David McElroy

The public media community around the country is outraged by the recent firing of two top staffers from Alabama Public Television. The commission that manages the network fired the executive director of APT along with his top assistant. Publicly, both sides just said there was a disagreement about the future direction of the network, but there was much more going on.

Conservatives who control the commission had asked for the network to consider showing a controversial 10-part series by a Texas minister named David Barton who considers himself a historian. (His only educational credential is a degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University.) The American Heritage Series presents this man’s view of the United States as a Christian nation and tries to debunk any notions that the Founding Fathers weren’t dedicated Christians.

The professionals at Alabama Public Television reviewed the material in Barton’s series and outlined why it was a bad idea and possibly illegal. The matter was supposed to be discussed at a commission meeting, but the commission went into executive session and fired the two instead.

At first blush, it seems that the story is simply that conservatives were unjustly trying to push their views onto the professional staff and fired them when they wouldn’t go along. That’s obviously what happened, but there’s a bigger issue here to me.

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When Barack Obama issued an order last week that will allow some undocumented immigrants to say in the United States without fear of prosecution, people generally supported it or opposed it based on the way they see the issue of immigration. Those who favor fewer restrictions on immigration welcomed the order. Those who don’t really like immigration denounced it.

The more I think about it, the more I think the immigration debate is completely secondary to the real issue. No matter whether you favor immigration or oppose it — for whatever your reasons — you should be afraid of this order, because it’s a very blunt statement by a sitting U.S. president that he can ignore laws that he doesn’t like.

Tomorrow, we expect the U.S. Supreme Court to issue its ruling about the constitutionality of key provisions of ObamaCare. If the court strikes down the law as unconstitutional, what’s to stop Obama from using the same principle he used with immigration and simply say he won’t abide by the law as interpreted by the court?

Now let’s look at the opposite case. Let’s say that the court upholds ObamaCare on Thursday. Then let’s say that Mitt Romney is elected president in November. Why couldn’t he simply issue an order for his administration to ignore the health care reform laws if he wanted to? How would that be any different from what Obama has done?

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In 1975, Chao Ponhea Yat High School in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, was converted into a prison. The communist Khmer Rouge had just overthrown the previous government, and the regime led by the murderous Pol Pot spent the next four years torturing and murdering people in this place. Although nobody knows for sure, it’s thought that somewhere between 17,000 and 20,000 men, women and children were brought here. Only seven of those are known to have lived.

We have roughly 35 years between today and the horrors of what happened at the place known at the time as Security Prison 21 (S-21). The complex is now known as the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. That’s one of the buildings of S-21 above just a few weeks ago, seen through the barbed wired that helped keep desperate people from getting out. What lessons can we draw from S-21?

The comfortable lesson is that there was something uniquely evil about communism or the Khmer Rouge regime that took over there. Maybe it’s something unique to Cambodians or to Asians in general. But those sorts of explanations don’t hold up. You can find similar torture and murder in many places around the globe. We certainly saw vicious inhumanity in Nazi Germany, not just from highly trained SS killers, but from ordinary people. When almost 2,300 Jews were killed in 1941, one of the killers was a police secretary back home in Vienna. Walter Mattner described the killings to his wife in a letter:

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