IOCC Should Reconsider Senator Sarbanes as Honorary Chairman

IOCC Anniversary Gala Paul Sarbanes May 2012 by Ronda Wintheiser –

Dear Mr. Triantafilou, board of directors, and the staff at IOCC:

I did finally receive a response to the email and the letter I wrote recently asking you to reconsider your selection of Senator Sarbanes as an honorary chairman for the upcoming gala planned for May 8th. Thank you for it.

The letter read, in part, that: “Senator Sarbanes was selected as an honorary co-chairman for the event for his steadfast commitment and support for IOCC’s ongoing humanitarian mission. While we recognize that you do have concerns about his participation, we hope you will not allow it to overshadow a 20-year legacy of positively impacting the lives of so many people.” [Read more…]

Paul Sarbanes’ Pro-Abortion Voting Record

Paul Sarbanes (Democrat)
Paul Sarbanes (Democrat)

The consistent pro-abortion voting record of Democrat Senator Paul Sarbanes (US Senator from Maryland, 1977-2007) while in office, with respect to the rights of the unborn, represents a radical departure from the Orthodox Christian Church moral teaching on the Sanctity of Life in the womb. His sustained disregard of the Christian and humane instinct to protect the unborn is appalling. Listed below is a brief overview of Senator Paul Sarbanes’ votes on supporting multiple pro-abortion Bills while in office.

2006 – Voted NO on notifying parents of minors who get out-of-state abortions.
This bill prohibits taking minors across State lines in circumvention of laws requiring the involvement of parents in abortion decisions. Makes an exception for an abortion necessary to save the life of the minor. Authorizes any parent to sue unless such parent committed an act of incest with the minor. Imposes a fine and/or prison term of up to one year on a physician who performs an abortion on an out-of-state minor in violation of parental notification requirements in their home state. [Read more…]

No Need to Panic About Global Warming

Global Warming Caused by the Sun Not Carbon Dioxide by WSJ Editors –
The following has been signed by the 16 scientists listed at the end of the article:

A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about “global warming.” Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.

In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: [Read more…]

The Simple Life

Bishop Tikhon (OCA)
Bishop Tikhon (OCA)
by Bishop Tikhon –
When we look around the world we live in, we are often overwhelmed by its complexity and its activity. The world seems never to take a break: businesses, stores and restaurants are open seven days a week, school activities take place at all times, entertainment can be accessed at any hour via the internet and wireless streaming devices and we are often slavishly controlled by all manner of communications: cell phones, emails, text messages and social networking.

All of this worldly activity is supposed to allow us more free time and make our life “easier” and “simpler.” But in reality, it only seems to complicate it by forcing us to devote more money and energy to acquiring those “time-saving” and “lifeenhancing” devices and products. Beyond this, all that worldly activity cuts down on the time we spend together as a family, restricts our ability to go to church services and events and chips away at the time that we devote to the care of our soul through prayer, spiritual reading and repentance. [Read more…]

Canada’s New Tyranny: The State’s Takeover of the Family

Canada Tyranny Christian Family Persecution by LifeSiteNews Editors –
The great English writer G.K. Chesterton once wrote: “The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.”

But if what Chesterton says is true, then Canada fails the test, because the Canadian family is no longer free.

In the past week we have witnessed the Supreme Court of Canada dismiss the appeal of a Quebec family for permission to exempt their child from that province’s controversial ethics and religious culture course, which critics say is “relativistic,” and teaches that all religious are equally valid. And we have heard a spokesperson for the Alberta education minister state that under the province’s new Education Act even homeschooling parents will no longer be allowed to teach their children traditional Christian sexual ethics. [Read more…]

What the Bible Teaches About Capitalism

Ten Commandments envy corrosive shall not covetby Aryeh Spero –
As the Ten Commandments instruct, envy is corrosive to the individual and to those societies that embrace it.

More than any other nation, the United States was founded on broad themes of morality rooted in a specific religious perspective. We call this the Judeo-Christian ethos, and within it resides a ringing endorsement of capitalism as a moral endeavor.

Regarding mankind, no theme is more salient in the Bible than the morality of personal responsibility, for it is through this that man cultivates the inner development leading to his own growth, good citizenship and happiness. The entitlement/welfare state is a paradigm that undermines that noble goal.

The Bible’s proclamation that “Six days shall ye work” is its recognition that on a day-to-day basis work is the engine that brings about man’s inner state of personal responsibility. Work develops the qualities of accountability and urgency, including the need for comity with others as a means for the accomplishment of tasks. With work, he becomes imbued with the knowledge that he is to be productive and that his well-being is not an entitlement. And work keeps him away from the idleness that Proverbs warns leads inevitably to actions and attitudes injurious to himself and those around him. [Read more…]

The ‘Fairness’ Fraud

Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell

by Thomas Sowell –
During a recent Fox News Channel debate about the Obama administration’s tax policies, Democrat Bob Beckel raised the issue of “fairness.”

He pointed out that a child born to a poor woman in the Bronx enters the world with far worse prospects than a child born to an affluent couple in Connecticut.

No one can deny that. The relevant question, however, is: How does allowing politicians to take more money in taxes from successful people, to squander in ways that will improve their own reelection prospects, make anything more “fair” for others?

Even if additional tax revenue all went to poor single mothers — which it will not — the multiple problems of children raised by poor single mothers would not be cured by throwing money at them. Indeed, the skyrocketing of unwed motherhood began when government welfare programs began throwing money at teenage girls who got pregnant.[Read more…]

Global Warming – The Great Delusion

Global Warming Hoax Great Delusion Lies by Matt Patterson –
In 1841 a Scottish journalist named Charles Mackay published a study of mass hysteria titled “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.”

Mackay analyzed a wide variety of popular pathologies in his entertaining tome, including financial panics, medical quackery, alchemy, and witch crazes. He wanted to know why so many people choose to believe so much that is false and potentially deadly. His answer:

“We go out of our course to make ourselves uncomfortable; the cup of life is not bitter enough to our palate, and we distill superfluous poison to put into it, or conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves at, which would never exist if we did not make them.”

I could not help but think of global warming as I was re-reading Mackay’s words. He would have recognized it as kin to his own numerous and insidious subjects—superstition masked as science; Western guilt over having conquered the world manifesting itself as hatred for the technologies that made it possible; apocalyptic yearning in the guise of political enlightenment. [Read more…]

Obama’s Unholy War Against Christianity, Not Islam

American Spectator - War Against Christianity by George Neumayr –
The more illiberal a religion, the more liberals tend to like it. Western liberals who propose no place for God in the public square can usually be counted on to excuse non-western religions that impose a false and dangerous one upon it.

The explanation for this apparent contradiction goes beyond the childish and self-hating affinity of western liberals for all things non-western. The deeper reason is western liberalism’s attachment to irrationality. Having ruptured a once-harmonious relationship between reason and religion in their own culture, western liberals can’t seem to stop themselves from championing similar ruptures in alien ones.

By different routes of irrationality, western liberals and militant Muslims arrive at the same spot. Western liberals reach it by a distorted “reason” without faith, militant Muslims by a distorted “faith” without reason, with each imbalance producing its own culture of death: abortion and euthanasia in the west, jihad in the east. [Read more…]

2,500 Religious Leaders, Every Catholic Bishop Oppose Obama Mandate

Orthodox Bishops against Abortion Mandate by Kathleen Gilbert –
The Family Research Council has released a letter signed by over 2,500 pastors and evangelical leaders protesting the Obama administration’s birth control insurance mandate. They join every Catholic bishop that heads a diocese in the United States in opposition to the mandate.

“This is not a Catholic issue,” Family Research Council (FRC) President Tony Perkins said in unveiling the letter at a press conference today. “We will not tolerate any denomination having their religious freedom infringed upon by the government.” [Read more…]