Tag: Public Order

Religion & Society

Year 247: In God We Trust

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On a dank and dreary Independence Day Tuesday, I travelled to a neighboring town to attend daily Mass. The celebrant was a visiting priest – a kindly retired priest who was so old that he didn’t always exert enough vocal strength to be quite heard. In his homily, he spoke of the blessings of political liberty enjoyed by citizens of the U.S., and cautioned against the risk of taking our blessings for granted, since we’ve never really known any other reality. But then he said something which really struck me. He called the congregation to remember the even...

Politics & Economics

A Belated Clarification

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Circumstances compel me to issue a clarification to a notion rendered in my last entry, from late December, lamenting the re-election of Barack Obama. My expressing a similar idea in a conversation prompted a sharp rebuttal that I was (wrongly and uncharitably) entertaining a conceit that everyone who voted to re-elect Obama did so either for trivial reasons, or out of naked self-interest. It is not true that I believe that, but I can understand how someone could come to that conclusion, given the cynical tone of my harangue. I made two offending comment...

Media & Culture

Such dangerous behavior could be triggered by any number of future public events

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Quote of the Day for Monday, January 17th, 2011: Call it a parting shot (!) on the Great Tucson Media Meltdown of 2011. This is former Washington Times Editor in Chief, Tony Blankley, commenting over at National Review Online: Because even though the Tucson shooting did not cause the media irresponsibility — this time — continued media misreporting and bias is now so ingrained that such dangerous behavior could be triggered by any number of future public events. Now is the time for us all to pause, and consider how the working members of the media can li...

Politics & Economics

Free Speech and the Peaceful Public Order

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I arrived home from my sister Mary’s funeral Saturday evening, and saw that Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and several other people had been shot during some kind of meet-and-greet in her congressional district. I’d never heard of Giffords, but was discouraged that such a thing would happen – it’s hard enough just given our political process to get good people to run for public office, and it was of course a terrible tragedy for the people involved. It seemed to me that it had been a long time since something like that had happened. As I read t...