I, like many Christians, watched in disbelief this past September at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina as the delegates not only voted once, but three times, to deny the reinstatement of God into their platform.
Just minutes later, Mark Alen Siegel, Chairman of the Palm Beach Democratic Party and nine time State Senator from NY made the hideous statement that, “ The worst possible allies for the Jewish state are the fundamentalist Christians who want Jews to die and convert so they can bring on the second coming of their Lord.”
Almost immediately, thanks to the power of online media and talk radio, Siegel was asked to turn in his resignation. He also was removed from the campaign program, forty-eight hours later that was put on for Obama’s visit to West Palm Beach Florida. Problem solved with the hope that this was just a solo opinion out of the almost one million residents of Palm Beach County.
However, recently with the exposure of Dr. Deandre Poole, a Professor at Florida Atlantic University, who insisted his students write and stomp on the name of Jesus as a part of a class assignment, one might wonder if there is a pattern of anti-Christian sentiment in Southern Florida? Even more interesting is the fact that Dr. Poole currently serves as the Vice Chairman of the Palm Beach Democratic Party. Yes, the same party that just seven months ago had Mark Allen Siegel as their Chairman.
This could just simply be a coincidence; however, I must question the principles of an organization that puts into leadership people with such radical, anti-Christian attitudes -- especially in light of the national press attention on the Palm Beach Democratic Party following the DNC. Why would they continue to knowingly keep in power individuals with such extreme beliefs? Could it be because the majority of their membership might also embrace that same ideology?
On the flipside, I believe Christians in America are looking for opportunities every day to show our support and stand up for our faith.
How can we forget August 1, 2012 when thousands of people across the country stood in line for hours to support Chick-fil-A when it came under fire for its views on marriage? Or despite Hollywood constantly trying to persuade us that traditional family values have morphed into a Sodom and Gomorrah lifestyle, American viewers have overwhelmingly shown their support for shows like the History Channel’s “The Bible” series as well as A&E’s Duck Dynasty, which ends every episode with a prayer.
Christians today have not become more timid as some might like to portray us. Rather, it seems those on the other side have become more bold in trying to desecrate our faith. They have used the vehicle of political correctness to make Christianity look like the religion of hate and used bullying techniques to try and scare away any future followers. They have attacked our religious symbols and celebrations, made children embarrassed to pray in school to Jesus, and removed the Ten Commandments from the hallways of our local governments.
Mathew 27:46 “My God, my God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?’ cried Jesus in his last few moments before he died on the cross at Calvary. Today, almost 2000 years later, considering the pattern of anti- Christian actions, unfortunately not isolated to those Democrat residents of Palm Beach County and the Democratic voters at the DNC, many Christians wonder if there is a line where God will ever forsake us?
What's the most important thing you can have? Is it money? Is it love? Is it happiness? Or is it something else? Best-selling author and nationally syndicated radio host Dennis Prager has the answer. It may change the way you look at and, ultimately, lead your life.
One significant development in the recent election was votes in four states approving same sex marriage initiatives. Until now, all previous state referenda to approve same sex marriage – 32 of them - failed.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page – a place where conservatives usually turn for intellectual capital – saw this as cause for celebration.
According to the Journal, marriage definition should come from voters, not from court orders. Americans, they argue, have “shown themselves more than capable of changing their views on gay marriage the democratic way.”
In other words, our definition of marriage should follow process, not principle. Let voters decide.
“As views on gay marriage change, and a growing number of Americans support it, politics will follow. This is how it’s supposed to work.”
I’d guess if I asked the Wall Street Journal editors if the American constitution should be viewed as a “living document” – if our understanding of its words and what they mean should be open to change to reflect attitudes of the moment – they would say “no.”
Liberals think the constitution should be re-engineered every few years like an iPad.
So it is not surprising when liberals, for whom tradition is meaningless, trash once sacred institutions in favor of impulses of the moment.
But it does surprise me when those whose politics are supposedly right-of-center, who view America’s founding documents as sacrosanct and give the highest priority to preserving their integrity, are cavalier regarding the integrity of an institution thousands of years older than our constitution.
But it’s a point of view not uncommon.
In the 1850’s, Stephen Douglas proposed solving the dilemma of whether slavery should be permitted in new states by suggesting that they should just vote. What could be more American than submitting the question of slavery to the democratic process of each state?
To this Abraham Lincoln observed: “God did not place good and evil before man telling him to make his choice. On the contrary, He did tell him there was one tree, of the fruit of which he should not eat, upon pain of certain death….I should scarcely wish so strong a prohibition against slavery in Nebraska.”
Lincoln’s rejoinder to the idea of “popular sovereignty” – that states should vote to determine if slavery would be legal – was that there are core truths – truths that define right and wrong, good and evil - that precede the democratic process.
To reject this premise is to buy into moral chaos. Which is what we are approaching today.
The claim that somehow it is a sign of a healthy, free society that by way of the vote we can re-write our language, our dictionary, our oldest, time-tested traditions is a sign of how lost we are.
Same sex marriage advocates argue that their efforts will save the embattled institution of marriage. But this takes a symptom of the disease and calls it a cure.
As American society has become more self-centered and materialistic, family and marriage have been imploding.
According to the Pew Research Center, in 1960 72 percent of American adults were married. This dropped to 51% in 2011.
Marriage and family is the pillar of any healthy society. It is the institution through which children are born and raised and through which time-tested truths and values are transmitted from one generation to the next.
To deal with the crisis of the collapse of family and marriage by redefining what they are is the sign of a society losing its way.
Fortunately, America is still a free country. Individuals can make their own choices about how they choose to live.
But taking personal choices to deviate from our social standards of right and wrong, true and false, and decide to change those truths and standards, so that nothing is any longer considered deviant, is a bridge to nowhere
Here’s an excerpt from a letter I received the other day from a college professor:
“….throughout this election I discussed with students the differences between ideologies. The majority of them are on federal financial aid. They are fine with more taxes as long as they will be taken care of. It is disturbing to hear that they are willing to spend their own money on tattoos and cell phones but cannot buy the book for class until the financial aid comes in.”
For those who see social conservatism as an annoyance and argue that Republicans must purge this agenda from their party in order to survive, I say “think again.”
If Republicans want revival, we need honest focus on what’s really wrong in America and what must be done to assure that a great nation will be standing for our grandchildren and great grandchildren.
This kind of thinking is different from polls and focus groups and clever schemes to manage media and voter turnout.
Leadership is about identifying the truth, believing it, and telling it in a way that people can grasp. Then they will respond and follow.
The professor’s letter provides a snapshot, a hint, of what America’s most basic problem is today. It’s a problem of character and values.
Having lectured on over 180 college campuses over the last 20 years, I have seen exactly what the professor is talking about.
Of course government is too big. But how did it get this way? Americans vote every two years. They voted every two years during the whole period over which government grew to its current unwieldy size.
With the majority of the country now on one kind of government program or another, does anybody really think we can change this without talking about the human attitudes and values that produced it?
Democrats have a much easier problem than Republicans. They are not trying to change America. The trends and attitudes that got the whole country on welfare, that produced the moral relativism that is destroying our families and character, is the platform of the Democratic Party.
Democrat politicians just have one job. Deny the patient is sick.
Republicans, if they are going to be a real opposition party, have a much tougher job.
With all the talk about this last election being driven by demographics and turnout, the most basic point is the party and its candidate did not step up as a serious, principled opposition party.
We can’t save Medicare and Social Security. They are bankrupt. Did we hear this from the Republican candidate? We heard wishy washy words about reforming these systems so we can save them.
Did we hear anything about how our public schools - controlled by unions whose agenda is growing their benefits and promoting moral relativism among our youth- are destroying our children and our future? No.
When Ronald Reagan was first elected in November 1980, 18 percent of our babies were born to unwed mothers. Today 42 percent are. Anyone who thinks this is not of crisis of the first order can just as easily vote for a Democrat as a Republican.
Americans just re-elected a president who opposed the Supreme Court decision banning partial birth abortion. The leader of our nation thinks it should be legal in America to kill a live, fully formed infant. What does this say about America today and our future?
There may be Republicans who think that we can ignore the crisis in character and values that underlies our fiscal crisis. There may be Republicans that think if we have a better tax system it doesn’t matter if we have a country of single mothers, sexually ambiguous and confused men, and abortion and euthanasia on demand.
But ignoring these things would mean not just the end of the Republican Party. But the end of our country.
Somehow we’ve come to accept, regarding government policy, that there are separate “economic” issues and “social” issues. The former being issues having to do with our pocketbook and the latter being issues touching religious values and behavior.
But this is a mistake. The economy is also a social “values” issue.
It’s about the extent to which we respect private property and it’s protected from politicians.
Respect for private property is disdained in socialist countries. Respecting the sanctity of private property reflects our values as much as does our respect for the sanctity of life and marriage.
The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees protection from being “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of the law.”
The Ten Commandments demand respect for marriage (honor your parents) and for life and property (don’t kill, don’t steal).
Consider the Obamacare mandate, which went into effect August 1, requiring employers to provide “free” contraceptives, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs to employees as part of their health care plan.
The uproar about this has been about its violation of religious liberty – forcing employers to provide these services regardless of their religious convictions.
But this wouldn’t be possible without politicians seizing private resources of citizens to pay for this mandate.
Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University activist who gained notoriety when she was verbally assaulted by Rush Limbaugh after she testified in favor of the contraceptive mandate, still promotes the cause.
In a recent Huffington Post column, she touts Obamacare as a victory for women’s “health care rights” and the fact that contraceptives are now available “at no cost.”
At no cost? Will contraceptives drop from heaven like manna?
In this case, women's "health care rights" is a claimed right for women to have taxpayers foot the bill for their birth control - to get others to pay for their contraceptives and abortion-inducing pills.
The "right" to transfer to others the costs of personal decisions regarding sex trumps taxpayers right to keep government out of their private property.
When blacks fought for civil rights in the 1960’s, the rights they fought for were equal treatment under the law. Protection of their life, liberty, and property.
It had nothing to do with claiming any so-called right to violate the private property of some and force them to pay for another’s lifestyle choices.
The costs of Obamacare, including paying for Sandra Fluke’s contraceptives, come out of our hide in the higher prices we’ll pay for products, as companies pass on their higher health care costs to consumers. And as wages stagnate, as employers take bigger chunks of paychecks to cover health insurance costs.
The CEO of Papa John’s Pizza recently said that Obamacare will add 11 to 14 cents in cost to each pizza delivered.
University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales notes in his new book “A Capitalism for the People”, “If workers feel poorer, it is because rising health insurance premiums have been swallowing up most of their real wage increases of recent years.” Premiums for family coverage, per Zingales, rose 50 percent from 2003 to 2010.
According to economist Art Laffer, government stimulus spending over the last five years totaled $4 trillion. That’s almost $13,000 for every American man, woman, and child. Our money, spent by politicians, according to Laffer, on “banks and companies that fail, solar energy companies that can’t make it on their own, unemployment benefits, and the like.”
How can we possibly have a functioning economy when politicians can randomly steal from citizens? When, basically, we have legalized theft.
Our economic crisis is also a crisis in values.
At the root of our floundering economy is a loss of respect for the sanctity of private property that goes hand in hand with the loss of respect for the sanctity of life and marriage.
I, like many Christians, watched in disbelief this past September at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina as the delegates not only voted once, but three times, to deny the reinstatement of God into their platform. 
