Educated Does Not Mean Liberal!

So I was watching that Pen and Teller show Bullshit the other night and I saw something on there that has always gotten on my nerves. Don't get me wrong--this is a great show, but they did this whole "College is Bullshit" segment and within that segment, they talk about how colleges are now stamping out freedom of speech for anyone who is not a minority and or a conservative Republican. They had this guy from FIRE.ORG (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), whose name I believe was Alan Charles Kors talking about how colleges today are bastions of liberal, democratic and socialist brainwashing. For those of you who don't know, FIRE is not a group that is concerned with every student’s free speech on campus. They are only concerned for the speech of people whom they agree with, namely conservatives, Republicans and Christians. This is not a group who will defend a student artist who creates nude or controversial art or the rights of a Palestinian student union to show films depicting the suffering of the Palestinian people under occupied rule. This is also not a group that will fight for the rights of war protesters on college campuses. So their name is somewhat misleading, as with all these other "family" and faux free speech and equal rights (for Christians and gun owners) type groups because the title doesn't live up to their intentions. That is probably what the show should have been about; after all, it is called Bullshit.

Anyhow, on this Bullshit episode Alan Kors cited the study of 1000 university professors in the U.S. and found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans 7-1 in the Humanities and Social Science departments and 30-1 in the Anthropology and Sociology departments. At U of C Berkeley and Stanford he found a 9-1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans within the faculty and administration. They also claim that the University of California system and Harvard topped U.S. universities in per capita political contributions to Democratic candidates and that within those two systems, Kerry voters outnumbered Bush voters 19-1. On the FIRE site, they talk about a study conducted in 2000 that stated among the voter registration records of Humanities and Social Science instructors at Cornell University, Democrats outnumbered 166-6 and 151-17 at Stanford. In the Ivy League system, they found that 80% of the professors voted for Gore in 2000 and only 9% voted for Bush. They claim that this is bad and that religious, conservative, Republican and uneducated people need to be represented as well. What they don’t report on is the discrepancy between conservative vs. liberal staff at a place like Liberty University, David Lipscomb, Bob Jones or Regent University. Sure, those aren’t state schools but neither are Harvard or Stanford and they are a lot cheaper than Harvard, Stanford, or Berkeley, so why can’t these conservative students go there if they want to learn about how the dinosaurs never existed?

Of the Universities mentioned with these terribly biased teaching staffs, I would like to point out the following: US News and World Report publishes an annual ranking of the nation's top schools; for 2006, Harvard was ranked number 1, Stanford number 5, and U of C Berkeley ranked 20th in the nation. Clearly, one of the main reasons these schools are ranked so high is because of their qualified and educated faculty. They wouldn’t be ranked this high if they were hiring half-retarded, bible-thumping, gun rack-owning, high school dropouts would they? What this says to me is that when you become educated you leave behind fantasy, myth and dogma and you appear to become what is considered “liberal”. You start to challenge traditions and begin questioning the world from an outside viewpoint and start questioning what you were taught by your parents and Sunday School teachers. Don’t mistake a guy who can analyze strata layers to determine how old they are as liberal if he concludes that the earth has been here for close to 5 billion years with no evidence of human fossils for the first 4 or so billion years. He doesn’t have an agenda, he has data. He has evidence that may or may not go against what you believe. Just because you don't believe that an invisible man created the entire Universe in 6 days doesn't mean you are a liberal socialist, it means you have evidence to the contrary and you know better. Bottom line: don’t confuse educated with liberal if you are not educated enough to know the difference.

Why is higher education the only place Republicans care about the ratio of Democrats to Republicans? At least in an educational setting there are facts that are discussed and independent books to read that weren’t written by these liberal professors. How can something like geography, history, or numbers and math be either liberal or conservative? Teaching kids that Europeans (us) wiped out the Native Americans and owned slaves is not liberal, they are historical facts. What they should be worried about is how the Republicans in Congress out number the Democrats and that 78% of all oil company donations go towards Republican candidates. A Democrat teaching kids about art history or Sigmund Freud is far less damaging than the oil industry running the White House and deciding which countries we invade.

I would also like to point out that if Harvard, the rest of the Ivy league and all these other “liberal” brainwashing institutions are trying to convert our students into liberal socialists they are doing a terrible job. George Bush went to both Yale and Harvard and most of his cabinet has attended other Ivy League schools. These are not people I generally think of when I hear the terms liberal or socialist. The President, Vice President and Secretary of State all having oil ties that affect our foreign policy is an easier connection to make than professors that happen to have voted for Gore, are all brainwashing our youth into becoming tree hugging, Christ hating socialists.

Breaking News! This Just In!

This just in: Doctors say Ariel Sharon twitched his nose!

Can someone explain to me how this is news?

Have A Baby So We Can Make More Money

Has anyone seen those "having a baby changes everything" ads sponsored by Johnson and Johnson? These are a series of commercials that show happy middle class white people with their babies having the time of their life. They start off by pointing out how selfish and shallow you are or were before having a baby and then they end the commercial by saying you can fix this unhealthy lifestyle by having a baby and buying a lot of Johnson and Johnson products. After the commercial they give you a link to baby.com. On baby.com you can find all the reasons you should be a parent, find baby names, get advice on weight gain during pregnancy, get advice on your relationship with your partner and of course get all kinds of offers on Johnson and Johnson products that you will surely need before and after having this little savior. Baby.com also has a link to babycenter.com which is also owned by Johnson and Johnson. On babycenter.com you can buy their books, clothes, strollers, and all kinds of other baby related gear that you will need to make your new family complete.

In other words, forgive me for not wanting to take Johnson and Johnson's advice on why I should be having a baby; I think they have a biased take on the subject. This attitude towards having a child is fairly common in our culture today. The message to single people, couples without children and people who are unable to conceive is essentially that you are not important, your life is not complete and you are not a true American, and thus will pay the price until you have children.

It's bad enough that childless people are already one of the most discriminated against groups in America. How many times have people with kids taken all their sick and vacation days in the first part of the year only to have their kids get sick in the winter and are then allowed to take extra time off? Why can't I get off extra time when I have to take my dog to the vet, or just because I want to be treated as an equal to people with kids? Who gets all the time off from work when they are pregnant or after they have a baby? Who gets all the per-child and child care tax credits? On the other hand, how many times have I been told at work that I am the one who should be going to out of town meetings the most because I have no kids? Who are the ones who have to stay late after work since they don't have to pick anyone up for soccer practice? Who are the ones who have to pay the taxes to support these people's children when they go to school or when they are unable to support their kids financially? Whose insurance premiums increase to allow everyone else to have babies? If you can't afford, or are unwilling to pay the price of having a child then don't have one; it's that simple. Why is one lifestyle rewarded but mine is not? Why don't I get tax credits for rescuing two shelter dogs? Is it because Johnson and Johnson is a bigger company and has more influence than the Nutro dog food company or my local pet store? The only people who should be getting tax breaks for having children are people who adopt.

I have nothing against people who have or want kids so why do they have so much against me? Don't make me pick up the bill or make me feel inferior for not making the same choices you have made. It is a lifestyle choice plain and simple. Forgive me for wanting to watch an entire movie without interruption, for enjoying a night on the town, for enjoying hot meals, for valuing a full night's rest, for not having to save for college and for being able to leave the country whenever I please. Some people choose to stay single, some people can't have kids and some people do have kids so does that make them so special? Why do they get all the breaks?

Why does the term "family values" only apply to people with kids? Does that mean couples who live together or the ones who can't have children have no values because they don't need a parental lock on their TV? Does this mean "family values" is all about free handouts as long as you play ball, and punishment if you don't? Just because you have kids and don't want them to hear the F word why do I have to pay the consequences? Maybe I do want to hear the F word; maybe I want to see naked lesbians making out on Skinemax and maybe I don't want to watch Look Who's Talking 2 and Disney movies over and over and over again. I have the freedom to choose that just as you have the freedom to not have cable or the internet in your child’s bedroom.

Don't force your economic burden and lifestyle on everyone else just because you decided to have kids, it doesn't make you better than the rest of us. Look, I am no Libertarian, I am not saying that my tax money that goes towards public schools doesn't end up benefiting the whole of society but just because you know someone with a penis and something fell out of your uterus doesn't mean that we should hand you a pile of cash or that it puts you on top of the world’s food chain. That's my rant for now; that commercial is dumb!