Culture war

Defending Marriage and Family is Defending the Common Good

June 14, 2012June 16, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

by Deacon Keith Fournier –
True marriage is the preeminent and the most fundamental of all human social institutions. It is a relationship defined by nature itself and protected by the natural law that binds all men and women. It finds its foundation in the order of creation. Civil institutions do not create marriage nor can they create a “right” to marry for those who are incapable of marriage. …

It seems that almost weekly there is another assault on true marriage. The unrelenting efforts of an activist wing of the homosexual community have nearly succeeded in reframing the issues of the debate. They aim to enforce a Cultural Revolution. They have been joined by eager collaborators in the Judiciary and elected officials who believe they are some kind of new “liberators”. [Read more…]

The Bishops are Being Played Like Cheap Fiddles

June 3, 2012October 31, 2017 by Orthodox Editors

by Ann Barnhardt –
I do not understand how it is that this isn’t glaringly, beat-you-over-the-head obvious, but whatever. I’ll explain it. Listen up. Especially if you have a hat shaped like the blade of a posthole digger in your wardrobe, and people actually call you “Excellency.”

Withdrawing health insurance (like Franciscan University at Steubenville, Ohio), shutting down schools, closing adoption agencies, soup kitchens or anything else in “protest” of ObamaCare and the HHS “mandates” is EXACTLY, PRECISELY, TOTALLY and COMPLETELY what the Obama regime wants.

Further, the reason why the “press” has been given the order to keep all of this quiet and to not report in any way on the lawsuits filed by the dozens of various Catholic organizations this week against the Obama regime – the largest religious legal action ever taken against the U.S. government by a long shot – is obvious.

The Obama regime is sitting back and watching all of you cowardly fools fold your own tents. [Read more…]

Same-Sex Marriage: How Did We Get Here? And Where Are We Going?

May 15, 2012May 18, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

by Archpriest Lev Semenov –
President Barack Obama recently affirmed his personal support for the legalization of same-sex marriage. For a perspective from Russia on this momentous development, we offer the following commentary by Archpriest Lev Semenov, Dean of the Faculty of Further Education at St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University and cleric of the Church of St. Nicholas in Kuznetskaya Sloboda, both in Moscow.

The political heavyweight of the Western world has taken a step towards the abyss. If we are to believe the news report broadcast on the radio, and later confirmed in the press, President Barack Obama has made his first public statement in support of the legalization of same-sex marriages.

One can only sympathize with the citizens of this country who hold the Christian faith, just imagining how they must have felt when they heard this statement from their head of state. [Read more…]

England: It was Fun While It Lasted

April 28, 2012May 3, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

by Kyle Smith –
England and the rest of the UK are increasingly becoming mirrors of the capital. London is splitting into a land of surly immigrants and the governing-media-celebrity class of the well-shod who insulate themselves from everyone else and thus don’t care what is going on.

The working and middle class have been left to their own devices as they contend with absurd levels of taxation, decaying schools, horrific crime, and cultural devaluation. Try as Britain might to make 2012 about the queen and Lord Sebastian Coe (its chief Olympics cheerleader and gold medalist runner), its more relevant faces are Liam Stacey and Rhea Page. [Read more…]

Time to Stop Being Intimidated by the Left

April 16, 2012April 18, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

by Steve McCann –
Over the past twenty years, the American left has been largely successful in intimidating much of the conservative movement and creating the impression that leftists are much smarter and thus able to stay one step ahead. Things have evolved to the point where every utterance or action by the current titular leader of the left, Barack Obama, is analyzed and dissected by many conservatives as if they were part and parcel of some grand strategy.

In fact, those on the left, including Barack Obama, are not as intelligent as they perceive themselves to be (and often are perceived to be by others), and oftentimes their actions and words are not part of a master plan, but rather symptomatic of either their personal failings or being mind-numbed robots promoting the left-wing agenda. [Read more…]

Why Don’t “Progressives” Debate Conservatives?

April 4, 2012April 6, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

by Dennis Prager –
Apparently, many liberals were disappointed in the administration’s performance before the Supreme Court. They felt that the government’s lawyer, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, did not respond effectively to the challenges of some of the conservative justices.

The editor of Commentary, John Podhoretz, offered an explanation on his magazine’s blog. “American liberals,” he wrote, “know their own language, but they don’t know the language of their ideological and partisan opposite numbers. … Conservatives speak liberal, but for liberals in the United States, conservatism might as well be Esperanto.”

I have argued this point for many years. In my book to be published later this month (“Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph”), I argue that the left is a victim of its own brainwash. How could they not be? All they hear, see and read from childhood on, from elementary school through graduate school, on TV and in the movies, are leftist ideas. [Read more…]

Freedom vs. the Secular Seminary

March 14, 2012March 15, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

by Christopher Chantrill –
Little did I know, when contrasting conservative freedom and liberal liberation, that a poster-girl for liberation was presenting herself at the Altar of the Victim, the remarkable Sandra Fluke, the toast of our Democratic friends. For Ms. Fluke’s belief system suggests to her that she cannot have access to her sexuality unless a big institution provides her contraception. Moreover, since she is a law student with a degree in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Cornell, she is evidently well into a professional career in liberation activism.

Conservatives scratch our heads at the activist university and its characteristic products like Ms. Fluke. But we are fools. The university has seldom been an institution of higher learning devoted to science and disinterested scholarship. More often it has been a seminary. When young Fred Vincy, son of a Middlemarch merchant, went off to the University of Cambridge in around 1830, it was to study to be a priest in the state Church of England. [Read more…]

How to Win the Marriage Debate

March 13, 2012March 15, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

by Selwyn Duke –
The big news on the culture-war front is a federal court’s striking down of Proposition 8, California’s constitutional amendment protecting marriage. In a two-to-one ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit wrote, “The people may not employ the initiative power to single out a disfavored group for unequal treatment and strip them, without a legitimate justification, of a right as important as the right to marry.”

Now, I’m not sure why the judges mention a “disfavored group,” as if singling out a “favored” one for unequal treatment would be okay. As far as I know, the 14^th Amendment, on which the court based its ruling, doesn’t offer equal protection to only those the current fashions deem “disfavored.” Thus, I think this is an example of emotionalism influencing a ruling and its language, sort of as if a judge sentenced a defendant and, adding an adjective, announced him as “stupid” Mr. Smith. Calling a group “disfavored” is similarly a subjective judgment. This is not the only thing the judges were subjective about, however. [Read more…]

Olympia Snowe’s Pro-Abortion Voting Record

March 4, 2012March 5, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

Olympia Snowe Pro-Abortion Abortion Advocate — Olympia Snowe (Republican)

The consistent pro-abortion voting record of Republican Senator Olympia Snowe (US Senator from Maine, 17 years in office) with respect to the rights of the unborn, represents a radical departure from the Orthodox Christian Church moral teaching on the Sanctity of Life in the womb. Her sustained abandonment of these critical Christian principles and her wholesale disregard for the safety and well-being of the unborn is shameful. Listed below is a brief overview of Senator Olympia Snowe’s votes on supporting multiple pro-abortion and pro partial-birth abortion Bills while in office.

2008 – Voted NO on defining unborn child as eligible for SCHIP.
Congressional Summary: To require that legislation to reauthorize SCHIP include provisions codifying the unborn child regulation. Amends the definition of the term “targeted low-income child” to provide that such term includes the period from conception to birth, for eligibility for child health assistance. [ Reference: Bill S.Amdt.4233 to S.Con.Res.70 ; vote number 08-S081 on Mar 14, 2008 ]

2008 – Voted NO on prohibiting minors crossing state lines for abortion.
Congressional Summary: To increase funding for the vigorous enforcement of a prohibition against taking minors across State lines in circumvention of laws requiring the involvement of parents in abortion decisions consistent with the Child Custody Protection Act. [Read more…]

What Kids Now Learn in College

March 2, 2012March 5, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

by Dennis Prager –
Save your money. Here’s a list of the lessons they’ll be taught.

As high school seniors throughout America will be receiving acceptance letters to colleges within the next month, it would be nice for parents to meditate on what they are getting for the $20–$50,000 they will pay each year.

The United States is no better than any other country, and in many areas worse than many. On the world stage, America is an imperialist country, and domestically it mistreats its minorities and neglects its poor, while discriminating against non-whites.

There is no better and no worse in literature and the arts. The reason universities in the past taught Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Bach rather than, let us say, Guatemalan poets, Sri Lankan musicians, and Native American storytellers was “Eurocentrism.”

God is at best a non-issue, and at worst, a foolish and dangerous belief.

Christianity is largely a history of inquisitions, crusades, oppression, and anti-intellectualism. Islam, on the other hand, is “a religion of peace.” [Read more…]