Daily Headlines | Monday October 25, 2021

Good Morning! 

In Act IV of Julius Caesar, Brutus is trying to persuade Cassius that the time is ripe to battle Octavius and Antony. He implores: 

“There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.”  

A nearly half-century campaign to defend innocent life now rides the current headed for the Supreme Court in November and December: 

1. Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Texas Heartbeat Case on November 1 

From The Daily Citizen: 

In two separate orders issued Friday, the United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear the appeals from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and abortion sellers challenging the Texas Heartbeat Act, which prohibits abortion once a fetal heartbeat can be detected. Oral arguments are now scheduled for November 1, a month before the high court is scheduled to hear arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a challenge to Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban. 

The action taken by the justices is unusual, in that the Texas law has only recently been challenged in the lower federal courts, and no ultimate decisions have been reached in those, which typically triggers an appeal to the high court. 

But nothing about the Texas case has proven typical, as the Supreme Court has already denied one emergency request from the abortion sellers to block the heartbeat law while the case advances. In both cases, the DOJ and the abortion sellers asked the high court to accept the case for a hearing now, even before any judgments are reached in the lower courts. 

The court’s order in the case brought by the DOJ – United States v. Texas – limits the scope of the argument on November 1 to the following question: “May the United States bring suit in federal court and obtain injunctive or declaratory relief against the State, state court judges, state court clerks, other state officials, or all private parties to prohibit S.B. 8 from being enforced?” That issue involves complicated nuances of federal case law that the justices will have to sort through. 

Interestingly, the order deferred any consideration of temporarily blocking the Texas law until the November 1 hearing. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the decision to defer. 

2. Email shows Loudoun superintendent knew of bathroom sexual assault on same day 

From the Washington Examiner: 

A newly disclosed email sent by the superintendent of Loudoun County Public Schools alerting school board members of an alleged sexual assault on school grounds contradicts what he later said publicly about there being no record of such an incident. 

Superintendent Scott Ziegler, who now claims his public statement was made after misinterpreting a question, sent the email on May 28, saying the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office in Northern Virginia was investigating an alleged sexual assault at Stone Bridge High School. 

“The purpose of this email is to provide you with information regarding an incident that occurred at Stone Bridge HS,” Ziegler said in the email obtained by WTOP News . “This afternoon a female student alleged that a male student sexually assaulted her in the restroom. The LCSO is investigating the matter.” 

But a month later, on June 22, when he addressed an unruly school board meeting over claims of a female student getting raped by another student in the girl’s restroom, he said, “We don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.” 

3. Parents Warn of Their Children Being Subjected to Transgender Indoctrination 

From The Epoch Times: 

 

Vera Lindner of Los Angeles, California, told The Epoch Times “the trans bomb was dropped,” into her world a year ago when her daughter was 14 years old. Her daughter, now 15, had been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome and Attention Deficit Disorder. She suffers from depression, anxiety, insulin resistance, and obesity. Her daughter was also diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). 

Dee, of Clover, South Carolina has a 17-year-old daughter who was indoctrinated at the age of 15. Her daughter has been diagnosed with pre-adoption trauma. 

A concerned mom in Augusta, Georgia, who is a single parent, spoke to The Epoch Times under the condition of anonymity using the pseudonym Mary. She said her son made his transgender announcement in November 2020. While not formally diagnosed with any specific disorder, she “had him tested when he was younger for being on the [autism] spectrum and he fell in the gray zone.” 

“They could not say yes or no,” Mary added. “He has always been a bit socially awkward and quirky.” 

4. Is the Public School System Constitutional? 

From the Wall Street Journal: 

Public education in America has always attempted to homogenize and mold the identity of children. Since its largely nativist beginnings around 1840, public education has been valued for corralling most of the poor and middle class into institutions where their religious and ethnic differences could be ironed out in pursuit of common “American” values. 

Education consists mostly in speech to and with children. Parents enjoy freedom of speech in educating their children, whether at home or through private schooling. That is the principle underlying Pierce, and it illuminates our current conundrum. 

The public school system, by design, pressures parents to substitute government educational speech for their own. Public education is a benefit tied to an unconstitutional condition. Parents get subsidized education on the condition that they accept government educational speech in lieu of home or private schooling. 

When government makes education compulsory and offers it free of charge, it crowds out parental freedom in educational speech. The poorer the parents, the more profound the pressure—and that is by design. Nativists intended to pressure poor and middle-class parents into substituting government educational speech for their own, and their unconstitutional project largely succeeded. 

Most parents can’t afford to turn down public schooling. They therefore can’t adopt speech expressive of their own views in educating their children, whether by paying for a private school or dropping out of work to home-school. So they are constrained to adopt government educational speech in place of their own, in violation of the First Amendment. 

NSBA apologizes for letter calling parents ‘domestic terrorists’ 

From the Washington Examiner: 

The National School Board Association apologized for its letter to President Joe Biden calling for help from federal law enforcement to assist with “threats and violence” from parents and protesters. 

The group said there was “no justification” for the language used in its Sept. 29 letter to the Biden administration calling some parents’ actions “the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism” as parents throughout the United States lock horns with school administrators over transgender policies, the use of critical race theory, and mask mandates. 

“On behalf of the NSBA, we regret and apologize for the letter. To be clear, the safety of school board members, other public school officials and educators, and students is our top priority, and there remains important work to be done on this issue,” the NSBA wrote Friday evening. “However, there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter. We should have had a better process in place to allow for some consultation on a communication of this significance.” 

It’s Madness to Quarantine Schoolchildren 

From the Wall Street Journal: 

During the 2020-21 school year, a study from Salt Lake County, Utah, published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, found only four positive cases among 735 students tested while in quarantine, a transmission rate of 0.7%.  

A study from St. Louis County, Mo., also published in MMWR, found no positive cases among quarantined students at a time when the total countywide two-week case count was 711 per 100,000 people (the CDC classifies a one-week rate of 100 per 100,000 as “high”). 

In mid-September 2021, the Los Angeles Unified School district reported that, since the school year began, 30,000 students had been quarantined and only 63 tested positive—a 0.2% positivity rate. That’s about half the rate at which the district’s students turned up positive in large-scale surveillance testing—meaning that random quarantines would have been expected to turn up more cases. The district changed its policy to test-to-stay: Asymptomatic students suspected of exposure may remain in school, subject to testing every few days for a week, along with other restrictions. Parents are still directed to keep them at home outside school hours. 

It’s past time for America’s public-health leaders to stanch the bleeding of last year’s educational disaster, particularly for low-income students. The CDC’s current quarantine policies keep children out of school and provide no meaningful reduction in Covid-19 transmission. 

Canadian Judge Orders Pastor to Preach Government’s Views on COVID 

From The Daily Citizen: 

Artur Pawlowski is a Polish immigrant who pastors Street Church and The Cave of Adullam in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He and his brother Dawid have been outspoken critics of the province’s COVID-19 restrictions on church meetings ordered by the Alberta Health Services (AHS) during the pandemic. 

After receiving 29 tickets, three court orders, two injunctions and two court contempt trials over the course of the last year, Pawlowski recently had to face Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Adam Germain, who found him in contempt of court for continuing to hold a church service after being ordered to stop. Although avoiding jail, Pastor Pawlowski  was ordered to pay $23,000 in fines, undergo 18 months of probation, and serve 120 hours of community service. 

Pawlowski, who famously chased Calgary police and health officials out of his church last year, calling them “Nazis” and “Gestapo” for attempting to shut down his church services, was also ordered by Justice Germain to give the government’s perspective whenever he publicly talks or communicates anything negative about AHS health orders and recommendations. CBC News headlined the court order this way: “Anti-mask activists ordered by Calgary judge to preach science, too.” 

In a 40-minute lecture from the bench, Germain told the Pawlowski brothers that “they are on the wrong side of science” and “also on the wrong side of common sense.”  

8.   The Wit and Wisdom of Thomas Sowell  

From National Review: 

Few social scientists are able to distill their thoughts into such punchy lines as Thomas Sowell, the great economist whose ideas are celebrated in Jason L. Riley’s inspiring book Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell. Among Sowell’s many quotable remarks: 

“I’ve studiously avoided entanglements with colleges for the past 35 years. The most intolerant place you can be these days is the academic campus.” 

“Much of what are called ‘social problems’ consists of the fact that intellectuals have theories that do not fit the real world. From this they conclude that it is the real world which is wrong and needs changing.” 

“There are a lot of assertions and foregone conclusions that are stated over and over again, but repetition is not a substitute for facts.” 

“I, of course, started out on the left and believed a lot of this stuff. The one thing that saved me was that I always thought that facts mattered.” 

“I made enough enemies to get me in trouble and enough friends to get me out.” 

“It is depressing to hear ideas trumpeted as New! when the underlying reasoning involved was common in the 1840s or the 1790s — and discredited by the 1920s.” 

“The current militant rhetoric, self-righteousness and lifestyle are painfully old to me. I have seen the same intonations, the same cadence, the same crowd manipulation techniques . . . and I have seen the same hustling Messiahs driving their Cadillacs and getting their pictures in the paper. 

“The characteristics of the intellectual vision are strikingly similar to the characteristics of totalitarian ideology.” 

“What the welfare system and other kinds of government programs are doing is paying people to fail. Insofar as they fail, they receive the money. Insofar as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.” 

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.” 

After High School Goes Viral For Massive Brawl, Community Dads Organize To Help Fatherless Students 

From the Daily Wire: 

Community dads are patrolling Southwood High School in Shreveport, Louisiana, following a series of fights that involved nearly two dozen students. 

Last month, a video of several brawling Southwood students went viral on social media. More incidents over the next few days led to police arresting twenty-three students and charging them with disturbing the peace. One student was additionally charged with battery on an assistant principal. 

Over the past few weeks, the Shreveport community — disturbed by the violence — has rallied around the school. As featured by CBS News, a group of local fathers began patrolling the school to provide a tender, yet firm, presence: 

They formed Dads on Duty — a group of about 40 dads who take shifts spending time at the school in Shreveport, Louisiana, greeting students in the morning and helping maintain a positive environment for learning, rather than fighting. 

The students say it’s working — and the numbers prove it. There hasn’t been a single incident on campus since the dads showed up. 

“We’re dads. We decided the best people who can take care of our kids are who? Are us,” explained Michael LaFitte, who started Dads on Duty. The dads saw that “not everybody has a father figure at home.” 

10.Meet the 15-year-old blind quarterback hoping to reach the NFL 

From CNN: 

Jasen Bracy is unstoppable when he’s on the football field. 

The 15-year-old Modesto Raiders starting quarterback is completely blind — and a merciless athlete, passing the ball, running touchdowns and breaking tackles. 

“I never used even once that I can’t see as an excuse. Never have, never will,” Jasen, who lives in Modesto, California, told CNN. “I told my team that the only difference between me and the other quarterback is that he has a different number, and that’s it.” 

The young star grew up enjoying the sport three days a week every time football season came around, with his father narrating every detail. Immediately, Jasen says, he knew that was his passion. 

“Maybe one day I’ll be on TV on the football field myself,” Jasen said he told himself every day. “There’s no limits, and if there’s something in the way, I’ll find out how to get around it or over it. I’ll find a way to achieve my goal in the best way possible.” 

Jasen has been blind since he was a young child. When he was 1 year old, he was diagnosed with retinoblastoma, a cancer that causes tumors in the retinas.