by Fred Lucas -
President Barack Obama says the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade is the chance to recognize the “fundamental constitutional right” to abortion and to “continue our efforts to ensure that our daughters have the same rights, freedoms, and opportunities as our sons to fulfill their dreams.”

The 1973 U.S. Supreme Court nationalized abortion law, prohibiting states from deciding on the matter. In his written statement, Obama acknowledged that abortion has been a divisive political issue.

Obama, while serving in the Illinois State Legislature and as president of the United States, has taken a hard line on abortion rights.

In his statement on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling, Obama said it reflects the broader principles of America. more »

by Bonasera –
A recent poll conducted among 1500 adults confirms what we have long suspected: even Evangelical Christians support statism. The polling group — Public Religion Research Institute — determined that social issues, like abortion, are proving to be less important to Evangelical voters when compared with economic issues like unemployment. Apparently the economy trumps infanticide even among those who have been historically pro-life.

This shouldn’t come as too great of a surprise to any readers of this site. The allure of statist control is a familiar refrain trumpeted by the mainstream media. It was only a matter of time before conservative Evangelicals should begin to believe the lies. What should come as a surprise though, is that Democrats see this as an opportunity to pull voters their way for 2012. more »

by Timothy Dalrymple -
One of the gravest dangers of the Budget Control Act passed yesterday is that it could provide Americans with a false sense of security. Washington has finally taken action. The crisis has passed. The sky is brightening, the trees are parting before us and — we’re out of the woods. Right?

Alas, but no.  Not only are we deep in the dark heart of the forest, but we’re still walking in the wrong direction.  The pace may have slowed, but the trajectory has not.  The immediate cash-flow crisis has passed, but the long-term solvency crisis remains.  We are still borrowing enormous amounts of money, still selling our children into debt slavery through our own spending insanity.  While the Budget Control Act (best summarized by Keith Hennessey) is intended to reduce the deficit (the difference between expected revenues and planned spending, or the amount we have to borrow in order to spend what we want to spend) in the years to come, it does not reduce the debt (the amount the federal government owes).  It slows — by a little — the rate at which the debt grows, but the debt is still astronomical and still swiftly growing. more »

Rev. Robert A. Sirico

It is telling that the Washington Post report on the religious Left’s Circle of Protection campaign for big government describes the effort as one that would “send chills through any politician who looks to churches and religious groups as a source of large voting blocs,” because, in fact, this is not an honest faith-inspired campaign to protect the “least of these” from Draconian government cuts, as claimed. It is a hyper-political movement that offers up the moral authority of churches and aid organizations to advance the ends of the Obama administration and its allies in Congress.

The Circle of Protection, led by Jim Wallis and his George Soros-funded Sojourners group, is advancing a false narrative based on vague threats to the “most vulnerable” if we finally take the first tentative steps to fix our grave budget and debt problems. For example, Wallis frequently cites cuts to federal food programs as portending dire consequences to “hungry and poor people.” more »

by Robert Weissberg -

The candidacies of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, Bible-affirming Christians, predictably have ignited the liberal media’s zeal for exposing their allegedly odd if not wacko religious beliefs (see here).  Support for some version of creationism, a faith in the efficacy of prayer, and actual belief in scriptural condemnation of homosexuality (among other religious views) are taken as prima facie evidence of presidential unsuitability.  To be sure, millions of Americans (assumed to be ill-educated trailer-court denizens with rotting teeth and beer guts) may share these odd inclinations, but, at least according to liberal pundits, holding them betrays a lack of intellectual sophistication plus an aversion to modern science.  Such antediluvian fundamentalism should, say the experts, have gone extinct with the Scopes Monkey Trials.

Ironically, liberal attackers are guilty of far greater unscientific dogmatism, sloppy thinking, and mind-boggling confusion but fail to notice it thanks to a manufactured respectability that deters — if not forbids — close inspection.   more »

Albert Mohler

by Albert Mohler -
The Christian church has faced no shortage of challenges in its 2,000-year history. But now it’s facing a challenge that is shaking its foundations: homosexuality.

To many onlookers, this seems strange or even tragic. Why can’t Christians just join the revolution?

And make no mistake, it is a moral revolution. As philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton University demonstrated in his recent book, “The Honor Code,” moral revolutions generally happen over a long period of time. But this is hardly the case with the shift we’ve witnessed on the question of homosexuality.

In less than a single generation, homosexuality has gone from something almost universally understood to be sinful, to something now declared to be the moral equivalent of heterosexuality—and deserving of both legal protection and public encouragement. Theo Hobson, a British theologian, has argued that this is not just the waning of a taboo. Instead, it is a moral inversion that has left those holding the old morality now accused of nothing less than “moral deficiency.” more »

by James V. Schall, S.J. -
Greed, some say, is the main reason the poor are poor. It isn’t. We rarely take a close look at envy. Because someone is rich, it does not follow that he is therefore greedy. A poor man is free to be both greedy and envious. Envy is as much a generator of extra work as want, perhaps more so.

Mandeville’s famous notion, that our vices not our virtues cause prosperity, has a point. Usable wealth must first be produced and made available. The primary causes of wealth production are brains, effort, and virtue. The world was given to us in a raw state to see what we would do with it, yes, for one another.

At first sight, the oft-repeated lament that the world’s goods need to be “redistributed” for the benefit of the poor seems logical. Usually behind this apparently innocent approach is the idea of the limitation of the world’s “goods.” If the world’s resources are “limited,” then we need to establish a system of control of human behavior, of our “desires.” more »

by William Sullivan -
The left is desperate to coerce Americans into embracing the president’s platform of increasing taxes on the wealthy to redistribute to the downtrodden, slothful, and all those between who stand to collect. So Charlie Rangel appealed to a largely Christian nation, “What would Jesus do?”

The hypocrisy here is so obvious that it need not be discussed in detail. Suffice it to say, when and where progressives draw the line on Christian influence in legislation tends to compromise any faith they claim to have. Asking this question about the current budget debate but not about, say, the morality of tax dollars serving to mutilate and siphon unborn babies from their mothers’ wombs is suspicious to say the least. If conservatives cite Christ’s teaching to protect unborn lives from a progressive agenda that indiscriminately allows for their destruction, it is panned as the archaic ravings of crackpots. Yet when Christ is referenced as a template of charity to advance the progressives’ redistributive agenda, nothing could be more pertinent to American values. more »

Gary Bauer

We have an obligation to help the poor. But nowhere does the Bible state that the power of government should be used to take one man’s money by force of law and give it to another man. Jesus’ admonition was a personal command to share, not a command for Caesar to “spread the wealth around.” …

Jim Wallis, a self-identified “Christian leader for social change,” has embarked on a crusade against Republican budget cuts he believes are “unbiblical.” But Wallis and others on the evangelical Left are on dangerous ground when they claim to know exactly which budget items God would approve and which he would cut.

Wallis has launched the “What Would Jesus Cut?” campaign to fight against Republican cuts in the 2011 and 2012 budgets—cuts to welfare programs, college grants, and international aid—and against Republicans’ proposed 2% increase in defense spending.

The campaign’s premise, as the group declared in a recent Politico ad, is that “cutting programs that help those who need them most is morally wrong.” more »

by Mark Tooley -
After any successful election for Republicans, the Religious Left immediately becomes alarmed about supposedly massive federal budget “cuts,” i.e. some reductions in budget increases, for some social welfare programs. In the Religious Left’s ultimate vision of the Kingdom of God, the federal government spends unlimited sums on the nation’s every supposed social need, regardless of result, while spending nothing on national defense, and only increasing taxes.

In 1981, responding to President Reagan’s budget “cuts,” the Religious Left endorsed a huge “Solidarity Day” protest march in Washington, D.C. to deplore the “transfer of billions of dollars from the social needs of people to the production of massive new weapons and strategic defense systems.” One United Methodist bishop explained: “For us to take out of the mouths of the hungry and the poor and the oppressed the funds that will build bombs and bullets and airplanes seems to be terribly incongruous with our understanding and the quality of life in the world in which we live.” more »

by Mark Tooley – It’s a wonderful mercy that much of the more extreme elements of radical feminist theology in the churches peaked in the 1990s and have since faded. The high tide of radical feminist theology was the 1993 ecumenical Re-Imagining Conference, endorsed by nearly all the Mainline Protestant denominations or their women’s agencies, where speakers condemned traditional Christianity as patriarchal and instead acclaimed ancient feminine deities like Astarte, Isis, and Athena. God was also commonly called “Sophia,” based on the Greek word for wisdom. There was a special altar call for lesbians, not for repentance, but for acclamation. A milk and honey ritual replaced the traditional Eucharist. more »

10/24/2010 – Robert Huff -
We live in an age of scientific hegemony (if I may borrow a term from the Marxists and feminists), where access to intellectual power and influence is granted to those who demonstrate their loyalty to the approved theories of the ruling elite. Scientists who refuse to bow at the altar of uniformity are labeled heretics and cast out of the intelligentsia, condemned to lives of unfunded grant proposals, tenure denials, and ruined reputations. more »

10/10/2010 – Peter Heck -
In light of the fact that an increasing number of Americans are questioning his faith, President Obama has apparently been told by his advisors to ratchet up the Jesus talk. So at a staged event in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Obama complied by responding to a question about why he became a Christian.

“I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead,” he explained, adding that he was moved by the thought of “being my brothers’ and sisters’ keeper.”

One has to wonder whether such an answer was really what his advisors wanted. After all, who would ever suggest that the president use the Biblical phrase “being my brothers’ keeper,” when his actual half-brother (blood-related) resides in a shack in Kenya? more »

7/6/2010 – Mark Tooley -

Predictably, Jim Wallis’s Religious Left Sojourners blog dishonored Independence Day by featuring an op-ed headlined “Why Christianity and July 4th are Incompatible.”

In it, a young pacifist pastor explained why Christians can’t “celebrate” having “killed thousands upon thousands of people because they [the British] were taxing us without giving us representation in parliament.” more »

6/1/2010 – Mark D. Tooley -
The 1.1 million-member United Church of Christ (UCC) is trying to raise $50,000 for a media campaign to blast Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law. Church prelates hope the ad will appear on May 29, when reputedly 500,000 will march in Phoenix against the law.

As America’s most left-wing Christian denomination, the fast declining UCC’s zeal for political activism perhaps compensates for its lack of evangelism. Having lost about half its members in recent decades, and several hundred congregations in recent years, the 1.1 million member denomination, at least as expressed by its elites, unapologetically plunges ahead with the latest causes du jour. more »