1

Denying Reality at a Steep Price

|

The idea of two distinct sexes has been acknowledged as fundamental reality for thousands of years by billions of people, biology and every major religion.

The Trump administration agrees, which is why the Health and Human Services Department is circulating a proposal defining gender this way for purposes of interpreting Title IX of the Civil Rights Act:

”The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”   Further, the determination should rest “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.”

This means that when a baby is born, it’s still OK to say, “It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy!” without having to ask the baby which sex it thinks it is.

Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration’s straightforward return to sanity has triggered a hysteria unseen since a majority of Americans had the audacity to say out loud that marriage is the natural union of male and female. The dystopic Left is apoplectic that anyone still dares to resist their distorted view of human sexuality.  They know that most people know better but are afraid to say so.

This is about much more than some people claiming to be the other sex and trying with the help of the media to rig the culture and legal system to their version of reality.  It’s a power struggle. The ruling elites aim to make us say that up is down, right is wrong, sweet is bitter and life is death.

Leading the charge, the Washington Post ran an editorial that said the HHS proposal, first reported by fellow cultural Marxists at the New York Times, was a “denial of reality” and based on “warped logic.”  Seriously.

Here’s more: “A brief conversation with a transgender person would cure most Americans of the notion that their expressed gender identity is a shallow preference, a phase or something other than a deeply held knowledge that their body does not match who they are.”

There’s nothing shallow about someone being so out of kilter with their own biology that they would contemplate surgical removal of otherwise healthy body parts.

The same people who accuse traditionalists of imposing their values on others insist that biology is meaningless.   But just because someone strongly believes something does not make it so.  Some people are afflicted with species dysphoria, in which they believe they are animals, a  “non-human species trapped in a human body.”  Are you going to believe them or your lying eyes?

There’s nothing wrong with treating transgender people with kindness.  We should all strive to live out Jesus’ admonition to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. But we need to oppose obscene developments like drugging children to delay their natural puberty in order to steer them into identifying with the opposite sex.  That is child abuse.

Here’s a welcome corrective from Dr. Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, who once favored sex-change surgery but now opposes it.

“I have witnessed a great deal of damage from sex-reassignment,” he wrote. “The children transformed from their male constitution into female roles suffered prolonged distress and misery as they sensed their natural attitudes…. We have wasted scientific and technical resources and damaged our professional credibility by collaborating with madness rather than trying to study, cure, and ultimately prevent it.”

At the end of the cross-dressing 1959 comedy “Some Like It Hot,” Joe E. Brown is driving away in a speed boat with Jack Lemmon still dressed as a woman.  Insisting he wants to marry “her,” Mr. Brown hears Mr. Lemmon give a half dozen excuses until finally ripping off his wig in exasperation and declaring that they couldn’t marry because, “I’m a man!”

The cheerful Mr. Brown smiles and says, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

No, nobody is perfect, which is why we need to approach people who are hurting with compassion while declining to become co-dependents in their denial of reality.

Robert Knight’s latest book is “A Nation Worth Fighting For: 10 Steps to Restore Freedom.”  This article was originally published at Townhall.com.



The Left Has Chosen Open Rebellion to Science

|

Written by Peter Heck

Pro tip: If you’re promoting the embarrassing pseudoscience of transgenderism, you’re an enemy not advocate of science.

It’s a fascinating spectacle to behold. On Monday of this week I wrote a piece defending the Christian conception of a much younger Earth than what modern scientists relying on a number of unproven assumptions propose. Though the target audience for that piece was Bible-believing Christians, it was widely panned by agnostic skeptics and non-theist scoffers who are all-in on the Darwinian faith and its requisite “millions of years” conception of Earth history.

That’s okay with me, and honestly to be expected. But you’ll have to excuse me when I snicker at the same voices, virulently attacking me for my betrayal of “science,” simultaneously promote the embarrassing pseudoscience of transgenderism. Please, for the sake of your own reputation, don’t appeal to the efficacy of science when retweeting this anti-science howler from the New York Times:

“The idea that a person’s sex is determined by their anatomy at birth is not true, and we’ve known that it’s not true for decades.”

The degree to which liberal progressives are willing to beclown themselves over something so objectively, scientifically clear is remarkable. Take Hollywood activist George Takei. His abuse of science is exceeded only by his desperate political crusading:

“The Trump administration is trying to make Trans people disappear by defining gender as only male and female, determined by genitalia at birth. This is an egregious, callous attack on the LGBT community. Send a clear message on Nov 6th that there is no place for hate in America.”

This is just shockingly irrational. What the administration is prepared to do is correcting the confused, politically-motivated nonsense the Obama administration committed in muddling federal definitions of sex and gender as part of a pandering campaign. The Times explained it, albeit in their characteristically slanted manner:

A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. The policy prompted fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.

Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.

Did you catch that? The administration is seeking to establish a logical, objective, rational legal definition of sex for programs falling under Title IX. George Takei’s politics notwithstanding, sex is only male and female, determined by genitalia at birth. Anyone who denies this, denies science.

And despite the hysteria, which again, is all generated for political purposes, this move would not make transgender people “disappear.” That is unless you believe that transgender people only “appeared” when the Obama administration meddled with Title IX to raise campaign funds from LGBT activists.

Having compassion towards people who are confused about their sexual identity is noble and good. It’s a hallmark of a moral society. But compassion never includes denying scientific reality or facilitating delusion for the sake of political profit. That is what the Obama administration egregiously and callously did. Correcting their error and restoring scientific sanity isn’t lacking in compassion, it’s embodying it.

This article originally posted at TheMaven.net



Trump Administration Stands for Biological Reality and Sexual Sanity

|

The New York Times reached a new low in silliness, ignorance, and alarmism—or would that be new high—with this headline on Sunday: “‘Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration.” What this silly, ignorant, alarmist headline is referring to is the Trump Administration’s reasonable and increasingly necessary decision to make clear that when Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 refers to “sex,” it meant and still means biological sex. Ever-cunning, slippery-as-eels “progressives” at the NYTimes said this:

The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. The policy prompted fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.

…

The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.

Do you see the cunning rhetorical slipperiness? In the good old days when everyone acknowledged the difference between girls and boys, and women and men, “sex” and “gender” were used interchangeably. But no more. “Progressives” relentlessly pontificate that “sex” and “gender” denote wholly different ontological realities, and yet, in this article, the authors keep slipping between the two definitions.

According to “trans” activists and their “progressive” disciples, “sex” refers to an objective, immutable biological reality determined by genes and revealed in anatomy and reproductive processes—pretty much the same as the Trump Administration is proposing to do. In contrast, in our brave new sexually ambiguous, socially constructed, phantasmagorical world, Leftists preach that “gender” denotes the socially constructed roles, conventions, behaviors, and expectations arbitrarily associated with males and females. “Gender identity” denotes the subjective, internal feelings one has about one’s maleness or femaleness, some combination thereof, or rejection of both.

The NYTimes falsely claimed that the Obama Administration “loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth.”

First, a baby’s sex is not assigned at birth. A baby’s sex—which never changes—is identified at birth.

Second, the Obama Administration did not loosen the legal concept of “gender.” The Obama Administration attempted to circumvent Federal law by redefining the term “sex” by edict, proclaiming that in Title IX the term “sex” includes the subjective, internal, non-material experience referred to as “gender identity.” It is long past time that this brazen usurpation of legislative authority be administratively refuted.

Obama’s presumptuous “gender identity” edicts to multiple government agencies, including the departments of Education, Justice, and Housing and Urban Development; the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; and General Administration Services, are based on the subjective beliefs of “progressives” that biological sex has no meaning or importance relative to feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy that derive from sexual differentiation.

These edicts are based on the non-factual, quasi-religious belief that in private spaces shared by persons unrelated by blood or marriage—including strangers—subjective feelings about one’s maleness or femaleness should supersede objective, immutable biological sex. No explanation is ever provided, however, as to why exactly subjective feelings should trump objective biological sex in determining private space-usage policies.

And these edicts depend on the incoherent belief that, while it’s reasonable and legitimate for women to oppose performing bodily functions or undressing in the near vicinity of objectively male strangers, it’s not reasonable or legitimate for women to oppose performing bodily functions or undressing in the near vicinity of male strangers who seek to pass as women.

Leftists argue that the disguises of some passers are so convincing that their presence in the private spaces of same-sex persons will be disturbing. They’re right. If, for example, a woman has transformed her appearance through body-mutilating surgery, cross-sex-hormone-doping and cross-dressing, her presence in women’s facilities will be disturbing. But this raises several issues:

1.) It is a tacit acknowledgement by Leftists that biological sex matters. They base their justification of the use of opposite-sex facilities by “trans”-identifying men and women on their appearance as the sex they wish they were. So, if a man has used surgery and chemicals to create the verisimilitude of a female body, he believes his superficial, medically-constructed material self matters. But if women think biological sex as revealed in unaltered bodily materiality matters and, therefore, don’t want persons who are objectively male in their private spaces, they are deemed hateful, exclusionary, bigoted “transphobes.”

2.) At the same time, arguing that elaborate disguises should grant passers access to opposite-sex private spaces reinforces the very gender stereotypes “progressives” claim are arbitrary and socially constructed. While arguing out of one side of their mouths that “gender” is an arbitrary social construct, they argue out of the other side that these arbitrary social constructs (e.g., liking stereotypical female activities and wearing dresses) are definitive signs of essential femaleness that should grant them carte blanche access to women’s private spaces.

3.) Passing raises the question of whether deceit justifies or legitimizes unethical behavior. In other words, if it’s legitimate, reasonable, and justifiable for men and women to oppose changing clothes or performing bodily functions in the near vicinity of opposite-sex strangers, does disguising one’s biological sex through dress, chemicals, and/or surgery make invasion of someone else’s privacy legitimate, reasonable, and justifiable? If so, is voyeurism ethically justifiable so long as no one knows it’s happening? To be clear, I’m not equating voyeurism to sexual passing. Rather, I’m suggesting that if concealing one’s sex justifies otherwise unethical invasion of privacy, does concealing one’s presence justify otherwise unethical peeping?

4.) Finally, the problem of which facilities passers in really convincing disguises should use is a problem of the Left’s making. It is they who are attempting to socially construct a bizarre alternate reality that pretends the human species is not sexually dimorphic and that men’s and women’s non-material essences can be trapped in opposite-sex bodies. It is they who then exploit the government to try to impose this unreality on everyone, falsely claiming that the sexual integration of private spaces is required by commitments to equality, inclusivity, and compassion. (One foolish devotee of the “trans” superstition recently told me that equality demands that “transwomen” be treated exactly like women. She means that men who pretend to be women should be treated exactly like women, which is the inverse of what equality demands. Equality demands that like things be treated alike.)

Back to the title “‘Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration.” In case the writers haven’t noticed, it was Obama and his accomplices who tried to define “sex” out of existence in Title IX. In making explicit that Title IX says nothing about either “transgender” or  “gender identity,” the Trump Administration does not define out of existence persons who choose to identify as “trans.” What it does is make clear that the term “sex” refers to, denotes, and corresponds to objective, immutable biological sex. Only a leftist could believe that phenomena that have objective existence can be “defined out of existence”—you know, like claiming “women can have penises” or that “transwomen are women.”

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Trump-Administration-Stands-for-Biological-Reality-and-Sexual-Sanity.mp3

Read more:

Stuff You Should Know About “Trans”-Cultism

55 Members of American Academy of Pediatrics Devise Destructive “Trans” Policy

Leftists Redefine Bullying

 

IFI depends on the support of concerned-citizens like you. Donate now

-and, please-



Conversation with Homosexual Journalist

|

I was part of an extended Facebook conversation with Chuck Colbert, a homosexual journalist from the Boston area who graduated from Notre Dame University but has renounced his Catholic faith and converted to Reform Judaism. He expressed virtually every fallacious claim that homosexual ideologues everywhere express—claims that conservatives should be prepared to refute. In the service of helping to equip IFI readers for such conversations, here are some of his claims (in boldface) followed by rebuttals.

1.) “Jesus said nothing about gay people.”

First, Jesus also says nothing about pedophilia, incest, rape, polyamory, sadomasochism, voyeurism, or infantilism. Are we to assume that Jesus, therefore, approved of these types of acts?

Second, arguments from silence are considered weak—if not fallacious—arguments. Anyone who has as much academic training as Colbert claims to have should know that. The fact that Jesus says nothing on a topic tells us nothing about what he thinks on that topic. We do know that Jesus said this:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. 

Jesus does not abrogate any of the transcendent, eternal moral prescriptions and proscriptions found in the Old Testament.

2.) “There are more than a few biblical scholars who interpret the passages [about homosexuality] much differently.”

Not until the last quarter of the 20th Century did a single scholar in the history of the church interpret any passage in Scripture in such a way as to imply God approves of homosexual activity. Radical reinterpretations of Scripture passages that address homosexuality were not driven by new discoveries. They were driven by the sexual revolution and the sexual desires of same-sex attracted persons. That said, even today, there are homosexual scholars who admit that Scripture is clear that God condemns homosexual activity.

Biblical scholar and expert on the topic of the Bible and homosexuality, Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon cites two homosexual scholars, historian Louis Crompton and professor of Christian Studies, of Women’s and Gender Studies, of Classical Studies, and of Religious Studies at Brandeis University, Bernadette Brooten—both of whom affirm homosexual marriage—who argue that such a position is not consistent with Scripture.

3.) “There was no such thing in biblical times of a positive LGBT identity. The modern understanding of same-sex marriage is different from the biblical times.”

There was “no positive LGBT identity in biblical times” because God condemns homosexual activity. God’s condemnation of homosexual acts is categorical—no exceptions. Paul tells us that those who affirm such sin as righteousness will not see the kingdom of Heaven.

The hubris of this argument is astonishing. It suggests that there is something that Jesus—who is God, and, therefore, omniscient—didn’t know about human nature, human activity, or human experience.

4.) “The fact is that many, many LGBTs have been married within their various faith communities; their children are doing just fine. Take some time to get to know real LGBT people.”

Though homosexuals may be “married” legally, they are not in reality married because marriage has a nature, which Jesus himself said is the union of one man and one woman.

Getting to know those in faux-marriages does not change the Word of God.

How we feel about people has nothing whatsoever to do with a moral assessment of volitional acts. Colbert’s suggestion “to get to know real LGBT people” reveals that to him the experiences of fallen humans supersede Scripture when it comes to homosexuality.

Does he apply that principle consistently? Would he, for example, recommend that people who disapprove of consensual adult incest take some time to get to know two brothers who are in love and raising kids together as a means to eradicate their disapproval? Would he suggest “getting to know” the five people of assorted sexes in a poly union as the means by which to assess the morality of polyamory or poly-parenting?

Intentionally denying children either a mother or father is unconscionable no matter how nice the two parents are. In addition to the intrinsic right of children to be raised whenever possible by a mother and father, there are a number of studies that indicate children being raised by homosexuals are not fine—and some of these studies are far better studies than those worshipped by the homosexual community. The “LGBTQ” community savages these studies by applying standards that they never apply to studies whose results they like.

For example, homosexuals—including Colbert—frequently tout a study on lesbian parenting without citing the serious structural problems with the study including small sample size, method of selecting participants (i.e., “convenience sampling” vs. far superior “random sampling”), self-reporting nature of responses, absence of a control group, and failure to do long-term follow-up testing.

For research that contradicts the claim that children raised by homosexuals fare as well as children raised by mothers and fathers in intact families, click here, here, here, and here.

5.) “LGBTs are active and productive members within their communities. As more and more people get to know and understand gay people, they see that we are just as good as everybody else. I am sure God is fine with ‘their behavior.’”

The fact that homosexuals do good things tells us precisely nothing about God’s view of homosexual acts. Virtually all sinners do good things as well.

No one is good. Romans 3: 10-12: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.”

6.) “Why would you care anyway? LGBT life has no adverse effect on your life anyway.”

The homosexual and “trans” community really must stop disseminating the patent lie that widespread cultural approval of homosexual activity, the legal recognition of intrinsically non-marital unions as marriages, and acceptance of the “trans” ideology affect only the parties involved. Here are just some of the adverse effects that harm countless lives:

  • Lies that destroy temporal and eternal lives are being disseminated as truth.
  • Children are being denied their intrinsic right to be raised by a mother and a father.
  • Children are being fed the lie that either mothers or fathers are dispensable.
  • Government schools are teaching implicitly and explicitly the lie that disapproval of homosexual activity constitutes hatred of persons.
  • Schools are now teaching kindergartners about homosexual relationships—rather, they’re teaching children leftist ideas about homosexual relationships.
  • Schools are teaching that biological sex has no intrinsic or profound meaning, including regarding feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy in private spaces.
  • A feckless school board (April 27, 2018 Brabrand Briefing.pdf) in Fairfax, Virginia has proposed replacing the term “biological sex” in the health curriculum for grades 8-10 with the nonsensical, science-denying term “sex assigned at birth.” Apparently, board members aren’t “woke” to the fact that doctors don’t assign sex. They identify it.
  • Government schools are mandating that faculty lie, ordering them to refer to students who masquerade as the opposite-sex by incorrect pronouns.
  • Government schools are engaging in absolute censorship of resources that dissent from “LGBTQ” dogma even as they present resources that affirm it. That’s not education. That’s indoctrination.
  • Professors are losing their jobs for expressing conservative or theologically orthodox views on sexuality and marriage.
  • Christian owners of wedding-related businesses are being sued.
  • The Boy Scouts of America was forced to accept openly homosexual scouts and leaders, and then girls who pretend they’re boys.
  • Public libraries now have drag queen story hours for toddlers, and little boys dressed in drag march in the shameful “pride” parades that deface our once-great cities every June.
  • “Progressives” like New York Times writer Frank Bruni have reinterpreted First Amendment religious protections to be limited to pew, home, and heart.
  • Adoption and foster care agencies have been forced out of business for refusing to place children in the homes of homosexuals.
  • Corporate America, professional medical and mental health organizations, the mainstream press, and the arts promote the pro-homosexual/pro-“trans” ideology.
  • While leftists express their views of homosexuality freely at work, even starting pro-homosexual clubs and slapping silly safe space stickers on work spaces, conservatives risk loss of employment for expressing their views.
  • Brendan Eich was forced out of his job at Mozilla, the company he founded, for donating to Prop 8—the California proposition that would have banned homosexual marriage.
  • Minors are being surgically mutilated and chemically sterilized in a futile quest to mask their sex.

The homo/“trans” ideology not only affects but also harms everyone.

7.) “Gay people are in nature so how can they be against natural law. There have been gays throughout history.”

There are diverse definitions of the word “natural.” Colbert seems to be using it in the sense of “found or existing in the world,” which is not how it’s used in natural law theory. Natural law refers to the design of humans which points to their intended purposes (i.e., teleology).

All manner of disordered desires and deviant activities exist in nature, including all sorts of “paraphilias.” Would Colbert argue that because some humans exist who desire to be hurt or hurt others, to expose their genitals, or to have sex with toddlers that these phenomena are natural—in the natural law sense—and worthy of affirmation?

8.) “Your view for LGBT Christians is pretty judgmental. Take a look at the planks in your eyes before you go after the specks in LGBTs’ eyes.Judge not, or you will be judged.”

The erroneous claim that the Bible prohibits making judgments between right and wrong must be examined in light of the following verses: “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment” (John 7:24), and “The mouth of the righteous utters wisdom, and his tongue speaks justice” (Psalm 37:30).

The verse that says, “Judge not, that you be not judge” means that we are not to engage in unrighteous judgment. We are not to condemn hypocritically a sin that we are engaging in. We’re to recognize the universality of sin and offer forgiveness as we have been forgiven. This verse does not entail a refusal to judge between right and wrong behavior. It does not prohibit humans from making distinctions between moral and immoral conduct.

It’s absurd to claim that the Bible prohibits Christians from making statements about what constitutes moral conduct (i.e., to judge). If it did mean that, we could not say that slavery, racism, bestiality, polyamory, selfishness, fornication, adultery, aggression, incest, lust, or gossip is immoral, for surely those moral propositions constitute the kind of judging that repels critics like Colbert.

Everyone does and should judge right from wrong. Every civilized human makes judgments every day between right and wrong actions. Christians have no moral authority to judge the salvific status of others, but Christians have every right to discriminate between right and wrong actions and to express those beliefs publicly. The ethical legitimacy of public speech is not dependent on the subjective response of those who hear such expressions.

As he railed against judgmentalism, here are some of the terms Colbert used to describe those who disapprove of homosexual acts: “self-righteous,” “sanctimonious piety,” “condescending attitude,” “rabid,” “bigoted,” “prejudiced,” and “hateful.”

9.)  “I did not choose to be gay anymore than you chose to be, presumably, straight. Being gay has nothing to do with a choice.”

While erotic attraction to persons of the same sex is not chosen, acting on those feelings is, indeed, chosen. Humans experience myriad powerful, persistent, unchosen feelings. Our task as moral beings is to determine on which of those feelings we are morally justified to act. And that task requires some arbiter of morality—some basis on which to judge right from wrong.

10.)  “I am not defying God. God does not condemn gay people, our lives and our love. God is fine with his creation of gay people.”

On what basis can Colbert make the claim that he is not defying God? He can’t rationally make such a claim based on either the plain words of the Old or New Testament.

God does, indeed, condemn homosexuals as well as many others. God condemns anyone who rejects the work of Christ on the Cross. One of the clearest signs of being saved from God’s wrath is repentance. Doing the will of the Father and confessing when we fail are signs that we are saved. Perpetual embrace of that which God condemns and calling that which God condemns “good” are sure signs that one will not see the kingdom of Heaven:

Or know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with men, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. (1 Corinthians 6:9-10)

God creates men and women. Through the fall of Adam, all of us are born with a fallen nature and are in need of redemption. While God for a time allows the disordering of his creation, he no more created in humans homoerotic desire than he created in humans adulterous desire, polyamorous desire, incestuous desire, “minor-attraction,” murderous desire, the desire to be an amputee, the desire to gossip, pride, covetousness, or physical anomalies.

If Christians truly love their neighbors as themselves, they should be prepared to respond courageously to claims like Colbert’s. Authentic love depends on knowing first what is true.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Conversation-with-Homosexual-Journalist.mp3

Subscribe to the IFI YouTube channel
and never miss a video report or special program!



You Don’t Want to be a Burden, Do You?

|

An April 13, 2018 USA Today op-ed titled “Make an End-of-life plan or Lose your Money and Choices in your Dying Days” by Hattie Bryant begins with the statement “End-of-life care can bankrupt your family and rob you of choices. End the denial about dying. Make a plan in case you end up seriously ill and frail.” (Emphasis added)

Ms. Bryant is very upfront about using the economic argument about aging and the enormous toll it can take financially and personally on the family as well as medical costs. She states that “in 2011, Medicare spent $554 billion and 28%, or about $170 billion, on patients’ last six months of life. After $170 billion is spent, those patients are still dead.”

Her solution is a new kind of economic advance directive she developed (and is selling as a book titled “I’ll Have It My Way: Taking Control of End-of-Life Decisions“ ) “that deals with how you want your funds spent when you are seriously ill or frail.” (All emphasis added)

SHOULD WE HAVE A “DUTY TO DIE”?

Back in 1984, Governor Richard Lamm of Colorado found himself in the middle of a firestorm of outrage when, as the New York Times reported, “Governor Lamm Asserts Elderly, If Very Ill, Have a ‘Duty to Die”.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

“Elderly people who are terminally ill have a ”duty to die and get out of the way” instead of trying to prolong their lives by artificial means, Gov. Richard D. Lamm of Colorado said Tuesday.

People who die without having life artificially extended are similar to ”leaves falling off a tree and forming humus for the other plants to grow up,” the Governor told a meeting of the Colorado Health Lawyers Association at St. Joseph’s Hospital.

”You’ve got a duty to die and get out of the way,” said the 48-year-old Governor. ”Let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.”

This philosophy was echoed in 2014 by one of the architects of Obamacare, Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, when he wrote “Why I Hope to Die at 75-An argument that society and families—and you—will be better off if nature takes its course swiftly and promptly” for The Atlantic Magazine.

At age 57 at the time, Dr. Emanuel states that while death is a loss, there “is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss” that “renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.” (Emphasis added)

He states that he will stop trying to prolong his own life by age 75.

CONCLUSION

Helping to care for many terminally ill or seriously disabled relatives, friends and patients of all ages for many decades both professionally and personally, I have a different perspective.

We are all born dependent on others for care and many of us need at least some help from others at the end of our lives. This can be hard at times-as even parents of newborns will attest-but the rewards are great both for the helper and the person being helped.

I remember when my mother with Alzheimer’s and terminal thyroid cancer was dying in 1988. It wasn’t the most convenient time for us, to say the least. I was a suddenly single parent with three young children and financially struggling.  My mother no longer recognized me but, as I told a friend, the most important issue was that I recognized her.  As a family, we did what was medically reasonable for my mother to help her without either prolonging or hastening her dying.

Taking care of my mother was a wonderful, if occasionally difficult, experience and I am grateful that we were able to keep her at home almost to the very end.

The final result was that my mother was kept  safe, comfortable and loved. Her funeral was truly a celebration of her life and my children learned an important lesson about the circle of life and taking care of each other. We still talk fondly about their time helping with grandma, even after 30 years.

When I made out my own advance directive, I made sure that it was as protective as possible against a hastened death. I don’t fear death. I do fear the bioethicists  and others who use economics and fear to push especially older people into prematurely signing away their rights to even basic care and what this does to our society.

This article was originally published at NancyValko.com



Virtue-Signalling from Leftists on Arming Teachers

|

**CAUTION: Not for younger readers**

Leave it to Chicago Tribune lifestyle expert Heidi Stevens to come up with another dumb idea. In an essay titled “Who do we become if we give teachers guns?,” in which she ruminates on the proposal to allow teachers to volunteer to be trained to use a gun in those rare instances when a mass killer starts killing school children, Stevens offers this deep thought:

Asking teachers to die for our children is very different from asking teachers to kill for them.

When did parents or anyone else ask teachers to die for our children? And to my knowledge, no one has proposed even asking teachers to carry and be trained to use guns—or as Stevens puts it, “to kill” for our children. She obviously phrases it like this to imply that defensively killing someone who is attempting to murder innocents is no different from murder. Killing is killing in the Upside Down in which Leftists live and move and have their being.

Here’s a more accurate description of what some have proposed: Knowing that there are many teachers who are already licensed and trained gun owners, some have proposed asking teachers if they would like to carry and be trained to use guns at school.

Stevens’ fatuous statement implies that asking teachers to die for our children is acceptable but asking if they are willing to kill a murderer to protect our defenseless children is beyond the pale.

Stevens quotes Al Vernacchio, a Pennsylvania teacher whose “writings” she follows:

I would rather throw my body in front of one of my students than raise a gun against an assailant. I may lose my life, but I will have preserved my humanity.

Vernacchio signals his virtue by claiming that “preserving” his “humanity” demands he use less effective ways of protecting his defenseless students from a murderer than more effective ways. Somehow in his twisted world—and it is twisted—his humanity is preserved by not killing a murderer, thereby making it more likely his students will be killed.

I wrote about the troubling Al Vernacchio in 2011. He’s a 54-year-old homosexual “sex scholar” and former Catholic who is “married” to a man and teaches English and human sexuality at a private Quaker school in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, where he promotes Leftist views of sexuality to teens. Of course, Leftist Stevens would follow Vernacchio.

A 2011 New York Times article on sex education features Vernacchio and shares the topics he covers in his class on sexuality for teens. Vernacchio encourages kids to share and discuss colloquial metaphors relating to sex and explains their meanings. He discusses penis sizes, giving and receiving oral sex, and shaving pubic hair. He shows a “research video… of a woman ejaculating… and a couple of dozen up-close photographs of vulvas and penises.” Vernacchio has handed out worksheets “with the five senses printed along the top and asked the students to try and list sexual activities that optimized each. (There were examples to prod their thinking: under hearing, for instance, was ‘listening to your partner read an erotic story.’)” Vernacchio, who says he doesn’t “necessarily see the decision to become sexually active when you’re 17 as an unhealthy one,” also “rarely misses a chance to ask his students to examine gender bias in their sexual attitudes or behavior.”

This is the kind of person who Stevens looks to for insight.

Stevens urges Americans to carefully consider “what we sacrifice when we fill our classrooms with guns. What we sacrifice when we fail to examine, thoroughly and honestly, why this country has one of the highest rates of death by firearm in the developed world, why mass shootings have broken out in churches and movie theaters, college campuses and a nightclub, an outdoor concert and, again and again, schools.”

Stevens’ hyperbolic claim that allowing  gun-owning teachers to choose to carry at school constitutes “filling our classrooms with guns” is demagogic nonsense. Even having one armed teacher in every other classroom would not constitute “filling our classrooms with guns.”

Since this country has always had a significant number of armed citizens, Stevens is wise in asking why we are now seeing such high rates of firearm deaths and mass shootings at churches, theaters, college campuses, schools, and music venues. What’s changed over the past thirty or so years?

Could it be the breakdown or rejection of the nuclear family?

Could it be exposure to violence in our video games, television shows, and movies?

Could it be the loss of small community schools and the concomitant growth of large schools that breed social hierarchies and are inhospitable places for those who are different?

Could it be the rejection of transcendent meaning and objective truth by a post-modern culture that reveres subjectivism, relativism, nihilism, Gnosticism, and even solipsism?

Could it be the abandonment of faith in Jesus Christ?

Stevens characterizes the proposal to allow trained, gun-owning teachers as an admission of “defeat in the fight to keep guns away from our children and decide, instead, to forever link ‘school’ with ‘killing ground.’”:

Who do we become when we arm our teachers? We become a nation that no longer trusts our collective humanity to triumph over evil. We commit to being so enamored of guns, so inured to bloodshed, so unwilling to imagine a better way, that we’d weaponize our classrooms.

Nice platitudinous rhetoric that ignores reality. Because of doctrinaire Leftists, we can no longer collectively agree on something as obvious as it’s inhumane to force women to share private spaces with men.

Moreover, one way to triumph over evil is to stop it dead in its tracks, which guns do better than throwing one’s body over the body of one student and better than appealing to some vague notion of “collective humanity.”

How grotesque, dishonest, and—dare I say—inhumane of Stevens to suggest that arming willing, trained teachers against people with murderous intent against defenseless children constitutes being “enamored of guns” or “inured to bloodshed.”

Does the presence of armed security at parades, the Olympics, the Capitol, and the White House mean Americans are enamored of guns or are inured to bloodshed?

Acknowledging the reality in which we live is not the same as being inured to bloodshed. Wanting to provide willing teachers a better means than their own bodies for defending children against armed assailants is not equivalent to being enamored of guns.

Stevens closes by quoting a teen who made this statement at CNN’s anti-gun advocacy spectacle that was promoted as a townhall meeting: “If a kid throws a rock at another kid in a sandbox, you don’t give every other kid a rock.”

So much wrong with that analogy, so little time.

Let’s start with the obvious: rocks aren’t guns. Generally, rocks don’t kill.

Second, any adult present when a little child begins to throw rocks could physically stop the child because adults are more powerful than small children. In other words, the physical strength of adults provides a superior defense against the rock-throwing assault of a little child.

Third, let’s imagine a sandbox full of very young children who for some reason can’t escape. A young bully approaches and starts hurling rocks that have the potential to grievously harm or kill the young children. Also present is an adult, but she is confined to a wheel chair with no ability to physically stop the rock-thrower. The rock-thrower is pelting the little ones. They’re screaming and crying. Some are unconscious, some are bleeding. The adult now notices a pile of rocks beside her on the ground. Should she simply sit there, or should she use the rocks to try to stop the carnage? Which of these terrible choices poses a greater threat to her humanity: meeting force with commensurate force, or letting the little ones be mowed down?

Fourth, Nikolas Kruz is not a little child. He is a young adult.

Generally, it’s not wise to look to teenagers for wisdom. They have limited life experience. For the most part, they aren’t particularly well-read. If they’re in public schools, they’re likely not particularly well-taught. The impulse-control part of teenage brains is not fully developed. And they tend to be rebellious. It’s especially unwise to look to traumatized, grieving teens for wisdom or answers to complex social problems.

A commenter on IFI’s Facebook page asserted that arming teachers turns a non-violent place into a place of violence. No, it doesn’t. Killers turn non-violent places into places of violence. Arming teachers is one proposal for preserving schools as non-violent places.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Virtue-Signalling-from-Leftists-on-Arming-Teachers_01.mp3

RESCHEDULED: IFI Worldview Conference May 5th

We have rescheduled our annual Worldview Conference featuring well-know apologist John Stonestreet for Saturday, May 5th at Medinah Baptist Church. Mr. Stonestreet is s a dynamic speaker and the award-winning author of “Making Sense of Your World” and his newest offer: “A Practical Guide to Culture.”

Join us for a wonderful opportunity to take enhance your biblical worldview and equip you to more effectively engage the culture.

Click HERE to learn more or to register!



The Culture War Is Not Over: Leftists Fight Over Identity Politics

|

Here is a recent headline from the Independent Journal Review: “Salon: Identity Politics Is ‘Dragging the Progressive Agenda Down.’” IJR’s Pardes Seleha explains that yes, indeed, a “far-left publication” [Salon] is “finally denouncing its long-embraced identity politics…”

Salon isn’t the only place on the political left to find critics of I.D. politics. Last November, Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia wrote an op ed that ran in the New York Times titled, “The End of Identity Liberalism.” Here was his opening:

It is a truism that America has become a more diverse country. It is also a beautiful thing to watch. Visitors from other countries, particularly those having trouble incorporating different ethnic groups and faiths, are amazed that we manage to pull it off. Not perfectly, of course, but certainly better than any European or Asian nation today. It’s an extraordinary success story.

But how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of and “celebrate” our differences. Which is a splendid principle of moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age. In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.

So, Lilla writes, “the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end.”

The “fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups,” he adds. Ouch. Trigger alert!

At the level of electoral politics, Lilla says, “identity liberalism has failed most spectacularly, as we have just seen. National politics in healthy periods is not about ‘difference,’ it is about commonality.”

Why is this series about identity politics running at the Illinois Family Institute’s website? Because those who have been running up the white flag of surrender in the “culture war” should pull down that flag immediately.

Another name for that culture war is identity politics. Aggrieved groups demand their rights. Women are to be treated to taxpayer funded abortion. The LGBT(etc.) crowd are to be treated as if their sex-centric identity is legitimate. College campus snowflakes are to be treated as if they were grown-ups.

Professor Lilla’s article attracted a good bit of attention on both the left and the right.

Here was Rich Lowry writing at the National Review:

A recent essay in the New York Times elegantly diagnosed the problem and inadvertently illustrated it. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and highly respected intellectual historian, wrote that “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender, and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.”

His piece itself occasioned a moral panic, focused overwhelmingly on how Lilla is, in fact, himself a white male. His op-ed was denounced from the left as “the whitest thing I’ve ever read,” and part of an “unconscionable” assault on “the very people who just put the most energy into defeating Trumpism, coming from those who will be made least vulnerable by Trump’s ascension.”

Lilla was so undeterred by the criticism from his fellow Leftists that he decided to turn the topic into a 160 page book, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics.

Beverly Gage, writing at the New York Times, wasn’t completely happy with the effort.

Still gobsmacked by the 2016 election, many liberals may be yearning for a thoughtful, generous and well-informed book to put it all in perspective, a strategic account of where they’ve been, where they are now and where they ought to go. In “The Once and Future Liberal,” Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, says his aim is to unify today’s fractured liberals around an agenda “emphasizing what we all share and owe one another as citizens, not what differentiates us.” Unfortunately, he does this in a way guaranteed to alienate vast swaths of his audience, and to deepen left-of-center divisions. Rather than engage in good faith with movements like Black Lives Matter, Lilla chooses to mock them, reserving a particularly mean-spirited sneer for today’s campus left. “Elections are not prayer meetings, and no one is interested in your personal testimony,” he instructs “identity” activists, urging them to shut up, stop marching and “get real.”

You can see why I included that entire paragraph. It was too much fun not to.

So, it’s clear that not everyone on the political left wants to move past identity politics — and that is very good news for those of us on the political right. Again, here is Beverly Gage:

This is not, of course, a work of historical scholarship. It is a polemic about the dangers of “identity liberalism,” and a critique of the misguided professors and students who seem so enamored of it.

Beverly in not a fan, either:

Despite his lofty calls for solidarity, Lilla can’t seem to get out of his own way — or even to take his own advice. He urges fellow liberals to focus on “the hard and unglamorous task of persuading people very different from themselves to join a common effort,” then proceeds to insult his own audience…

“The Once and Future Liberal” is a missed opportunity of the highest order, trolling disguised as erudition.

One note of thanks to Ms. Gage: Since I’m not going to read Lilla’s book, I appreciate her including this quote in her review — again, too much fun:

“Elections are not prayer meetings, and no one is interested in your personal testimony,” [Lilla] instructs “identity” activists, urging them to shut up, stop marching and “get real.”

Let me close with Michael Brown, also writing last December partly in response to the Lilla op ed:

[Leftist] radical agendas can only go so far before the people begin to push back, and that it is partly what happened with the recent elections.

Enough with the divisive ways of identity politics. Enough with the attack on traditional American values. Enough with the assault on our religious freedoms. Enough.

So, in that sense, yes, we are witnessing a larger moral and cultural backlash, even if some of these issues were not front and center in the Trump campaign. And to the extent we can make the case for a biblically-based, moral conservatism, one that treats everyone fairly but that recognizes that certain boundaries are healthy and good, we can turn the hearts of the younger generation as well as recapture the hearts of the older generation.

As my close colleagues and I have said for the last 15-plus years, on with the revolution.

Also worth reading on this topic is Kay S. Hymowitz‘s article “Why Identity Politics Are Not All-American,” where she opens with a reference to Mark Lilla’s NYT article.

Read more:  Series: Identity Politics & Paraphilias

PLEASE consider a financial gift to IFI to sustain our work.
We have stood firm for 25 years, working to boldly bring a biblical perspective to public policy.

donationbutton



Kill HB 40: Wombs Should be Sanctuary Spaces and No-Kill Shelters

|

If signed into law by Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner, HB 40, which passed in both the Illinois House and Senate, will force taxpayers to subsidize abortions for women on Medicaid and for women covered by state employee health insurance.

Feticidal maniacs in Illinois—including lawmakers—are desperate to have Rauner sign this bill into law. They reason that since abortion is legal, the public should subsidize it. Leftists believe all Illinois taxpayers should pay for poor women’s and state employees’ choices to have their unborn children killed. Ironically, while Leftists command that men never express an opinion on abortion, Leftists also say male taxpayers should fund abortion. Word to Leftists:

1.) Those tiny humans growing inside women get half their DNA from men.

2.) The issue of whether the product of conception between two humans is a human with rights is a human rights issue—not exclusively a women’s issue.

3.) There are no criteria that Leftists can manufacture to defend the right of some humans to snuff out the lives of other humans that apply only to incipient human lives. Whether those criteria are intrinsic or extrinsic to humans in the womb, they all can be applied to humans who escaped the torture chamber that the womb has become. Intrinsic criteria such as immature development, dependency status, lack of sentience, or lack of perfection apply to humans outside the womb as well. Extrinsic criteria such as being considered a financial or emotional burden also apply to humans outside the womb.

4.) According to Leftists, men can have wombs, menstruate, become pregnant, and give birth, and, therefore, abortion is a men’s issue.

5.) Using the language of “rights,” feticide-defenders are appealing to the respect Americans have for “negative rights”—also known as liberties—(e.g., the right to vote, assemble, exercise one’s religion, and speak freely), which are not accompanied by any obligation for others to subsidize them. But what feticide-defenders are really suggesting—without explicitly saying—is that women have a “positive right” (i.e., an entitlement) to abortion, which imposes a duty on others to subsidize it. Abortion, however, is not an entitlement, and society has no obligation to pay for women to get them. Neither wanting something; nor really, really wanting something; nor experiencing suffering from not obtaining this desperately desired thing means the public has an obligation to provide it.

7.) We, as a benevolent society, have created safety nets to provide for basic health care for those who are unable to provide for it themselves. No matter how many times feticide-defenders call the killing of incipient human life “health care,” it’s not. Killing human fetuses is neither health care nor reproduction. It’s death facilitation and anti-reproduction. If Leftists want to help poor women and state employees kill their offspring, they have the choice and negative right to do so.

In an editorial appearing in Crain’s Chicago Business, K. Sujata, president and CEO of the Chicago Foundation for Women (CFW), frets about the implications of an HB 40 veto. She worries about the economic interests of pregnant women, many of whom choose to have sex when they can’t afford or don’t want to provide for the needs of humans who may result from their choice to have sex:

HB40 also removes restrictions on reproductive health care coverage that put women’s economic security at risk…. In order for women and their families to achieve full economic security, all women in Illinois must be able to make the important decision of when to start or grow their family.

Do Illinoisans really have a moral obligation to provide for the “full economic security” of state employees? Do Illinoisans really have a moral obligation to pay for the destruction of the tiny family members already growing inside of poor women?

And how does killing humans—including female humans—whose lives are just beginning fulfill this core principle of the Chicago Foundation for Women:

We believe that equality is a universal human right, and we uphold respect and dignity as guiding principles in all our work.

If Leftists really believe that more developed, sentient, able-bodied, and cognitively superior humans have the right to exterminate less-developed and cognitively and physically impaired humans whose self-awareness is diminished or absent, then they are kindred spirits with Princeton University bio-unethicist Peter Singer who makes the same argument but applies it to post-natal humans as well. What possible ethical difference do a few days or few inches of birth canal make in terms of the right to kill?

Remember ten years ago when Hillary Clinton expressed her belief that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare. And by rare, I mean rare“? Northwestern University law professor Andrew Koppelman expressed the same sentiment during a forum at Northwestern Law School several years ago. When I asked why abortion should be rare if incipient human life is so devoid of personhood as to be undeserving of even minimal constitutional protection, he had no answer.

If Leftists really wanted abortion to be rare, they wouldn’t be fighting tooth and nail for the passage of HB 40, which, it is estimated, will result in an additional 15,000 abortions each year at taxpayer expense.

But no one actually believes Leftists care about whether abortion is rare or common. To them destroying human fetuses is no different from excising tumors.

Wombs should be sanctuary spaces and no-kill people shelters where all humans are safe. Governor Rauner should kill HB 40.

Take ACTION: Click Here to email Governor Bruce Rauner. Urge him to keep his pledge to veto HB 40. Also, please continue to call the governor’s public comment line every day until this is resolved: (217) 782-0244 and (312) 814-2121. 

You can also send Gov. Rauner a message via Twitter: @GovRauner

Listen to Laurie read this article in this podcast:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/2Kill-HB-40-Wombs-Should-Be-Sanctuary-Spaces-and-No-Kill-Shelters.mp3

PLEASE consider a financial gift to IFI to sustain our work.
We’ve stood firm for 25 years, work diligently to accomplish our mission to
“boldly bring a biblical perspective to public policy” in Illinois.

 



You Know It When You See It

|

It’s dangerous to paint with a broad brush. I think we do that too often when we, as conservatives, go after the press for media bias. Many times when I see conservative leaders decry media bias, I ask “was that a biased story, or were you just unprepared for the interview?”

Now that’s not to say media bias isn’t real – everyone knows that the majority of the press comes from a liberal perspective.  Even CNN’s Jake Tapper has admitted that media bias is real, and Mark Leibovich of the New York Times agrees that most of the media is center-left.

One of the most obvious examples of media bias shined through in the last few weeks.

Here’s the situation: You have two high profile state Attorney Generals. Both have clear and distinct ideologies:

Attorney General #1 is a conservative.

Attorney General #2 is a liberal.

As such, they work with and receive donations from organizations that support their ideologies.

When Attorney General #1 is making national news, these ties are reported in the Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post, etc, etc. When Attorney General #2 is in the news, these ties are conspicuously left out. You get one guess on which one is the conservative…

If you guessed the Attorney General #1, you win!

Attorney General #1 is Scott Pruitt, the former Oklahoma Attorney General, who is now President Trump’s head of the EPA (a great selection in my opinion). As Oklahoma Attorney General, Pruitt sued the EPA more than a dozen times because, under President Obama, the agency continually issued unlawful regulations on states and businesses.

The coal and gas industries Obama was attempting to regulate were supportive of these lawsuits, and therefore, supported Pruitt. I think most people would agree that it’s noteworthy and good journalism for the media to report on Pruitt’s ties with the oil and gas industry as he’s taking on a job like this. This certainly doesn’t disqualify him, but it’s relevant information.

Meanwhile… in California. Two Attorney Generals have investigated David Daleiden and The Center for Medical Progress. Daleiden is the undercover journalist who exposed Planned Parenthood’s sale of aborted baby-body parts.

Yet instead of going after Planned Parenthood for their inhumane business practices, the California AG’s have turned their wrath on Daleiden: first raiding his home, and now pressing charges.

The two California Attorney Generals Kamala Harris (who is now a U.S. Senator) and Xavier Becerra have received tens of thousands of dollars in donations from Planned Parenthood and other backers of the abortion industry.

Yet when this story broke in the Associated Press, this detail was left out. Don’t you think it’s a little relevant that the person pressing charges against Daleiden received campaign contributions from the organization that was embarrassed and exposed by his reporting?

Apparently none of the major media outlets did. Showcasing once again why trust in the media is at an all time low.

Read more:  62% in U.S.: News media has party favorites



Liberal Censorship

|

When liberal journalists come out and confess their bias, it’s tempting to say, “The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.” But don’t. This is good news.

Writing at the New York Times recently, columnist Nicholas Kristof took that hard first step. The title of his piece says it all: “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance.”

“We progressives,” he writes, “believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table, so long as they aren’t conservatives.” (Or, one might reasonably add, evangelical Christians).

Kristof and fellow liberals profess a love for tolerance and diversity. But when it comes to the most important kind—diversity of thought—he admits that the gatekeepers in academia and the media actively stigmatize those who hold views different from their own.

“We’re fine with people who don’t look like us,” he writes, “as long as they think like us.”

Universities, once recognized as bastions of tolerance and diversity, bear perhaps the greatest blame. Kristof cites studies showing that just 6 to 11 percent of humanities professors are conservatives. Fewer than one in ten social-studies professors call themselves conservative. For perspective, consider that twice that number identify as Marxists!

And lest anyone blame this on conservative self-selection, a third of academics openly admit that they would be less likely to hire a qualified candidate who voted Republican. Black, evangelical sociologist George Yancey says he faces more discrimination on campus for his Christian beliefs than he does off-campus for the color of his skin. This aggressive bias turns classrooms into hard-left “echo-chambers” where only one side of any debate is ever heard.

Kristof took his concerns to Facebook, where he asked his mostly liberal followers why those who pride themselves on tolerance can be so intolerant. The replies he got were stunning.

“Much of the ‘conservative’ worldview consists of ideas that are known empirically to be false,” commented one fellow liberal.

Why stop with conservatives? asked another. “How about we make faculties more diverse by hiring idiots?”

Wow. Kristof was understandably dumbfounded. “My Facebook followers have incredible compassion for war victims in South Sudan, for kids who have been trafficked, even for abused chickens, but no obvious empathy for conservative scholars facing discrimination.”

Speaking of Facebook, Kristof wasn’t the only one this month coming clean about left-wing bias. Several former Facebook employees recently told Gizmodo that the social media titan’s “news curators” “routinely [suppressed] conservative news” on the site’s trending module.

Rather than serving as an unbiased meter of what people are talking about, concluded Gizmodo, “Facebook’s news section reflects “the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation.”

Whatever your political persuasion, this skewing of education and news to push an agenda is toxic to free societies. It’s gotten so bad that even a few brave liberals are asking, “Is this really what we stand for?”

And we should applaud them! But it’s only a start. If we want other voices heard in academia and the media, we have to make the case for why that’s crucial—both by helping our friends and neighbors recognize the bias, and by offering our own voices in answer to the echo.

FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News
Michael Nunez | gizmodo.com | May 09, 2016

Facebook news selection is in hands of editors not algorithms, documents show
Sam Thielman | The Guardian | May 12, 2016

This article was originally posted at BreakPoint.org



“Progressives” and Religious Liberty

|

“Progressives” who view the cultural embrace of deviant sexuality as good seek to eradicate the last cultural obstacle to its universal embrace: biblical truth. Since that’s not possible, they seek instead to eradicate religious liberty by incrementally narrowing the cultural terrain in which the “free exercise of religion” is permitted to roam.

“Progressives” committed to the absolutely free exercise of sexual deviance view religious liberty as exercised by theologically orthodox Christians as a malignant tumor that harms the health of the republic. In order to destroy this insalubrious tumor without destroying the host, religious liberty must be excised slowly and carefully, tissue by tissue.

There’s no clearer evidence that “progressives” believe religious liberty has no place in the public square than the virulent response to reasonable laws proposed or passed in a few states to protect that which the First Amendment already protects.

Of course, since foolish inconsistency is the hallmark of little “progressive” minds, religious liberty for those who affirm heterodox or heretical religious beliefs is hunky dory because such beliefs neither prescribe nor proscribe. When it comes to sexuality, such beliefs affirm anything and everything. And affirmation of desire is the Left’s supreme truth.

But do all “progressives” share the beliefs of  New York Times columnist Frank Bruni who ordained that religious liberty should be restricted to “pews, homes and hearts.”

Here’s what Michelle Obama said about faith:

Our faith journey isn’t just about showing up on Sunday for a good sermon and good music and a good meal. It’s about what we do Monday through Saturday as well, especially…when …we’re making those daily choices about how to live our lives.
 
We see that in the life of Jesus Christ.  Jesus didn’t limit his ministry to the four walls of the church. We know that….And our charge is to find Him everywhere, every day by how we live our lives. That is how we practice our faith. You see, living out our eternal salvation is not a once-a-week kind of deal.  

And here’s what the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said in “Letter from Birmingham Jail”:

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.

…

More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God…. 

…

I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.

…

I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?“ 

…

In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful–in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.”‘ But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent–and often even vocal–sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. 

Whose words more comport with the First Amendment: Frank Bruni’s or Martin Luther King Jr.’s? Whose words have inspired courageous, noble, and sacrificial works? Whose words more resonate with truth?

While children in elementary schools are being taught the body and soul-destroying lies that homoerotic activity is good, that families in which children are intentionally deprived of either mothers or fathers are good, that rejection of one’s physical embodiment as male or female is good, and that marriage has no intrinsic nature, many Christians say and do exactly what “LGBTQQAP” activists want them to say and do: nothing.

And now the government is ordering Christians to use their labor, their gifts, and their property in the service of a type of event that God hates. Such unjust laws and court decisions must be resisted. Christians must resist all efforts to undermine the liberty that Michelle Obama and Martin Luther King Jr. urge Christians to embrace and make visible through works.

“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men,
knowing that from the Lord you will receive the
inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.”
~Colossians 3: 23-24

Follow IFI on Social Media!yellow-balloons-shutterstock_63832522

Be sure to check us out on social media for other great articles, quips, quotes, pictures, memes, events and updates.

Like us on Facebook HERE.
Subscribe to us on YouTube HERE!
Follow us on Twitter @ProFamilyIFI



Christians to the Closet?

|

The U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to hear a case that could do for same-sex marriage what Roe v. Wade did for abortion-on-demand.

What concerns me, besides the obvious prospect of having marriage permanently redefined in American law, is the impact of such a ruling on religious freedom. As you know from listening to BreakPoint, there is ample reason for concern on that score. Recent events have demonstrated that the clash between gay rights and religious freedom is a zero-sum game.

That’s why a recent column by Frank Bruni of the New York Times concerned me so profoundly.

From the start, Bruni, who is himself gay, demonstrates that he does not, or perhaps cannot, understand this issue. He begins by telling readers that he “chafes” at being called “a threat to your religious liberty.”

He then goes on to dispute the idea that allowing “men who have romantic relationships with other men and maybe want to marry them” will somehow run roughshod over someone’s creed. In fact, he calls such a belief “absurd.”

Bruni calls “the deference that many politicians show” to religious liberty concerns that are raised by same-sex marriage and gay rights “an illustration of religion’s favored status in a country that’s still working out this separation-of-church-and-state business and hasn’t yet gotten it quite right.”

Not surprisingly, he compares those raising the issue of religious freedom to segregationists whom, he is quick to remind his readers, also claimed religious warrant.  He ends by saying that “I support the right of people to believe what they do and say what they wish — in their pews, homes and hearts. But outside of those places? You must put up with me, just as I put up with you.”

Of course, he supports no such thing. Bruni’s definition of “putting up” with religious believers can be summed up in a phrase he is no doubt familiar with: the closet.

Imagine that the shoe were on the other foot and a Christian wrote that he supported the right of gay people to “do what they wish in their clubs, homes, and hearts” but that outside the subject must not be broached. Bruni would certainly reject that idea as “bigotry.”

Yet, Bruni and others clearly want to stuff Christians into the closet that they recently escaped.

As to the idea that same-sex marriage and gay rights more generally pose a threat to religious liberty, that isn’t a Christian creation. More than a decade ago, Chai Feldman of Georgetown Law School, wrote about what she saw as the emerging conflict between gay rights laws and religious freedom.

As she put it, “When we pass a law that says you may not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, we are burdening those who have an alternative moral assessment of gay men and lesbians.”

For Feldman, who is herself gay, most of the time protecting the “dignity” of the gay person should trump religious freedom. As she told Maggie Gallagher, “I’m having a hard time coming up with any case in which religious liberty should win.”

Now, obviously I disagree with Feldman on the priority we should accord religious freedom. But I give her credit for recognizing the conflict, something that seems to completely escape Frank Bruni. For him, the conflict, along with those who disagree with him, is something best left in—you guessed it—the closet.

Read More:

NY Times Columnist Wants to Confine Religious Liberty to Church Closet
Written by Laurie Higgins

This article was originally posted at the BreakPoint.org website.



Sharia No No-Go Zones? Really?

|

The Leftist media and Islamic supremacist groups have been doing a victory dance ever since Saturday night, when Fox News issued an apology for statements made on the air by terror expert Steve Emerson and others about Muslim no-go zones in Britain and France. However, the apology doesn’t say what it has widely reported as saying – and there is considerable evidence that Muslim areas in both countries are a growing law enforcement and societal problem.

Fox Report host Julie Banderas stated:

Over the course of this last week we have made some regrettable errors on air regarding the Muslim population in Europe, particularly with regard to England and France. Now, this applies especially to discussions of so-called ‘no-go zones,’ areas where non-Muslims allegedly aren’t allowed in and police supposedly won’t go.

To be clear, there is no formal designation of these zones in either country and no credible information to support the assertion there are specific areas in these countries that exclude individuals based solely on their religion.

There are certainly areas of high crime in Europe as there are in the United States and other countries — where police and visitors enter with caution. We deeply regret the errors and apologize to any and all who may have taken offense, including the people of France and England.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s joyous headline read: “Fox News admits ‘no-go zones’ are fantasy.” The far-Left Crooks and Liars blog exulted: “Fox Pundits Finally ‘Apologize’ After A Week Of Being Mocked For ‘No Go Zones’ Claim.” More restrained but still unmistakably gleeful was the New York Times: “Fox News Apologizes for False Claims of Muslim-Only Areas in England and France.” The Leftist media has seized on Fox’s apology to declare that there are aren’t any no-go zones in France or Britain – and by extension that there is no problem with Muslim populations in Europe. NewHounds’s summation was typical: “Fox News has become the laughingstock of Europe this week as first England and then France lampooned its ignorant, Islamophobic reporting.”

The only problem with all the cork popping around Fox’s apology was that there is a problem with Muslim areas in Europe – and the Fox apology didn’t go so far as to say there wasn’t. To be sure, the controversy began with undeniably inaccurate statements from Emerson. He said on Fox on January 11 that “there are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in.” That is false, and Emerson has acknowledged that and apologized.

However, Emerson was not guilty of fabrication, just of overstatement. Some of the comments on a piece in the UK’s Daily Mail about his gaffe and British Prime Minister David Cameron’s reaction to it (he called Emerson a “complete idiot”) insisted that Emerson was at least partially right: “Just shows cameron doesn’t even know what is happening in this country , as the news presenter is totally correct , its a no go zone .” “There ARE some parts of Birmingham where you darent or shouldn’t go !” “Is he far off the truth? Maybe it’s not true for Birmingham as a whole but there are certain areas where it is true. Certainly it is true of certain other Towns in the UK. Bradford, Leicester, Luton spring to mind.”

Fox’s apology stated that,

“To be clear, there is no formal designation of these zones in either country and no credible information to support the assertion there are specific areas in these countries that exclude individuals based solely on their religion.”

That says as much as it says, and no more. It says that neither the British nor the French government has designated any areas to be no-go zones where non-Muslims aren’t allowed in, and that there is no evidence that non-Muslims are not allowed into any areas in either country.

But this carefully worded statement does not actually say that there aren’t areas in Britain or France in which non-Muslims are menaced for not adhering to Islamic law. That is a real and abundantly documented problem. Emerson pointed to it when he said:

“In parts of London, there are actually Muslim religious police that actually beat and actually wound, seriously, anyone who doesn’t dress according to Muslim, religious Muslim attire.”

While Emerson’s implication that this was an ongoing phenomenon was false, there were indeed such Sharia enforcers in London between 2011 and 2013. In July 2011, the UK’s Daily Mail reported:

“Islamic extremists have launched a poster campaign across the UK proclaiming areas where Sharia law enforcement zones have been set up. Communities have been bombarded with the posters, which read: ‘You are entering a Sharia-controlled zone – Islamic rules enforced.’”

In December 2013, members of one of these self-styled “Muslim patrols” were imprisoned; according to the Guardian, in London they

“harassed people, berating them with shouts of ‘this is a Muslim area!’ They forced men to dump their alcoholic drinks, instructed women on the appropriate way to dress, and yelled insults at those they perceived to be gay.”

They didn’t just berate people; as Emerson said, they beat them. In YouTube videos, they threatened to do so, saying: “We are coming to implement Islam upon your own necks.” In June 2013, Muslims attacked an American who was drinking on the street, grabbing the bottle out of his hands and smashing him in the eye with it, causing permanent injury. In August 2013, according to the Daily Mail, “two brothers in law who went on a sponsored walk wearing comedy mankinis had to be picked up by police – after they were pelted with stones and eggs by residents who told them ‘this is a Muslim area’ and demanded they leave.”

A “Muslim area” – maybe even a “no-go zone.” Not in the sense that non-Muslims are barred from entering, but in that, if they do enter, they have to adhere to Sharia restrictions.

The Fox apology is all the more curious in light of the fact that others, even on the Left, have noticed the no-go zones in France before some Fox commentators began talking about them in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. David Ignatius wrote in the New York Times in April 2002:

“Arab gangs regularly vandalize synagogues here, the North African suburbs have become no-go zones at night, and the French continue to shrug their shoulders.”

Newsweek, hardly a conservative organ, reported in November 2005 that

“according to research conducted by the government’s domestic intelligence network, the Renseignements Generaux, French police would not venture without major reinforcements into some 150 ‘no-go zones’ around the country–and that was before the recent wave of riots began on Oct. 27.”

The police wouldn’t venture into these areas without major reinforcements in 2005. Does anyone really think that the situation has improved in the intervening years?

And the day after the Charlie Hebdo massacre set off Fox’s discussions of no-go zones in France, the reliably Leftist New Republic wrote:

“The word banlieue (‘suburb’) now connotes a no-go zone of high-rise slums, drug-fueled crime, failing schools and poor, largely Muslim immigrants and their angry offspring.”

So something the New York Times noted in 2002 and Newsweek in 2005, and that the New Republic reported was still a problem in January 2015, is now something that Fox News has to apologize for discussing?

Clearly there is a problem in these areas. Two of the three Charlie Hebdo murderers were born and raised in France. Where did they get their ideas about killing blasphemers? Not from French schools. They learned them in the Muslim areas where they were born and raised. What’s more, France leads the West in the number of Muslims who have traveled from there to wage jihad for the Islamic State, with well over a thousand Muslims leaving France to join the caliphate. Where did they get their understanding of Islam?

In objecting to Fox’s coverage, the French government objected to claims that these areas were outside their control and subject to Sharia, but it is obvious that whatever control they do have over these areas is not enough to prevent the indoctrination of all too many young Muslims into the jihad ideology.

There needs to be a balanced, honest public discussion of these Muslim areas in Britain and France. The controversy over what has been said on Fox in recent weeks only obscures the need for that discussion. And Fox’s apology, however carefully worded, only plays into the hands of Leftists and Islamic supremacists who have a vested interest in rendering people ignorant and complacent about the reality of what is going on in these areas.

So now would be a good time for Fox to apologize for its apology – and to devote extended attention to the Muslim areas of Britain and France, and shed light on what is really going on in them. That would be to provide a service far greater than the usual surface-scratching of television news.

This article was originally posted at the Front Page Magazine website.



Religious Liberty vs. Erotic Liberty

|

Barely five days after The New York Times ran a major news article on the firing of Atlanta’s fire chief for his views on homosexuality, a major Times opinion writer declared that religious liberty is a fine thing, so long as it is restricted to “pews, homes, and hearts” — far from public consequence.

The firing of Kelvin Cochran as chief of Atlanta’s Fire Rescue Department came after the city’s mayor, Kasim Reed, determined that the chief could not effectively manage the department after he had written a book in which he cited Scripture in defining homosexuality as a sin.

The most crucial portion of the Times story includes the mayor’s rationale:

“At a news conference, Mr. Reed said that Mr. Cochran’s ‘personal religious beliefs are not the issue.’ But Atlanta’s nondiscrimination policy, the mayor added, is ‘nonnegotiable.’

‘Despite my respect for Chief Cochran’s service, I believe his actions and decision-making undermine his ability to effectively manage a large, diverse work force,’ Mr. Reed said. ‘Every single employee under the fire chief’s command deserves the certainty that he or she is a valued member of the team and that fairness and respect guide employment decisions.’”

But the mayor’s words do not form a coherent argument. Chief Cochran was fired precisely because his “personal religious beliefs” are, in the mayor’s mind, incompatible with assuring every member of the department “that he or she is a valued member of the team and that fairness and respect guide employment decisions.”

Chief Cochran had written a book entitled, Who Told You that You Were Naked?, in which, according to the Times, he had affirmed that homosexual acts are among what the Bible defines as “vile, vulgar, and inappropriate activities” that “dishonor God.”

The story has been widely reported in the national press, and no accusation that Chief Cochran had acted in a discriminatory fashion toward any department employee has yet been asserted. In November, announcing the Chief’s suspension without pay, Mayor Reed said that Chief Cochran’s views as expressed in the book were inconsistent with the city’s policies on discrimination. Note, as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution made clear, the mayor’s concern was the chief’s views on homosexuality. The paper cited a statement from the mayor’s office in its report on the suspension: “I want to be clear that the material in Chief Cochran’s book is not representative of my personal beliefs, and is inconsistent with the administration’s work to make Atlanta a more welcoming city for all of her citizens — regardless of their sexual orientation, gender, race and religious beliefs.”

But the mayor did not extend his concern about non-discrimination on religious beliefs to Chief Cochran, who clearly expressed his views as a matter of biblical belief.

Liberties do not exist in a vacuum. In any historical moment, certain liberties collide with other liberties. We are now witnessing a direct and unavoidable collision between religious liberty with what is rightly defined as erotic liberty — a liberty claimed on the basis of sexual identity and activity. Religious liberty is officially recognized in the Bill of Rights — even in the very first amendment — and the framers of the American order did not claim to have established this right to free religious expression, but to have recognized it as a pre-existent right basic to citizenship.

Erotic liberty is new on the scene, but it is central to the moral project of modernity — a project that asserts erotic liberty, which the framers never imagined, as an even more fundamental liberty than freedom of religion. The logic of erotic liberty has worked its way from law schools and academia into popular culture, entertainment, public policy, and Supreme Court decisions.

In one classic example, Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy famously wrote  of human dignity in terms of one’s “concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” — and he has explicitly tied that to erotic liberty in a series of decisions and opinions.

Chief Cochran wrote a book, as a Christian and for his fellow Christians. According to the Times article, he gave a copy of the book to three city employees who had not asked for it. In response, he was fired by Mayor Reed.

The opinion column published just days after Chief Cochran’s firing was written by Frank Bruni, an openly-gay columnist whose essays often appear in the “Sunday Review” section of the paper. In this case, he cites his own sexual orientation in making his argument in “Your God and My Dignity.”

His argument is that claims of endangered religious liberty for conservative Christians are “absurd.” He complains about “religious people getting a pass that isn’t warranted.” Religious liberty, he claims, is being used as “a fig leaf for intolerance.”

The legalization of same-sex marriage cannot and will not infringe upon religious liberty, he claims, because such laws “do not pertain to religious services or what happens in a church, temple or mosque; no clergy member will be compelled to preside over gay nuptials. Civil weddings are covered. That’s it.”

The really chilling part of his statement is the restriction of religious liberty to “religious services or what happens in a church, temple, or mosque.” This is becoming more and more common, as major political and legal figures speak more and more of “freedom of worship” as a replacement for religious liberty. Religious liberty certainly includes freedom of worship, but it by no means stops there.

Furthermore, when the proponents of same-sex marriage and the new sexual revolution promise even to respect what goes on in a church, temple, or mosque, they evidently cannot keep their arguments straight. In the very same column, Bruni complains that religious congregations are given too much liberty to define their own ministry. He laments that “churches have been allowed to adopt broad, questionable interpretations of a ‘ministerial exception’ to anti-discrimination laws that allow them to hire and fire clergy as they wish.”

The front lines of the battle for religious liberty will be at the door of your congregation very soon, if this column is any indication — and it is. While promising to respect “freedom of worship,” Bruni openly implies that congregations should not have the right to hire and fire ministers or clergy on the basis of their sexual orientation or beliefs. What kind of liberty is that?

It is no liberty at all. This argument spells the end of religious liberty in any meaningful sense. What about the right of religious schools to hire, admit, and house on the basis of Christian moral judgment? If Bruni complains about congregations having the right to “hire and fire clergy as they wish,” we can only imagine what he would want to see mandated in terms of religious schools and institutions.

The headline over the print edition of Frank Bruni’s column is “Your God and My Dignity.” The use of the term “dignity” in this way is explained by University of Texas professor Mark Regnerus as “the mission creep of dignity.” In an important article released today, Regnerus contrasts the traditional view of human dignity, rooted in the belief that every human being is made in God’s image and affirmed by natural law theorists as “Dignity 1.0.” As Regnerus explains, this view of human dignity is defined as a person’s “inherent worth of immeasurable value that is deserving of certain morally appropriate responses.” As he further explains, “Understood in this way, dignity is an inalienable value. It’s a reality. Human dignity does not become real when you start to believe in it. It remains real even when neglected or violated. It may be discerned differently across eras, but it’s not arbitrary, to be socially constructed in unique ways by collective will or vote.”

“Dignity 2.0,” on the other hand, is on the ascent. As Regnerus asserts, “To be sure, Dignity 2.0 exhibits some similarities with its predecessor. Each has to do with inherent worth. Each implies the reality of the good. Each understands that rights flow from dignity. But Dignity 2.0 entrusts individuals to determine their own standards.”

In terms of the moral revolution and marriage, he writes:

“Witness, as an example, what is happening to marriage in the West, where the power elite has aligned behind Dignity 2.0 and its novel conclusions about the nature and structure of a timeless institution. The basis for Dignity 2.0 in the West does not rest on external standards, on traditional restraints such as kinship, neighborhood, religion, or nation, which are all stable sources of the self. Rather, it is based upon the dis-integrated, shifting “me,” subject to renegotiation, reinvention, and reconstruction, reinforced by expansive conditions and regulations. It’s exhausting—though profitable to attorneys. And Facebook. But it also explains my confusion: there are rival forms of dignity, and the version you employ matters a great deal.”

Indeed, it matters a very great deal. And the central thrust of Dignity 2.0 is what I describe as erotic liberty — the newly asserted liberty that is now trampling  or endangering religious liberty.

Don’t miss the final words of Frank Bruni’s column:

“And I support the right of people to believe what they do and say what they wish — in their pews, homes and hearts. But outside of those places? You must put up with me, just as I put up with you.”

In the event we missed the point earlier in his column, he makes the point crystal clear in the end. Religious liberty is to be respected, so long as it is confined to “pews, homes, and hearts.”

Chief Kelvin Cochran knows exactly what Frank Bruni means. Do you?

This article was originally posted at the AlberMohler.com website.



NY Times Columnist Wants to Confine Religious Liberty to Church Closet

|

Openly homosexual New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Bruni has announced his generous support for the right of people of faith “to believe what they do and say what they wish—in their pews, homes and hearts.” (emphasis added).

Wow, thanks, Mr. Bruni.

The hubris of “progressives,” particularly “progressives” of a particular rainbow-hued stripe, seems to know no bounds. According to Bruni, conservative Christians must relinquish their constitutionally protected right to the free exercise of religion on his altar to the god of homoeroticism.

A peevish Bruni starts his screed by moaning that he feels “chafed” by claims that homosexuals like himself are a threat to religious liberty and then proceeds to argue for a breathtaking limitation of religious liberty to only pews, homes, and hearts—which is actually no liberty at all. In so doing, Bruni reveals his lack of understanding of both the history of religious liberty and of what faith entails for followers of Christ.

The First Amendment was intended to protect the right of people of faith to practice their religion unencumbered by government, which has the unruly tendency to intrude into areas of human life into which it ought not intrude. The Free Exercise Clause was intended to provide broad protections for the exercise of religion—which is not limited to pews, homes, and hearts, and not abrogated by homoeroticism.

Homosexuals and their “progressive” ideological allies who condemn orthodox Christian beliefs are trying to arrogate to themselves the right to determine what the free exercise of religion for orthodox Christians entails. For true followers of Christ, the practice of religion is a holistic endeavor—at least as holistic as homosexuals claim their romantic and erotic desires are. Imagine someone saying that he supports the right of homoerotically-oriented men and women to believe what they do and say what they wish only in their churches, homes, hearts, and maybe the Center on Halsted.

Or imagine if those homosexuals who attend churches that embrace late 20th Century, heterodox theology and as a result support legalized same-sex faux-“marriage” were told that they could believe what they wish and say what they wish only in their pews, homes, and hearts. In other words, they should lose the right to affect public policy or allow their business practices to reflect their religious beliefs.

In a hyperbolic rhetorical flourish, Bruni asks, “why should a merchant whose version of Christianity condemns homosexuality get to exile gays and lesbians?” Exiling gays and lesbians? Wow again.

The inconvenient truth for Bruni is that Christian florists and bakers are seeking neither to exile homosexuals nor to refuse to serve customers who affirm a homoerotic identity. Rather, they’re refusing to use their time, gifts, and labor to make a particular product that celebrates an event that the God they serve abhors. In reality, these same florists and bakers have actually served on multiple occasions the very homosexuals who are suing them for not making products for their “weddings.”

Bruni then digs in with his floppy shovel, suggesting that not making a cake or floral arrangement  for a same-sex “wedding” is analogous to a Muslim store-owner refusing to serve a woman whose head is not covered or a Mormon hairdresser turning away clients “who saunter in with frappuccinos.”

In other words, Bruni suggests that when a baker chooses not to make a particular product for a particular type of event—and a type of event for which this baker has never made a product—it is analogous to a business-owner demanding that a customer adopt the owner’s religious practices in order to be able to purchase a product or service.

But of course, no Christian florist or baker has demanded that customers adopt his or her religious practices or beliefs in order to purchase a product or receive a service. Conservative Christian bakers sell their cookies and cupcakes to homosexuals. Christian photographers take photos of homosexuals. Christian florists sell flowers to homosexuals. No Christian has turned away customers who saunter in wearing a PRIDE t-shirt. And Christian business-owners do not demand that customers wear crucifixes or take Communion in order to be served.

It’s important to note this critical distinction: A ceremony that celebrates the union of two people of the same-sex is not identical to a ceremony that celebrates the union of two people of opposite sexes. Such a ceremony is the antithesis of a marriage, which is why many orthodox Christians will not use the terms “wedding” or “marriage” to describe the union of two people of the same-sex.

Calling a homoerotic union a “marriage” does not make it a marriage in reality. Just as legally construing a human as 3/5 person would not make him in reality only 3/5 a person, the foolish decision of foolish people to recognize legally a homoerotic union as a “marriage” does not make it in reality a marriage.

So, the request of homosexuals for a cake for their “wedding” is not the same as a request from a heterosexual couple for a cake for their wedding. Homosexuals are seeking to compel bakers to make a product for an entirely different type of event, and one which the bakers believe mocks real marriage and offends God.

Bruni trots out and beats the dying but still useful homosexuality = race horse: “As these lamentations about religious liberty get tossed around, it’s worth remembering that racists have used the same argument to try to perpetuate segregation.” It’s also worth remembering that the fact that one group of people with a gross misunderstanding of Scripture appealed to religious liberty to defend evil practices does not mean all groups who appeal to religious liberty are guilty of engaging in evil practices or of grossly misinterpreting Scripture.

Moreover, it makes no rational sense to compare a condition like race that has no inherent connection to either feelings or volitional acts to homoeroticism which is constituted solely by feelings and volitional acts.

Since Bruni is busy declaring the boundaries in which people of faith may exercise their religion, maybe Bruni can help us out by answering these questions:

  • Should a male Muslim massage therapist whose faith prohibits him from touching unrelated women be required to give massages to unrelated women?
  • Should a Mormon hairdresser whose faith teaches that polygamy is profoundly sinful be required to use her skills to style the hair of brides in a polygamist’s commitment ceremony?
  • Should a Christian whose faith teaches that racism is sinful be required to bake a cake decorated with a white supremacy message for a Neo-Nazi event?
  • Should a baker who identifies as a “gay Christian” and attends a theologically heterodox church—perhaps a Metropolitan Community Church or a Dignity USA chapter—be compelled to make a cake for a National Organization for Marriage event?

Bruni makes clear the error in his thinking when he says that Christian bakers, photographers, and florists “are routinely interacting with customers who behave in ways they deem sinful. They don’t get to single out one group of supposed sinners. If they’re allowed to, who’s to say they’ll stop at that group?”

Bruni’s rendering of the plight of Christian owners of wedding-related businesses is backwards. Christian owners of wedding-related businesses are not singling out and refusing to serve a particular group of sinners. Rather, some members of a particular group of sinners are trying to force Christian owners of wedding-related businesses to participate in their sin.

Bruni presumptuously proclaims that “Baking a cake, arranging roses, running an inn: These aren’t religious acts…”

Well, God may beg to differ with Bruni:

  • “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31).
  • And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col. 3:17).
  • “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men…” (Col. 3:23)
  • “Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness…” (Jer. 22:13).
  • “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10).
  • “For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience.  Therefore do not become partners with them; for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true), and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord.  Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.  For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret” (Eph. 5: 5-12).

Due to the astonishing influence of homosexual and “trans” activism and the unbiblical cowardice of Christians—including especially Christian leaders—we’re going to see the government increasingly making demands on Christians with which Christians ought not comply. It is during those times that Christians should remember that we are commanded to “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

The Truth Project

First Annual IFI Worldview Conference
featuring Dr. Del Tackett
April 10-11, 2015

CLICK HERE for Details