By Chris Powell
Having gathered hundreds of people at Weaver High School in Hartford the other night, the Greater Hartford Interfaith Action Alliance called for a state law to limit housing rent increases to 3% annually. This was presented as social justice. Like so much else presented as social justice, it was actually just pious posturing and, worse, scapegoating.
The presumption of the clergy group’s proposal is that landlords cause inflation and, because they cause it, they exclusively should bear its financial burdens — as if, amid inflation, a landlord’s costs for energy, employee wages and benefits, building services, and taxes don’t rise with everyone else’s.
Landlords don’t cause inflation. Inflation is caused largely by government when it increases the money supply out of proportion to the economy’s production of goods and services — which is of course exactly what the federal government has been doing in recent years, exploding the money supply while curtailing production or making it more expensive.
But the clergy group favors more and more government and isn’t likely to achieve its objective if it starts complaining about government’s responsibility for inflation. So the clergy group will blame landlords instead as then presume to teach the public about the morality required by God.
The clergy group didn’t stop with rent control. It also called on state government to spend hundreds of millions more dollars on city school systems in the name of improving education there, as if increasing spending on city schools hasn’t been Connecticut policy for almost 40 years without ever improving student performance. But calling for more government spending on education is a lot easier for the clergy members than telling their parishioners that the primary cause of educational failure is their own childbearing outside marriage and the resulting child neglect.
The clergy group’s third idea is to have state government spend another $20 million in the name of “violence prevention” programs, as if the violence and social disintegration that long have been worsening in the cities are not also consequences of family breakdown.
Religious vestments may inspire respect and even intimidate but they don’t substitute for critical thinking or vindicate scapegoating.
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NO, HE’S NOT: Darien’s Board of Education thinks that reading “Julian Is A Mermaid” to second-graders, as recently was done at Royle Elementary School as part of the “social and emotional learning” curriculum, is necessary to teach tolerance. It’s not necessary at all. But it may be a good way of putting transgenderism into impressionable little minds that are easily confused.
The book tells the story of a little boy who sees a parade of female impersonators, wraps a curtain around his waist, and joins them in aspiration of becoming a sea creature of the other sex. Presumably the book was read to the second-graders in part because some cannot yet read themselves. If so, the problem is not exclusive to Darien, since this month the state education commissioner reported more scary details about the long collapse of student proficiency in Connecticut.
Kids can be cruel and so do need to be taught to behave decently. But teaching them does not require transgender metaphors. Instead schools can be frank and candid. Schools can tell students that Julian is [ITALICS] not [END ITALICS] a mermaid but is afflicted with gender dysphoria, an unfortunate mental condition, but that in a free country like theirs, people can be different in their personal lives, that in school these differences must be respected, and that students who taunt, bully, or belittle their classmates will be punished. (That is, required to spend hours being lectured by a diversity, equity, and inclusion social worker.)
Such a policy can be put in print and students can be given two copies and compelled to sign and return one to acknowledge their receipt and understanding of it — and then school staff can enforce it.
If that’s not enough for a school system, then the system has a sinister agenda and people should mobilize to change it.
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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)
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Chris Powell column 