Somewhere in the State of Washington in the County of Snohomish there is a High School with a great woodwind orchestra. For their graduation the students selected an Ave Maria by Franz Biebl, a very beautiful piece of music but much less known than famous Ave Maria of Gounod and Franz Shubert. Chances were that nobody would have known any the better. And it was to be instrumental only. The students took the lyrics out. Well the lady Principal by the name of Whitehead said, No you can’t because it is a religious piece and might offend the sensitivities of some people. And I don’t want trouble. Thus for fear of negative reaction she violated the free speech of the students.
A girl student by the name of Nurre took the case to court. 12 months later the court sided with the school. An appeal followed and 12 months later a higher court upheld the lower court and it went right up the Supreme Court that refused to take the case. Alito (or someone else) dissented with the majority opinion in a well thought out argument that impressed me. Here it is: “In prohibiting Nurre and her classmates from playing their selected piece of music, the School District misjudged the Establishment Clause’s requirements and, in so doing, violated Nurre’s First Amendment rights. I am concerned that, if the majority’s reasoning on this issue becomes widely adopted, the practical effect will be to kill the creativity of musical and artistic presentations by their students for fear of criticism by a member of the public, however extreme that person’s views may be. The taking of such unnecessary measures by school administrators will only foster the increasingly sterile and hypersensitive way in which students may express themselves and hasten the retrogression of our young into a nation of Philistines, who have little or no understanding of our cultural heritage.”
In an attempt to avoid offending anyone, America’s public schools have increasingly adopted a zero tolerance attitude towards religious expression. Such politically correct thinking has resulted in a host of inane actions, from the Easter Bunny being renamed “Peter Rabbit” to Christmas Concerts being dubbed “Winter” Concerts and some schools even outlaw the colors red and green, saying they’re Christmas colors.
And now, simply because someone is offended by the title, students cannot play music that has no words and is performed with no religious intent. By sanitizing the schools of anything remotely related to religion, we are not only silencing our young people, stifling their creativity; worse we are setting up the premises of a cultural wasteland bereft of our rich heritage of art, music and culture. Religion is such an innate part of American culture that it would be impossible to create a strictly secular course of study for students.
To put this in perspective, consider the following. If someone complains about Michelangelo‘s art because it was so often themed on Christianity, does this mean that we are supposed to have art history books without the Sistine Chapel? What about other masterpieces such as Da Vinci’s The Last Supper? For that matter, what about great writers such as Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, or Edgar Allen Poe? To mention but a few. Some of Western civilization’s greatest music was inspired by religion or created for a religious purpose, composed by such maestros as J.S. Bach, Wolfgang Mozart, and Joseph Haydn.
Even contemporary great artists have drawn inspiration from religion. For example, the Beatles are visited by Mother Mary in “Let it Be“; Led Zeppelin writes of a “Stairway to Heaven“; and even Jon Bon Jovi sings about “Livin’ on a Prayer.” Anyone should cringe at the thought of letting governmental bureaucracy control what art is. It is troubling to reflect that our Supreme Court’s refused to review to pick up the case thus allowing the emergence of a new unconstitutional reality: the right to not be offended. There is no way to completely avoid giving offense. At some time or other, someone is going to take offense at something someone else says or does. It’s inevitable. Each time we allow political correctness to trump freedom of speech we are complicit in undermining the character of our nation.
I was pondering these ideas because I come across people that would like me to say or write different things from the ones I feel deeply about. They would like to stifle the voice that maybe upsets them. Even in political discourse we’ve become so intransigent that we cannot tolerate people who think differently. This country uniquely in the world enshrined in its constitution the right of people to freely express themselves and makes it legally very hard for anyone to stop them. Not until now that is.
The Christian faith holds several acts of “super-sizing” to be miracles accomplished by Jesus Christ — a handful of fish and loaves of bread expanded to feed thousands; a wedding feast running low on wine suddenly awash in the stuff.
Now a new study of portion expansion puts Jesus once more at the center. Brian Wansink and his brother Craig, a biblical scholar at Virginia Wesleyan College, analyzed 52 depictions of the Last Supper, “history’s most famous dinner party” painted between the year 1000 and the year 2000. Using the size of the diners’ heads as a basis for comparison, the Wansinks used computers to compare the sizes of the plates in front of the apostles, the food servings on those plates and the bread on the table. Assuming that heads do not increase in size during that period, the researchers used this method to gauge how much food portions increased.
And increase they did. Over the course of the millennium, the Wansinks found that the entrees depicted on the plates laid before Jesus’ followers grew by about 70%, and the bread by 23%. As entree portions rose, so too did the size of the plates — by 65.6%.The apostles depicted during the Middle Ages appear to be the ascetics they are said to have been. But by 1498, when Leonardo da Vinci completed his masterpiece, the party was more lavishly fed. Almost a century later, the Mannerist painter Jacobo Tintoretto piled the food on the apostles’ plates still higher. There is scant evidence that the body mass index of people in developed societies soared into unhealthy ranges for most of the 1,000 years studied.
There’s little doubt, however, that it changed drastically in the 1970s, 80s & 90s – coincidentally, when portion sizes began a dramatic run-up. Our bodies are larger because we eat more.
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