Chicken Queen

Gay rights groups are becoming very creative, in a galline kind of way. They have come up with an alternative to Chick-fil-A called "Fair Filet."

At "Fair Filet," gays can walk in and buy a chicken meal and eat it at your leisure. However, if you are heterosexual, believe in traditional marriage, and happen to be walking in the near vicinity of the restaurant, large "Fair Filet" security guards in uniforms and brown shorts are allowed to drag you into the restaurant and force you to eat their chicken while you watch sensitivity training videos on the restaurant monitors that explain that you are an intolerant bigot who, despite the fact that you were minding your own business just a few minutes before, needs to repudiate your traditional religious beliefs in favor of  ...

... Uh oh. Wait a minute. Let me study this for just a second ...

Shoot. Turns out it's just a fake publicity campaign that lies about what Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy said and is supporting a hate campaign against traditional values.

Nevermind.

Press Release: Family Foundation suggest U of L campus makeover

LEXINGTON, KY--The Family Foundation today called for a campus makeover at the University of Louisville in the wake of reports that the university was considering ejecting Chick-fil-A from its campus cafeteria because of the views of the restaurant chain's president who thinks marriage is between a man and a woman.

"We think U of L should rename Grawemeyer Hall, its administration building, 'The Ministry of Truth," said Martin Cothran, senior policy analyst for The Family Foundation of Kentucky. "If President James Ramsey and Provost Shirley Willilnganz really want to create an environment of intolerance and ideological uniformity, then we think a more pronounced Orwellian theme would be appropriate for campus buildings."

Cothran wondered whether Ramsey and Willinganz might arrange for an inscription on the building, similar to that in George Orwell's book, 1984. In 1984, the inscription on the front edifice of the Ministry of Truth read, "WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. "We think something along the lines of 'DIVERSITY IS UNIFORMITY, EQUALITY IS FAVORITISM, TOLERANCE IS BIGOTRY' would fit the new ideological regime that is being established on U of L's campus."

"Then, anyone found eating politically incorrect chicken, could be hauled to the building and into Ms. Willinganz's office in the Ministry of Love--which, by the way, we think should be called 'Room 101.'"

Cothran suggested other changes as well, such as changing the university's fight song to "Oceana 'tis of Thee."

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Courier-Journal takes U of L's Ramsey and Willinganz to task

Omigosh. The Louisville Courier-Journal wrote an editorial yesterday that actually got it right. And when Courier-Journal editorials start making sense, you know something's up.

The CJ yesterday editorialized against what the University of Louisville provost Shirley Willinganz is clearly trying to find a way to do: kick Chick-fil-A off its campus.

Here it is:

Why stop there? A directory of local restaurants shows at least six Chick-fil-A outlets in the Louisville area. Should we pull their business licenses? Change Health Department ratings to D for discriminatory?  

Of course not.  

... But calling for the ouster of the restaurant — or even a boycott — is extreme, especially on a college campus. Should we demand ideological purity tests of all on-campus vendors, not to mention professors who count a number of conservative voices in their midst?

In fact, the editorial explicitly agreed with Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy in his statement about his and his company's right to say what they want to say because, you know, it's like a free country.

And then there was this:

If U of L officials and students don’t back off, they are easy targets for the rhetoric of reflexive groups such as Kentucky’s Family Foundation, which fired off a press release Monday blaming the “tolerance police” for ferreting out “thought crime” on campus.

So the Family Foundation is no longer a "religious right wing group" in CJ editorials? They're now just "reflexive"? Is that a promotion or something? Now there's some news.

New University of Louisville Fight song

We mentioned this morning that the University of Louisville's Ministry of Truth was celebrating Hateweek by considering the possibility of expelling Chick-fil-A from its student cafeteria for its doubleplus ungood views on marriage, which consisted of supporting the idea of the traditional family.

Both UofL President James Ramsey and Provost Shirley Willinganz, chief members of the university's Inner Party, upset with the Oldthink expressed by the company's Dan Cathy, have decided to use their official positions to enforce their personal left-wing political views on campus and to expel any Chick-fil-A for possible Thoughtcrimes.

Our comments on the Intolerance Eruption at the university were carried in the Lexington Herald-Leader and on public radio.

But there may be good news. UofL has not made a decision yet on whether they are going to kick Chick-fil-A off the campus:

Mark Hebert, a spokesman for U of L, said Monday the university has not made any decisions yet on whether it will or can terminate Chik-fil-A's contract. Willihnganz is meeting with student groups this week to determine their views on the issue, Hebert said.

That's encouraging: U of L isn't being intolerant and discriminatory yet; they're just considering whether they can be intolerant and discriminatory.

Our next step is to publicly call on the university to dump its current fight song in favor of the following:

At the University of Louisville, it's the year 1984

LEXINGTON, KY—A state family advocacy group today charged that University of Louisville officials were using their positions for personal political purposes in the wake of reports that the university is considering expelling Chick-fil-A from its student food services for its position in favor of traditional marriage. “We don’t need people running our universities who think they can use their positions to pursue their own personal special interest political agendas,” said Martin Cothran, senior policy analyst with The Family Foundation.

The group said the university was turning its nose up at the very taxpayers who support it. “If James Ramsey and U of L have no use for a private business that supports traditional marriage,” said Cothran, “then they have no business asking for funds from taxpayers in a state whose voters approved, by a 75 percent margin, a 2004 constitutional amendment saying virtually the same thing.”

Cothran’s comments came on the heels of reports that UofL President James Ramsey and University Provost Shirley Willinganz had personally pledged to boycott the restaurant chain for its views on traditional marriage and that Willinganz was looking into ways of preventing them from serving as a food vendor on campus. “Maybe it’s good that UofL leadership has come out of the closet about their contempt for the views of a majority of Kentuckians, but to even consider using their positions to persecute individuals or organizations they personally disagree with is simply Orwellian.”

“It’s 2012 almost everywhere else,” said Martin Cothran, “but at UofL it seems to be 1984.”

Cothran has criticized the university for a lack of intellectual diversity on its campus several times in recent years. “This just proves our point,” said Cothran. “The administration at UofL seems to be under one party martial law when it comes to the viewpoints it is willing to tolerate on campus.”

Cothran said the university’s position is at odds with its stated opposition to intolerance and its support of inclusion of all viewpoints. “That the university is even considering kicking Chick-fil-A off campus is a measure of just how intolerant the Tolerance Police who now run such institutions have become. If there was any doubt before that the university’s rhetoric on tolerance and diversity was empty, it has now been removed. UofL seems to be becoming a place where divergence from the party line on social issues is considered a Thought Crime.”

Cothran added that it is ironic that just as many opponents of traditional marriage are backing off efforts to crack down on Chick-fil-A, UofL would have chosen to announce the move. “It’s not exactly great timing,” he said.

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Materialists who didn't get the quantum mechanics memo

Stephen Barr is a physicist at the University of Delaware, and isn't having any of this nonsense about science supporting materialism:

Materialism is an atheistic philosophy that says that all of reality is reducible to matter and its interactions. It has gained ground because many people think that it’s supported by science. They think that physics has shown the material world to be a closed system of cause and effect, sealed off from the influence of any non-physical realities --- if any there be. Since our minds and thoughts obviously do affect the physical world, it would follow that they are themselves merely physical phenomena. No room for a spiritual soul or free will: for materialists we are just “machines made of meat.”

Quantum mechanics, however, throws a monkey wrench into this simple mechanical view of things. No less a figure than Eugene Wigner, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, claimed that materialism --- at least with regard to the human mind --- is not “logically consistent with present quantum mechanics.” And on the basis of quantum mechanics, Sir Rudolf Peierls, another great 20th-century physicist, said, “the premise that you can describe in terms of physics the whole function of a human being ... including [his] knowledge, and [his] consciousness, is untenable. There is still something missing.”

It's a point made in a more extended form by physicist Paul Davies in his book, The Matter Myth. But some apparently never got the quantum mechanics memo: If you listen to those in the natural sciences, like biology, they still talk as if quantum mechanics never happened.

Read more here.

Remember when liberals used to be tolerant?

Remember when liberals used to say things like:

• Groups shouldn't try to use the government to impose their own morality on other people. 
• If you don't like pornography then don't buy it.
• No one has the right to limit your First Amendment right of freedom of expression

Not any more.

Eat More Chikin: Tolerance Police brandishing their truncheons against Chick-fil-A

Just in case you're wondering where that sound of goose-stepping is coming from, you might check out the news from Chicago, where an alderman (and now, apparently the mayor) is trying to prevent Chick-fil-A from building a second store in town because of its president's position on gay "marriage."

And then there's Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, who revealed himself this week as a stürmfuhrer in the Brown Shorts, and who has declared that Chick-fil-A "doesn't belong in Boston."

As if we needed further proof of the increasing intolerance of the gay rights movement.

The Tolerance Police apparently don't see any inconsistency in preaching tolerance on one day, and then getting out their political truncheons to intimidate a private company because of its president's religiously-based belief that marriage should be between a man and a woman on the other.

Apparently one of the rights the gay rights movement wants is the right to infringe on the rights of conscience of others. [Click heels here]

HT: The Volokh Conspiracy, Michelle Malkin

What's that you say about grammar not being important any more?

This just in from the Eastern language front: Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit and founder of Dozuki:

“I am a grammar “stickler.” I have a “zero tolerance approach” to grammar mistakes that make people look stupid. Everyone who applies for a position at either of my companies, iFixit or Dozuki, takes a mandatory grammar test. If job hopefuls can’t distinguish between “to” and “too,” their applications go into the bin. Yes, language is constantly changing, but that doesn’t make grammar unimportant. Good grammar is credibility, especially on the internet. In blog posts, on Facebook statuses, in e-mails, and on company websites, your words are all you have. They are a projection of you in your physical absence. And, for better or worse, people judge you if you can’t tell the difference between their, there, and they’re.

Oh, and try making a mistake--I mean the least little typo--on an application for a legal internship.

Takeaway line from Wendell Berry's Paideia Prize acceptance speech on education

"I think our education system is too big to fail, but I also think it's too big to fix--without a lot less money."

My introduction to Wendell Berry at the Paideia Prize banquet last night

Greetings.

I have been to almost every CiRCE conference. I think I may have missed two. And what I have found over the years is that there is one author who is referred to by participants more than any other, and that is Wendell Berry. If you don’t know of him before you get here, you are sent home thinking that something is missing in your life and that you probably ought to do something about it.

He is here with us tonight. I had heard that Wendell gets a lot of invitations to speak. And I think I asked him one time how he decided which ones to accept. As I recall, he said something like, “The easiest thing is to just say “No.” And I understand that he employs that option liberally. And so I first want to thank him on behalf of the CiRCE Institute for accepting our invitation—and our award.

Secondly, I want to say why it is that I appreciate Wendell Berry. I met Wendell before I had ever read any of his books. He had come to teach a class at Highlands Latin School. I had heard that his books were pretty good. And soon I fell to reading his novels. It was a bit like going through the wardrobe and entering another world.

The world I entered was a world of life, and death, and joy, and sorrow, and peace, and far-off war, and laughter, and weeping, and charity, and violence; it was a world of work, and play, and friendship, and love. There was something striking about this world, and for a long time I couldn’t put my finger on it. And then one day I realized what it was: It was not another world that I had entered. The world that I had entered was this world.

All roads lead to Port William.

I told my wife one time that Wendell Berry’s stories were the one thing I read for no reason whatsoever. They were the only books that I read for no other end than themselves.

His novels and short stories had the great virtue of being not just good, but true. But his essays had another quality that it took me a little while to identify. One of his collections of short stories is titled Fidelity. But any collection of his essays could easily have bourn that title. They were faithful: not only in the sense of being true, and therefore faithful to the world, but in the sense of being faithful to the Word.

There is a sense of integrity that leaps from every line. There is a word that is very seldom used, although examples are everywhere: the word "cant." It means insincere, hypocritical, platitudinous speech. I find myself falling into it on occasion. But I can’t remember ever encountering a word of cant in anything of his I have ever read.

And there’s one more thing.

I was teaching class one day, and—I don’t know how we got on the subject—but Emily, his granddaughter mentioned that on Saturday mornings, “Granddaddy takes us out and teaches us how to to horse farm.” The “us” included her brother Marshall. “And when the weather's bad,” she continued, “he takes us up to the cabin and teaches us how to write. Granddaddy’s got boxes this high with the stuff I’ve written.”

I’ve thought about those remarks from time to time, and I’ve thought about the fact that his son Den farms too, and I’ve seen a few things Mary, his daughter, has written, and how he has devoted so much time to passing on the things that he loves to his children and to his grandchildren.

“Fidelity” is not just the title of one of his books.

Ladies and gentlemen, would you please welcome Wendell Berry ...

What could possibly go wrong with Obamacare?

HT: Carpe Diem: