Don is angry with me. He cannot understand why I support punishing rapists with death while simultaneously defending the rights of the unborn. He accuses me of applying double standards, promoting hypocrisy, and of being "inconsistent." But I am perfectly consistent in my beliefs. And, truth be known, so is Don.
The reason so many people are unfairly labeled as "inconsistent" is because the term "double standard" is applied in such a haphazard fashion. People are actually guilty of applying a double standard when they treat two identical things differently. On the other hand, they are not applying a double standard when they treat two different things differently. They are just applying common sense.
It’s pretty easy to see that I am not applying a double standard in opposing abortion and supporting the death penalty. An unborn child is not the same thing as a convicted murderer. In fact, no unborn child has ever committed murder. Forgive me for going out on a limb, here. But we are dealing with different things.
Of course, opposition to abortion and support of capital punishment is perfectly consistent with respect for innocent life. Abortion must be stopped because it takes an innocent life. Murderers must be stopped because they take innocent lives. And nothing deters like capital punishment. No executed man has ever become a recidivist.
Those liberals who claim the lack of a "general deterrence" effect of capital punishment are to be dismissed as smug hypocrites. General deterrence refers to the discouragement of would-be offenders – as opposed to those already convicted of crimes. Of course, general deterrence is not possible when the appellate process extends over a period of decades. The would-be killer is not deterred because he knows that punishment would not swiftly follow his offense. That is due to the almost endless appeals in capital cases. These endless appeals are caused by liberals who block any and all efforts to reform the process. Therefore, they lack the moral authority to protest the condition they have created.
Of course, my desire to extend the death penalty to cover first degree rape does not introduce inconsistency into my worldview. The convicted rapist is not an innocent human being. Additionally, I want to insure that if the victim becomes pregnant, she can kill someone in order to assuage the memory of the rape. Presently, too many people would prefer that she kill the innocent child. I would rather spare the innocent child and kill the guilty rapist. See how I keep coming back to a concern for saving innocent life? You may disagree with me. But at least I’m consistent.
Of course, Don thinks I’m crazy. And there's a reason for that. He likes having sex with a lot of women. In fact, besides smoking pot and bombing my Facebook page, there's nothing he enjoys more than "getting a little strange" - as he likes to say.
Don's sex life is relevant to the discussion because it is the only reason he supports unrestricted abortion. He has an otterbox to protect his iPhone. But he won't wear a condom to protect himself during sex. If the woman won't assume the responsibility he shirks, he must rely on abortion as a back-up plan. Otherwise there would be a lot of little Dons running around - and one less Don Juan hitting the bars looking for some "strange."
Of course, Don consistently employs the rape exception in abortion debates because the issue makes pro-lifers seem calloused towards women. He also uses the rape victims in debates so he can keep using women for sex after the debate is over. I always agree with him when he says a woman has a right to terminate a life in order to help assuage the painful memory of rape. We just disagree on which life should be terminated. Don thinks she should have a doctor kill the baby by dismemberment. I think she should have a prison doctor kill the rapist with a lethal injection - after a fair trial, of course.
Don fights back hard when I say rape should be a capital crime. But he's just being consistent. The more he sleeps around, the greater the likelihood he will be charged with rape. Therefore, it is in his best interest to promote leniency in the law of rape - the kind of leniency he is unwilling to extend to the unborn.
My friend Don says we can’t legislate morality. What he really means is that we shouldn't legislate morality because it would interfere with his sex life. His reasoning is strangely consistent. It is also consistently selfish.
Author’s Note: I firmly believe that most Americans are not Swift enough to appreciate social satire. I also believe that the best satire is based on real-life events. If you agree, would you prayerfully consider joining my support team? Being a wise acre is a full-time job.
Welcome back students! My name is Biff Latane and I am the campus director of Jesus Crew (or J. Cru for short) here at Denton State University (or DSU for short). Before I tell you more about J. Cru at DSU, I want to take a few minutes to apologize for an episode that occurred during our last meeting at the end of the last quarter.
Abortion is a sensitive issue and I want to assure everyone that it is an issue none of us will have to hear about again during our time together in J. Cru. Regrettably, there was a miscommunication that resulted in a pro-life speaker coming to address us last quarter. One of our officers made the decision to bring the speaker into our meeting. I was not aware abortion was to be discussed until I arrived late for the meeting approximately halfway through the speaker's presentation.
At first, I had no problem with what I heard. The speaker talked for a few minutes about the sanctity of life and the idea that life begins at conception. But then he crossed a line. He stated that RU-486 - even if used early in a pregnancy - results in the killing of an innocent human being. He also suggested that it is the moral equivalent of poisoning an infant. That crossed the line, in my opinion. It was graphic and offensive language that simply will not be tolerated in our meetings. We need to promote tolerance instead. Whether something is true is not as important as preserving an atmosphere of respect as far as I am concerned. I really believe that. And I'm sorry if anyone was offended by the speaker.
Some may have thought it was rude for me to interrupt the meeting and ask our speaker to leave in the middle of his speech. But I used my best judgment in aborting the speech and I have no regrets whatsoever. I can assure you nothing of the sort will ever happen again.
So enough of what we will not be doing this quarter. Let's talk about what we will be doing. First off, we will be distributing copies of Dan Muller's book Pink like Blues on campus. I love Dan's biographies. I've read all five of them. My favorite quote is the one where he says "If I ever leave Christianity, it will not be for intellectual reasons. Who knows anything anyway? I mean, like, whatever man." Dan is deep and I can't wait to share his work with students all over our campus. We need to make Christianity accessible by responding to the culture in which we live.
Ok, so that's our first big event on campus. In fact, our book distribution project is our only big event this quarter – aside from my periodic pleas for people to join my support team. So let’s make sure to do a lot of sidewalk chalking to promote it. In fact, that will give us another opportunity to get together again later and clean the sidewalks. There is a time to chalk and a time to de-chalk, I suppose.
As far as the rest of the quarter is concerned, we will be having our weekly meetings all quarter long. But instead of having them on Wednesday they will be moved to Monday. Apparently, the Abstinence Club had to have their meetings moved to Wednesday because they wanted to call it "no hump day." For the reasons I specified earlier, I have no additional comment. The best way to prevent unwanted discussions of abortion is to abstain from having discussions about sex. So let’s move on.
Monday meetings will take the form of pizza parties. We want to avoid Chick-fil-A (for obvious reasons). Clearly, everyone seems to like pizza and no one is offended by it. This brings me to the primary issue I need to discuss with you this evening.
It seems our national headquarters has received a letter from the corporate attorneys at J. Crew. We have been threatened with copyright infringement for printing "Jesus Crew" tee shirts and selling them at some of our campus events. So, for the second time in a few short years, we are forced to change our name in order to avoid conflict.
After much prayer and contemplation, Jesus Crew is changing its name to "The Campus Crusade for Crust." We decided to leave out the name of Jesus, which some consider to be offensive. Besides that, it's really about the pizza anyway. So thanks for coming everyone. Don’t forget to leave your pizza orders on the table before you go. Oh, and before I forget, let me leave you with one more question:
Does anyone feel led to join my support team? Organizing pizza parties is a full-time job
Dr. Ben Carson stepped into the national spotlight recently when, as speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast, to an audience that included President Obama, he was openly critical of the President’s approach to health care and his overall management of the nation’s economy.
Carson, who is director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, is a hero to many. His life story, rising from a Detroit ghetto to a life of accomplishment and distinction, is a story of American ideals on steroids.
Those ideals say that America is about merit not circumstance. Your life, your achievements are the result of what you do and how you live, not where you came from.
The hard history of blacks in America has always made it a challenge for them to accept this credo. Many still carry a sense that those ideals may be true for whites, but they never were true, and still aren’t true, for blacks.
So in this context, Ben Carson’s story is particularly important. It’s making liberals nervous, and the attacks on him are starting.
He’s now pulled out, under pressure, from giving the commencement address at Johns Hopkins University because some are unhappy with how, in an interview on Fox, he expressed his views regarding the importance of maintaining the integrity of traditional marriage.
Blacks have known about Carson for years. I gave his book Gifted Hands to my daughters to read when they were little girls. A highly acclaimed made-for-TV movie about his life aired in 2009, with Dr. Carson played by Oscar-winning actor Cuba Gooding, Jr.
But this story of personal responsibility, hard work and traditional values is becoming a political story. It is becoming political because Ben Carson’s American dream story, according to the liberal script, is not supposed to work for blacks.
Ben Carson is the biggest threat to liberals since Bill Cosby got out of line at an NAACP banquet in Washington, DC in 2004.
Cosby had the temerity to deliver tough, critical talk about what too many blacks are doing with the freedom that civil rights activists of the 1960’s fought to achieve.
He contrasted the sixties generation with the new generation of black youth sitting in jail. “…..these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake.”
Cosby attributed the chaos to breakdown in values, family, and personal responsibility. It’s the last thing the NAACP crowd wanted to hear that night and he paid a price. He was vilified and marginalized until he backed off.
Liberals never take on what black conservatives actually say because they can’t. So the attacks become personal.
Trillions of taxpayers’ dollars have been poured into black communities over the last half-century producing virtually no change in the incidence of black poverty.
Yet, Ben Carson, through diligence and traditional values, achieved on his own what those trillions of dollars of government programs were supposed to deliver.
Liberal black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates put the cards on the table in an article about Cosby which appeared in 2008 in The Atlantic magazine. The typical black conservative votes for Democrats, he notes, “not out of love for abortion rights.... but because he feels…. that the modern day GOP draws on support of people who hate him.”
So stoking paranoia about racism has always been the strategy of liberals to fend off the political threat of conservative values that so many church-going blacks embrace.
Predictably, Coates has produced a New York Times column on Carson, reducing this great man to the usual caricature of a black empty suit manipulated by white conservatives.
Ben Carson is an accomplished and wealthy man. Americans, certainly black Americans, need him in public life more than he needs to be in public life. Let’s hope the left wing and the haters of traditional morality don’t succeed in making him conclude it’s not worth it.
The pro-aborts are losing. They know it, and they hate it.
As LifeNews.com reported in January: “CNN released the results of a new poll showing a majority of Americans want all or most abortions prohibited – a clear pro-life majority.”
Indeed, the winds of life are blowing free the foul stench of a pro-abortion culture of death.
This is why President Obama and his fellow pro-abort zealot, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, have unilaterally, arbitrarily and unconstitutionally forced, through Obamacare, every taxpaying American citizen to fund “free” abortion-on-demand.
This draconian overreach is in perfect keeping with the 2012 DNC platform, which, for the first time, admits without shame: “The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to … abortion, regardless of ability to pay.”
Psalm 8:28 commands: “Defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed.”
To be sure, there can be none more oppressed than the tens of millions who, over four short decades, have been – and will continue to be – slaughtered within the safe haven of their own mothers’ wombs.
With its 1973 Roe decision, the U.S. Supreme Court put the government’s official stamp of approval on mass murder. Since then, the battle lines have been drawn. This is war. They, “pro-choicers,” are the bad guys, while pro-lifers are the good guys. It really is that simple – that black and white. It’s good versus evil.
History will reflect as much.
To the unenthusiastic mother, politically motivated abortion violence is deviously portrayed as an acceptable escape from what may seem a desperate situation. To the innocent child, it is – without fail and without due process – execution by torture.
Consider the horrific practice of Partial-Birth Abortion, innocuously tagged “Intact Dilation and Extraction.” This is a practice so brutal and so needless that even the liberal American Medical Association (AMA) admitted that it is never necessary under any circumstances.
During a partial-birth abortion, the abortionist pulls a fully “viable” child – often kicking and thrashing – feet first from her mother’s womb, leaving only the top of her head in the birth canal. This is so the abortionist can technically claim to be performing an abortion, rather than committing murder.
He then stabs the child through the base of her skull with scissors, piercing her brain until her kicking and moving about suddenly and violently jerks to a halt. Next, he opens the scissors to enlarge the wound, inserts a vacuum tube and sucks out her brains, thereby collapsing her skull.
Her now limp and lifeless body is then cast away like so much garbage.
Appalling, isn’t it? Infanticide by any objective measure.
So, naturally, Mr. Obama, reasonable fellow that he is, agrees with the AMA, correct? He and other “pro-choicers” were the first to applaud the high court when it upheld a ban on this Hitlerian practice, right?
Wrong.
Barack Obama unbelievably called the Court’s decision in Gonzales v. Carhart part of a concerted effort “to steadily roll back the hard-won rights of American women.” In so doing, he revealed to the world that leftist support for abortion “rights” has everything to do with politics and nothing to do with science or “health care.”
Moreover, consider Mr. Obama’s opposition to the “Born Alive Infant Protection Act.” It passed both houses of Congress in 2002 with overwhelming bipartisan support. Born Alive very simply requires that when a baby survives an attempted abortion – when she is “born alive” – further attempts to kill her must immediately cease, and steps must be taken to save her life.
Yet, incredibly, this president, while serving in the Illinois Senate, vehemently opposed the bill’s Illinois twin. He complained that requiring efforts to save the live victim of a botched abortion is “really designed simply to burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion.”
Barack Obama’s solution? Finish off the little pest.
So prepare for Obama and other pro-aborts to go utterly berserk now that Arkansas has passed the Human Heartbeat Protection Act. It requires that when an abortion is performed at or after the 12th week, doctors must test for a fetal heartbeat before an abortion is performed. If a heartbeat is detected, a woman cannot have an abortion, except in cases of rape, incest, or if a mother’s life is in danger.
This is common-sense stuff. The human heartbeat has long been indisputable proof of life both within and without the womb.
Still, and not surprisingly, even as the state legislature was overriding the Democratic governor’s veto of the new law – SB 134 – the ACLU and other pro-abort radicals were vowing to challenge it in court.
Mathews Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, has vowed to preserve it: “If asked, Liberty Counsel will defend this law without reservation, free of charge for the people of Arkansas, born and unborn,” he said.
“In keeping with medical advances, history and common sense, the Arkansas legislature has said that the life of a 12-week-old unborn child with a detectable heartbeat is protected under the law.”
And well it should be. SB 134 is just the beginning. Brave lawmakers in Arkansas have provided the template for other states to follow.
They’re on the right side of history.
Indeed, history has a way of repeating itself. The Roe decision was not the first time the U.S. Supreme Court has so disgraced our nation. Roe v. Wade represents the twin bookend to the Court’s shameful 1857 Dred Scott decision.
In Dred Scott the Court absurdly held that African-American slaves, even if emancipated, were not fully persons and therefore could never be considered U.S. citizens. Likewise, Roe v. Wade ruled that children in gestation are not fully persons and are therefore not entitled to their most basic civil right: life.
As with Dred Scott, Roe’s fate, I believe, is certain. It’s just a matter of time. History will eventually judge Roe v. Wade every bit as harshly as Dred Scott.
Call yourself “pro-choice”? Shame on you. You’re no better than a modern-day slave master. Dump the garbage and join the right side of history.
Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people. (Proverbs 14:34)
The name “Abraham Lincoln” enjoys a boundless shelf life. The 16th president of the United States is more popular today than ever. The blockbuster movie “Lincoln” recently took home two Oscars, with Daniel Day-Lewis earning the “Best Actor” nod for his masterful portrayal of the Civil War president.
In his outstanding biography, “Abraham Lincoln, a Man of Faith and Courage,” author Joe Wheeler observed that “Lincoln has had more books written about him than all our nation’s presidents put together.”
Love him or hate him, Abraham Lincoln remains, far and away, the most admired president in U.S. history.
It’s little wonder, then, that President Obama seeks to associate himself with this great man at every possible turn. Even so, in terms of worldview, political philosophy, integrity and honorability, the two men are as north to south. Their similarities both begin and end with an Illinois mailing address.
Consider, for instance, that, whereas Lincoln was both a Republican and a strong social conservative by modern standards – Obama is a hard-left Democrat and radical Marxist by any standard. Whereas Lincoln ultimately united a nation brutally divided, Mr. Obama brutally divides a nation once united.
While, as noted by Wheeler, Abraham Lincoln was a man singularly driven by unfettered fidelity to both biblical principles and the one true God of the Bible, Mr. Obama is hell-bent on undermining, if not outright defying, every jot and tittle of the Holy Scriptures.
By placing his hand on the Lincoln Bible and swearing to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States … to the best of my ability,” Mr. Obama sought to draw some symbolic connection to President Lincoln.
Instead, and due to his counter-biblical public policy, he not only engaged in brazen duplicity, but managed to underscore the stark contrast between the two leaders. As compared to his pious predecessor, “the best of [Mr. Obama's] ability” has been weighed on the scales and found wanting.
In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln observed: “Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him, who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust, in the best way, all our present difficulty.”
I believe that, due to our nation’s near total rejection of God and our government’s official stamp of approval on that which Scripture unambiguously calls mortal sin (i.e., homosexuality, the deconstruction of legitimate marriage, abortion on demand and the like), God has, for the first time in our relatively brief history, “forsaken this favored land.” I believe we are a nation under judgment and that Barack Obama is part of that judgment.
Lincoln also declared, “The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.”
Let that sink in. “God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.” God declares homosexual behavior “an abomination.” Mr. Obama celebrates it. God says “thou shalt not murder.” Mr. Obama and his ilk are responsible for the cold blooded murders of 55-plus million American babies at the callous hands of abortionists.
Jesus, in His own words, reaffirmed the definition of legitimate marriage, saying, “Haven’t you read that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.” (Matthew 19:4-6)
Mr. Obama has called Jesus a liar, saying, in effect, “At the beginning the Creator made them lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT). For this reason a male, female or shemale will leave his, her or whatchahoozie’s father and mother, father and father or mother and mother and be united to his or her wife – and/or husband – and the two or more will become one flesh. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
Contrast Mr. Lincoln’s reverence for God and Christianity with Mr. Obama’s declaration that, “Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation.”
Or consider these words, where Mr. Obama both defamed the Bible and mocked Christ’s Sermon on the Mount:
“Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is OK and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application?”
The Sermon on the Mount – a passage so radical that its application the Defense Department would not survive? No, Mr. President, you simply desire it not survive.
Indeed, “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people.” This is not just a flowery aphorism. It’s a self-evident truth – an objective reality. We as an American people have embraced sin and are thusly condemned.
Lincoln said, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” As individuals, we will each stand before God and give an accounting – we will all face judgment. As a nation, we can only be judged in the temporal – in the here and now.
Lincoln also said, “let us renew our trust in God, and go forward without fear, and with manly hearts.” This sage admonition, though certain to infuriate modern-day feminists, is in perfect keeping with 2 Chronicles 7:14, which declares, “If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
Because, as the psalmist observed, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” (Psalm 33)
Difficulty in getting change in our country is an ongoing source of frustration. Particularly when we have huge problems facing us as we do today.
But the founders knew what they were doing setting up the checks and balances of our constitutional republic. The delicate arrangement we call freedom should never submit with ease to a charismatic demagogue or to an emotion filled crisis.
The current push for gun control is case and point. It is at a time like this that we should be grateful that changing our laws is hard to do.
Every normal and decent American wants to live in a country where we will never again see life lost as result of a weapon held and fired by some deranged individual.
If we knew how to prevent it from ever happening again, we all would sign off in a minute.
But we don’t know. And that is the point.
Ironically, President Obama acknowledges that we don’t know what causes the irrational violent incidents we have witnessed. It is the reason one part of the proposal he has put forth is to provide funding to the Centers for Disease Control to study the problem.
Yet, despite acknowledging lack of understanding about what drives gun violence, the president and Senator Dianne Feinstein do not hesitate to offer what they claim is a solution. They propose further controls on gun ownership that are deeply problematic in their intrusion on our freedoms and right to bear arms, guaranteed under the second amendment of our constitution.
Why are the president and Senator Feinstein so ready to compromise basic American freedoms with gun control measures, that already have a dubious record of success, to solve a problem that President Obama acknowledges we don’t understand?
To the president’s credit, in his remarks introducing his gun control initiative, he acknowledges that there may be cultural reasons that contribute to this sick, violent behavior.
But he defines the cultural parameters of what he chooses to look at in such narrow terms that you have to question his seriousness or sincerity.
The president said, “Congress should fund research into the effects that violent video games have on young minds.”
But why limit this discussion to video games?
Has the president walked by a local movie theater complex recently to see what is playing? How about the local fare on television? Or what about the content of rap music?
Can it possibly be that the disproportionate support that the Democratic Party gets from the entertainment industry - major sources of gratuitous violent media – gets them a pass from today’s discussion?
President Obama outraised Mitt Romney five to one from the movie/TV/music industry.
This business was in the top ten sources of business funding for Senator Feinstein’s re-election in 2012, with election funding sources showing these entertainment businesses didn’t provide a dime to her Republican opponent.
What about other major themes in American culture today that contribute to a sense of meaningless and lack of respect for the sacredness of life?
Of course, I am talking about our indifference to the lives of unborn children, who are murdered in our country with impunity. Somehow those who want to intrude on gun ownership can live with the violence perpetrated on the unborn and have little interest in seeing its implications on violence in other areas of our society.
Another part of this discussion is about the mentally ill. Can President Obama or Senator Feinstein give us a good definition of mental illness and seriously tell us how this can be used to control gun ownership?
We have a serious problem on our hands, which demands serious discussion.
This discussion is not taking place and the gun control initiatives that have been put forward do not begin to justify the compromise of our basic freedoms, which they would require.
My friends at Campus Reform are on top of it, as usual. They always expose the thin-skinned idiocy of campus liberals and give me lots of column fodder in the process. Thanks guys. The next round of waffle fries is on me.
Campus Reform is reporting that Chick-fil-A, the popular fast food restaurant chain, has now been dubbed a "symbol of hate," by a professor at Eastern Illinois University (EIU). Lisa Moyer, who teaches in the Family Studies Department at EIU, apparently made the comment with a straight face, although some have suggested that the term "straight face" reinforces heterosexist oppression. Regardless, her comment reinforces my belief that it is always a mistake to choose a major ending in the word "studies."
Moyer made her strangely uninclusive remarks in response to questions about a faculty resolution at EIU. The resolution proposed expelling a Chick-fil-A restaurant from campus in order for the university to be more inclusive. Because of the franchise's alleged opposition to homosexuals, some faculty decided that getting rid of them would promote diversity by producing complete uniformity of thought on issues related to sexual orientation. Talk about queer reasoning!
Moyer, in typical liberal fashion, has projected her hatred of Chick-fil-A onto the restaurant itself and has characterized their company logo as a symbol of hate. I suppose it's now in the same category as a burning cross or a Nazi swastika. In her recent interview with Campus Reform, she elevated hypersensitivity to a Zen art by arguing that her efforts to censor this "symbol of hate" are justified because Chick-fil-A makes a lot of students, particularly in the LGBT community, "feel uncomfortable.” (See www.CampusReform.org for additional details).
Although the Faculty Senate resolution to remove Chick-fil-A from campus was defeated 3-6, the LGBTXYZPDQ community won anyway. That is all because the discussion resulted in the school opening an office for LGBTQ outreach. When they win they win and when they lose they still win - so long as they keep reminding everyone they feel uncomfortable and need special protection.
So I've been thinking about it and I've decided that our LGBTQIA Office here on my campus makes me feel uncomfortable. In fact, the rainbow is a symbol of hate. So, next week, I plan to introduce a resolution to ban them from campus. I expect the resolution to be defeated because it is idiotic. I'm just hoping I get a special office as a consolation prize - simply for being a narrow minded bigot.
Make no mistake about it: the best way to get money in higher education is to be a thin skinned bigot. African American centers reward racial hypersensitivity, Women's Centers reward gender hypersensitivity, and ABC-LGBT-XYZ-PDQ Centers reward unmitigated religious intolerance.
So what exactly is the motivation for all of this thin-skinned hyper-ventilating? Just follow the money. At the end of every rainbow flag, there's a pot of gold - and usually a few burned out professors smoking pot as well.
It is true that Chick-fil-A initially came under fire last summer after CEO, Dan Cathy, indicated personal opposition to same sex marriage. But that wasn't the real issue. The real outrage was over Cathy's personal donations to pro-family conservative groups such as the Family Research Council. The attempt to organize a boycott of the chain was simply an effort to cut off the flow of money to those organizations.
So those of us who support traditional marriage must borrow a page from the pink play book and do the same. If you are donating to a school that houses one of these LGBTQ outreach centers, then shame on you. Give your money to a pro-family "hate group" instead. They tend to be more inclusive anyway.
Oh, yes, and buy more chicken with the money you save from those withheld donations. It'll keep you from having a cow whenever you encounter a divergent viewpoint.
In 1995, feminist leader Naomi Wolf called for a pro-abortion movement “that acts with moral accountability and without euphemism,” noting that, “With the pro-choice rhetoric we use now, we incur three destructive consequences -- two ethical, one strategic: hardness of heart, lying and political failure.” That hardness of heart was fully manifest in the profane video produced by the Center for Reproductive Rights celebrating the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
But let’s go back to October 16, 1995, when the New Republic published Wolf’s remarkably candid article entitled, “Our Bodies, Our Souls.” Wolf made reference to “Dr. Joycelyn Elders’s remark, hailed by some as refreshingly frank and pro-woman but which I found remarkably brutal: that ‘We really need to get over this love affair with the fetus....’”
She explained that “Second Wave feminists reacted to the dehumanization of women by dehumanizing the creatures within them. . . . Yet that has left us with a bitter legacy. For when we defend abortion rights by emptying the act of moral gravity, we find ourselves cultivating a hardness of heart.” And she urged that abortion must be treated with “grief and reverence.”
In stark contrast with that attitude, the Center for Reproductive Rights released an online video which is so obscene that author Eric Metaxas writes, “When I first watched this ad, I thought, this HAS to be a spoof. It employs the ugly racial stereotype of a smooth-talking [black] predator celebrating his freedom to use women at zero cost to himself: Hey, baby, hook up with me—and then go have an abortion. Are they kidding? No; this was no spoof.”
The “smooth-talking predator” is actor Mechad Brooks who sits in a chair holding a red rose in one hand and a drink in the other, saying to the camera (as if speaking to his spouse), “All these years so many people said we’d never make it. They’ve been trying to tear us apart. . . Put limits on you, on me, on us.” And then, Metaxas notes, “he roars with laughter,” a sardonic, mocking laughter at that.
“We’re going to be standing right by your side, today, tomorrow, and the years to come,” he continues. “Because that is how much you mean to me, baby.” And then, once more, the laughter.
To repeat: This was not intended to be a sick joke or a demented spoof. This was meant to be taken seriously, presumably by the same kind of people who shouted their approval of abortion at last year’s Democratic National Convention. Let’s celebrate the slaughter of 55 million babies in the womb, especially in the African American community!
Metaxas quotes Ryan Scott Bomberger, an African-American pro-lifer who runs the Radiance Foundation, who noted that, “With the black abortion rate as high as it is and black fathers as absent as they are, it’s just sick to see Mehcad Brooks shill for the number-one killer in the black community.”
More graphic still are the comments of Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who asked what her uncle would do “if he’d lived to see the contents of thousands of children’s skulls emptied into the bottomless caverns of the abortionists’ pits?”
Naomi Wolf wrote that, “The pro-choice movement often treats with contempt the pro-lifers' practice of holding up to our faces their disturbing graphics. We revile their placards showing an enlarged scene of the aftermath of a D & C abortion: we are disgusted by their lapel pins with the little feet, crafted in gold, of a 10-week-old fetus; we mock the sensationalism of The Silent Scream.”
Yet, she asked, “How can we charge that it is vile and repulsive for pro-lifers to brandish vile and repulsive images if the images are real? To insist that the truth is in poor taste is the very height of hypocrisy. Besides, if these images are often the facts of the matter, and if we then claim that it is offensive for pro-choice women to be confronted by them, then we are making the judgment that women are too inherently weak to face a truth about which they have to make a grave decision. This view of women is unworthy of feminism. Free women must be strong women, too: and strong women, presumably do not seek to cloak their most important decisions in euphemism.”
In light of these comments, I would like to make a simple proposal. The repulsive video described here has been pulled by its producer, but if someone can find a copy of it (legally), perhaps they can remake it, interspersed with these very images Wolf describes, terribly disturbing images which are now readily available online. Then let’s see if a single pro-abortion leader in the world will even attempt to minimize the horror of abortion.
Wolf argued that, “Only if we uphold abortion rights within a matrix of individual conscience, atonement and responsibility can we both correct the logical and ethical absurdity in our position and consolidate the support of the center.”
Let every American look at the pictures of these ripped up and mutilated babies and ask if it is possible for there to be an “abortion rights” movement that operates “within a matrix of individual conscience, atonement and responsibility.” And let every American ask what kind of human beings (and what kind of organization) could mockingly celebrate the slaughter of the unborn.
Although it certainly wasn’t Oscar material, I still love the 1989 film “Erik the Viking,” starring, among others, Tim Robbins, Mickey Rooney, Eartha Kitt and John Cleese. It’s a campy British comedy-fantasy about a band of misfit Vikings on a quest to reach Valhalla.
In one scene, the motley mob finds its way to the island of Hy-Brasil, a happy, peaceful, sunlit land populated by white-robed, free-loving, uber-pacifist morons.
You know, liberals.
Through a series of immaterial events, the island begins to sink into the ocean. As it does, Erik and crew evacuate and re-board the ship while Hy-Brasil’s inhabitants blithely remain, singing out of tune and playing harps, horns and other instruments badly.
As the crest of the island dips beneath the sea, King Arnulf – a blundering buffoon played by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame – exclaims: “Everyone, stay calm. This is not happening.”
It’d be funny if it weren’t true, but America has become Hy-Brasil, Barack Obama King Arnulf and liberals of every stripe his white-robed, mind-numbed, sycophantic subjects. Our enemies, both foreign and domestic – some of whom have “The Honorable” before their names – are laughing themselves silly.
Indeed, “progressives” are a caricature of themselves, fully given over to pseudo-utopian, relativist ideals that remain ludicrous – hopelessly unattainable – by any objective standard.
Still, our patchouli-wearing, pervert-pride-prancing, “pay-for-my-abortion”-shrieking friends are anything if not determined. They’ll let neither reality nor the U.S. Constitution stop them. Nothing, it seems – especially not those mealy-mouthed puddin’ pops running the GOP – can keep this ship of fools from sinking a once great nation.
Problem is, they’re taking us all down with them.
How do you stop skyrocketing debt and deficits that even liberal economists admit, if left unchecked, spell America’s doom? You don’t. You print trillions more and spend it like game tokens at Chuck E. Cheese. The party must go on or the kiddos get cranky. Sugar Daddy Barack’s got hungry mouths to feed.
How do you stop evil nutjobs pumped full of psychotropic drugs from shooting-up “gun free zones”? Why, by leaving them heavily armed, of course. By unconstitutionally grabbing guns from the very law-abiding citizens positioned to tap two in the body and one in the head whenever these death-culture byproducts start killing.
Liberal logic: “Up is down, down is up, we’ll make it so and we won’t give up!”
In sum, you spend your way out of debt, tax your way to higher employment, fornicate your way disease-free, abort your way to non-violence and unilaterally disarm your way to national security.
Any questions?
Now, some of you may say, “But wait, Obama knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s no buffoon.”
I both agree and disagree. Yes, the “progressive” dogma that courses through his veins – a mind-altering hallucinogen that gives liberals the munchies for power – is, indeed, inherently sinister.
Still, he believes it with every ounce of his nicotine-hardened heart.
By deliberately deconstructing America’s constitutional republic – our free-market form of government – and replacing it with a Euro-socialist, moral relativist amalgam of his liking, this misguided anti-colonialist radical thinks – truly believes – that he’s doing the right thing.
Such are the ways of the well-meaning tyrant.
People sometimes ask me how it is that I manage to stay so optimistic – to maintain deep joy as we watch our nation’s foundations crumbling around us like the walls of Jericho. They wonder how it is that I’m able to pick up and carry on with a smile as America heads careening toward cliff’s edge.
It’s easy. First, I put my full faith and trust in the Sovereign Creator of the universe who is the same yesterday today and forevermore: Christ, God incarnate, who is always faithful to those who have faith in Him.
Then, I laugh at them; liberals, that is. I make fun of their dull-witted, self-defeating, abjectly wicked worldview. I follow God’s example. Of those who align themselves against His laws and His nature, Psalm 2:4 says, “He who sits in the heavens laughs. The Lord scoffs at them.”
How can you not scoff at the silly twaddle they’re hocking?
Ultimately, I’ve read the end of the book. I know what happens. The good guys win. That keeps me smiling no matter what goes down on the culture-war front. It keeps me snickering.
Still, once I stop laughing, I get about the business of trying, with every fiber of my being, to defeat them. Not reason with them, not compromise with them, not suck up to them and certainly not trust them.
Defeat them.
Oh, I’ll love them. I must. I’m commanded to by the Lord I serve. I’ll pray for them, too. Do it all the time. But I’ll never, ever, under any circumstances, trust them.
You may be surprised to learn that, in various forms, I get dozens – sometimes hundreds – of pieces of hate mail each week. My recent favorite came from a delightful bloke with the email handle synth84@aol.com. “Someday, someone may just choose to use their second amendment right (sic) to put a bullet in your worthless head. You are a disgusting waste of life you uneducated, non-human, uncivilized, evil, parasitic Nazi maggot. Shame on you.”
Right. Shame on me.
How do you reason with, compromise with, suck up to or trust that?
You don’t. You defeat it.
Abraham Lincoln, a man of deep faith, forecast nearly a century-and-a-half ago our current state of the union: “America will never be destroyed from the outside,” he said. “If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
President Obama sits atop the highest perch of a nation fast-sinking. “Everyone, stay calm. This is not happening,” he assures us.
But it is happening. We’re destroying ourselves from within. We’re going down, and the only way to stop it is to utterly defeat those responsible.
The number forty has great significance in the Bible.
Perhaps best known is the forty years that the Israelites were condemned to wander in the desert before being permitted entry into the Promised Land.
Maybe this mystical quantity will bear significance as we note, this month, the fortieth year since the Roe v Wade decision legalized abortion in America.
Forty years we have lived with the silent, and sometimes not so silent, holocaust in our midst as the lives of 55 million innocent and unborn children have been killed, plucked from their journey to enter this world.
Who were they? Who would they have become?
The unmarried graduate student who gave birth to hi-tech impresario and co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, may well have aborted this child had her pregnancy occurred in 1973 rather than 1955.
This past week former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, recovering victim of a crazed gunman, visited, along with her husband Mark Kelly, Newtown, Connecticut, site of the latest horrible shooting incident.
In their public remarks, they expressed concern that our society has become “desensitized to acts of violence.”
Appropriate words, I think, that certainly should be considered in the broadest possible sense in our effort to grasp our willingness to tolerate, even nurture, the open and flourishing presence of evil in our society.
It takes a deadening of the soul to permit this, a state of being “desensitized.”
We know it because when those senses are awakened, our indifference and willingness to tolerate evil is pushed back.
When William Wilberforce fought to abolish the slave trade in England, he moved a boatload of the elite into proximity of a slave ship to smell the stench. Their senses were awakened and a major step forward was achieved to end the horror.
Reformed slave trader John Newton composed “Amazing Grace,” with the unforgettable line “Was blind but now I see.”
If there is good news, it is that, slowly, America seems to be coming to its senses regarding destruction of unborn children.
This week’s Time Magazine cover story announces “40 years ago abortion-rights activists won an epic victory with Roe v Wade: They’ve been losing ever since.”
But in noting that ultrasound has reduced the willingness of Americans to tolerate abortion, author of the story Kate Pickert misses the key point when she writes, “Thanks to prenatal ultrasound, Americans now understand what a fetus look like and that babies born as early as 24 weeks can now survive.”
The key point is that the graphic ultrasound picture, showing the growing and moving fetus, has raised awareness that this unborn child is alive and that abortion is murder.
Ultrasound is sensitizing a desensitized American public that has been willing to tolerate this horror over these forty years.
Wars are not won overnight. Victory is achieved battle by battle.
Wilberforce did not stop slavery, but he stopped the slave trade.
Lincoln’s first aspiration was not total abolishment of slavery in America, but making it illegal in new entrants to the Union.
A battle before us now, as the American soul awakens to the evil of abortion, is to end the expropriation of US taxpayer funds, which now provide almost half the budget of the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood.
According to Rep. Marsha Blackburn(R-Tenn), Planned Parenthood’s latest annual report shows receipt of $542 million from US taxpayers. This is outrageous, particularly when every other day we witness a new confrontation in Washington to find ways to cut our trillion-dollar budget deficit.
Rep. Blackburn has introduced legislation to end this funding to large abortion providers. Every American should support this and help win this battle.
And we must continue to work to win the war and awaken the American soul, so that forty years after Roe v Wade we bring an end to the scourge of legal abortion in America.
Editor’s note: Dr. Adams will speak at Christ Church Lutheran Church in Phoenix, AZ on January 19. The speech, which is part of the Voices for the Voiceless "Redefine" Conference, will begin shortly after the conference opens at 8 am. Dr. Adams will then go to Minneapolis to speak at the Minnesota Youth for Life Conference on January 21. The all-day conference will be at Sacred Heart Catholic Church.
A former student recently emailed that she was disappointed that I had gotten so heavily involved with the student pro-life movement in recent years. She said she could remember a time when I had a love for defending free speech rights. Her email was somewhat unfair as I am still defending First Amendment rights (did she read my last column?). Also, I have been involved in pro-life advocacy since I became a columnist in 2002. In fact, my very first published column was on the topic of abortion.
In the event my former student is reading this expression of anti-abortion advocacy, I would like to enumerate the reasons why she - a pro-lifer herself - should have been involved in the student pro-life movement when she was in college. The following are also reasons why all pro-life students should be actively pro-life:
The Societal Diminution of all Human Life.
The pro-abortion choice movement has produced a general devaluing of human life that can only be corrected by a strong pro-life movement among students. How many of you were shocked by the acquittal of Casey Anthony? I was certainly angry but I was not shocked. She wanted to party and to date without being weighed down by the responsibility of motherhood. I believe she killed her little girl in order to live a life of convenience. The evidence clearly points toward her unmitigated guilt. But tens of millions of women have done the same thing since Roe v. Wade. No wonder the Anthony jury seemed bored throughout most of the proceedings. No wonder she walked despite the evidence. Her kind of guilt is commonplace.
The proximity of the threat.
The culture war is raging in America. There are battlefields everywhere but none as large or contentious as the university campus. This is where the immensely profitable non-profits make a lot of their money off abortion. They are marketing their services to your fellow students. Therefore, simply by virtue of where you are, you can make a greater difference if you are willing to cut against the current.
Momentum.
A May 2009 Gallup Poll found 51% of Americans calling themselves pro-life. Gallup began asking that question in 1995 and this was the first time a majority of Americans identified themselves as pro-life. Pew Research Center did a survey around the same time showing that only 46% believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That was down from 54% the previous year. Therefore, I would urge pro-lifers to become activists because they would be joining a winning team. In so doing, they could help accelerate these positive trends.
State and Individual Neutrality.
The state cannot be neutral on abortion. It either a) recognizes that the unborn are human and have a right to life or b) permits killing them. Since our government has taken the public policy position that the unborn are not afforded the same rights as toddlers - including the right to be free from dismemberment - you need to take a public policy position, too. That means becoming an activist, not being a pacifist in the midst of a war on the unborn.
Propaganda and Passivity.
Pro-choice arguments are so bad that they cannot survive scrutiny. They must be confined to soliloquy, rather than subjected to debate. For example, the "back alley abortion" argument suggests that we must make killing children safe or else adults might be killed in the process. Abortion choice advocates warn that "thousands" would be killed in back alleys if abortion were once again illegal. This is the way they justify legalizing the murder of millions. The logic is twisted and the facts are wrong. The Centers for Disease Control reported that only 39 women died from illegal abortions in 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade. Put simply, propaganda is activism. And it is only effective when repeated endlessly in the presence of the passive. So we must all be active in combatting this deadly information.
Men's Liberation.
Men tend to be more supportive of abortion than women. That is why it is more accurate to call the so-called abortion rights movement a men's liberation movement - as opposed to a woman's liberation movement. Abortion liberates men by allowing them to sleep around without fear of consequences. It frees men from fatherhood and allows them to exploit women. So we need more male activists. Next time someone says "men have never had abortions, so they should not be commenting on it" say this: "women have never played in the NFL, so they should not be sportscasters."
Underlining Causes.
People will tell you that you should never become an activist seeking to make abortion unacceptable or, heaven forbid, illegal. Instead, they say you should focus on underlying causes. Rape has underlying causes. Should we make it legal and instead try to treat its underlying causes? Come to think of it, spousal abuse has underlying causes, too. We would never elect a politician who ran on a platform of making it legal for a man to beat his spouse. But we routinely elect politicians who run on a platform of saying it should remain legal for a woman to kill her baby. As you young people would say, "that's messed up." Indeed, it is. That's why we need activists.
Reading this column, you may have noticed that all of my observations to this point have been brilliant. I'll have more brilliant observations in my next book, "Up from Humility." But the brilliant observations in this column have not been mine. In fact, each and every one of them was stolen from a new book called "Stand for Life" by John Ensor and Scott Klusendorf.
I highly recommend John and Scott's new book. You can pick it up on Amazon for less than the price of two tall skinny lattes or a single ticket to the late show. By the time you are finished reading, you’ll be ready to take your first steps as an activist fighting for the right of the unborn to take their first steps.
Stand for Life is more than just aptly titled. It's a real life saver (and I mean that literally). Of course, that's just my humble opinion
If someone had told me in 2009 that President Obama would get close to ten million fewer votes in 2012, I'd have both laughed out loud and simultaneously thought to myself, "we'll take that."
Of course now, I can't eplain why I would've been so happy.
Nonetheless the President's underwhelming yet historic win, buy a quite slim margin of victory, has caused the word "mandate" to cross the lips of left-leaning opinion makes once again showing the true delusion of those who back team Obama.
One of the specific areas that such a "mandate" is demanding adherence to across the nation is found in the discussion of an actual legal mandate listed in the Obama-care legislation.
The requirement of the Health & Human Services mandate to force employers to provide insurance coverage for birth control and abortions--without question--violates the conscience and deeply held beliefs of committed Christians and pro-life voters. The administration, assuming they have a "mandate," believe now is the time to enforce THE mandate.
Never mind that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops felt so assaulted by the requirement that they hauled the Obama administration into court. Never mind that dozens of additional faith-based institutions have joined the cause. Never mind that President Obama's most loyal base--African American church goers--violently disagree with the plank, the administration presses ahead.
There is little violence that compares to the violence of forcing an individual to take actions against his own soul.
Yet the reality of this violence, this torture, this pain--is something that the administration seems immune to understanding.
To be clear, forcing a person who has honest pro-life convictions to supply the means, money, or mechanism to have a child aborted is the equivalent of forcing a Jewish prisoner of war in World War II to place the the bodies of fellow Jews into the incinerators at Auschwitz.
There is no difference.
This striking, hardened, indifference by the President and his staff tells us a great deal about the character, temperament, and values of our newly re-elected first-servant.
Since the courts will now not overturn the Obama-care legislation, since the elected class sneers at the idea of doing away with the mandate, and since there are no other paths to legal change for this matter it becomes clear the only path left is defiance.
The government has no more right to force a person of deep religious conviction to provide the means of death to innocent children, than do they to come into one's bedroom and rape one's wife. The difference being that rape is a lesser crime than extermination.
In the principled argument of obeying the human law of established government, God is clear that we should obey the human government. The exception to this biblical principle stems from a conflict between the law of man and the law of God.
For those that believe their relationship with God is of moral priority, to violate His law, is to commit multiple transgressions against the author of their soul. It is to commit blasphemy and rebellion against the one they are pledged to obey.
Thusly, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer defied the tyranny of the National Socialists of his time, it is time for people of genuine faith to run the risk of consequence in order to demonstrate faithfulness.
Demonstrate such faithfulness to God and his principles...
Demonstrate such faithfulness on behalf of the innocent victims who would be exterminated otherwise...
The consequence of such defiance is not yet understood. If successful it might create such a constitutional crisis that the court might be forced to reexamine what it has done to force violence upon the human soul. At worst those who do defy might begin to be jailed, as they are in Canada, and other nations in which the governments have limited religious freedoms and are seeking to choke people of faith with a society of pagan secularism which is in itself a propagated religious belief system.
There is a time of great purity that awaits people of faith in the days, weeks, and next four years to come.
An Eric Holder led justice department--actively seeking to subvert justice, implement a political agenda, and give almost no thought to accountability for its own actions--may be quite eager to engage, pursue, and prosecute those who they deem political opponents. A Janet Napolitano led Department of Homeland Security may work hand in hand with Holder to track those she has already labeled as dangerous--all the while ignoring genuine national security threats. And a Barack Obama appointed and remade Supreme Court may throw out the actual rule of actual law and for the foreseeable future checks and balances may be lifted all together.
Bonhoeffer can almost be heard warning us from the grave.
Yet by his example, we must be faithful, regardless of the consequence that awaits.
So... Disobey the mandate, and defy this law.
For when it becomes necessary to follow one's conscience--especially to save the lives of those who are most vulnerable--citizens and institutions have a requirement to violate that law.
And when any law violates human dignity, and by extension God's greater moral code--"We The People" have the responsibility and moral authority to disobey it.
Can there be political bubbles like financial bubbles?
Financial bubbles, inflated by hopes and dreams, burst when reality negates any possibility that those hopes and dreams will be realized. At that point, sky high stock or bond or real estate prices come crashing down to earth.
Can the same thing happen in politics? Can a skilled politician, who has become popular with soaring rhetoric and promises, deflate when it starts becoming clear that he is not going to deliver?
Of course, I am thinking about our president.
Mitt Romney demonstrated in the first presidential debate that the considerable gap between President Obama’s rhetoric and his performance makes him a vulnerable candidate.
Yet, the president’s bubble is far from bursting.
Romney, in the debate, was aggressive but deferential toward Obama. He was deferential because, despite the poor state of the country after almost four years of the Obama administration, Barack Obama is still a popular president.
Recent polling shows his approval remains around 50 percent. At similar stages in the presidencies of the last two presidents voted out after one term, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, their popularity ratings were in the thirties.
What accounts for Barack Obama’s Teflon? How is it that, after almost four years of terrible economic results – high unemployment, sluggish growth, huge deficits and mounting national debt – that Obama’s persona is not more tarnished?
Shouldn’t today’s economic facts on the ground be sufficient to puncture the Obama bubble?
One part of the answer to this puzzle is the changing demographics of the country.
The United States today is a nation that is much less white, much less married, and less traditional than it once was. These are growing trends and each reflects in at least some large part constituencies with values supportive of Obama’s world view - activist government and moral relativism.
What was once the exception to the rule in America – not being white, not being married, not having traditional views on family, sex, and abortion – is now becoming the rule. And these constituencies are becoming sufficiently large to elect a president.
National Journal released a poll right before the debate showing Obama and Romney dead even nationwide – 47 percent each – among likely voters.
The poll shows Obama’s white support at just 38 percent.
Obama was elected in 2008 with 43 percent of the white vote. It appears that he could be re-elected with even less.
In Gallup’s polling of last week, Obama’s approval among white voters stood at 39 percent.
He gets 38 percent approval among those who attend church weekly compared to 55 percent among those who attend church seldom or never.
And his approval among married voters is 40 percent compared to 57 percent among those not married.
According to data compiled by the Tax Foundation, the large majority of those now filing tax returns in the U.S. are single. In 1960, 65 percent of all tax filers were married and 35 percent single. In 2010 it’s reversed - 61 percent of filers were single and 39 percent married.
When Barack Obama pushes for taxing the rich, he’s not just pitting those with the highest incomes against everyone else. He’s pitting married against singles. Eight of ten tax filers in the top twenty percent of earners are married. The majority of middle income and below filers are single.
It’s really a cultural divide, one you can be sure that Barack Obama is very aware of, that is keeping his bubble inflated.
The fact that Obama’s support is still this strong despite his terrible record sends a clear warning to those looking for a new birth of American freedom.
Romney and Ryan should consider taking these constituencies on directly – blacks, Hispanics, singles – explaining why America’s future hinges on shutting down the government plantation.
In just a day or so, but certainly before the end of this next week, you will be here, your mother will be exhausted from the process 40 weeks has taken on her, and I will be thrilled to give thanks for the blessing that a second healthy baby boy can mean to a father's heart. Because of that I feel it's important that I speak into your life, even from this vantage point of you not yet being here. I would not do so if I did not feel that the days you are being born into were not historic, and depending on the course our nation leads with--and the world follows--the prescience of Dickens might just hold true. These could be the best or worst of times.
Regardless of what they are, you dear one, will have your work cut out for you Therefore I feel it's my obligation, duty, opportunity, and desire to fill your mind with truth. I hope that in doing so your life is preserved, protected, prolonged, and prospered. When your older brother was born, I admonished him to be mindful of five things. I will instill in you these same foundations, but over the last two years the world has changed, and therefore I feel it's important to expand on the base of what I want you to learn, experience, and know.
Your identity can never be compromised...
Just weeks before you have come into this world, never have smart people been so confused, educated people so ignorant, and haughty people been in such need of humiliation. There has been an attempt by one major political force to remove from it's very consciousness the idea of God. How foolish they are! If God did not exist, neither would you. For it is in a miracle that only He can work that you were the joyous surprise you turned out to be. These same forces wish to cause you to question everything about yourself, your parents, your faith, even your DNA, and you anatomy. But the bottom line is this son, God created you while you were in your mother's womb, and as sure as you now have the ability to read these words, this same God intends for you to fulfill a purpose during your days. Your mother and I pledge our unending support in assisting you to find that purpose.
Understanding people will always prosper you...
Son, for far too many years of my life, I could not comprehend the value of working with people. It was silly, immature, and counterproductive. Everywhere you go in life, be it school, church, university, or career, people will always be involved. In most cases they will be the gatekeepers to things you want like jobs, money, grades, companionship, marriage, sex, and kids. People are made by God, for His purposes, and when we value them the way He does, there is this joy that comes into our lives--as well as theirs. This is also one of the huge dividing lines in the world-views that set people apart in this life. One value system esteems people, encourages them, helps them grow and become independent, challenges them in healthy ways to walk, then run. Other value systems ask people to see themselves not as individuals but as pieces of some sort of collective, incomplete on their own, and constantly dependent on draining resources of others--especially those that do not belong to them. In our home you will be rewarded for achieving success, and you will encouraged to give from your success into those who have not had the advantages you will have had. Your mother and I pledge our unending support in assisting you to find that charity.
Forgive completely, As you will be...
In the days to come little man, your brother--who's two years your senior--will likely have times when he is not the ever-dearest-angel that we thought he first might be when he was your age. He may get territorial about his stuff, and sadly, you will have a lot of things handed down to you that were once his. Please understand that your mother and I are going to keep him in check, but there may be times when he wrongs you. And let me assure you of something else--there will be many more thousand who definitely will wrong you over the course of your life. Son, learn to be long-suffering when people are unfair, but more importantly be quick to forgive when they admit their wrong doing. And I don't mean - forgive them in word, but secretly hold the grudge to grind the axe the next time. No! Forgive! Let go of the hope to insure that they face the wrath or judgment you believe them to be worthy of and allow for God to work in you, to build character, and to grow your faith in Him, and those who love you. For this is also true, there will be many times when you too will miss the mark, and in your home you will be forgiven quickly, and you will be encouraged to change course. Your mother and I pledge our unending support in assisting you to find (and give) forgiveness quickly.
Be measured by merit...
In the world you are being born into, there's a lot of psycho-babble that's more or less hogwash. Our president, congress, and much of the two political parties work regularly to assure people that mediocrity isn't a crime. But in our home--it will be. God did not create you, give you skills sets and interests, passions, desires, and abilities to watch you almost do something swell. I hope my son to demonstrate by example the meaning of a day's work, and what it means to succeed through the effort of excellent ethics. I want you to never be afraid to be the one the buck stops with, because you've been prepared, you've done the work, and you did it better than anyone else. You don't hear this from the leaders of our times, but the marketplace pays for value, and it is up to you to demonstrate--through your own toil and sweat--the value you bring to that marketplace. Your mother and I pledge to assist you in measuring your success by the ethic of your effort.
Be afraid to follow, never to lead...
Son, in the very week of your birth, our nation's highest leaders demonstrated for the world to see with their own eyes, what little to no value there is in people who "lead from behind." In short there is no value. There is danger, there is abdication of responsibility, and there is a degree of cultural and political popularity for those who do refuse to lead. Measuring statements to never be too controversial, measuring actions so as to attempt to appease everybody--rather than measuring them on the basis of right vs. wrong, this is the very definition of modern day leadership. Yet it confines those caught under such "leaders" to an outlook of dismal futures, lessened hopes, and it keeps alive the worst form of bigotry, the kind that comes with low expectations. In the end son, you and your brother will have significant expectations put to you as you are being raised. The hope in doing so is that you undergo training to become a self sufficient thinker, and ultimately someone other people turn to for answers on the biggest questions facing your generation. I don't care if you ever become President. But I want very much your thinking abilities to be so clear that all who come into contact with you recognize the gift you've been given in the area of clarity. Your mother and I pledge our unending support in helping you obliterate confusion, and pursue clear thinking.
Son it is with great sadness that I felt compelled to have to issue these encouragements to you. Yet if you adopt them I will not regret it for a moment.
The days that lie in wait for you are filled with problems that experts will argue require sophistication. In reality that's just the intellectual elites' way of saying, "they have no clue." You will be given a different gift than them, and in return Jonathan Stephen McCullough you will be required to recognize it and put it to use.
For God did not give you to a family who does not care, and is not engaged.
Rather you have been given a haven of protection, training, and wisdom that few of your generation will know. It is our greatest joy to give it. It will be our lasting joy to see it at work in your life.
For we love you with all we have baby boy, and God willing, you will know that very, very, soon!
Don is angry with me. He cannot understand why I support punishing rapists with death while simultaneously defending the rights of the unborn. He accuses me of applying double standards, promoting hypocrisy, and of being "inconsistent." But I am perfectly consistent in my beliefs. And, truth be known, so is Don.
