by Bob Barr | May 25, 2022 | Townhall Article |
TownhallSince my days as a student at USC (the real USC – the University of Southern California), I have been a die-hard fan of college football. I love to watch the competition, skill, and heart that players, teams, and coaches put into this truly all-American sport. But the sport I love is changing, and not for the better. In this, I agree with Clemson coach Dabo Swinney, who recently levelled a modest criticism of those changes, saying, “I’m not against NIL at all, what I am against is anything that devalues education — that’s what I’m against.” For this and similar comments, the coach was pilloried as regressive, racist, and hypocritical, and attacked personally for his strong Christian faith and trademark Southern drawl.In fact, his recent statement merely clarified remarks made a month before, in which he warned against “tampering . . . and manipulating young people” as a part of the NCAA’s “name/image/likeness” (NIL) endorsement program, which allows collegiate athletes to make money from their on-field talents. Once again, it was a modest critique, and in hindsight, Swinney’s comments were clearly prescient.Thus is the vindication of Dabo Swinney, and all the collegiate sports fans who are witnessing their beloved sports crumble away. To say college athletics have gone off the rails is an understatement. Even supporters of the NIL system would be hard-pressed to disagree with the “Wild West” scenario predicted by coaches like Swinney. Education? Only in-between meetings with the agent, and only if the athlete cannot go pro in three years. Some schools do better than others with graduating players, but education, at least in the cash-cow sports of football and basketball,...
by Bob Barr | May 23, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerThe New York Court of Appeals soon may decide whether “Happy,” a 50-something-year-old elephant in the Bronx Zoo, possesses human rights.While this may appear on its face to be a preposterous proposition, it is one being considered seriously by the highest court in the state of New York.The case in favor of granting human rights to non-human animals is being pressed by the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) via a habeas corpus petition, the ancient and constitutionally enshrined principle that an individual has a fundamental right to force the government to prove it has a legal right to detain that person.The question as to whether animals possess or should be granted “rights,” has been a topic of debate going back at least to the mid-18th century in England. Only recently, with the 2007 establishment of NhRP (originally called the Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights), has the issue gained legal traction in the United States.Not surprisingly, these earlier lawsuits filed by NhRP were docketed in New York state courts on behalf of chimpanzees Tommy, Kiko, Hercules and Leo. While these habeas corpus petitions were not granted by the New York court at the time, as with many fringe legal theories, if advocates press their theories consistently and patiently, the odds for a favorable result increases. Hence, the current case on behalf of Happy the elephant.It is easy to dismiss the legal theory that non-human animals should be recognized as having human legal rights. The consequences of permitting such a principle to advance and take hold even to a limited extent in our judicial system, however, are profound. The Maryland-based, animal-rights non-profit The Humane League,...
by Bob Barr | May 18, 2022 | Townhall Article |
TownhallWhy would an 18-year-old, with a full life ahead of him, feel so broken and jaded by the world that he feels his only option is to pick up a gun and kill people? This is a question few Democrats, including President Joe Biden, will ask.After all, issuing statements denouncing “weapons of war” (which has nothing to do with anything) and calling for yet more “gun control,” are far easier than seriously probing why so many young men are turning to internet-fueled hate mongers as a way to fill the emptiness in their lives. Still the Left stubbornly clings to the notion that gun-control and other federal legislative efforts will solve the deep-rooted cultural problems giving rise to the rash of mass shootings in recent years. Their willful blindness will force all of us to likely endure repeats of last Saturday’s tragic event at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. It is not as if there are no clues in plain sight to help us unravel the factors predicating many of these mass murders.One common theme, for example, at least as among recent mass shootings, including that in Buffalo, and in Charleston (2015), San Diego (2019), and Christchurch (2019), is that the killers were denizens of the dark corners of the online world. This begs the question, “why?” Why does the hateful violence in online commentary fill a void left empty by social institutions that in years past provided moral anchors to young people? Probing a bit deeper reveals more clues.In today’s risk-averse culture, children and their parents are warned, in some cases actually punished, for allowing their children to engage in...
