We didn’t learn about President Obama’s attack on Catholic and Protestant schools in Ireland from our local tabloid in Cincinnati, but it has resonated on the internet.  Giving a talk to students on June 17 in Belfast, our President advised them that they would be better off if they did not have separate schools.  He said that having separate school systems “encourages division” and “discourages cooperation.”  I have no idea how a non-religious school would treat the “troubles” of Ireland and how it would deal with private and public morality, but we do have ample experience in these United States.

Tax support was first given to public schools so that they would teach morality—right from wrong—in the hopes that students would make upright law-abiding citizens.  The text in many of these schools was the Bible, but the interpretation was anti-Catholic.  Thus the Catholic Church was forced to build its own school system as an alternative to having Catholic children regularly subjected to both anti-Catholic prejudice as well as teaching.  This was buttressed by a series of anti-Catholic court decisions that forbade any sort of support for the citizen-students who attended the non-public schools.

Thus for too many years Catholics have experienced in this country something similar to the fate of Catholics and other non-Muslims who live in countries with legal systems built on the Islamic Sharia.  They have to pay a special punitive tax that provides no benefit to them as taxpayers.  The same is true of Catholics in the United States who want their children to be educated in Catholic schools.  While the country as a whole benefits from such education, its support falls on Catholics as a special expense in addition to the taxes they already pay for the public schools.  The same is true of Protestants who have seen their once-Protestant public schools completely secularized and now devoid of moral education and thus establish their own schools.

The theme of this blogsite is the quotation from President George Washington’s Farewell Address.  If he could return, he would be aghast at the abandonment of the teaching of religion and morality in our tax-supported schools.  What is needed for the improvement of education in these United States is for all tax-supported funds to follow the students regardless of the schools they attend.  This would result in a healthy competition between the various schools that would benefit everybody.

But that will not start to happen during this administration.  While he can offer his advice on reducing division and encouraging cooperation in Ireland, here in these United States President Obama is insisting that Catholic schools be just as secular as the public schools.  In fact, if they do not accept his Birth Control Mandate, they will have to pay a punitive Sharia-like fine that will force them to close.

Mr. David B. Dillon, Chairman and CEO, The Kroger Company

June 7, 2013

Dear Mr. Dillon

When I learned that the Kroger Company is sponsoring the Homosexual Activists Sex Parade in Cincinnati this coming June 19, I was dismayed.  When I went to the Kroger website, I became even more concerned when I read the first two sentences.  “The Kroger Company values honesty, integrity, safety, diversity, inclusion and respect.  We look for those qualities in the associates we hire.”

Obviously there is no problem with four of those six criteria, but your support of the gay parade raises questions about what Kroger means by diversity and inclusion since those words are sometimes used to advance the gay agenda.  You are giving your shareholders’ money to those who are trying to persuade or force the country to accept sodomy as a legitimate form of marriage.  Will you be trying to find out what your employees and vendors believe about these matters?  Would you deny employment to someone who is not afraid to say he or she believes that the biblical teaching of exclusively heterosexual marriage is correct?

The issue has nothing to do with respect for all individuals.  No one is asking you to not employ or to disemploy men and women based on their sexual orientation.  What the issue is all about is whether certain activists can persuade this country to call sodomy a form of marriage.  What the issue is ultimately all about is whether God has a plan for love, marriage and sexuality, whether God has created man and woman to be complementary and to marry with the anticipation that their sexual union will yield babies, and whether God has created marriage as exclusively a male-female relationship.

No culture on earth has ever called sodomy “marriage.”  The biblical account tells us that there were many men practicing sodomy in the city from which it gets its name, but no one was calling it marriage.  It is very strange that a publicly owned corporation is using its resources and good name to intervene in this battle, and it is especially strange for it to back the side that wants to destroy the traditional concept of exclusively heterosexual marriage.

My request: please disengage immediately from your current stand.  Return to a state of neutrality in the moral and religious war about same-sex marriage.

I need to hear that you have returned to a state of neutrality regarding same-sex marriage and thus are not funding efforts such as the gay parade.

Cordially,

John F. Kippley