This Time the Rabbit Didn't Die

According to Todd Starnes (Fox News) the school board of Madison City Schools, Madison, Alabama has spared the life of the Easter bunny.

Lydia Davenport, principal of Heritage Elementary School, had banned the erstwhile Easter creature, claiming people relate the Easter bunny to religion. Pardon my cannibalism, but if you can find the Easter bunny in the Bible, I'll eat it.

The principal ruled, in the name of religious diversity, that no activity centered around any religious holiday would be allowed. Some diversity. The last time I checked, "diversity" meant a multitude of views discussed openly in the public arena of ideas. Depriving students of any and all holiday activities is not religious diversity. It's not diversity of any kind. It is hypocrisy. It is totalitarianism. It is prison.

Fortunately, school superintendent Dee Fowler had better sense: "These traditions [Christmas and Easter] are part of our rich heritage, and I do not see them as infringing on one's religious rights."

Score one for real diversity - the ability to hear a different point of view without being permanently scarred. Score one also for the school board that refused to have its traditional heritage being railroaded out of school.

Score one for the Easter bunny too. Ironically, many evangelicals have been quietly objecting to the Easter bunny for years because it is probably of pagan origin. When I spoke to a fellowship recently, I advised, "Pretend you're offended. Maybe Christianity will be rid of one more pagan holdover."

Now, thanks to the Madison City School board, the rabbit lives.

Oh the Humanity!

National Review Online (along with several other news outlets) reports a New Hampshire school district has voted - well, the school board did, 4-1 - to do away with dodgeball because it is a "human target" game.

I could understand this decision better if we were talking about the kind of dodgeball we played when I was a kid and the balls were heavy missiles. When I was six years old, I was hit flush in the face with one of those artillery rounds and both lens in my glasses popped out.  But in this case, the balls in question are not even inflated. They're Nerf balls. You know, the kind of soft, spongy balls that big brothers like to bounce off the heads of their baby sisters.

I can only imagine how many lens have popped out, how many faces have been rearranged by a flaming Nerf ball. (Come to think of it, if we had had Nerf balls back in my day, they probably would have been flaming, just to make the game more interesting.) At any rate, the citizens of New Hampshire can rest easy knowing their school boards, one of them anyway, is out there protecting their children from themselves.

Meanwhile, we have an answer to the age-old question "What do Nerf balls and New Hampshire have in common?"

Answer: They're both soft.

Maybe If the Building Fell in the Shape of a Swastika

Find the source for this post at the Associated Press:

hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_SEPT_11_MEMORIAL_CROSS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-03-29-17-31-57

A judge has finally seen the light and tossed out an insane lawsuit brought by a group calling itself American Atheists against the display of a cross-shaped steel beam found among the rubble of the World Trade Center. Naturally the atheists claimed that allowing the beam to stand amounted to a governmental sanction of Christianity, and thus (according to them) a violation of the Constitution. 

What could possibly be wrong with their claim? Plenty.

Aside from the simple fact that the Constitution guarantees freedom of (not from) the free exercise of religion, no where are the atheists promised the right not to have their feelings hurt. But I digress. 

The real idiocy of the lawsuit lies in the fact that no one (except God) created the cross in question. It exists because that's the way the building fell down. 

"What?" you say.  

That's right. 

The cross is not and was not the brain-child of some enterprising rescue workers. It is a cross section of girders that remained in place after the rest of the building around it collapsed. Rescue workers -hardly flaming evangelists - treated the crude remains with reverence because of their task in locating survivors and the remains of victims. 

The American Atheists and their supporters, ever vigilant to take offense, couldn't wait to get their dander up the instant their collective imagination told them the standing beams resembled something ever so faintly religious. The judge had better sense.

"No reasonable observer would view the artifact as endorsing Christianity," the judge said.

Ah, there's the difference - "reasonable."

Maybe if the World Trade Center had fallen into the shape of a swastika, the atheists would have been happy.

Follow-up on the restaurant story

Here's the link to the Washington Times story on the police officers refused service. Find it at
www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/mar/28/virginia-police-officers-refused-restaurant-servic/

But Would They Have Served the Lone Ranger and Tonto?

The Buffalo Wild Wings Restaurant in Manassas, Virginia restaurant with one very dense employee on its roll has the honor of being the first entry to our new blog. The reason will be immediately obvious. This item is taken from Cheryl K. Chumley, of the Washington Times.

It seems our stalwart anti-gun employee refused to serve eight police officers (plain clothes but displaying their badges) because - get this - they were carrying guns. Here's the quote:

"A restaurant manager in Manassas, Virginia has gone on the defensive, rushing to apologize after an employee refused to serve eight police officers because they were carrying weapons."

According to the story as detailed by the Washington Times, the officers were not only refused service, they were asked to leave. How stupid is this? For starters, cops are allowed to carry their weapons legally because they are police officers (Duh!) The fact that they were plain clothes does not mean necessarily that they were off duty. After all, they were displaying badges - something officers don't do when they are off duty (another "duh").

But to top it off, now the whole world knows that not only does this restaurant have no way to protect itself in case of a robbery, but every Buffalo Wild Wings Restaurant in the country has the same policy. So goodbye cops and hello thieves.

I can think of at least one restaurant where it would not be safe to eat, especially around closing time. The manager wants the cops back and has "reached out to the Prince William County Police Department." Don't expect a stampede of cops to their front door.

Jumping into the shallow end of the gene pool...

Okay, this is different. I just  had to have a place to write something totally different, something off the wall, a place to release some frustrations. After viewing all the nonsense in the media and posting several items on Facebook, it became obvious to me that way more was happening out there than Facebook could - or would - handle. So here goes.

The game rules are simple. The idea is to post items taken from mainstream, reputable media that are thoroughly documented, thoroughly accurate, and completely without common sense whatsoever. No hearsay rumors. No conspiracy theories. Not too much taken from isolated you-never-heard-of-before websites. (Sorry about that.) I want to use items so obviously true and so completely ridiculous that no one can seriously contend with the truth of the item even when they disagree with it - which someone is bound to do.

Judging by the way things are going out there in the country, I should have lots of material to work with. So check in from time to time. This should be fun.