Leftist Tyranny

The Artificial Imposition of Poverty

November 22, 2011November 24, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by James Peron –
Most of the world’s poverty is not self-inflicted, yet apparently many seem to think it is.

My experience, living in Africa, tells me otherwise. Much of global poverty is imposed and I don’t mean by evil “multi-national corporations” or “globalization.” Those myths are easily debunked. The real causes of poverty in these nations are not hard to find.

First, however, I’d like to start with what is not the cause of poverty. People in poor nations are not poor because they lack ambition or are lazy. [Read more…]

Radicals Don’t Compromise

November 22, 2011November 24, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Democrats Extreme Communists Radicals by Jeffrey Folks –
As the impasse at the deficit reduction supercommittee shows, Congress’s inability to get things done is once again on display. The blame for this failure has been widely attributed to the “unwillingness of both sides to work together,” but the reality is that liberal Democrats on the committee never intended to compromise. They would rather pursue their goal of socialism than save the country from fiscal collapse.

This is just sort of behavior that has brought Greece to ruin and that now threatens all of Europe, if not the entire global economy. To channel Rick Perry’s thoughts on Chairman Ben, the refusal to put country ahead of party is nothing less than treasonous.

For their part, Republicans have engaged in political posturing as well, but when the chips were down, as they have been now for weeks, the GOP at least offered a proposal, albeit a flawed one. Democrats have offered nothing that would bring the committee anywhere near $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction over the next ten years. Not only that, but their immediate response to the GOP proposal, without even pausing to consider its contents, was to denounce it as “laughable.” [Read more…]

Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz says Children in the Womb are Not Persons

November 8, 2011November 12, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Debbie Wasserman Shultz (D), Chair of the Democratic National Committee, said that calling a child in the womb a person is an extremist position.

by Deacon Keith Fournier –

On November 8, 2011, the people of Mississippi will have an opportunity to cast their vote to affirm a scientific fact, that a human being in the womb of his or her mother is a human person from the moment of conception. The lieutenant Governor of the State recently expressed what many of his fellow Mississippians believe in these words: “The Founding Fathers said that every American has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. On November the 8th, we’re going to give that right to every child in America, beginning in Mississippi”

If the people of the State pass this amendment to the State Constitution, intentional abortion, which is the taking of innocent human life in the womb, will be illegal – just like every other act of killing an innocent human person. The Mississippi amendment specifically includes them in the definition section of person in the State Constitution.

The Mississippi effort is a part of a growing trend in the States to pass such constitutional amendments to protect the lives of our youngest neighbors. [Read more…]

Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid (Part 2)

November 7, 2011November 12, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Marcia Segelstein –

Do you ever wonder what the world will be like in 20 or 30 years? If you’re a parent or a grandparent, chances are you’ve thought a lot about the world the next generation will inhabit. And if you’re a Christian, no doubt you’ve wondered if Christian values will be part of the mainstream culture, or whether such values will even be tolerated.

Mary Beth Hicks, in her new book, Don’t Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid, makes a good case for those concerns, some of which I wrote about in my last column.

Take the issue of homosexuality. Traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs teach that the practice of homosexuality is wrong. But gay activists and their liberal supporters have done a stunning job of shifting public opinion against those tenets. They’ve even invented a word for it: homophobia. We’ve reached the point where bringing morality into a discussion of homosexuality is considered hateful. [Read more…]

Defending Our First Freedom

October 29, 2011October 29, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Christian persecution, loss of religious liberty America by Archbishop José H. Gomez –
We are slowly losing our sense of religious liberty in America.

There is much evidence to suggest that our society no longer values the public role of religion or recognizes the importance of religious freedom as a basic right. As scholars like Harvard’s Mary Ann Glendon and Michael Sandel have observed, our courts and government agencies increasingly treat the right to hold and express religious beliefs as only one of many private lifestyle options. And, they observe, this right is often “trumped” in the face of challenges from competing rights or interests deemed to be more important.

These are among the reasons the U.S. Catholic bishops recently established a new Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty. My brother bishops and I are deeply concerned that believers’ liberties—and the Church’s freedom to carry out her mission—are threatened today, as they never have been before in our country’s history. [Read more…]

No Representation without Taxation

October 27, 2011October 29, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

No Representation without Taxation by Bruce Walker –
The recent Occupy Wall Street ruckus and the drumbeat rhetoric of Democrats in Washington that the rich pay too little shows the dangers of placing power in the hands of those who have no real interest beyond self-interest in the governance of the nation. One rallying cry of our forefathers when the British Crown sought to impose taxes — really, very modest taxes — on the colonies without the consent of us colonials was “No taxation without representation!”

The logic of that slogan ran something like this: if I have no say in who passes taxes that I must pay, then what prevents the officials from imposing unfair taxes on me? On the other hand, if both the burden of taxation and the voice in tax-making are roughly equal, then taxes passed will be just and sensible. [Read more…]

Does Sex Ed Undermine Parental Rights?

October 27, 2011October 29, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Robert P. George and Melissa Moschella –
Imagine you have a 10- or 11-year-old child, just entering a public middle school. How would you feel if, as part of a class ostensibly about the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, he and his classmates were given “risk cards” that graphically named a variety of solitary and mutual sex acts? Or if, in another lesson, he was encouraged to disregard what you told him about sex, and to rely instead on teachers and health clinic staff members?

That prospect would horrify most parents. But such lessons are part of a middle-school curriculum that Dennis M. Walcott, the New York City schools chancellor, has recommended for his system’s newly mandated sex-education classes. There is a parental “opt out,” but it is very limited, covering classes on contraception and birth control. [Read more…]

Who Will Save New York? Herman Cain?

October 21, 2011October 21, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Radical Liberals Leftists by Richard F. Miniter –
I’ve just had my fourth grown son move his employment or business from New York State to Virginia. A fifth had already moved to Colorado. A daughter and three grandchildren are still here both working and living. For how long I don’t know because my son-in-law’s situation is fluid and the school taxes they pay on a home he rebuilt from the ground up with his own hands is more money each year than the purchase price of my first house forty odd years ago, not two minutes walk away. More money than a lot of people make today. More money than many senior citizens have to live on.

“I’m single and tired of paying more than half my income in taxes” my last son to move south grinned, “so I decided to let you and Mom shoulder the New York state public school teacher’s retirement fund all by yourselves.” [Read more…]

Why Is Class Hatred Morally Superior to Race Hatred?

October 18, 2011October 18, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Dennis Prager –

The major difference between Hitler and the Communist genocidal murderers — Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot — was what groups they chose for extermination.

For Hitler, first Jews and ultimately Slavs and other “non-Aryans” were declared the enemy and unworthy of life. For the Communists, the rich — the bourgeoisie, land owners, and capitalists — were labeled the enemy and regarded as unworthy of life.

Hitler mass-murdered on the basis of race, the Communists on the basis of class.

Because the Holocaust was unique in its industrialization of death and in its targeting of every Jew, including babies, for death, the post-World War II world has been rightly obsessed with eradicating racism (but not anti-Semitism!), i.e., the hatred of another solely because of race. But the world has not been obsessed with eradicating the other source of genocide: classism, or the hatred of others based on class. [Read more…]

Who Knew Conservatives Loved the IRS?

October 17, 2011October 17, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Economic Slavery IRS by C. Edmund Wright –
If there’s one thing that the ongoing national debate over Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan has exposed, it’s how much some conservatives love our current tax code and its enforcement arm. Who knew?

Okay, that may be an exaggeration — but it is not an overstatement to say that much of the criticism of Cain’s plan coming from the right is based in a stunning comfort with and knee-jerk reliance on our current system. It’s as if there is an undercurrent of belief that our IRS system is very, very good and can be replaced only by perfection. At the very least, much of the negative analysis is based on picking one aspect of the Cain plan and applying it to our current reality as if the 9-9-9 plan was ever designed to be applied piecemeal. This notion can come from only an intellectual vacuum where tax realities do not change human behavior. [Read more…]