We Applaud the Republican Platform: No ‘Abortion Rights’, Only a Right to Life

GOP Republicans Pro-Lifeby Deacon Keith Fournier –
To the consternation of those who oppose the Right to Life the Republican Party passed a Pro-Life Plank in Tampa, Florida on Tuesday, August 21, 2012. The platform will come before the delegates next Monday for a vote. The platform committee is chaired by the Pro-Life Governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell.

The language of the Republican Platform is refreshingly clear: “Faithful to the ‘self-evident’ truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.”

Sadly, the opponents of the fundamental Human Right to Life of our youngest neighbors in the first home of the human race control much of the media. [Read more…]

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Liberals’ Illegitimate War on Women

War on Women Liberalsby Jeannie DeAngelis –
Willingness or unwillingness to prevent or terminate a pregnancy appears to be the sole criterion upon which liberal women judge how well they’re being treated.  It’s stunning that the left actually embraces the idea that taking a stand for life instantly translates into hostility toward, or contention with, the female gender.

The right to abort the unborn is so precious to left-leaning women that they are even willing to overlook the fact that 50% of the fetuses losing their lives in abortion clinics are of the gender they believe Republicans are currently waging war against.  The truth is that it’s pro-choice women who discriminate; they’re fine with liberal men being womanizers, perverts, and adulterers, and if women like Juanita Broderick consider what Bill Clinton did to her a “legitimate rape,” then the men they admire can even be alleged rapists. [Read more…]

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Four Characteristics of Good Orthodox Preaching

Fr. Jonathan Cholcher
Fr. Jonathan Cholcher
by Fr. Jonathan Cholcher –
Orthodox preaching needs to be good preaching. To be good, Orthodox preaching must not only deliver good content, but it must strive to make the hearers good. Therefore, good Orthodox preaching is the Gospel (lit., good news) proclaimed and lived.

Four characteristics mark good Orthodox preaching:

  • Christ crucified and risen;
  • the language, or rationale, of Scripture;
  • plain discourse; and
  • attention to the experience of salvation through the Gospel.

All Orthodox preachers exhibit these traits beginning with Christ Jesus, the apostles, and the prophets. They only preach what they themselves have come to know.

First, Orthodox preaching is the Word, the Logos incarnate Who was crucified and raised to redeem the world from sin, death, and the power of the devil. [Read more…]

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Obamacare Begins Child Sterilization, Without Parental Consent

ObamaCare a nightmare for Americaby Stephanie Zawada –
With back-to-school season in full swing across the nation, parents in Oregon have more to worry about than shopping for sweaters and purchasing pencils. In the state of Oregon, the Obamacare mandate, which went into effect on August 1, 2012, provides free sterilizations to girls as young as fifteen. Now, your daughter, your high school freshman, can choose, without your consent, to be permanently sterilized. …

Forget the milestones of obtaining a driver’s license at 16 and being able to legally drink at 21 – getting sterilized at 15 is now the first step in the social maturity process of an American youth.

The “Required Health Plan Coverage Guidelines” set forth by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services states: “Non-grandfathered plans and issuers are required to provide coverage without cost-sharing consistent with these guidelines in the first plan year.that begins on or after August 1, 2012.All [FDA] approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity.” [Read more…]

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The Silence of the Pulpits

Christian persecution, loss of religious libertyby Bill Warner –
If you are even slightly awake about the world news today, it is no surprise that Christians are being killed, raped, and brutalized throughout the Islamic world.  However, there is a place where you can go to  escape the dreadful and relentless details of Christian annihilation by Islam.  You can just go to church.

For example, Christians were killed this week in Nigeria.  Nothing out of the ordinary — indeed, in the world of Christian persecution, this is routine.

And so the response found in nearly every church to the murder of Christians is…wait for it…complete silence.  Not a mention or reference to it, or to the brutality against Christians that happens almost every day in the Islamic world.

This is not a passive silence, because if you try to change it, you will fail.  The silence is an active, working conspiracy that goes throughout nearly all of Christendom. [Read more…]

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The Unteachables: A Generation that Cannot Learn

Indoctrination of Childrenby Janice Fiamengo –
The greatest tragedy of progressive education is not the students’ lack of skills, but of teachable character.
“The honeymoon is over.” Instructors who award low grades in humanities disciplines will likely be familiar with a phenomenon that occurs after the first essays are returned to students: former smiles vanish, hands once jubilantly raised to answer questions are now resentfully folded across chests, offended pride and sulkiness replace the careless cheer of former days. Too often, the smiles are gone for good because the customary “B+” or “A” grades have been withheld, and many students cannot forgive the insult.

The matter doesn’t always end there. Some students are prepared for a fight, writing emails of entreaty or threat, or besieging the instructor in his office to make clear that the grade is unacceptable. Every instructor who has been so besieged knows the legion of excuses and expressions of indignation offered, the certainty that such work was always judged acceptable in the past, the implication that a few small slip-ups, a wrong word or two, have been blown out of proportion. [Read more…]

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Will a Weakened American Character Defeat Paul Ryan?

Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager
by Dennis Prager –
The Republican vice-presidential candidate, Congressman Paul Ryan, is the Democrats’ political version of the Anti-Christ. He believes in self-reliance; the left believes in reliance on the state. His moral values are shaped by religion (Catholicism); the left is frightened by religious Christian politicians (and athletes, and members of the armed forces, and talk show hosts, and, for that matter, clergy). He believes in individualism; the left believes in collectivism. He believes in small government and powerful citizens; the left believes in large government and dependent citizens.

Nevertheless, the Democratic Party claims to be overjoyed at his selection as the Republican vice-presidential nominee. [Read more…]

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The Childishness of the American Left

Democrats Socialists Democrats Communists Economic Illiterate by Steve McCann –
The American left is the most self-indulgent, arrogant, and spoiled group of people on the face of the earth.  They live in a nation facing national bankruptcy and societal upheaval — a country presently subsisting on the residue of past economic achievements.  Yet the only things that matter to them are their lifestyles and imposing their self-determined superiority on rest of the American people.

The true indebtedness of the United States now exceeds $222 trillion.  Appearing on National Public Radio in August of 2011 Professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff of Boston University said:

If you add up all the promises that have been made for spending obligations, and subtract all the taxes we expect to collect, the difference is $211 Trillion.  This is the fiscal gap.  That is our true indebtedness. [Read more…]

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The Rich Don’t Make Us Poor

Christians in Post-Welfare World by Charles Kaupke –
We’ve been hearing a lot lately about the need for the wealthy to “pay their fair share” so that the federal government can pay down its debts and continue to fund programs to provide basic human necessities for the poor, such as food, shelter, and prophylactics. Their argument is that the greedy rich have been stealing increasingly large percentages of the nation’s GDP, and have been hoarding their riches, rather than generously giving them to the federal government to be used for the common good. The only solution is to increase taxes on the rich, so that instead of letting billionaires covetously hold onto (and thus waste) their excess wealth, which they don’t really need, the government can take that cash and use it much more effectively, to give the rest of us free stuff. After all, it just isn’t fair that some Americans control billions of dollars’ worth of wealth, while others struggle to make ends meet.

Sounds plausible, right? Of course it does. Unfortunately for those who make a living out of inciting class warfare, it’s not true. [Read more…]

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Cultivate That Quiet Light, Find Strength in God

Cultivate That Quiet Light, Find Strength in God by Protodeacon Leonid Mickle –
We are all given talents to be used to the glory of God throughout our journey toward salvation. If we exercise them to the best of our ability and to the glory of God, they become part of that light which enlightens the world. The enemy is tireless in his attempts to keep us from performing them. If he cannot sway us from performing the obviously important tasks, he works on the little things, the mundane, seemingly insignificant details of daily life. …

Many are perishing
I have often heard advice similar to that given by St. Seraphim of Sarov: Cultivate the quiet light of Christ within you, and with it you will enlighten those around you. At times, when contemplating the zeal which so many apostles demonstrated in their confession of the Faith before the world, I have wondered about that advice. We know that many are perishing, that many have either never even heard of the Orthodox Church, or are not aware that the Church is not an ethnic clubhouse, but a source of Living Water for all. Why are we not told to advertise, to go out with trumpets, drums, loudspeakers, bright lights, to make the Church more visible? God sometimes provides us with wonderful answers in unexpected settings. [Read more…]

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