Sexual indoctrination of children

Boston Globe
Arrested father had point to make. Disputed school’s lesson on diversity

CONCORD — For David Parker, the first alarm went off in January, when his 5-year-old son came home from his kindergarten class at Lexington’s Joseph Estabrook School with a bag of books promoting diversity.

Inside were books about foreign cultures and traditions, along with food recipes. There was also a copy of ”Who’s In a Family?” by Robert Skutch, which depicts different kinds of families, including same-sex couples raising children.

The book’s contents concerned Parker and prompted him to begin a series of e-mail exchanges with school officials on the subject that culminated in a meeting Wednesday night with Estabrook’s principal and district director of instruction. The meeting ended with Parker’s arrest after he refused to leave the school, and the Lexington man spent the night in jail.

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Remembering the First Genocide

From the Acton Institute Blog:

Tuesday, April 26 2005

Yesterday, people all over the world marked the 90th anniversary of the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks, a commemoration that has taken on added political frieght with Turkey’s candidacy for accession to the European Union. Given the refusal of Turkey to even acknowledge the genocide — which also targeted hundreds of thousands of Pontic Greeks and Syrians — the EU question should be put permanently on hold until the Turks face their past with honesty. But the prospects of that happening are, for now, almost nil as the genocide charges provoke a domestic backlash in Turkey and fuel a virulent anti-Americanism. The recent election of Pope Benedict XVI, who has expressed his doubts about the wisdom of Turkey joining the EU, predictably provoked an outrage in the Turkish press.

Turkey’s refusal to own up to the Armenian genocide — often referred to as the first of the 20th century — is no mere correction of a now-distant historical record. It speaks directly to what is happening in that nation today. The latest State Department report on religious freedom notes that the hard-pressed Greek and Armenian Christian communities have had numerous church properties confiscated by Turkish authorities. Here’s the trick: Properties are threatened with expropriation when the population of a religious community drops below a certain level. The government then determines a property has fallen into disuse, and assumes its management.

For Orthodox Christians, the Armenian genocide stirs up terrible memories — millions of believers perished in the 20th century at the hands of the Turks, the Communists, the Nazis. These tragic events are, for many, a living memory. For the departed, we ask, in the words of an Orthodox prayer, that the Lord “keep them in everlasting remembrance.”

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Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation

Ed. These guys get it. Note Feder’s comment below.

Front Page Magazine
By Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation
Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation | April 27, 2005

The announcement of the formation of Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation (JAACD) came at a press conference yesterday (April 21st) at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Present were JAACD President Don Feder, and several members of the group’s Advisory Board — syndicated columnist Mona Charen, popular talk-show host Barry Farber, Rabbi Joshua Haberman, and Rabbi Yehuda Levin.
[Read more…]

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Benedict XVI: Science May Have a New Friend and Neo-Darwinism a New Foe

From The Center for Science and Culture blog:

Cardinal Ratzinger’s sermon at the Mass for the Election of a Supreme Pontiff has been trumpeted as a frontal assault against cultural relativism. This it was and, yet, digging deeper one finds reason to believe that Ratzinger, the newly elected Pope, may also have materialist interpretations of science (including Darwnism) in his
sights.

In an impassioned essay at NRO, Michael Novak writes:

What Ratzinger attacks as relativism is the regulative principle that all thought is and must remain subjective. What he defends against such relativism is the contrary regulative principle, namely, that each human subject must continue to inquire incessantly…. Ratzinger wishes to defend the imperative of seeking the truth in all things, the imperative to follow the evidence.

Neo-Darwinism has long shielded itself from scrutiny and competition by a convoluted web of definitional tactics. Those we might term militant Neo-Darwinists don’t want scientists to follow the evidence wherever it leads. They only want to follow it to material, impersonal causes.

Read more.

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Book recommendation: The Cube and the Cathedral

I’m reading George Weigel’s The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God and want to recommend it to anyone trying to understand more deeply the religious underpinnings of culture.

Weigel posits WWI as the point where the cataclysmic dislocation from a Christian to secular atheist of European society occurred. Of course the ideas of secular atheism have antecedents in earlier epochs, but they emerged as part of Christian culture because of the great dislocation. Only when WWI ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, has it become clear how radical the secularist atheism really is.

I’m only about a third of the way through it but there are quite a few gems in the book. (Missourian, you would like the facts on the decline of European culture; one example: Sweden has a poverty class greater than the US.) One is this: the social structures of secular atheism always work towards the destruction of people. So true when you think of it: abortion, euthanasia, etc. It’s what we call the “culture of death.”

The “Cube” of the title (La Grande Arche de la Defense) serves as counterpoint to the “Cathedral” (Notre Dame) which reflect de-Christianized Europe against a formerly Christian Europe.

Take a loot at the book the next time you are at B&N. (Better yet, order it through the link above and send a couple of quarters my way to help pay for this site.) Many OT readers will like it.

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Biblical Aspects of the Question of Faith and Politics

LewRockwell.com Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)

[This is a homily that was delivered on 26 November 1981 in the course of a service for Catholic members of the Bundestag in the church of St. Wynfrith (Boniface) in Bonn. The readings provided for the day by the lectionary were 1 Peter 1:3-7 and John 14:1-6. At first sight they seemed to be out of keeping with the subject, but on closer inspection they showed themselves to be unexpectedly fruitful.]

The epistle and gospel that we have just listened to have their origin in a situation in which Christians were not citizens of a state who were able to shape their own lives but the persecuted victims of a cruel dictatorship. They could not share in responsibility for their state but simply had to endure it. It was not granted to them to shape it as a Christian state; instead their task was to live as Christians despite it. The names of two emperors in whose reigns tradition dates these two passages are enough to cast light on the situation: they were Nero and Domitian. Thus the first letter of Peter describes Christians as strangers within this state (1:1) and the state itself as Babylon (5:13). By doing so it indicates very impressively the political position that Christians were in; it corresponded more or less to that of the Jews living in exile in Babylon who were not responsible citizens of that state but subjects without any rights, and who thus had to learn how they might survive in it, not how they could build it up. Thus the political background of today’s readings is fundamentally different from ours. Nevertheless they contain three important statements which are significant for political activity among Christians.

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Christians are leaving the town of Bethlehem

Los Angeles Times Ken Ellingwood

Palestinians among them grow tired of Israeli roadblocks, outbreaks of hostility.

BETHLEHEM, West Bank — From an office near the traditional birthplace of Christ, Mayor Hanna Nasser frets about the prospects for Christians in his slice of the Holy Land.

The outbreak of hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians more than four years ago has accelerated emigration by Palestinian Christians that began years earlier.
[Read more…]

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‘Good sex for teens’: The war against abstinence

TownHall.com Robert Rector

Each year, more than 3 million teenagers contract a sexually transmitted disease. In addition to the threat of disease and pregnancy, sexually active teens are three times more likely than teens who aren’t sexually active to become depressed and to attempt suicide.

Clearly, it’s in society’s interest to discourage teen sex. Teens themselves realize this: According to a Zogby poll, more than 90 percent of them say that society should teach kids to abstain from sex until they have, at least, finished high school. Parents want a stronger message: Almost nine in 10 want schools to teach youth to abstain from sex until they’re married or in an adult relationship that is close to marriage.

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The end of self-reliance?

Townhall.com George Will

WASHINGTON — It hurt her feelings, says Jane Fonda, sharing her feelings, that one of her husbands liked them to have sexual threesomes. `”It reinforced my feeling I wasn’t good enough.'”

In the Scottsdale, Ariz., Unified School District office, the receptionist used to be called a receptionist. Now she is “director of first impressions.” The happy director says, “Everyone wants to be important.”

Manufacturers of pens and markers report a surge in teachers’ demands for purple ink pens. When marked in red, corrections of students’ tests seem so awfully judgmental.

Fonda’s confession, Scottsdale’s tweaking of terminology and the recoil from red markings are manifestations of today’s therapeutic culture. The nature and menace of “therapism” is the subject of a new book, “One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance” by Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel, M.D., resident scholars at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Pope Benedict XVI: Enemy of Jihad

FrontPageMagazine.com By Robert Spencer April 20, 2005

In choosing Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to succeed Pope John Paul II as Pope Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church has cast a vote for the survival of Europe and the West. “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century,” historian Bernard Lewis predicted not long ago; however, judging from the writings of the new Pope, he is not likely to be sanguine about this transition. For one thing, the new Pope seems to be aware of the grave danger Europeans face: he has called upon Europe to recover its Christian roots “if it truly wants to survive.”

For while his predecessor kissed the Qur’an and pursued a consistent line of conciliation toward the Islamic world, despite numerous provocations and attacks against Catholics in Muslim countries, the new Pope Benedict XVI, while no less charitable, has been a bit more forthcoming about the reality of how Islam challenges the Catholic Church, Christianity, and even the post-Christian West. He has spoken up for the rights of converts from Islam to Christianity, who live under a death sentence in Islamic countries and increasingly live in fear even in the West. He has even spoken approvingly of Christians proselytizing Muslims — a practice that enrages Muslims and is against the law in many Islamic countries.

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