Up is Down, and Down is Up.

I was going to talk again about my creeping electric bill, but I think I'll save that.  Unbelievably, something else is bothering me.

Didn't the Pilgrims come to the New World because they wanted to escape religious persecution?  It was really hard for them, and some groups of them didn't survive here.  But apparently, escaping religious persecution was really important to them, so they kept trying until they made it.

And didn't the colonies form a small Union, and write a Declaration of Independence, and then a Constitution, and then some Amendments, the first of which guaranteed freedoms of religion, speech, and press?  And not being pushed around and controlled by people whose interests were not their interests?   Didn't they have to fight a war over those values?

And aren't there people today -- this very day! -- who call themselves "conservatives," by which they also claim to mean "originalists," who think that the "Founding Fathers" had unique and impossible to repeat wisdom, which led them to conclude, over 200 years ago, things that we should emulate and honor today, even if we're trying to deal with matters that didn't exist over 200 years ago, and would have been beyond the imagination of the "Founding Fathers?"

Nebraska.  It's in the mid of the midwest.  Sometimes, we call that part of what is now our country, which was not our country 200 years ago, the "corn belt."  Sometimes, we call it the "bible belt."  Since the midwest was not our country over 200 years ago, is it still in some sense not our country?  If it's not our country, then they can make whatever laws they like for their country.  If it somehow now is our country, don't they have to follow our laws?  And for what it's worth, that part of the country is usually very reliable to declare itself "conservative" (whatever it is they tell themselves they're trying to conserve) and "originalist."

So, here's what recently happened in Nebraska: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/nebraska-school-officials-close-down-student-newspaper-that-published-lgbtq-articles/ar-AA117AqM?li=BBnb7Kz

Does our Constitution and its first Amendment guarantee us freedom of speech, press, and religion?  Wasn't this country in many senses founded on yearnings for freedoms like those?  And didn't we fight and die for freedoms like those?  Does our Constitution or any of its Amendments say anything about sexual preference, or gender identification, or abortion?

So, when some part of the government (even the School Board or the school's administration) in Nebraska shuts down a student newspaper, which is exercising its purely American and guaranteed freedom of speech/press, and possibly freedom of religion, to talk about something the "Founding Fathers" never addressed, and likely never considered, and they shut it down for reasons that most likely amount to religious persecution of people/students who might not share their personal religious beliefs, isn't that as unAmerican as humanly possible?

These midwesterners aren't "conservative."  They're not "liberal."  They're fascists.  And they are not remotely "American," in the original and intended sense.  It becomes a little clearer why they demonize what they call "Antifa," as if being against fascism was a bad thing.

Being against fascism and religious persecution, and guaranteeing ourselves freedoms, like freedom of speech, press, and religion, were what this country was all about.  It was our goal.  It was our purpose.  It was our ethos.  But not in Nebraska.

Now, I do want to be fair here, since being fair is one of my things.  And amazingly enough, I'll even be a bit politically incorrect.  Although it's true that anyone who understands homosexuality knows that this is a normal and non-pathological orientation for some people, it is fair to express concern about part of the rest of "LGBTQ."  The T part -- transsexualism -- has no rational meaning, since no person can think he or she was somehow "supposed to be" a gender, with chromosomes, and hormones, which he or she is not and does not have, because no one can know what the experience of being that other gender feels like.  And to make matters worse, the linked article is about school students -- minors.  It is universally agreed in this country, and in many others, that minors do not on average and predictably have the maturity and introspection to consent to sexual activity.  So how can they have the maturity and introspection to make a decision they will never, ever, be equipped to make: that they were "supposed to be" some other gender (there are several)?  If mentally well adults want to make that decision, I still say they don't know what they're doing, but I don't dispute it with them.  But minors?  No.  Although American history and our agreed Constitution give them every right to say whatever they want to say about it.  No real American (if midwesterners are real Americans) can take that away from them.

And I realize that the matter of abortion is fraught, because some people simply look at it as murder, which, in a narrow sense, it is.  (Orthodox Jews follow the Old Testament, which proscribes the "spilling of seed" -- male masturbation -- as a form of murder, and convention among Orthodox Jews say women who have had a period cannot touch anyone for two weeks, because they have "touched" a "dead body" -- the unfertilized ovum/egg -- and until they undergo a ritual cleaning.  These proscriptions are more of a stretch, but they're the same idea.)  At a certain level, I could appreciate the antiabortion argument, if we ignore all the other factors behind abortion.  But antiabortionists don't call themselves antiabortionists.  They refer to themselves as "pro-life."  And that's the problem.  They're not pro-life at all.  They're hypocrites.  The vast, vast majority of them are not against capital punishment.  They don't take that same narrow view of something that is intended to kill someone else.  Now, they're suddenly very interested in the other factors, like what bad thing the sentenced person was convicted of having done.  And they're generally not opposed to guns in civilian hands, which the Constitution and the "Second Amendment" do not permit in a general or blanket way (we can have that conversation another time), even though we see that the second most common result of guns in civilian hands is death.  (The most common result is nothing, which raises the question of why civilians want guns, if there is no benefit to having them.)

It's really hard to tell which end is up.