Orthodox Editors

Planned Parenthood Is About Abortion

Planned Parenthood Abortion Evil by Joseph Lawler –

Whether or not Planned Parenthood survives the negotiations to prevent a government shutdown, Republicans will have scored a victory if the episode draws more attention to what it is the organization actually does.

Planned Parenthood has done a great job of using the media to cultivate an image of a squeaky-clean organization that provides such unobjectionable-sounding itmes as reproductive health services and family-planning aids in order to prevent unwanted pregnancies and reduce the need for abortion. Despite the fact that the wider media consistently describes them as such, that depiction is not accurate. It can’t be overlooked that Planned Parenthood performs abortions on a massive scale: 332,278 abortions in 2009, more than one-quarter of all abortions nationwide. [Read more…]

Why God Isn’t Doing Well These Days

Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager
by Dennis Prager –

God is not doing very well these days. Here are four reasons:

The first is that increasingly large numbers of men and women attend university, and Western universities have become essentially secular (and leftist) seminaries. Just as the agenda of traditional Christian and Jewish seminaries is to produce religious Christians and religious Jews, the agenda of Western universities is to produce (left-wing) secularists. The difference is that Christian and Jewish seminaries are honest about their agenda, while the universities still claim they have neither secularist nor political agenda.

That is why the more university education a person receives, the more he is likely to hold secular and left-wing views. The secular left argues that this correlation is due to the fact that a college graduate knows more and thinks more clearly and therefore gravitates leftward and toward secularism. But if you believe that the average college graduate is a clear and knowledgeable thinker as a result of his or her time at university, I have more than one bridge to sell you. [Read more…]

What We Can’t Not Know – Universal Moral Truths

What We Can't Not Know by Chuck Colson –
Want to clear the room at a party? Just say something like, “There is such a thing as right and wrong, and everybody knows it.”

The great commandment in this postmodern, relativistic world of ours is this: “Don’t impose your morality on me.”

Obviously, it didn’t used to be this way. Once, if you mentioned basic moral rules like the Ten Commandments, everyone would agree that they were right. Not only were they right for all, but they were also known to all. Everyone knew that honoring parents and telling the truth is right for everyone. And everyone knew that deliberately taking innocent human life, sleeping with your neighbor’s spouse, and mocking God is wrong for everyone. Today all of that has changed.

Or has it? According to University of Texas Professor J. Budziszewski, it really hasn’t — at least not in the way you might think. [Read more…]

Shhhh: Judeo-Christian Culture Is Actually…Superior

Judeo Christian Morality Bible by Stuart Schwartz –
Shhh. I am about to say is something so radical that it will jangle every politically correct nerve in your body. And yet…it is true. The founding and traditional culture of the United States, its Judeo-Christian heritage and boots-on-the-ground decency is superior to all other cultures this world has produced. And it certainly beats the radical worldview (part Marxist, part Islamic, and all thug) that our political and media elites — led by the president of the United States — are imposing upon us.

Scream if you must — but then think. Think about what former Godfathers Pizza CEO Herman Cain — Christian and African-American — and so many others recognize as “the greatest country in the world.” Outside of the cocoons of condescension wrapping the university and urban strongholds of our trendy elites, this is recognized not as jingoism but truth. [Read more…]

GOP: Still Clueless After All These Years

Communism in Americaby Tim Daughtry –
One of the most brilliant strokes of political genius ever was the idea of capturing a nation’s cultural institutions as a means of capturing political power. Unfortunately, it was the Marxist intellectuals of the early 1900s who hit upon the idea. The real path to revolution, they realized, was not control of the means of production, but control of the topic of discussion.

Marxist theorists saw schools, labor unions, news media, seminaries and even the family as fronts in the war against free societies. The power of these institutions lay in the fact that they determine the “narrative” of the political debate. They determine the buzz phrases, which topics get discussed and which ones ignored, who are the “good guys,” and who are the “bad guys.”

So when Marxists come to power, as they did in 2008, the narrative that rings from the institutions is “hope, change and reform.” When the mainstream comes to power, as we did in 2010, the narrative becomes “hate, extremism and shutting down the government.” [Read more…]

We’ve Become a Nation of Takers, Not Makers

America in Trouble Liberty Cryingby Stephen Moore –
If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.

It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?[Read more…]

To Seek God and to Let Oneself Be Found by Him

Faith and Reason Define Christianity by Deacon Keith Fournier –
Naturally, the humility of reason is always needed, in order to accept it: man’s humility, which responds to God’s humility

Christians of the nascent Church did not regard their missionary proclamation as propaganda, but as an inner necessity, consequent upon the nature of their faith: the God in whom they believed was the God of all people, the one, true God, who had revealed himself in the history of Israel and ultimately in his Son, thereby supplying the answer for which all people, in their innermost hearts, are waiting. […]

Yesterday, I covered the launch of Pope benedict XVI’s outreach called “The Court of the Gentiles” intended to encourage a dialogue with non-believers. The effort debuted in Paris over the weekend. It already has appointments in Tirana, Albania, Stockholm, Sweden, numerous locations in the United Sates, Canada and Asia. This effort is the inspiration of Pope Benedict XVI, the Missionary Pope, and is being led by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi who heads the Vatican’s culture office. [Read more…]

A Liberal by Any Other Name

by Christian D. Malesic –
Those on the left side of the political spectrum have always wrestled with labels, wearing them proudly until they become dirty words and then throwing them quickly to the curb. Nonetheless, in order to communicate with one another, our language needs a term that describes the political views of those who oppose the conservatives of the Right.

Historically speaking, the left were ‘progressives’ then ‘liberals’; now they want to be ‘progressives’ again. Around the start of the 20th century (circa 1900), the term progressive came into popularity and common use. It was used proudly by many on the left to describe their political ideology until sometime in the 1940s when it began to fade away. Essentially, the progressives themselves showed the American public what it was that a progressive believed through President Woodrow Wilson’s anti-Capitalism and pro-Socialism stances, onto which President Franklin D. Roosevelt placed an exclamation point with his New Deal. [Read more…]

Unfit to Foster, Christianity an ‘Infection?’

Owen and Eunice Johns
Owen and Eunice Johns
by Chuck Colson –
For 15 years, Owen and Eunice Johns served as foster parents to British children. Social workers praised them as “kind and hospitable people” who “respond sensitively to” children.

But London’s High Court has just ruled that the Johnses are unfit to foster.

The reason: The Johnses are devout Christians, and their views about homosexuality may harm the children in their care. This opinion echoes that Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, which, according to the Daily Mail, claimed foster children risked becoming “infected” by the Johnses’ Christian beliefs.

The case came about when the Johnses re-applied to the Derby City Council to foster children after taking a break. But instead of welcoming them back with open arms, social workers expressed concern that the couple’s beliefs were in violation of the new Equality Act Regulations, which protect the rights of homosexuals. [Read more…]

Exchanging the Truth of God for a Lie: Transgender Activists, Cultural Revolution

Christian Marriage Sacrament by Deacon Keith Fournier –
The Gender Identity Movement demands the recognition of a ‘right’ to choose one’s gender and laws which accommodate, fund, and enforce such a ‘right’

The “Gender Identity Movement” is dangerous. It is a part of a broader Cultural Revolution which substitutes an entirely different view of the dignity of the human person, human freedom, human flourishing, human sexuality, marriage and the family and the moral basis of a free society than that which formed Western Civilization. […]

In the first chapter of the Apostle Paul’s Letter to the Christians of Rome he writes of a progressive moral corruption which can occur to people who “while claiming to be wise become fools.” St. Paul pulls no punches saying of such people that they “exchanged the truth of God for a lie.” He also addresses the consequences of their immoral choices and actions.( Romans 1) In this strongly worded admonition, the Apostle is quite clear in affirming the early Church’s rejection of homosexual practices in a list of debased behaviors which grow out of moral corruption.

Anyone who maintains that there is no reference to the rejection of homosexual practices in the Bible has to remove this entire chapter and many other biblical references. They must also get rid of early Church documents which uniformly condemn homosexual practices. [Read more…]