Recent editorials from North Carolina newspapers:
___
April 14
StarNews of Wilmington on pirate flags at Cape Fear:
Argh.
Some of North Carolina’s ferries will be sporting pirate flags this summer.
No, the ferries will not be looting, pillaging and stripping the booty from Tar Heel shipping (although this might be an intriguing solution to raising state revenues without taxes).
Rather, the Cedar Island, Hatteras and two smaller ferries will raise a replica of Blackbeard’s pirate flag.
Blackbeard - alias Edward Teach or Thatch, or possibly Drummond - met a gory end 300 years ago, when Lt. Robert Maynard of the Royal Navy cornered him off Ocracoke Island. Some say Maynard chopped off the pirate’s head and hung it from his bowsprit. (Legend has it the headless corpse still managed to swim three laps around Maynard’s ship, but that’s unconfirmed.)
The state Department of Natural and Cultural Resources bought the pirate flags for education and tourist-promotion purposes. They’re even planning a Pirate Festival for the fall on Ocracoke.
How ironic: At a time when Confederate former heroes are literally being pulled from their pedestals, the state is going pirate crazy.
In fact, the real-life pirates had more in common with the Crips or the Bloods than with Errol Flynn or Capt. Jack Sparrow.
Rather than robbing the rich and giving a little to the poor, they tended to waylay ordinary sailors and fishermen, stripping their vessels of sails, rope, food and any rum that happened to lie handy. No wonder piracy was a hanging offense.
Still, little kids love pirates, and the excavation of the wreck of Blackbeard’s flagship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, has been worth millions to North Carolina in promotional advertising.
So, pirates it is. Except, Southeastern North Carolina doesn’t get to join in the game.
The bureaucrats at Cultural Resources have a flimsy excuse: They’re only flying the colors where Blackbeard had a historical association, and apparently he never tarried long around the mouth of the Cape Fear.
The region does, however, have a pirate of its own: Major Stede Bonnet, who was captured by Col. William Rhett of South Carolina on Sept. 27, 1718, a couple of months before Blackbeard’s last stand, not far from the site of modern-day Southport.
To be honest, Bonnet was not much of a pirate. Blackbeard seems to have stolen his lunch and his ships and held him prisoner awhile. In his showdown with Rhett, he ran aground several times. The pirate chronicles claim that the former Barbados planter was driven to piracy to escape a shrewish wife.
In fact, Pirates didn’t kill as many people outright as advertised (Blackbeard apparently fudged his reputation to get folks to surrender faster - sort of a bad-guy act), but many of their victims were left with no way to get home and were lost at sea.
But, still, old Stede’s OUR pirate. It’s Bonnet’s 300th anniversary, too. (The South Carolinians hanged him a couple of weeks before Christmas 1718.) Couldn’t the Southport-Fort Fisher ferries sport the Major’s old pirate flag? It seems only fair.
Online: http://www.starnewsonline.com/
___
April 14
The Robesonian on corporal punishment:
Those who are working to ban the use of corporal punishment in the Public Schools of Robeson County were confident going into Tuesday’s meeting of the Board of Education, believing they had identified six out of the 11 members who would raise their hand to end this sanctioned use of violence in our schools.
But members of Advocates for a Better Education, a group leading this effort, might have erred in showing their hand in advance as it enabled those who support the use of corporal punishment to rally a defense. School board members, in what might be seen as a cowardly move but we believe was prudent, decided against a vote, and instead opted to address the issue as the system works toward a comprehensive update of all its policies, which has not been done in too long.
Meanwhile, and this is the hard part, the option to spank a child remains in all of our schools.
Most schools in Robeson County don’t exercise that option, meaning a child’s zip code could be a determining factor. Pause and consider how ridiculous that is.
Although most don’t want to believe it could happen, it is a fact that some of our children who suffer disabilities have suffered this abuse - and that is what it is. We wonder what any educator would believe could be gained by inflicting pain on a child unable to understand what is happening. Can we not at least agree that this is unforgivable?
We understand that corporal punishment is ingrained in our culture, but we cannot understand why any parent would give permission to an educator to strike his or her child. It is more confusing why any educator, given today’s litigious society, would want to administer that punishment.
Robeson County is one of only two schools in the state that continue to allow corporal punishment, but it is done sparingly in Graham County, giving us this dubious distinction: About 90 percent of the paddlings in the schools in this state are administered in Robeson County, and close to all of those paddled are minority children, the overwhelming majority of them being American Indian.
It is a horrible look.
We could somewhat understand the defense of corporal punishment if there were a shred of evidence that its use results in positive outcomes. No study has found that, and in fact the evidence is growing that when children are subjected to such violence, they are more likely to use violence themselves as an adult.
Perhaps it is a factor, even if small, in the violence in our county that ranks us No. 1 in the state.
The Advocates for a Better Education immediately called on Raleigh to pass legislation banning corporal punishment in the state. Rep. Charles Graham, a former educator who opposes its use, stands ready to take that baton but was clear he would prefer the local school board to make the call.
Sadly, corporal punishment - and not things that matter, such as low-performing schools, school buildings that are falling apart, and classes without books and adequate supplies - is what energizes too many in this county, and a vote in the wrong direction might be costly on Election Day. But what is leadership about if not leading?
Most likely Superintendent Shanita Wooten will provide the full board a new set of policies that no longer provides for the use of corporal punishment for an up-or-down vote.
Let’s get that done without undue delay.
Online: https://www.robesonian.com/
___
April 17
The Wilson Times on UNC Chapel Hill’s free speech principles:
College students may not understand free speech, but at the University of North Carolina, professors seem plenty willing to teach them.
The UNC-Chapel Hill Faculty Council voted 28-4 last Friday to adopt the “Chicago Principles,” a document that expresses support for freedom of expression and opposition to censorship. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has called on all American colleges, public and private, to endorse the University of Chicago’s free speech policy statement.
This encouraging step comes on the heels of a startling Knight Foundation survey showing that large numbers of undergrads prefer mandatory political correctness to the sometimes rough and tumble world of vigorous debate in the marketplace of ideas.
Sixty-four percent of students say the First Amendment shouldn’t protect hate speech. While we join them in condemning racism and bigotry, we note that censorship isn’t the proper remedy. Misguided views can only be defeated when they’re debated, debunked and defanged. Americans confront prejudice rather than shrinking away from it.
Since “hate speech” is not a defined category of expression in U.S. jurisprudence, it’s easy to misapply the label and use it to declare anything a particular person or group finds offensive to be out of bounds. Increasingly, students use “hate speech” cries as a cudgel to silence others and as justification to shout down speakers or stage riots to disrupt their events.
Nearly four in 10 students believe it’s sometimes OK to drown out speakers they find disagreeable, which it is not. The First Amendment protects peaceful protest, but there’s no such thing as a constitutional license for censorship by crowd.
It’s this precise misunderstanding that led some liberals to criticize North Carolina’s campus free speech law passed in 2017. The state statute requires universities to punish those who shout down speakers. Critics feared protesters’ rights could be violated. The case law is clear - demonstrators can picket to their hearts’ content and “fleeting boos” are fine, but yelling over a speaker to prevent him from being heard is a violation of free speech, not a legitimate exercise of it.
Ten percent of students say it’s sometimes acceptable to prevent someone from speaking by the use of violence or physical force. That grim statistic is reflected in the Antifa riots that caused the cancellation of conservative firebrand Milo Yiannopolous’ speech at the University of California-Berkeley in February 2017.
Students aren’t learning civics in high school and arrive on college campuses without a good grasp of the First Amendment and the importance of open debate in a free society. When they’re met by radical professors who conflate controversial speech with physical violence and spineless administrators who capitulate to demands for safe spaces and trigger warnings, universities can have a free speech crisis on their hands.
Fortunately, that isn’t the case at the University of North Carolina.
Friday’s vote didn’t grant students free speech rights; the First Amendment already does that. It didn’t require professors and administrators to respect those rights; the 2017 state law accomplishes that. Since faculty doesn’t set campus rules, the Chicago Principles are non-binding. Yet there’s still something profound about professors taking a public stand for free expression in this day and age.
The University of Chicago statement can have the force of policy when college boards of trustees vote to adopt it, and we encourage North Carolina’s private institutions of higher learning, which are not bound by the First Amendment or the state’s campus free speech law, to take that voluntary step.
UNC faculty members drafted their own preamble and conclusion to the Chicago Principles resolution. The university, they wrote, is “reaffirming a commitment to full and open inquiry, robust debate and civil discourse” and vows to “affirm the intellectual rigor and open-mindedness that our community may bring to any forum where difficult, challenging and even disturbing ideas are presented.”
“At Carolina, we have long known that light and liberty are the essential tools that allow problems to be seen, ideas to be tested and solutions to be found,” the statement reads. “At a moment of deep societal division and flux, we embrace these truths once again.”
Light and liberty - those should be guiding principles for all North Carolina colleges. More must follow in UNC’s footsteps and adopt the Chicago Principles without delay.
Online: http://www.wilsontimes.com/
Please read our comment policy before commenting.