Meddling In Ireland

Freedom: In Northern Ireland, President Obama repeated an old canard about religious schools being at the root of division there and elsewhere.  In reality, hatred comes from state power and poisonous political ideologies.

Sticking his nose in Northern Ireland's internal affairs at the Group of Eight summit in Belfast, the president pretty much told the Irish to dimantle their Catholic and Protestant schools, on the grounds they're hotbeds of hatred.

"If towns remain divided  -  if Catholics have their schools and buidings and Protestants have theirs, if we can't see ourselves in one another, and fear or resentment are allowed to harden  -  that too encourages division and discourages cooperation," Obama told an Irish audience of 2,000, many of whom were children in religious school uniforms.

It was an odd statement coming from an American president whose nation's founding was premised on the idea that diverse religions could flourish together as long as there is freedom.  America has been a beacon of this idea's success for more than 200 years.

It also reeked of a broader dishonesty pushed by the global left that somehow religion  -  along with national identity, sovereignty, patriotism and religious schools  -  bear the blame for everything from the troubles in Northern Ireland to the great wars of the 20th century.

In reality, the oppostie is the case.  State power and, in Ireland's case, the British Empire's refusal to allow the Irish to practice their religion in peace, were at the root of Northern Ireland's troubles, which were exacerbated by the U.K.'s sociaist failures in the '60s and '70s and Marxist terrorism.

"True partiots are always democrats," noted Dutch politician Geert Wilders at an American Freedom Alliance conference last week in Los Angeles, debunking the leftist truism that patriotism, sovereignty and religious identity are petri dishes of trouble.

Catholic and Protestant schools in reality have a better record on teaching respect and tolerance than do state schools, particularly in America.

Catholic school graduates, for instance, are likelier to vote, earn higher wages, be more civic-minded, show more tolerance of diverse views and be more committed to service as adults than the state alternative that Obama favors, according to three studies by Notre Dame University.  Protestant schools can almost certainly show comparable results.

President Obama likely knows this  -  because he sends his daughters to a Protestant school.
  (Investor's Business Daily, June 20, 2013)