According to Patrick J. Reilly, in Are Catholic Colleges Catholic Enough? – WSJ.com, the case hinges

on the Supreme Court’s ruling in NLRB v. The Catholic Bishop of Chicago, et al. (1979), which found that the NLRB had violated the First Amendment’s free exercise clause by requiring Catholic schools to comply with federal labor laws, thereby possibly interfering with religious decision-making. But that ruling didn’t stop the NLRB from claiming authority over most Catholic colleges and universities by arguing that Catholic Bishop protects only “church-controlled” institutions that are “substantially religious,” a phrase taken from Chief Justice Warren Burger’s majority opinion in the case. Many of the nation’s 224 Catholic colleges and universities are legally independent of the Catholic bishops or the religious orders that founded them.

So the NLRB has put itself in the position of judging schools’ religious character, and it has concluded over the years that many Catholic institutions are inconsistent in their application of Catholic principles to teaching, course requirements, campus life and faculty hiring. It’s a serious overreach by the government, though many Catholics would agree that colleges and universities often demonstrate inconsistent religious observation.

The erosion of religious identity in Catholic higher education over the past 50 years has been marked by theological dissent, hostility toward the bishops, and increasingly liberal campus-life arrangements such as co-ed dorms and lax visitation rules. These issues fueled the 2009 confrontation at Notre Dame, for example, when pro-life Catholics objected to the school honoring President Barack Obama.

The temptation to please the world is always there in Christian higher education.   Many initiatives undertaken by ostensibly Christian universities seem to be very similar to those that get excited attention at secular schools, but there are things that Christian higher ed talks about less and less (abortion-on-demand, for example) while it holds countless workshops on hot topics like human sex trafficking (as if there was something controversial about it, as if there was someone, somewhere, who thought it was a good thing).

Catholic educators are now awaiting the result of Manhattan College’s appeal to the NLRB regulators in Washington. Their appeal relies heavily on an argument put forward in 1986 by future Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Writing for half the members of an evenly divided D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Breyer argued that the NLRB had contravened the Catholic Bishop ruling by establishing a “substantial religious character” test to determine whether a college meets sectarian standards.

The D.C. Circuit has formally embraced Justice Breyer’s reasoning twice over the past decade, instructing the NLRB to stop interfering with any college or university that “holds itself out to students, faculty and community as providing a religious educational environment.” In ruling against St. Xavier University and Manhattan College, NLRB regional staff seem to have ignored that instruction.

Protestant and evangelical Christian colleges and universities, take note: the candidate of hope and change you helped elect, possibly as part of your diversity initiatives, has his sights set on making you follow the same federal employment rules as any other school.  You may be forced to hire people who do not “model the Christian life” for students…  unless, of course, your notion of the Christian life has recently undergone radical revision.

You knew it was bound to happen. You knew that someone so emphatically moralistic had to have a skeleton or two in the closet. But is it true that another family-values demagogue made a sex tape and because of a little digging by Politico’s Ben Smith, said sex tape will see the light of day? And is it true that the video involves none other than Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry?

Well, it isn’t as bad as all that. In fact, by today’s standards it might not even be rated as much of a scandal. But, still, schoolchildren were involved…

To explain: Back in 1986, when then state representative Perry was trying to educate Texas teens about the horrors of drugs, his office disseminated a video to the high schools in his district. At the end of the video there was a thirty-second gap. Then there was five seconds of a scene from the movie “1984.” A sex scene.

According to the Associated Press, one account from an assistant coach at Baird High School recalled that it was very difficult trying to instruct a bunch of snickering and laughing teenagers after the video was turned off.

A technician at House Technical Services took full responsibility for the scene be added, mistakenly placed on the video while copies were being made. Perry, of whom it was said had no knowledge of the sex scene prior to the video’s distribution, asked that all 26 of the videos be returned to his office. He admitted to being shocked that the scene was included.

What can you say about a “news” organization (yes this is only “commentary”, but most people who don’t actually read the story won’t know the difference) that runs a story where the body of the story specifically contradicts the implication of the headline?  That is, there is not and never was a “Rick Perry Sex Tape,”  whatever scandal there was had nothing to do with anything Rick Perry did, except to try to ameliorate its effects, and the “five second skin” exposure was not Rick Perry’s or anyone associated with Rick Perry, or anyone who even knew Rick Perry.

But the Yahoo people know that many people get their news from headlines, and don’t read the story.  So there are now people walking around the USA who think there is a “sex tape video scandal” involving Rick Perry.

Thanks, Yahoo.  You’re behaving true to form.  Again.

Are all these orders and actions by prominent politicians an appropriate response to hurricane Irene?  Time will tell, but there is already evidence that the virtually apocalyptic predictions may not be realized.  Will there be damage? Sure. Deaths? I hope not. But we are setting up a “Boy Who Cried Wolf” scenario if we sound an unnecessarily shrill alarm for a storm that may not deserve it, thereby creating a populace that learns to ignore or downplay the warnings when a real monster comes ashore.

You can see many more entries in the Powerline Blog YouTube Channel, along with Money Madness.

I want to be careful not to make policy pronouncements on specific issues that the Bible does not address. I think sometimes Christians simply have to make decisions based on the results of one policy or another. People can evaluate the factual data in the world in different ways; evaluating the results of different tax policies and things like that. However, on unemployment, there are at least two principles that come into play. One is that we are to care for the poor and those in need, and the Bible frequently talks about the need to care for the poor. I think government has a legitimate role in providing a safety net for those who are in genuine need of food, clothing and shelter.

There is also a strong strand of biblical teaching that emphasizes the importance of work to earn a living. Paul commands people to work with their own hands and gain the respect of outsiders, be dependent on no one. He says if anyone will not work, he should not eat. In the book of Proverbs, it says a worker’s appetite works for him. The longer that unemployment benefits are continued, the more we contribute to the idea that some people should not have to work in order to earn a living, but we should just continue to have government support them. That creates a culture of dependency, which is unhealthy for the nation and unhealthy for the people who are dependent, year after year, on government handouts.

In the book The Battle, Arthur Brooks says that what people need is not money, but “earned success.” The example that comes to my mind is a student at the seminary here who told me that a number of years ago, he had been in jail. He was arrested for the sale of drugs and other crimes, and his life was just a mess. Later, he finally got a job at a fast food restaurant and one day his manager told him he was doing a good job of keeping the French fries hot. All of a sudden, this young man had a sense of “earned success.” That is, he was doing well at something and he felt great about it and it spurred him on to work harder, to seek to receive more managerial responsibility at the fast food restaurant, and now he is a straight-A student at the seminary and has had a number of years of successful Christian ministry already.

So we need to be asking the important questions about how we can we get the economy growing so that more jobs are available.

BTW, after the debacle of trying to get a decent headshot photo for ReAL, my daughter finally came over with her professional SLR camera and her knowledge of light, shadow, exposure and (certainly not least) her skill at touching up afterwards, to get the picture of me that appears at ReAL.  At least she didn’t make me look like I’d just finished the perp walk.

President Barack Obama is calling for a six-year, $53 billion spending plan for high-speed rail, as he seeks to use infrastructure spending to jumpstart job creation.

An initial $8 billion in spending will be part of the budget plan Obama is set to release Monday. If Congress approves the plan, the money would go toward developing or improving trains that travel up to 250 miles per hour, and connecting existing rail lines to new projects. The White House wouldn’t say where the money for the rest of the program would come from, though it’s likely Obama would seek funding in future budgets or transportation bills.

Obama’s push for high-speed rail spending is part of his broad goal of creating jobs in the short-term and increasing American competitiveness for the future through new spending on infrastructure, education and innovation. During last month’s State of the Union address, Obama said he wanted to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail within 25 years.

At the same time he’s calling for new spending on sectors like high-speed rail in the upcoming budget, Obama also has pledged to cut overall spending as he seeks to bring down the nation’s mounting deficit.

Well, to be clear, Obama only called for a “freeze in spending”…  a freeze at the ridiculously high levels he set in his first two years.  Only his sycophants in the press would call not raising spending even further “a cut.”

In any case, America is not Europe, nor is it Japan.  There is not now a demand for high speed rail, nor will there be anytime soon.  If there was a demand for it, private interests would be busy investing in it, expecting to make money from it.  Obama seems to have learned nothing from the subsidy infested mess that is Amtrak.

I propose a better way to spend the money.  He should invest in research in alchemy.  Turning lead into gold is probably impossible….  but maybe not.  And along the way, spending 50 billion dollars is likely to accidentally result in some real science getting done, something with at least “spin off” benefits, technologically and economically.

So lets hear it for alchemy in the federal budget.  That makes a LOT more sense, and is probably a better way to spend large amounts of money, than high-speed rail, which will continue to be a sinkhole for money even after it’s built, which will probably cost a lot more than anyone now projects.

Of course, we all know Obama has no actual hope of doing this.  He just brought it up to play to his lefty audience, who love anything that makes people get in lines and wait somewhere.  But Obama knows he has no chance of getting this through a Republican House of Representatives.  He’s just talking for effect, and public relations with his base.

Still…  maybe in trying to turn lead into gold, the scientists would finally discover cold fusion.

The recent election would seem to indicate that more and more voters find Obama to be a toxic leader. But he is certainly not the only leader, good or bad, who affect the lives of the constituency under them.

Research is currently being done concerning how and why people find themselves in a workplace environment under leadership that is considered to be toxic.  If you’d like to participate in a survey related to the subject of toxic leadership as it may relate to childhood trauma please click on the following link:

http://qtrial.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_80LJ5hGHl2MPOBu

Making the Case for Life: Pro-Life Apologetics from Mark Harrington on Vimeo.

Hat tip:  Larry O