Don's Tuesday column (with final paragraph cut for length by editor--IT'S IMPORTANT)

                 THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson Red Bluff Daily News   2/12/2013

Drama, labels or just taking a stand

Tonight’s Tea Party Patriots meeting will host Trish and Justin Grant, who will be speaking on the FEMA camps. I encourage interested readers to attend and see what they present. Potential threat to our freedom or Internet myth? Make your own mind up.

A letter writer took apparent offense at my January 15 column that recounted the left wing, nearly lunatic ranting of the Chicago Teachers Union president, Karen Lewis, about taking what rich people have away from them, complete with a sick laugh line about how wealthy people were simply beheaded in the “old days.” The writer asks, as the “tolerant” left usually does, that the editor “please eliminate” (behead?) my column. Moreover, insulting rhetoric, name-calling and castigation of conservatives is the typical method of literary bullying they choose instead of reasoned debate. Why, even their Dear Leader, President Obama, expressed his disapproval of “name-calling” in his inaugural speech. We on the right knew such blather was only directed at us, his political antagonists, not his supporters.

I painted a rather unflattering picture of Big Labor teachers unions, their corrupt power grabbing though legislation and initiatives, ramming public-union-friendly measures using taxpayer-supplied union dues, and the leftist indoctrination that passes for educating our young. I will fill this column with the left wing utterances I found documented at a Los Angeles teachers’ demonstration, if someone doubts me.

For the record, I support the right of private sector employees to choose to join a union, by secret ballot after sufficient time to evaluate the union’s case. I loathe strong-arm tactics like “card check,” forced membership and payment of union dues by those declining. Regarding private sector unionization, the numbers support me: union membership has recently fallen from 7 percent to 6.6 percent. Don’t resort to attacking me for the apparent obsolescence of the union movement in the eyes of workers.

Even public employee unions experience dramatic membership declines when members are given freedom to choose, as seen in Wisconsin. I detest forced, or any, unionization of public employees; there’s inherent corruption when tax-payer-provided dues help elect union-friendly politicians and school board members. My position is harsher only by degree than that of President Franklin Roosevelt and early union leader George Meany, who opposed unionizing public workers.

The writer finds the “back and forth drama between the RMs (Richard Mazzucchi and Robert Minch) and Don Polson” disgusting. I suspect he only really finds my side of any dispute “disgusting.” I doubt he finds disgusting Mr. Mazzucchi’s thinly veiled attempts to intimidate his critics (which practice he has discontinued and for which a critic felt he, the critic, was not owed an apology), or Mr. Minch’s name-calling and insults directed at myself. The reader is free to tell us if he feels that Minch crossed the line of columnist respect and etiquette when he called me heartless and un-Christian for my views on the homeless; or when he recently used the epithet “confused bible thumper” to castigate my statement that we have “God-given” rights to self-defense and the pursuit of happiness.

Let Minch be free to enjoy his God-free existence as an apparent atheist – it reflects no negativity on his love of country, family or honest commerce. His statements in his Friday, February 1, column indicate he looks down, shall we say, in derision, disrespect, bemusement or haughty dismissal at his God-and-Jesus-believing fellow citizens. According to all polls I’ve seen, around 80 percent of Americans believe in God; but we could all be wrong. Anyone that can look in a mirror and say they are looking at a soul-less, God-less reflection will not incur my judgment.

However, the Declaration of Independence states that we conservatives, liberals and independents “are endowed by (our) Creator with certain unalienable Rights …”.  “We the people … in order to … secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity …” established our Constitution. “Blessings” requires the existence of a “Bless-or” (One, who by definition is not a human, who gives or endows us with Blessings). Again, I may be wrong, but I’m unabashedly and without reservation going to take the side of the Founders and Framers on the “Creator” endowing us “with unalienable Rights” and “Blessings.” But don’t take my word for it.

I withdraw the term “liberal” at Mr. Minch’s protest; however, folks who take what I described as “left of center positions” (my exact words in two columns) usually object to being referred to as liberals. Mr. Minch has yet to retract any printed insult he has ever leveled at me; un-Christian of him, no? (tongue/cheek) Bear in mind I was categorizing positions taken by other columnists; on the gun issue, my positions are articulately, unabashedly conservative; theirs are not. I stand with the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America and other 2^nd Amendment-defending groups; they do not. Please correct me if I misstate.

Those who dispute that self defense and “the pursuit of happiness” are “God given” rights deriving from Nature and Nature’s God, as the Founders believed, should clarify who or what gives us said rights. Those atheists should inform us, if rights are bestowed by other persons (not God), how they are inviolable against abrogation by other persons. Mr. Minch should elaborate how he has come to believe “automatic” weapons, illegal since 1934, should now be banned. Or why semi-automatics (one shot from one trigger pull) should be illegal. Just asking.