicious attack on me by Times columnist Nicholas Kristof over the Christmas controversy. Kristof, the human rights guy, described me as akin to a Muslim fundamentalist. He also challenged me to join him in reporting human rights abuses abroad. Well, here’s my question: If Africa is in play, Nick, why not Vermont?

So on February, 3, 2006, I dedicated my syndicated newspaper column to Kristof and his employers at the Times and wrote this:

         

Here’s an update on that young Vermont girl whose life has been made a living hell by a justice system that literally could not care less about her.

You may remember that 34-year-old Mark Hulett pleaded guilty to raping the child over a four-year period, starting when she was just six-years-old. The judge in the case frowned when he heard the confession and promptly sentenced the vicious criminal to 60 days in prison. A few journalists, including myself, picked up on the outrage and, under enormous pressure, Judge Edward Cashman changed the sentence to three years; still an incredible miscarriage of justice.

The girl, now 10, is being raised by foster parents. Vermont authorities believe her mother and stepfather are incapable of properly protecting the child. She is undergoing counseling and is in school, but, according to those who see her every day, she’s confused and unhappy.

Surely this young girl’s human rights have been violated; no person on this earth should have to suffer the way she has.

A few weeks ago, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof criticized me for reporting on the Christmas controversy. Kristof asserted that I fabricated the story and ignored “real” stories like the suffering in the Sudan.

Kristof wrote: “So I have a challenge for Mr. O’Reilly: If you really want to defend traditional values, then come with me on a trip to Darfur. I’ll introduce you to mothers who have had their babies clubbed to death in front of them, to teenage girls who have been gang-raped…”

Now, I do three hours of daily news analysis on TV and radio; there’s no way I can go to Africa in light of those commitments. However, I’m glad Kristof can go because somebody needs to spotlight that terrible situation.

But an interesting thing happened shortly after that Kristof column: the 60-day sentence for the child rapist came to light. Because Kristof had referenced teenage rape in his criticism of me, I fully expected to see him and The New York Times all over the Vermont situation. After all, this human rights violation happened just a few hundred miles north of New York City.

But the Times didn’t cover the Vermont story—didn’t even mention it. And there was not a word from my pal Nicholas Kristof, the human rights guy.

So what’s going on here? Aren’t liberal press advocates champions of the downtrodden? Maybe Kristof can write another column explaining to me why the Vermont child doesn’t matter to him or his newspaper.

I hope this doesn’t sound bitter, because I don’t mean it to be. I am genuinely perplexed by the sanctimonious left-wing press, which doesn’t consider a 60-day jail term for a child rapist an outrage.

While the Times rails against alleged human-rights violations in Guantanamo Bay and other far-off places, it apparently has no interest in protecting poor American children from predators and irresponsible judges.

Something isn’t right here. What say you on the left?

         

Now, that column was written with the intention of embarrassing Kristof and the New York Times. I admit it. Remember, that newspaper is the secular-progressive Bible. My feeling is that the Times ignored the Vermont story because I was so involved in it and because the Times is definitely on board with the “restorative justice” movement. But I could be wrong.

For the record, about a week after I wrote that column calling the Times out for ignoring the little girl in Vermont, Nicholas Kristof wrote another column asking his readers to send money so a ticket could be purchased in order to send me to Africa. It was a dopey article, the point of which escaped just about everyone I know. But Kristof did comment on my crusading for justice in Vermont. He called it “good stuff.”

Well, thanks, Nick, but I’m still waiting for your employers to assign someone to expose the myriad of human rights violations going on inside the United States. It would be great for the powerful New York Times to get behind Jessica’s Law, a tough anti–sexual predator law being adopted by states across the country, wouldn’t it?

Never gonna happen.

And the atrocities keep on coming in the USA. Soon after the Vermont debacle, an Ohio judge named John Connor pronounced sentence on a man who forced a five-year-old boy and an eleven-year-old boy to have sex with him. The man admitted committing the felonies and to doing a number of other horrendous things to these children. Connor could have sentenced the predator to ten years in prison. But he did not. He gave the degenerate probation. No prison time at all. Connor pronounced that the man had a “disease.”

I let Judge Connor have it on The Factor, arguing that the state had to impeach him. Even after the Vermont experience, I thought the Ohio press would be on my side. The Toledo Blade was. But most of the other media condemned me. Newspapers in Cincinnati, Akron, and Dayton actually supported Connor. It was another shocking display of media irresponsibility. The Dayton Daily News was the worst. It leveled personal attacks on me, the governor of Ohio, and the attorney general of the state for demanding Connor’s removal. It was, perhaps, the most despicable thing I have ever seen in an American newspaper. And, no surprise, the Dayton paper is a bastion of secular-progressive opinion.

Taking the evidence presented, I believe it is fair to say that not only does the S-P movement sympathize with child predators because of their “disease”; they are also making it easier for these criminals to operate. To prove this, we must travel to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a reliable stronghold of secular-progressive thought.

Earlier in this book, I mentioned that the ACLU is representing the North American Man-Boy Love Association in a civil lawsuit. That case, I argued, proves that the ACLU is not only misguided, it is dangerous. Here are some more details that, I hope, prove this point once and for all. We begin with the fact that the ACLU believes NAMBLA’s “rights” are being violated. So please consider that the starting point of this terrible situation.

On October 1, 1997, ten-year-old Jeffrey Curley was playing in the front yard of his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home. A few yards away, two men, Salvatore Sicari and Charles Jaynes, were watching Jeffrey from their parked car.

Sicari and Jaynes talked it over—could they kidnap the boy and get away unseen? It was risky in broad daylight, but the men, losers both, decided to try. Leaping out of the car, they grabbed the boy, threw him inside, and sped off. But Jeffrey fought back hard. Finally, the men suffocated the boy with a gasoline-soaked rag and drove to Jaynes’s apartment, where they sexually abused Jeffrey’s body. Afterward, they drove to Maine, where they dumped the young boy’s corpse into a river. It does not get worse than this.

Massachusetts detectives did a great job on the case, and both Sicari and Jaynes received life in prison. During court testimony, Jaynes’s diary was introduced. In said diary was a description of the NAMBLA Web site and Jaynes’s writing that it encouraged him to act out his violent fantasies on young boys. As I told you earlier, Jaynes accessed the NAMBLA Web site at the Boston Public Library. Remember, the ACLU and S-P movement want no restrictions on library Internet access.

Not surprisingly, Jeffrey Curley’s family was so appalled by the NAMBLA connection that they filed a $200 million federal lawsuit against the group, seeking to put it out of business once and for all. It fell to the Curley family to attempt to do what the U.S. justice system has been unable to do—crush NAMBLA.

By the way, it is worth noting that one of the most popular NAMBLA publications is titled “The Survival Manual: The Man’s Guide to Staying Alive in Man-Boy Sexual Relationships.” This revolting “manual” explains how to insinuate yourself into a child’s life and get away with molesting the boy. Sick doesn’t even begin to cover it.

After the Curley family filed its suit, it was answered—by the ACLU. The S-P shock troops took the case to “protect” the free-speech rights of NAMBLA. ACLU Massachusetts legal director John Reinstein said in a press release: “Regardless to whether people agree with or abhor NAMBLA’s views, holding the organization responsible for crimes committed by others who read their material would gravely endanger important first amendment freedoms.”

Once again, a theoretical argument is put forth to defend active evil. As with the war on terror, the S-P vanguard cannot come to grips with the fact that NAMBLA has no place in any civilized society, is an organization that appears to be criminal, encouraging child rape, and should be put out of business any legal way possible. But in the “anything goes” world of the secular-progressives, theory is much more important than protecting the kids.

One more item to bolster my argument: the ACLU’s war against the Boy Scouts has received a lot of attention. Very simply, the Scouts decline to approve openly gay Scoutmasters and require that the boys acknowledge a “higher power.” The ACLU sees this as a violation of gay and atheist rights, even though the Supreme Court has ruled that the Scouts and all other private organizations have the right to make their own charters and rules.

So, all over the country, the ACLU has sued the Boy Scouts, seeking to have them denied public assistance and access, such as having a jamboree on city property. It is a jihad against the Scouts, no question. Once again doing the math, I have come up with this equation: NAMBLA gets ACLU support. The Boy Scouts get ACLU attacks. Am I wrong here?

                  

                  

Finally, let’s go back to school, where the S-P assault on American children is being intensely waged under the guise of looking out for the kids. Besides abortion, the one issue that will drive any secular-progressive crazy is school “vouchers” for disadvantaged children.

Because so many public schools are ineptly run and even dangerous to attend, states like Florida have provided assistance to poor families who wish to send their children to private schools. In the high school where I taught in the 1970s—Monsignor Edward Pace in Opa Locka, Florida—forty low-income students were receiving tuition assistance from the state. But the S-P Florida Supreme Court—you remember, the one that ruled in favor of Al Gore in the 2000 election and was overturned by the Supreme Court—decided that Florida violated its constitution by directing fees to private schools. Predictably, the court rationalized its ruling by invoking the separation of church and state theory. But in the real world, where most of us have to live, many of the poor children involved were forced to return to violent, chaotic public schools.

The secular-progressives will tell you they are looking out for your “rights” and the overall welfare of children in the school voucher debate. But that’s an impossible argument to win when you realize that a poor kid doesn’t have the same “rights” as a rich kid to attend a school their parents choose. This is flat-out classism and a stark denial of equal opportunity.

But, as we’ve learned, the true S-P agenda wants nothing to do with the traditional Judeo-Christian values that are taught in most private schools. That is really the issue here. The separation of church and state argument is just a ruse, and there’s proof. After World War II, more than 2 million veterans were given educational “vouchers” paid for by the government in order to afford to attend the college of their choice. Many of those vets chose religious colleges. Back then, the S-P movement was in its infancy and little was said.

But over the years, as the S-P forces in America grew in strength, the opposition to all government assistance involving any religious affiliation intensified. It came to a head in a 1999 lawsuit involving educational assistance to the poor in Cleveland. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that as long as the government didn’t force an American student to attend a religious school, there was nothing un-Constitutional about supplying poor American families with money to attend any school of their “choice.”

This entire issue, of course, is about free choice and the Constitutional right to pursue happiness on an equal basis. Using a variety of studies, ABC newsman John Stossel has documented that poor kids who use vouchers to attend private schools dramatically improve their academic performance. So the intense S-P opposition to school vouchers isn’t exactly “nurturing” poor children, now is it?

Want more evidence that S-P opposition to school vouchers damages kids? Try this: In Washington, D.C., according to the National Center for Education Statistics, public school spending on each pupil is now over $10,000 per child per year, an astounding amount and about double what it was thirty years ago. D.C. Catholic schools spend far less per pupil than the public schools do. And—you guessed it—test scores for the Catholic school kids are far higher than those for the public school students. In fact, 98 percent of kids graduating from D.C. Catholic schools go on to college, while almost 40 percent of D.C. public school students never graduate from high school; they drop out. Once again, the math tells the story. Too bad so many public school kids will never learn how to do math.

The sad truth is there are few public schools in the United States that can compete with private schools because of the discipline factor. Private schools work intensely with parents and demand that strict academic and behavioral guidelines be followed. In many public schools, “self-esteem” is the lesson of the day, and social promotion the school fight song.

And once a kid gets to college, well, forget about hearing the traditional point of view very much. Most American universities have become secular-progressive theme parks. Even once-traditional schools like Georgetown and Villanova have suffered a large infusion of S-P influence.

In fact, a study by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA surveyed more than fifty-five thousand college professors about their political beliefs. Asked to describe themselves ideologically, 48 percent said they were “liberal” or “far left,” 18 percent said “conservative” or “far right,” and 34 percent described themselves as “middle of the road.”

But wait a minute. What exactly does “middle of the road” mean on America’s college campuses? It is impossible to nail down completely, but let me offer this insight: In the mid-nineties, as I mentioned, I attended Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. I learned a lot there and am proud of earning a master’s degree in public administration with decent grades.

Press and media studies at the Kennedy School are done in the Shorenstein Center, which is headed up by former New York Times reporter Alex Jones, a committed liberal. But Professor Jones does not see himself that way. He believes he’s a fair and balanced guy and said so on The O’Reilly Factor. He also said the New York Times is not a liberal newspaper and the former editor of the Los Angeles Times, Jon Carroll, whom Jones hired to teach at the Kennedy School, is not a liberal guy either.

I thought that analysis fascinating, because while at the L.A. Times, Mr. Carroll hired far-left bomb-thrower Michael Kinsley to run the editorial page, which also featured radical S-P icon columnists like Robert Scheer. Under Carroll, the Times lurched to the left, and drastically declined in circulation. Maybe that was a coincidence, but Carroll eventually quit. Soon after his departure, Kinsley and Scheer were fired by the Tribune Company, which owns the L.A. Times.

Now, I could be wrong (have I said that before?). I mean, maybe Jones, Carroll, Kinsley, and Scheer are all “middle of the road.” I can only go by what they’ve written and what they’ve said. I can’t read their minds.

Professor Jones, I believe, sincerely thinks he’s a nonpartisan educator. Again, maybe he is. The point here is that in academic circles “middle of the road” is completely different from what it would be in, say, Tupelo, Mississippi. I believe it is safe to assume that on most college campuses in the United States, S-P thought rules, at least in public.

Nowhere is that point better illustrated than at the University of Colorado. This is the home of radical professor Ward Churchill, the unhinged “ethnic studies” professor who proudly proclaimed that many of the Americans killed on 9/11 were “little Eichmanns” who deserved their fate because they were evil capitalists. You remember the outcry over that.

Well, despite all the controversy and serious questions about Churchill’s background and scholarship, he emerged as a hero among many in the secular-progressive community. But he’s not a hero to me.

So when I heard that Hamilton College in upstate New York had hired Churchill to speak on campus, I really let the college have it on radio and TV. Why pay this guy money to spew that kind of hate? I asked. Doesn’t anyone care that his vile words bring pain to the families who lost people in the World Trade Center attack? Would Hamilton be hiring David Duke to speak anytime soon?

Hamilton folded. Churchill did not speak.

As soon as the decision to throw this loon overboard was made, the S-P media sprang into action. It was the usual bilge: O’Reilly’s a fascist, a bully, a terrible human being in every way. Secular-progressive columnist Richard Cohen, who writes for the Washington Post, was distraught over the Churchill situation:

         

Then Bill O’Reilly struck. The Fox TV commentator went to town on the controversy, finding the usual liberal idiocy at the usual liberal college perpetuated by the usual liberal morons. Having rounded up his usual suspects, O’Reilly ended a segment about Hamilton by providing the name of the college’s president, Joan Hinde Stewart, her e-mail address and the school’s phone number.

Then, blood dripping from his evil heart, he asked his deranged viewers to “keep your comments respectable.” The school caved.

         

Now, Richard Cohen is one of the most fanatical S-P media people working today. He truly hates me and obviously despises the “deranged” millions all over the world who watch The Factor. Of course, I couldn’t care less, and I don’t hate him. In fact, the only thing about Cohen that even registered on my radar is that he often used personal attacks in his column to smear those with whom he disagreed.

But, I’m pleased to say, Richard Cohen no longer does that very much. After I gently advised him on the air to cease and desist from the smear tactics, he did. Good for him.

However, Cohen’s decision may have had something to do with karma. In May 2006 he wrote in the Washington Post that television satirist Stephen Colbert had bombed while doing a monologue at the Washington White House Correspondents dinner. Immediately Cohen was barraged by hundreds of hateful e-mails. Apparently two far-left smear Web sites had urged their readers to attack Cohen. The writer called the chorus a “digital lynch mob”: “It seemed that most of my correspondents had been egged on to attack me by various blogs…. All in all, I was—I am, and I guess I remain—the worthy object of ignorant, false and downright idiotic vituperation.”

I know how you feel there, Richard. What I don’t understand is why this is news to you. As the aforementioned NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin wrote about the vile Web sites Media Matters and Think Progress: “[They] encourage people to express strong feelings; the level of pure acrimony seemed to me to rise to the level of hate speech.”

Even the ombudsman for NPR knows the score.

Summing up, there is no question that the S-P movement is firmly entrenched on most college campuses and is making a lot of progress in public secondary and grammar schools. That is worrisome. The educational battlefield is a key area in the culture war. Here, especially, traditional forces are on the defensive and are heavily outnumbered. Right now American voters renounce secular-progressive initiatives again and again. But will that hold twenty years from today?

That, for the traditional warrior, is the key question.