From Dennis Potter
Monroe
There's been a word thrown around throughout this whole government employee union debate. If I've heard it once, I've heard it 1,000 times, and that's rights.
But the one word that has to go hand in hand with rights is responsibility, yet I never hear it. Why? Newton Minow once said, "We've gotten to the point where everybody's got a right and nobody's got a responsibility."
Why do so many shout "My rights" but don't finish the sentence? Gerald W. Johnson said, "No man was ever endowed with a right without being at the same time saddled with a responsibility."
So then, what does God say about rights and responsibility? In Genesis 2:16&17, God said to Adam, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden: but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die." So then, freedom and rights without responsibility equals consequences. Consequences - another word not mentioned with rights.
Everybody has the God-given freedoms that are afforded by law. But your freedoms can't run over other people's freedom. That would fall under responsibility.
The consequences are where we're at now. Public employees are just that, employees of the public. That puts them in an altogether different arena than the private-sector employees. Unions require an adversarial condition between the employer and the employee at the bargaining table, each wanting a share in the profits. In government, there is no profit, and at the bargaining table, there may not be an adversarial condition if both parties are on the same side.
This is why President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the president of the AFL-CIO in 1959, George Meany, were in agreement, when they said that unionization in the pubic sector is wrong. Maybe that's what Jesus was talking about in Mark 3:24 when he said, "If a kingdom is divided against it self, that kingdom cannot stand".
The union president today said that this system has worked well for some 60 years. That's because the squeaky wheel has been getting the grease, (in more ways than one) and now the grease gun's empty. So we, the public, exercised our right and voted Scott Walker in as our governor and he's taken the responsibility to fix the problem right, to avoid even bigger consequences later.
Monroe
There's been a word thrown around throughout this whole government employee union debate. If I've heard it once, I've heard it 1,000 times, and that's rights.
But the one word that has to go hand in hand with rights is responsibility, yet I never hear it. Why? Newton Minow once said, "We've gotten to the point where everybody's got a right and nobody's got a responsibility."
Why do so many shout "My rights" but don't finish the sentence? Gerald W. Johnson said, "No man was ever endowed with a right without being at the same time saddled with a responsibility."
So then, what does God say about rights and responsibility? In Genesis 2:16&17, God said to Adam, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden: but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die." So then, freedom and rights without responsibility equals consequences. Consequences - another word not mentioned with rights.
Everybody has the God-given freedoms that are afforded by law. But your freedoms can't run over other people's freedom. That would fall under responsibility.
The consequences are where we're at now. Public employees are just that, employees of the public. That puts them in an altogether different arena than the private-sector employees. Unions require an adversarial condition between the employer and the employee at the bargaining table, each wanting a share in the profits. In government, there is no profit, and at the bargaining table, there may not be an adversarial condition if both parties are on the same side.
This is why President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the president of the AFL-CIO in 1959, George Meany, were in agreement, when they said that unionization in the pubic sector is wrong. Maybe that's what Jesus was talking about in Mark 3:24 when he said, "If a kingdom is divided against it self, that kingdom cannot stand".
The union president today said that this system has worked well for some 60 years. That's because the squeaky wheel has been getting the grease, (in more ways than one) and now the grease gun's empty. So we, the public, exercised our right and voted Scott Walker in as our governor and he's taken the responsibility to fix the problem right, to avoid even bigger consequences later.
