Leftism

Leftist Policies Trap the Poor in Cycle of Poverty – The Mindset of the Left

Welfare state: Immoral and irredeemable by Thomas Sowell –
The political left has long claimed the role of protector of “the poor.” It is one of their central moral claims to political power. But how valid is this claim?

Leaders of the left in many countries have promoted policies that enable the poor to be more comfortable in their poverty. But that raises a fundamental question: Just who are “the poor”?

If you use a bureaucratic definition of poverty as including all individuals or families below some arbitrary income level set by the government, then it is easy to get the kinds of statistics about “the poor” that are thrown around in the media and in politics. But do those statistics have much relationship to reality? [Read more…]

For Democrats, Abortion is Their Religion

Democrats Pro Abortionby Fr. Ben Johnson –
Why would the radical Left increasingly use such religious language to defend the indefensible, the gruesome murder of the unborn?

Because abortion is their religion.

Its promoters cling to it more closely than any other political principle. They consecrate it as “sacred” and brand any attempt to constrain it as “an abomination,” a blasphemy against their idolatrous creed. Any attempt to reason about it is met with emotion-laden non-sequiturs and fulminating excommunications. How else can one even conceive of a book like The Sacrament of Abortion?

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The rhetoric is getting weird out there.

As the House of Representatives considered passing a ban on abortions beyond the 20th week of pregnancy, Congresswoman Gwen Moore of Wisconsin filled the chamber with the rhetoric of a fundamentalist preacher. Reacting with righteous fury, the representative from the Milwaukee shouted, “This bill is an abomination!” [Read more…]

Christ Was Not a Communist

Jesus Christ Was Not a Communistby Bill Flax –
Christians desire to live virtuously with beliefs grounded in love, truth and justice. However, for many churches, justice has been perverted from its biblical meaning — conformity to God’s statutes — into a quest for egalitarianism. Truth — consistency to the character and will of God — has lost its clarity. Love has been reduced into a mere emotion. Many mainline denominations afford more certainty to atheists in academia and media than Scripture.

Many Christians abandoned Scripture, embarrassed by its teachings anywhere they differ from what passes for progressive, nuanced or sophisticated thought. Paul warned against being deceived by the world’s philosophies (Colossians 2:8), but many mainline churches were overrun by the same leftist ideologies that overran every other facet of America’s intellectual current. Babel rises anew.

Salsman perceives this but mistakes its foundations. The religious left and, more frequently, irreligious opportunists transform Christ’s teachings from the spiritual to the political/economic. They even interpret the gospel through the decidedly un-Christian lens of humanistic socialism. [Read more…]

The Left, Bert and Ernie, and Lost Innocence

The Left, Bert and Ernie, and Lost Innocence by Dennis Prager –
Premature sexualization of kids is only the latest fallout from left-wing social-justice crusades.

If a Martian were to observe the human condition, he would have to conclude that the Left has an agenda to deprive children of their innocence. The Martian would have no other explanation for the premature sexualizing of children that the Left has engaged in for decades, and which seems to increase almost weekly.

The most recent example is the cover of the current issue of The New Yorker, which depicts the Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie. They are seated on a couch snuggling, and Bert’s head rests on Ernie’s shoulder as the two watch television. The TV features a picture of the U.S. Supreme Court.

To their credit, the creators of Sesame Street and of Bert and Ernie have stated that the two characters are not only never depicted as having anything other than platonic interest in each other; they are also never depicted as having any interest in females. As indeed they should be; they were characters for children to enjoy. [Read more…]

Evil, A Hard Concept for the Left to Accept – The Mindset of the Left

Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell
by Thomas Sowell –
When teenage thugs are called “troubled youth” by people on the political left, that tells us more about the mindset of the left than about these young hoodlums.

Seldom is there a speck of evidence that the thugs are troubled, and often there is ample evidence that they are in fact enjoying themselves, as they create trouble and dangers for others.

Why then the built-in excuse, when juvenile hoodlums are called “troubled youth” and mass murderers are just assumed to be “insane”?

At least as far back as the 18th century, the left has struggled to avoid facing the plain fact of evil — that some people simply choose to do things that they know to be wrong when they do them. Every kind of excuse, from poverty to an unhappy childhood, is used by the left to explain and excuse evil. [Read more…]

Children Need Our Marriage Tradition

Children Need Traditional Marriageby John M. Smoot –
In the United States, we were fortunate to inherit a marriage tradition of monogamy with a strong stigma against divorce. Did it work for everyone? No. Did it work for our society as a whole? Yes. Was it beneficial for most children? Yes.

Then the sexual revolution happened. As Yale Professor George Chauncey writes in his article “Gay at Yale: How Things Changed”:

All around them, lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men saw their heterosexual friends decisively rejecting the moral codes of their parents’ generation, which had limited sex to marriage, and forging a new moral code that linked sex to love, pleasure, freedom, self-expression, and common consent. Heterosexuals, in other words, were becoming more like homosexuals, in ways that ultimately would make it harder for them to believe gay people were outsiders from a dangerous, immoral underworld. [Read more…]

Queering Education: It’s Worse Than You Think

Queering Education Homosexual Indoctrination Propagandaby Robert R. Reilly –
The logic works like this: If homosexual acts are moral, as so many now insist, then they should be normative. If they are normative, they should be taught in our schools as a standard. If they are a standard, they should be enforced. And so it has come, and is coming, to be. Education is an essential part of the drive to universalize the rationalization for homosexual behavior; so it must become a mandatory part of the curriculum.

The infiltration of higher education by LGBT studies is well known. However, less attention seems to have been paid to the effort to spread LGBT propaganda in elementary schools and high schools. Because of the young ages of students K through 12, the introduction of pro-homosexual materials has required a special sensitivity from those who are trying to get away with it. They must avoid the explicit nature of the LGBT courses offered at the college level and disguise the effort in terms of something other than what it really is. Therefore, they use a stealth approach under the cover of issues such as school safety, diversity, and bullying. [Read more…]

Frank Schaeffer is a ‘Christian Atheist’

Frank Schaeffer Christian Atheist Leftist Progressive Delusionalby Kristin Rudolph –
Usually Frank Schaeffer’s talks follow a predictable pattern in which he describes how he followed in the footsteps of his prominent evangelical father, Francis Schaeffer, became disillusioned with the “Religious Right,” and now learns about God mostly through his relationship with his grandchildren. Recently, however, Schaeffer candidly discussed his personal theological views at Revolution NYC, an emergent congregation in Brooklyn, NY.

Over the past couple decades, Schaeffer has distanced himself from his family’s evangelicalism, and describes himself as Eastern Orthodox. But during his talk, Schaeffer told Jay Bakker, pastor of Revolution NYC and son of former televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker: “I describe myself as a Christian atheist.”[Read more…]

Opposing ‘God Bless America’

Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager
by Dennis Prager –
A Christian minister preaches the religion of leftism.

If you were a Christian minister who was given the opportunity to write an op-ed piece for the Washington Post, what subject would you choose? War and peace? The decline in faith among America’s young people? The increasingly empty pews in mainstream Protestant churches? The ethical decline in society? Or any of myriad other morally and religiously troubling issues?

Well, not if you were a Methodist minister named James P. Marsh Jr.

If you want to know how far much of mainline Christianity has declined, Pastor Marsh’s column would be a fine place to begin. Think back to any time in American history. It is hard to imagine that a Christian minister would have any reaction to his fellow Americans standing and singing “God Bless America” other than unalloyed delight. [Read more…]

The Soul Abstracted from Life

Public School Indoctrination Brainwashingby Daren Jonescu –
Modern civilization willingly consigns almost all of its children to the living hell of forced retardation. Everyone knows the educational establishment is beset with problems, corruptions, and the downward ratchet of lowest common denominator standards. And yet parents continue to send their children to government schools, hoping, perhaps even half-believing, that this will not significantly harm the children’s adult lives. They are dead wrong. What follows is an anatomical diagram of mankind’s greatest shame.

The primary purpose of all government-controlled education — regardless of how this is expressed by particular defenders of the enterprise — is to produce the kind of citizens the government sees as best suited to its established form of governance. By “the government,” I mean those people and factions within the political infrastructure who are in a position to determine the long-term structure and interests of the community as a whole. [Read more…]