Ja’eisha Scott, a student at Fairmount Park Elementary School in St. Petersburg, Fla., threw a violent tanturm in her classroom (video). She was taken to the assistant principal’s office where the tantrum continued (video). No matter how sternly Ja’eisha was told that her actions were “not acceptable,” or how her rude behavior was making the teacher “sad,” she wouldn’t calm down.

So, the police were called. Five-year-old Ja’eisha was escorted from the school in handcuffs.

The video clips of this spoiled brat and her incompetent teachers do not inspire confidence in our so-called “education” system. I’m sure almost everyone who watches the videos will feel a longing to return to the good ol’ days when teachers took charge and children respected authority. But what concerns me is that some would actually praise the decision to summon the gendarmes.

Sure, a violent child needs to be restrained, but was it really necessary to call the cops to slap on handcuffs? Grab the kid’s arms and hold her until she calms down. Stick her in an empty room by herself where she can’t break anything or hit anyone. In the video, Ja’eisha climbs up onto a desk and her teacher–apparently in an effort to save the girl’s life–picks her up and sets her gently on the floor. Why could the teacher get away with using physical contact in that situation, yet have no justification to do so when the kid is hitting people and trashing classrooms?

I believe the implications are more serious than most of us care to admit. David Yeagley indentifies one of the main underlying problems in his article “Cuffing the Kids.” Recalling other incidents involving the apprehension of young children, he asks:

Why is this series of arrests taking place? Because of the permissive atmosphere engendered by the ACLU, the NEA, and child advocate organizations. All of these have so inhibited the basic disciplines necessary in child training that to survive and yet avoid a lawsuit, schoolteachers and administrators have no choice but to call the police. The leftists have designed these very circumstances, and yet they are the first to express outrage when the police arrive. Handcuffs all ’round seems to be the Left’s version of “No child left behind.”

The real tragedy is that, despite all the evidence, we fail to see the kind of society we are becoming. Examples like this should, at the very least, cause people to seriously reconsider sending their children to a government-run indoctrination center.

Yeagley concludes:

The police state is strong in Florida elementary schools–and this means children are getting used to it. As they carry their police records into adulthood, they will think nothing of the constant presence of police and law enforcement. They will have been conditioned to the hand of Big Brother violently intruding in the lives of even the youngest citizens.

Our children are indeed being conditioned to view the state as the ultimate authority in every aspect of their lives. But that’s what happens when God is no longer the focus of our attention. If anything, this entire incident is an indictment of our willingness as a nation to let the atheist state raise our children.

I haven’t been commenting much lately on the Iraqi fiasco, so I thought it might be fun to take a few minutes and review what is happening.

About three weeks or so ago, I heard and read a spate of stories indicating that the administration was cautiously optimistic about events in Iraq. Even this week, General Myers said, “I think we are winning, okay. I think we’re definitely winning. I think we’ve been winning for some time.”

One of the problems from the get-go in Iraq is that there was never a clear picture of what “winning” meant. On Thursday, after three months of haggling, the Iraqis formed a new Shiite-dominated government (is that winning?). The move was greeted by a series of attacks by Sunni “insurgents.”

The Pentagon did admit that attacks are at the same level as one year ago. But, hey, no worries mate! Rummy says that all we have here are “a relatively small number of people who have weapons and who have money and who are determined to try to prevent democracy from going forward.” Well, I feel better now, don’t you?

Over the past month, the daily total has edged up to about 50 or 60 attacks, and some analysts are concerned that the culprits are Sunnis, who may be hardening in their opposition to a “democratically elected” Shiite government. Indeed, the words “civil war” are now being uttered in Iraq.

The new government has excluded Sunnis from top cabinet positions and is promising a de-Baathification of government, but they were able to find a prominent spot for neocon favorite Ahmad Chalabi. You remember Chalabi, right? He’s the guy who gave the Pentagon false information about mythical Iraqi WMDs and leaked intelligence to Iran. Well, he will now act as deputy prime minister and acting oil minister.

So it looks like there are two plausible scenarios in Iraq, as there have been from the beginning. Either the state completely collapses into civil war, creating a breeding ground for all sorts of unsavory characters, or Iraq becomes a Shiite-controlled regime, closely aligned with their Iranian co-religionists. In either case, have our efforts in Iraq enhanced U. S. security or advanced the national interest in any way?

Meanwhile, the evidence continues to mount that Americans were deceived leading up to the war. The Iraq Survey Group released a final report this week and not only didn’t Iraq possess WMDs, but apparently they didn’t ship them off to Syria, either. I hope someone over at Fox News knows how to read and they pass this information on to their viewers.

There was also an interesting tidbit from Vincent Cannistaro, the former CIA head of counterterrorism operations and intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan. Cannistraro says, “there was a tremendous amount of pressure on the analysts” to produce intelligence favorable to the administration’s strained claims.

The point is that it’s being taken as conventional wisdom that there really wasn’t any pressure by policy makers on the analytical process itself. And that’s just simply not true. It’s simply not true because analysts, generally, are like anyone else. They are concerned about their careers, their futures. Many of them are ambitious. If they understand that a dissenting opinion against the conventional policy wisdom is heard, that it’s going to affect their careers. There was a chilled environment in which to express any kind of opposite opinion.

Not only that, there wasn’t very much of a receptiveness at the senior levels of the CIA — at George Tenet’s level, for example, because he was a very political director. And he was very concerned about getting along with the administration. He was formerly a Democrat, appointed by a Democratic President and he had to stay on in a Republican administration. And he had to compete with a secretary of defense, Rumsfeld, who really didn’t want the CIA playing a large role in the intelligence community, and wanted to supplant that role. So, George had a more political bent. He wanted to get along, and therefore he had to play along. And “playing along” really meant to sustain the conceptions of the policy makers — particularly at the Pentagon and the vice president’s office — that Saddam Hussein was a real and imminent danger.

To do that, you had to accept some of these alarming reports that kept coming in, being fed by Ahmed Chalabi and his INC group. In many cases, the information was fabricated. Information, for example, about an alleged attempt by Saddam Hussein to acquire nuclear material, uranium, from Niger. This, we know now, was all based on fabricated documents. But it’s not clear yet — either from this report, or from any other report — who fabricated the documents.

The documents were fabricated by supporters of the policy in the United States. The policy being that you had to invade Iraq in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and you had to do it soon to avoid the catastrophe that would be produced by Saddam Hussein’s use of alleged weapons of mass destruction.

When asked about the forged Niger documents, Cannistraro said that while he didn’t want to comment specifically, there was some evidence that forgeries were spawned here in the U.S. Hmm, maybe they’ve taken up counterfeiting over at the American Enterprise Institute.

I started reading Chronicles when my big brother passed along an issue before Gulf War I–and I’ve been reading ever since. Though some great writers have come and gone, I assume that they can’t work easily for the temperamental Tom Fleming, the magazine retains great verve and punch.

The latest issue runs head-on into the panoply of issues clouding discussion over the Middle East and American foreign policy in the region. The Rockford Institute, publisher of Chronicles, will also be releasing a book examining the issue in more detail. You may have to look around for a newsstand that sells Chronicles, though you might easily find an issue of National Review to put on the bottom of the bird cage, but it will be worth your time.

Here is one gem from Aaron Wolf writing about Christian Zionists:

The Republican Party, so heavily influenced by the neoconservatives, is happy to cultivate the dispensationalist evangelicals, both through the promise of promoting their “moral values” and through tough talk about “terrorists”—where terrorist is often a synonym for Palestinian. A strange and perverse symbiosis exists between many politicians, who promise the moon to evangelicals, and popular evangelical leaders, who are so eager for access to the corridors of power that they are willing to compromise again and again on those “moral values” issues (“gay marriage,” abortion, euthanasia) in order to stay in the loop…

If we are to remove the obstacle of Christian Zionism, we must encourage and support the efforts of those evangelical theologians who are earnestly seeking to reform evangelical eschatology in favor of a view that both takes the Bible seriously and places emphasis on the crucified and risen Christ (Who will, indeed come again), not on the state of Israel. Furthermore, we must make every effort to expose the relationships among the Likud, the neoconservatives, and the Christian Zionist leadership and the cynical ways in which they seek to manipulate faithful evangelicals into supporting their secularist goals—goals that have nothing to do with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, from which Evangelicals derive their name. Evangelicals must be brought to the conclusion that it is through the Church and the Gospel, not through the Republican Party, that God’s purposes on earth are furthered.

Amen, Aaron!

I also see in the current issue an advertisement for a book called, “Neo-Conned! Just War Principles: A Condemnation of War in Iraq.” I see that there are Catholic (Buchanan, Sobran, Wanniski, Fleming), Jewish (Gottfried), and non-Christian (Francis) writers represented. What they need is a thoughtful Protestant contribution. I nominate this guy.

A discussion I got involved in on another site prompted some thinking on my part on the nature of theonomy. Theonomy is an inescapable concept, that is, all people subscribe to one view of theonomy. Man is, as Chesterton noted, inherently religious, and if he will not worship the true God he will worship a fake god, be it the state, himself, or a statue of a chicken. Man will always seek to live in conformance to his god’s laws, and we wind up with communists, nymphomaniacs, and cultists.

The problem, then, that the world has with those who proclaim that God’s law applies to all of life is not that they believe God’s law, but rather that they believe that it’s true for everybody. They then go about their merry little way enslaving themselves by either creating a statist society or an extreme libertarian utopia where every man is free to make himself a slave to pleasure. I’m generalizing, of course, but these are the two main trends.

The solution for the Christian is quite clear. God’s law or chaos. There are a wide number of views on how God’s law is to be applied, and that’s to be expected. As fun as it is to squibble and argue about the particulars, the primary point of agreement ought to be that society is governed by the Lord and as such ought to obey His law. Christ made it clear that the law was a continuing institution in the Sermon on the Mount:

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. – Matthew 5:17-18

Again, Christians may differ as to how God’s law is to be applied today. Some believe that the laws about cottons still apply, others argue that such laws were made null by the new covenant, i.e Peter’s experience with the unclean foods in Acts 11. These disagreements can sometimes result in meaningful dialogue, unfortunately they usually result in the two sides parting ways. Which is a shame, firstly because we reflect our Lord’s image poorly in doing so, and secondly because both sides have the same goal, just different ideas on how to get there.

A quick caveat – I don’t want to create the impression that those Christians who don’t hold to some form of theonomy are somehow unregenerate. There’s no shortage of great Christians with great flaws. (Or, like myself, poor Christians with great flaws.) My chief point here is against the relativists, who seem to think that they can avoid theonomy. (unfortunately, there’s a goodish deal of relativism in the church these days as well, so I suppose that there’s some inadvertent friendly fire involved here.) They can try to avoid Biblical theonomy, sure, but there’s no way they’ll be able to get away from any form of theonomy.

The reason this is all so important has nothing to do with having all of our theological ducks in a row. Rather, it has to do with every aspect of our lives. Theonomy doesn’t just apply to the state, it applies to how we live day-to-day. We live self-sacrificial lives not because it’s a nice thing to do, but because we’ve been commanded to do so. Biblical theonomy, simply put, is Christian living.

Do students have the right of free speech in school? Smart aleck students and the ACLU think so:

Free Speech Battle Brewing over Students’ Anatomical Buttons

WINONA, Minn. – High school students here are being admonished for wearing buttons inspired by the sometimes raunchy off-Broadway hit “The Vagina Monologues” and have been threatened with expulsion if they wear risque T-shirts inspired by the show.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota is offering to help students fight any consequences in what’s become a battle between free speech and school conduct policies.

The trouble started last month when student Carrie Rethlefsen saw Eve Ensler’s play about female sexuality and sexual violence against women, which led the teen and fellow student Emily Nixon, 17, to start wearing “I (heart) My Vagina” buttons.

Despite the threats of serious punishment, Rethlefsen has continued to wear her button to raise awareness about women’s issues. As a show of support, more than 100 students have ordered T-shirts bearing “I (heart) My Vagina” for girls and “I Support Your Vagina” for boys. …

The typical conservative response, of course, has been to criticize these idiot kids and drone on about the good ol’ days when students knew their place and respected authority. Unfortunately, that kind of reaction misses the point entirely.

For decades, we have drilled into the heads of children that they have a right to a public education. Allowing the state to usurp the authority of parents, we now have a system of government-run indoctrination camps funded entirely by John Q. Public–whether he actually has kids in school or not.

What else can we expect? These kids–stupid and disrespectful as they may be–have developed an entitlement mentality. They are acting preceisely as anyone would expect spoiled brats to act.

Rather than get bent out of shape over the kinds of shirts and buttons they are wearing to class, why not focus on the root cause of the problem? Nothing will change until government schools are a thing of the past.

Baptist Press covered Richard Land’s recent trip into the belly of the beast–Harvard. Land spoke to a class and attended an evening forum where he addressed, among other things, America’s “special” obligation in the world:

We believe that America has a special role to play in the world. Now we do not believe that America is God’s chosen nation, but we do believe that God’s providence has blessed this country, and that that is a belief that brings with it obligations and responsibilities and that America has a special obligation and responsibility to be the friend of freedom and the friend of democracy in the world.

And I cannot tell you the number of Southern Baptists and other evangelicals and Catholics who told me that they were moved to tears by the president’s second inaugural address and the statement that we are going to be the friend of freedom. People of traditional religious values believe America has a special obligation and responsibility because of the blessings we have received to be the friend of the oppressed … and to help those who want freedom for themselves.

In the inaugural speech to which Mr. Land refers, the president said, “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

Earlier in his first term, the theologian-in-chief invoked natural law in this speech as the foundation of American foreign policy. Bush said:

In the struggle of the centuries, America learned that freedom is not the possession of one race. We know with equal certainty that freedom is not the possession of one nation. This belief in the natural rights of man, this conviction that justice should reach wherever the sun passes leads America into the world.

With the power and resources given to us, the United States seeks to bring peace where there is conflict, hope where there is suffering, and liberty where there is tyranny. And these commitments bring me and other distinguished leaders of my government across the Atlantic to Africa.

Compare this to the words of John Q. Adams in 1821:

She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.

She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.

She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

I am no expert on matters philosophical, but it would seem that natural rights imply a social contract whereby the government or state created by the contract has an obligation to protect the rights of ITS OWN CITIZENS!! The goal of foreign policy ought to be protecting liberty for our posterity–not spreading “democratic values” to every third-world hellhole.

And by the way, when will “ethicists” like Dr. Land point to a single Scriptural text to support their baptism of messianic globalism, their perversion of Christianity into an apology for unceasing war, and their deification of democratism?

The current debate over Senate rules vis a vis the filibuster of judicial nominees demonstrates the hypocrisy, corruption, and lack of discernment among my brothers and sisters on the “religious right.”

According to Family Research Council head Tony Perkins, the filibuster is being wielded by God-hating liberals as a weapon against “people of faith.” Perkins also called the Democrats’ abuse of filibusters “an affront to the American people and a willful disregard of the Constitution.

“Our founding document is clear,” he said. “Judges are confirmed by the vote of a majority of senators — not the supermajority now imposed by the minority party.”

Conservatives were once leery of discovering new and novel “constitutional rights” in places where they had never been found before. The Constitution says only that the president “shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint” judges, ambassadors and other officers. To read that provision as a dictate a to bring every nominee to a floor vote reveals that conservatives, too, have learned how to torture the Constitution into saying whatever they want to hear.

To gin up evangelical support for changing Senate rules and correct this “constitutional abomination,” the FRC is sponsoring an event here in Louisville. The gathering at local mega-church Highview Baptist will include such luminaries as Albert Mohler, James Kennedy, James Dobson, Chuck Colson, and Senate Majority Leader (and 2008 presidential candidate?) Bill Frist.

Not to be outdone, Focus on the Family has announced an ad campaign directed at 19 senators in 14 states. FOF’s federal issues analyst, Amanda Banks, says that so-called “values voters” need to make their voices heard in the debate over the filibuster.

“If Democratic senators do not hear from their constituents, there is no question they will continue to obstruct the president’s nominees. If Republicans don’t hear from their constituents, they’re likely to allow the Democrats to continue unconstitutional tactics.

“With a Supreme Court nominee potentially right around the corner, we must convince the Senate to act now and restore the constitutional duty of senators to offer advice and give consent to judicial nominees. That means a fair, up-or-down vote in the Senate.”

I don’t recall consternation over the misuse filibusters when the GOP attempted to filibuster six of Bill Clinton’s nominees. Nor did religious conservatives invoke the name of the Almighty to condemn Republican congressmen who deep-sixed nominees in committee without permitting an “up-or-down vote in the Senate.”

Moreover, why are my evangelical brethren convinced that the GOP will do ANYTHING about judicial activism? Perkins says, “We now have a President who is committed to nominate judicial candidates who are not activists, but strict constructionists — judges who will simply interpret the Constitution as it was written.”

But the GOP has not used the constitutional mechanisms at its disposal to rein in the judiciary. Have they limited the appellate jurisdiction of the court or impeached even a single wayward judge? And one more thing; since the GOP appointed 7 of the 9 sitting Supreme Court justices and GOP-appointed judges already control 10 of 13 appeals courts is it the “liberals” and Democrats that are responsible for the very real problem of judicial dictatorship?

A second point is that conservatives, especially Christians, should be loath to eliminate checks on the legislative process. The filibuster is one such mechanism that serves to restrain legislators from barreling out of control. George Will points to this odd change in conservative philosophy, “Some conservatives oddly seem to regret the fact that the government bristles with delaying and blocking mechanisms — separation of powers, bicameral legislature, etc. The filibuster is one such mechanism — an instrument for minority assertion. It enables democracy to be more than government-by-adding-machine, more than a mere counter of numbers. The filibuster registers intensity, enabling intense minorities to slow or stop government.”

Will also points out that the change in Senate rules would further enhance presidential power, strengthening the executive branch at the expense of congress. Will astutely notes that the power of the executive branch has already been expanded immensely due to the “warr on terror” and the never-ending expansion of presidential war-making prerogatives and asks, “Are conservatives, who once had a healthy wariness of presidential power, sure they want to further expand that power in domestic affairs,” too?

The same question should be put to evangelicals, who claim to believe that the Bible teaches the depravity of man. Do they really want such power entrusted to one man sitting in the White House? Apparently, if he’s one of “us,” the answer is a resounding “yes.”