Leftist Tyranny

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…]

Marxism versus the Middle Class

October 10, 2011October 10, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Anti-communism Anti-Marxism by Jeremy Meister –
Marx’s idea has often been called a “classless society,” but this characterization constitutes one of the biggest myths in modern history. What Marx wanted was a return to the “natural order” — a medieval society where there is a ruling upper class that owns all the property and makes all the decisions while the lower peasant class does all the menial labor. …

Obama’s out there waving around one of the richest men in the world (Warren Buffet) in his attempt to sell average Americans on his “millionaire’s tax.” So now all intellectual talking heads are discussing the goodness and virtue of making those who make seven figures pay more.

But the real focus should be how it is going to affect those at the bottom. Obama and his surrogates have been floating the idea of 250K or 200K as the possible cutoff. Now, it should be pointed out that there is nothing stopping them from making the cutoff as low as 150K or 100K — we’re still in the idea phase, after all. [Read more…]

More Fun When You Share

October 7, 2011October 8, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Obama communist socialist democrats by Jeffrey Folks –
This week I received a credit card offer that suggested I share duplicates of my card with family and friends. “It’s more rewarding when you share,” the offer promised. Just call the 800 number, and we’ll zip a duplicate of your card to any of your family members or friends.

Of course, you’ll be responsible for the charges. That’s what sharing is all about.

And that conception of sharing has been showing up everywhere lately. It was front and center in Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, when she screeched that she’d like to seize ExxonMobil’s profits and redistribute them to “smart” green energy companies — smart start-ups like Solyndra, not corporations like Exxon that actually produce something of value.

The same idea underlies Obama’s constant talk of “fairness” and of taxing those who “can afford to pay a little more.” Obama is simply reciting the fundamental Marxist doctrine of equal distribution of wealth. That idea of equality never translates into reality in actual Marxist societies — far from it. [Read more…]

Christians Need Not Apply?

October 5, 2011October 5, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Christian persecution discrimination by George J. Marlin –
Christians who spar in the political arena have grown accustomed to being pounded by secular ideologists who deny the spiritual and look askance at most traditional moral constraints. Though we have taken punches, we are still standing. But the secularists’ latest offensive to eradicate all traces of our Judeo-Christian heritage from American society is, in my judgment, most disconcerting and may be the knockout blow.

Secularists have moved beyond dismissing Christians as anti-intellectual and anti-rational. They are now publicly ridiculing them and questioning their fitness to participate in public life. They portray religious beliefs as nothing more than superstitions, old wives’ tales, or legends, and claim anyone who believes such drivel is balmy. Is it any wonder, then, that agencies like HHS now think they can ride roughshod over the conscience rights of individuals and religious institutions? [Read more…]