Freedom vs. the Secular Seminary

Freedom vs. the Secular Seminaryby Christopher Chantrill –
Little did I know, when contrasting conservative freedom and liberal liberation, that a poster-girl for liberation was presenting herself at the Altar of the Victim, the remarkable Sandra Fluke, the toast of our Democratic friends. For Ms. Fluke’s belief system suggests to her that she cannot have access to her sexuality unless a big institution provides her contraception. Moreover, since she is a law student with a degree in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Cornell, she is evidently well into a professional career in liberation activism.

Conservatives scratch our heads at the activist university and its characteristic products like Ms. Fluke. But we are fools. The university has seldom been an institution of higher learning devoted to science and disinterested scholarship. More often it has been a seminary. When young Fred Vincy, son of a Middlemarch merchant, went off to the University of Cambridge in around 1830, it was to study to be a priest in the state Church of England. [Read more…]

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Obama Miserable Failure: 4 Million Lose Health Coverage Under Obamacare

Obama Miserable Failure
Yet more evidence is coming out that government socialist “solutions” never work as intended and always make an existing problem much worse. Two different news stories highlight the real consequences of the destructive and misguided ObamaCare regulations (known as the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”). Rather than helping, the ObamaCare rules are wreaking havoc on companies, individuals, and medical institutions, spreading more misery to all of America.

Instead of reducing costs and helping people, it’s dramatically raising costs (estimates have doubled to $1.76 TRILLION) and hurting Americans (4 Million will lose coverage), while gradually destroying our world-class health care system which America has created based on ethical capitalism, competition, and free-market principles. Conservatives warned this was going to happen and this is exactly what we’re witnessing.

Of course, these objective (non-partisan) facts and clear results before us will not deter the liberals, leftists, and progressives who cannot be bothered with reality. The left will continue to support the suicidal socialized medicine model that has been a failure throughout history. [Read more…]

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How to Win the Marriage Debate

Defend Marriage Orthodox wedding by Selwyn Duke –
The big news on the culture-war front is a federal court’s striking down of Proposition 8, California’s constitutional amendment protecting marriage.  In a two-to-one ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit wrote, “The people may not employ the initiative power to single out a disfavored group for unequal treatment and strip them, without a legitimate justification, of a right as important as the right to marry.”

Now, I’m not sure why the judges mention a “disfavored group,” as if singling out a “favored” one for unequal treatment would be okay.  As far as I know, the 14th Amendment, on which the court based its ruling, doesn’t offer equal protection to only those the current fashions deem “disfavored.”  Thus, I think this is an example of emotionalism influencing a ruling and its language, sort of as if a judge sentenced a defendant and, adding an adjective, announced him as “stupid” Mr. Smith.  Calling a group “disfavored” is similarly a subjective judgment.  This is not the only thing the judges were subjective about, however. [Read more…]

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Obama Admin Finalizes Rules: $1 Abortions in ObamaCare

Obama Abortion HHS mandate by Steven Ertelt –
It’s official. The concern pro-life organizations had about the ObamaCare legislation funding abortions has been confirmed, as the Obama administration has issued the final rules on abortion funding governing the controversial health care law.

Nestled within the “individual mandate” in the Obamacare act — that portion of the Act requiring every American to purchase government — approved insurance or pay a penalty — is an “abortion premium mandate.” This mandate requires all persons enrolled in insurance plans that include elective abortion coverage to pay a separate premium from their own pockets to fund abortion. As a result, many pro-life Americans will have to decide between a plan that violates their consciences by funding abortion, or a plan that may not meet their health needs.

The Department of Health and Human Services has issued a final rule regarding establishment of the state health care exchanges required under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. [Read more…]

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Fixing the Moral Deficit, Biblical Principles for Debt Reduction

Chuck Colson
Chuck Colson
by Chuck Colson –
Thirty-five years ago, my friend Ron Sider published Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, a very influential book at the time. While I haven’t always agreed with Ron, in fact, we’re poles apart politically, I have no doubt of his integrity, his wisdom and his desire to bring biblical truth to all aspects of life.

That’s why so I’m happy that Ron has turned his attention to one of the most pressing issues of our time: our national debt.

His new book, Fixing the Moral Deficit, is the result of his reflections on the issue. As the title suggests, for Ron, the ballooning national debt isn’t simply a matter of accounting. According to him, there are three “crises” operating here: the first is the deficit crisis, the result of government spending more than it collects in taxes; the second is a poverty crisis, in which the bottom 20 percent become poorer, while the top twenty percent get wealthier.

Together, he says, these add up to a third crisis—which he calls the “justice crisis”–in which we “put current expenditures on our grandchildren’s credit cards,” which Sider calls “flatly immoral.” Amen. [Read more…]

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Socialism without Guns

Greece communism socialism by Larrey Anderson –
As their economic orgy fades to its inevitable end, the people of Greece find themselves in a country that resembles more of a debtor’s prison than a representative democracy. The Greeks have sold their freedom for a mess of pottage. If the United States is not careful, we could soon find ourselves in a very similar situation.

Unlike the former Soviet Union, there was no violent Marxist “revolution” in Greece. Freedom was taken from the country’s citizens without a single shot being fired. The Greeks squandered their freedom by electing, time and again, politicians who promised an unsustainable socialist utopia. The Greeks committed political suicide by creating socialism without guns. [Read more…]

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The American Left and the Erosion of Public Discourse

American Left Socialism Communism progressives by Steve McCann –
Much has been made of the precipitous decline in the level of discourse in the United States. Many attribute this to the coarsening of the language and the ever-widening gulf between the various factions in the political spectrum. However, these factors are a symptom of a current underlying and foundational dilemma: the inability of not only the general public, but nearly all of the so-called societal leaders and opinion-makers to generate an original thought, as well as a stubborn refusal to use reason and logic when confronted with irrefutable facts and arguments.

These traits can be explained, insofar as the general public is concerned, as the consequence of their subjection for the past forty years to a woeful and deliberately incomplete education bordering on indoctrination. However, this factor does not fully explain many of the so-called best and brightest falling into the same abyss and being unable to coherently expound on an original thought or concept. While this is true for a few on the conservative side of the political spectrum, it is overwhelmingly the case among those who self-identify as liberals or progressives. [Read more…]

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Issa: Distorting the Debate of Religious Freedom

Darrell Issa: Distorting the Debate of Religious Freedom by Rep. Darrell Issa
Let’s make something perfectly clear: I support a woman’s right to use contraceptives. I don’t question whether women and men have a right to use contraception — I believe they do. This is not about religious freedom versus contraception but about religious freedom versus unconstitutional mandates.

When Congress granted broad powers and authority to the Obama administration through the 2010 health care overhaul, it was never explained that the administration would use those powers to launch an assault on religious freedom. [Read more…]

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Darrell Issa, Orthodox Congressman, On Religious Freedom

Darrell Issa (Republican) - Orthodox Christian
Darrell Issa (Republican)

Congressman Darrell Issa is an Orthodox Christian politician (Republican) from California. As a member of the House of Representatives he spoke out against Obama’s HHS healthcare mandate that infringes on the religious liberty of all Americans. He is not afraid to stand up and speak up for what is right and just. Here is Rep. Darrell Issa’s statement from a hearing on “Separation of Church and State” held on February 16, 2012:

Date: Feb. 16, 2012
Location: Washington, DC

Americans of all faiths have a right to practice their religion free from the fear of persecution or harassment from their government. Our nation’s founders believed this and enshrined religious freedom into the First Amendment to the Constitution.

While some Americans may not feel that government mandates forcing them to pay for contraception are an infringement on their religious beliefs, others consider it to be an assault against their freedom of conscience. A government policy that encroaches on the conscientious objections of religious groups concerns all Americans who value the protections of the First Amendment. [Read more…]

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Something deadly this way comes: the insatiable appetite of the Culture of Death

Albert Mohler
Albert Mohler
by Albert Mohler –
The debate over abortion comes down to one essential issue — the moral status of the unborn child. Those making the case for the legalization of abortion argue that the developing fetus lacks a moral status that would trump a woman’s desire to abort the child. Those arguing against abortion do so by making the opposite claim; that the unborn child, precisely because it is a developing human being, possesses a moral status by the very fact of its human existence that would clearly trump any rationale offered for its willful destruction.

This central issue is often obscured in both public argument and private conversations about abortion, but it remains the essential question. We have laws against homicide, and if the unborn child is recognized legally and morally as a human being, abortion would be rightly seen as murder.

In the main, abortion rights advocates have drawn the moral line at the moment of birth. That is why, even with our contemporary knowledge of the developing fetus, abortion rights activists have persistently argued in favor of abortions right up to the moment of birth. Anyone doubting this claim needs only to consider the unified opposition of leading abortion rights advocates to restrictions on late-term abortions. [Read more…]

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