Don Pesci: In Connecticut (!) at a glorious center of conservatism on the Glorious Fourth
“Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1776,” a 1900 painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris depicting Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson working on the document.
SOMERS, Conn.
The Fourth of July this year, as everyone in Connecticut who has tolerated the weather the past few days well knows, was wet. The weather, along with fidgety concerns about the effect of fireworks displays on an apparently violated environment, have thrown cold water on John Adams’s view of a proper celebration of independence.
“The Second Day of July 1776,” Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, on the occasion of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival [of Independence] …It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”
The official celebration of Independence on July 4, pedants will note, is off by two days.
The weather did not matter on this July 4, as the Blake Center for Faith and Freedom, an offshoot of Hillsdale College, in the city of the same name in Michigan, celebrated the real founding in 1776 of the United States of America. All the fireworks were inside the center in Somers.
My wife, Andree, and I were in attendance and found the building itself, a brick-by-brick recreation of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, astonishing, along with the company in attendance, a crowd who draw comfort and illumination from the Founding Fathers of the country; the Blake Center’s executive director, Labin Duke, and the two speakers – Hillsdale Professors Thomas West and David Azerrad, – who shed illumination, if not pomp, on the subjects they chose to present.
The first speaker, West, the author of The Political Theory of the American Founding; Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom, limited his remarks to a discussion of the foundational understanding of modern views concerning the odd shape of our post-liberal foreign and domestic policy. What would the Founders, for instance, have thought of an interventionist foreign policy – that is, an activist foreign policy in which one nation imposes its political views upon another?
Most of them would have felt, as John Adams did, that “America is the friend of liberty everywhere, but the custodian only of our own.” And then, too, there is Washington, the weld of the American Revolution, warning his fellows to avoid “entangling alliances.”
The second speaker, David Azerrad, ventured into our current Marxist-inflected mare’s nest – are we all racists?
The short answer, although there continues to exist in our relatively racist-free society some real racists who continue by their morally offensive and unorthodox behavior to prove the rule that the United States has left racism behind us. Such obnoxious idiots might well profit from a Hillsdale education and a careful reading of the Declaration of Independence, written chiefly by Thomas Jefferson -- “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” -- himself a slave owner.
That declaratory bit concerning “natural rights” having been authored by the Christian God who endowed mankind with “certain unalienable Rights,” among which are “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” is the wooden stake thrust into the heart of a vampire-like slavery, done to death in a Union-shattering Civil War watered with the blood of patriots at Shiloh and Gettysburg.
The founder of the Friendly’s restaurant chain, S. Prestley Blake, and his wife, Helen, at first sold the property to one buyer, later repurchased it and then more or less gifted it to Hillsdale, in 2019.
In four short years, The Blake Center for Faith and Freedom has become, its patrons realize, an inestimable pearl of wisdom located providentially on the border of Connecticut and Massachusetts.
We should count ourselves lucky – though the center itself regards such “luck” as providential – to have in our presence such a pearl buried deep in an ocean of muddy neo-progressive nonsense. And all of us know for a certainty that no one may reach the pearl without a deep personal dive into history, the U.S. Constitution, the deposit of Christian faith and morals, and the luminous writings of honored precursors of the American experiment in ordered liberty.
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.
#Blake Center for Faith and Freedom
Chris Powell: Ways to help keep ex-cons out of jail
Now that the majority in the Connecticut General Assembly is more Democratic and liberal, the legislature is paying more attention to the plight of prisoners and former offenders. While the attention is welcome, it has been entirely of the bleeding-heart variety, not very thoughtful -- leading only toward a policy of erasing or concealing criminal records, since those records are impediments to former offenders as they return to society.
Of course,
there is a strong public interest in reintegrating former offenders. Society needs them to be productive and self-supporting so they don't return to crime or kill themselves in despair. But the public interest in access to criminal records is just as strong. For how can any potential employee, tenant, borrower, or romantic partner be evaluated when government aims to keep the public ignorant?
Besides, erasing or concealing criminal records won't be as helpful to former offenders as some legislators think. Any conscientious employer, landlord, or lender will notice crime-caused gaps in a former offender's employment history, and any self-respecting person will want to know a date's background before they go home together.
So former offenders should always have some explaining to do. But some state legislators and the legislature's recently created study group, the Council on the Collateral Consequences of a Criminal Conviction, seem to think otherwise.
Members of the council recently visited the state prison in Somers to research what are said to be the scores of state laws that make life harder for former offenders. According to a Connecticut Mirror report, council members interviewed 25 prisoners who will be released soon, and some prisoners said they already know they will have trouble getting jobs and housing because they have been in and out of prison before.
Legislators and council members call this "discrimination" as if discrimination is always irrational and bigoted. But "discrimination" really isn't a dirty word. It is a necessity of life. It is the recognition of differences, like the difference between good and bad, safe and unsafe, skilled and unskilled, and reliable and unreliable.
Former offenders will always be competing for jobs, housing, and romantic partners with people who have no criminal records. It cannot be otherwise. For why should people who have lived within the law not have an advantage over those who have broken the law? If there is no advantage in obeying the law, the law is pointless.
Besides, legislators pursuing erasure or concealment of criminal records don't seem to realize that society has only as much crime as it legislates, nor that much criminality arises from victimless crime -- particularly drug criminalization -- as well as from the negligent parenting facilitated by welfare policy and from public education's practice of social promotion, which produces many young adults without job and life skills. Elected officials will benefit from erasure or concealment of criminal records because it will conceal their responsibility for the awful results of government's mistaken policies.
Will state government ever care enough about former offenders to indemnify their employers, landlords and romantic partners? Of course not. But state government easily enough could give former offenders rudimentary paid jobs, medical insurance, and housing to help settle them in their first year or two out of prison.
Indeed, offenders should get much more job training in prison and it might be good at sentencing in court to condition their release on their showing they have the skills needed to make an honest living.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.