Phil Jensen Running for South Dakota Dist. 33 House

I received some campaign information from Phil Jensen who is running for the South Dakota state House in District 33:

I’m Phil Jensen and I’m a Reagan Conservative! I was born and raised in Wichita, KS, where I attended Butler County Community College, Wichita State University, and Kansas University Medical Center’s 1600 hour advanced paramedic training. I met and married my wife Janet (Deiss) of White River, S.D. in 1988.

Janet and I are real estate investors and have owned and operated Health Advantage, Inc., a Saladmaster Cookware Dealership for the past twenty years. For several of those years, our dealership ranked in the top ten in sales, world-wide.

In 2007 we found ourselves battling breast cancer. We faced challenges that have helped us to focus on those things that are truly important: family, friends, and service to our community.

I became involved in politics when I was nineteen, working on behalf of Sen. Bob Dole. I have been active in SD politics by helping and encouraging several candidates to run for office. I am a hunter, a member of the SD Wildlife Federation, the National Rifle Association, Republican Ambassadors and Rimrock Evangelical Free Church.

I believe in the limited Jeffersonian model of government; that government governs best at the local level; that the proper role of government is to establish and maintain an environment that enables and encourages the individuals and businesses of the state to be independent, contributing and self-sustaining citizens. Ronald Reagan once said that government is like a baby…an alimentary canal with a large appetite at one end…and no sense of responsibility at the other.

I will work:

- To reduce the size of government
- To represent taxpayers’ concern for escalating property taxes.
- To encourage economic development for business owners and entrepreneurship,
- To increase the number of health care providers to allow free market forces to bring the cost of health insurance and health care services down and reduce the number of uninsured.
- To improve education, protect gun rights, and protect life.

I would appreciate your vote for one of the two House seats available in District 33.

Your voice does count!

If you have questions, concerns or ideas please call me: 343-1335.

Norway Illustrates the Devastation of Homosexual 'Marriage'

Frank Turek has an excellent piece at TownHall.com today on why, regardless of what you think of the morality of homosexual behavior, the concept of homosexual "marriage" crosses a line that is way, way, way too far. Why?

Contrary to what homosexual activists assume, the state doesn’t endorse marriage because people have feelings for one another. The state endorses marriage primarily because of what marriage does for children and in turn society. Society gets no benefit by redefining marriage to include homosexual relationships, only harm as the connection to illegitimacy shows. But the very future of children and a civilized society depends on stable marriages between men and women. That’s why, regardless of what you think about homosexuality, the two types of relationships should never be legally equated.

Well, you can just dismiss Turek because he's one of these closed-minded Bible-thumpers, right? Check again.

Why not legalize same-sex marriage? Who could it possibly hurt? Children and the rest of society. That’s the conclusion of David Blankenhorn, who is anything but an anti-gay “bigot.” He is a life-long, pro-gay, liberal democrat who disagrees with the Bible’s prohibitions against homosexual behavior. Despite this, Blankenhorn makes a powerful case against Same-Sex marriage in his book, The Future of Marriage.

He writes, “Across history and cultures . . . marriage’s single most fundamental idea is that every child needs a mother and a father. Changing marriage to accommodate same-sex couples would nullify this principle in culture and in law.”

Is Blankenhorn must making a historical guess, an extrapolation here? No, he's talking about established trends in country where they've been allowing homosexual unions to be called "marriage" for a long time, now.

Are these just the hysterical cries of an alarmist? No. We can see the connection between same-sex marriage and illegitimacy in Scandinavian countries. Norway, for example, has had de-facto same-sex marriage since the early nineties. In Nordland, the most liberal county of Norway, where they fly “gay” rainbow flags over their churches, out-of-wedlock births have soared—more than 80 percent of women giving birth for the first time, and nearly 70 percent of all children, are born out of wedlock! Across all of Norway, illegitimacy rose from 39 percent to 50 percent in the first decade of same-sex marriage.

It makes sense, after all. If any sexual union can be called "marriage," then what does marriage really mean? What's special about it? What's unique about it? If there's no special value to it, why bother with all the hassle of it? So people aren't.

And children are suffering for it.

Only the most radical self-centered social-engineering Leftist would try to argue that children don't need both a mother and father, and a stable home life. That is exactly what they're being robbed of in homosexual unions where children are present.

And allowing homosexuals to call their unions "marriage" robs marriage of any intrinsic value, so the widespread shacking-up and chaotic homes already problematic in the heterosexual world will end up becoming the norm.

As a former cop, I've seen the myriad of social problems which come out of broken homes. Angry, confused children from these environments end up causing a tremendous burden on law enforcement and the legal system even before they become adults, resulting in assaults and property damage, and costing the taxpayers millions.

I made the case over a week ago that even beyond morality itself, the state has a compelling reason to preserve marriage. This piece by Turek only proves more evidence that I was right.

A civilization that allows children, it's future generations, to be robbed of a mother and a father in the home, and of a stable home life, is a civilization bent on suicide.

Libertarians Choose Barr

From the Washington Times, former Republican congressman Bob Barr has been selected as the Libertarian Party's nominee for president.

Mr. Barr, a conservative standard-bearer who switched to the Libertarian Party less than two years ago, defeated Mary Ruwart, a biophysicist and longtime party activist, by 54 percent to 46 percent in the final ballot. Delegates late last night agreed that Wayne Allyn Root, a celebrity sports handicapper, would be Mr. Barr's running mate.

Normally the Libertarian Party's nominee would hardly be notable, but normally the Republican nominee is strong enough to guarantee that little of the conservative vote would be lost to the Libertarian ticket.

However, with this year's Republican nominee, John McCain, seeming intent on spitting in the face of his conservative base, the Libertarian and Constitution parties could see interest like never before.

Happy Memorial Day 2008!

Thank a vet for your freedoms, honor them always, we owe them everything.

Memorial Day is a United States federal holiday that is observed on the last Monday of May (observed in 2008 on May 26). It was formerly known as Decoration Day. This holiday commemorates U.S. men and women who have died in military service to their country. It began first to honor Union soldiers who died during the American Civil War. After World War I, it was expanded to include those who died in any war or military action. One of the longest standing traditions is the running of the Indianapolis 500, which has been held in conjunction with Memorial Day since 1911. It is also traditionally viewed as the beginning of summer by many, for many schools are dismissed around Memorial Day.

Rethinking the American Education System

Charles Murray proposes bold changes for our education system in a piece entitled "The age of educational romanticism" at the New Criterion.

It's a rather lengthy piece, but briefly, Murray contends that our one-size-fits-all approach to education isn't working, and is detrimental to children.

He examines several of the educational trends to which we've subjected our children over the years as we've attempted to improve education. He doesn't have kind words for No Child Left Behind, but neither does he for the idiotic self-esteem approach, either.

The entire article is an interesting walk down educational-policy lane, but these paragraphs perhaps best sum up Murray's contention:

For the good of our children, educational romanticism needs to collapse, and quickly. Its effects play out in the lives of young people in devastating ways. The fourth-grader who has trouble sounding out simple words and his classmate who is reading A Tale of Two Cities for fun sit in the same classroom day after miserable day, the one so frustrated by tasks he cannot do and the other so bored that both are near tears. The eighth-grader who cannot make sense of algebra but has an almost mystical knack with machines is told to stick with the college prep track, because to be a success in life he must go to college and get a B.A. The senior with terrific SAT scores gets away with turning in rubbish on his term papers because to make special demands on the gifted would be elitist. They are all products of an educational system that cannot make itself talk openly about the implications of diverse educational limits.

There is much more to be said about these harms (and I have said it, in a book that will appear in a few months). For now, it is enough to recognize that educational romanticism asks too much from students at the bottom of the intellectual pile, asks the wrong things from those in the middle, and asks too little from those at the top. It short-changes all of them.

In this last paragraph, Murray nails one of the greatest benefits of homeschooling.

Many of us homeschoolers do so because we don't want our children indoctrinated by the secularist mindset forced on our public schools. We don't want our children being led to the conclusion that their faith is something to be ashamed of, that it's something irrelevant in the "real world," in fact that it has no place in the "real world."

We also may not want them exposed to so much of the pop peer pressure that dictates immodest clothing, foul language, and too often involves substance abuse. These enticements are strong enough in and of themselves, and from neighbor children and other peer groups, without immersing our children in this type of herd instinct for eight hours a day.

But homeschooling also allows the parent/teacher to tailor educational methods and materials to the child, which is something simply not possible in a diverse class of 15-30 or more kids.

If a child is having trouble with a particular subject or in general, the parent/teacher can take more time with the child. If the child "gets it" and is about to become bored with learning, the parent/teacher can move on to new material. This way, neither the "slow learner" nor the "fast learner" get short-changed--a sad prospect for either.

When I started first grade (I didn't go to headstart/kindergarten), I was way ahead of the other kids. I had been reading since I was four, and by the time I started first grade, I had read countless books...though I could have counted them if I'd taken the time, because I could also count and perform other basic mathematical functions. I didn't get seriously challenged until somewhere around the 7-9th grade, and even then, the challenge was fleeting. I was bored to tears through most of my school career.

My daughter, however, is homeschooled and moves at her own pace. She's 10 years old and recently took the standardized test required of 4th-grade homeschool children. She tested several years ahead of her grade in every area, with most at the "post high school" level.

My son is 5 and he's been reading for about a year now. He's known his numbers for about that long and can do simple addition and subtraction. He's currently learning to write, and he's actually doing better than his sister did at that age.

Can you imagine how bored my children would be if I suddenly threw them into a public school?

In the end, though, while I think Murray danced around one of the top if not THE top determiner of student success, he failed to bring it into the light, and it's one where homeschooling probably excels the best. It's called "parental involvement."

Whether a child is smart, slow, or somewhere in the middle, or whether they are more mechanically inclined than academically inclined...the attention, encouragement and support of the parents is the single greatest factor in the success of the child.

Even a smart child is going to have a hard time in school (and in life) if he/she comes from a home where they're treated like the cat that gets fed and occasionally petted for a minute, and is otherwise ignored.

And even a slow-learning child can grow up to be well-adjusted and self-sufficient if his/her parents provide a stable home life with plenty of love and encouragement.

We definitely should, as Murray suggests, take a serious look at a major overhaul of how we do education in this country.

But even more importantly, we desperately need to take a serious look at how we parent in this country. Children are always going to be at a great disadvantage if they spend most of their day in a daycare or public school, and only see their parents for an hour or two a day, with maybe less than 10 minutes a day actually interacting with them.

It'll take sacrifices to invest time and energy into our children. We'll have to give up some career goals. We'll have to forgo a bigger house or a new car. We'll have to give up some of our cherished personal recreations. We'll probably even have to bite our tongues and hold our tempers, sometimes.

But the course of a person's success, failure, or mediocrity is mostly determined in their early years, by what does or doesn't happen at home.

Aren't our children worth such an investment?