Black lives do matter, but not because they’re black—which, as “progressives” continually tell us—is just a social construct. Black lives matter not because of the color of their skin but because they are human lives created in the image and likeness of God and endowed by God with unalienable, intrinsic rights.
An arm of, arguably, the most tyrannical, divisive, hateful, and destructive political movement in the country will once again urge children and teens to disrupt government schools for an entire day on Friday April 12, 2019. And for the 23rd year in row, spineless Christians will take it on the chin. They tolerate the intolerable—not for principled reasons—but out of cowardice.
The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) sponsors and promotes the political protest called Day of Silence whose goal is to exploit taxpayer-funded middle and high schools for the purpose of transforming the moral, political, and ontological views of other people’s children. GLSEN even provides a guide for “educators” that teaches teachers how to promote Leftist views of homosexuality and the “trans” phenomenon on Day of Silence.
GLSEN urges students to refuse to speak for the entire day—including during instructional time—in the service of normalizing disordered feelings and sexual acts that God abhors. And Christians shamefully say and do nothing.
Day of Silence uses government schools to propagate arguable assumptions about the nature and morality of homosexual acts and relationships and of biological-sex impersonation. And Christians rationalize their capitulation as fostering unity and demonstrating “niceness.”
Why are “LGBTQ” activists more impassioned, tenacious, and persevering in promoting wickedness than Christ-followers are in opposing it? Do Christians not remember that we are to deny ourselves and take up our crosses daily, to hate evil and love good, to expose the unfruitful works of darkness, and to count it all joy when we encounter trials because of our identity in Christ?
Have Christians forgotten these words of Jesus: “It is inevitable that stumbling blocks will come, but woe to the one through whom they come! It would be better for him to have a millstone hung around his neck and to be thrown into the sea than to cause one of these little ones to stumble”?
As children and teens are inculcated with a body-, mind-, and heart-destroying ideology, one must wonder if Christians love—or even like—their neighbors.
There is something Christian parents can do. They can contact their children’s middle and high school administrators to ask if students and/or teachers will be permitted to refuse to speak on Day of Silence. If the answer is “yes,” keep your children home. Stop acquiescing to every moral offense the sexually deviant among us do in the service of their ideology.
Schools have a legal and pedagogical right to prohibit students from refusing to speak during class time. Schools may prohibit any actions they deem disruptive, and surely refusing to speak during instructional time is disruptive.
Imagine if another group of students refused to speak for an entire day to draw attention to the plight of women in Muslim countries, or the plight of Christians in China, or to object to American military intervention around the world, or to oppose socialized medicine, or endorse the Green New Deal. Such hijacking of government schools is disruptive and inappropriate. Students can engage in political action on their own time and their own dime—not in public schools supported by the hard-earned money of diverse peoples, many of whom object to the assumptions of the “LGBTQ” ideology.
A month ago, a Fresno, California high school spokesperson prohibited students from wearing MAGA hats, implying that the hats would be “distracting.” Translated: She feared intolerant leftist high school students would respond obnoxiously to the presence of peers wearing MAGA hats.
It’s well-known that conservative kids are far less likely to respond obnoxiously to “progressive” paraphernalia or political action than Leftist kids would to conservative paraphernalia or political action. Therefore, only conservative paraphernalia and political action are deemed distractions and banned. Leftist brats, bullies, and boors win again.
If the Leftists who control government schools really cared about creating a learning environment free of political distractions and disruptions, they would establish policies that prohibit all clothing with political messages and all controversial political action. But they don’t.
I learned from my experience working at Deerfield High School on Chicago’s North Shore that the claims of Leftist teachers about their commitments to tolerance, inclusivity, and diversity are lies. They don’t value true tolerance, inclusivity, or diversity. They don’t seek to make schools “safe” places for all students. They don’t care if Orthodox Jews, Muslims, or theologically orthodox Christians feel excluded, uncomfortable, and “unsafe.”
The central pedagogical goals of Leftist “teachers”—better known as agents of change—are ideological not pedagogical. And they’re shameless in their hyp0crisy.
Conservative Parents: If your middle or high school allows students to refuse to Speak on Day of Silence, please keep your children home.
Click here for more information.
Listen to this article read by Laurie:
https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/mp3-What-the-World-Needs-Now-is-Some-Conservative-Civil-Disobedience_01.mp3
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Written by John Stonestreet and Roberto Rivera
Forty years ago, a group of evangelical leaders and scholars took a clear and unapologetic stand on a fundamental tenet of the faith.
This month marks the fortieth anniversary of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, which was signed in October of 1978 by more than 200 evangelical leaders, including R.C. Sproul, J.I. Packer, and Francis Schaeffer.
The Chicago Statement was not only a landmark document in evangelical history, it played an important role in the work of the late Chuck Colson and our ongoing work at the Colson Center.
Here’s a bit of history to set the stage. If there was one phrase that summed up the ethos of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was “Question Authority.” The phrase emerged out of opposition to the Vietnam War and Watergate, but then it spread well beyond the world of politics into various arenas of culture, even into the church.
We know, for example, the story of how liberal “mainline” churches doubted the Bible and its claims of supernatural miracles. But the culture-wide distrust of authority crept into Evangelicalism, as well, which has—given its diversity and independent congregations—kind of always struggled with ecclesial authority.
Phrases such as “Christianity isn’t a religion; it’s a relationship” entered the lexicon and became an excuse for some to radically privatize the faith, to reject historical teaching, and even embrace new ways of reading and interpreting the Bible.
For instance, a survey of students at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the mid-70s found that the longer a student attended the seminary, the less likely he was to agree with the statement “Jesus is the Divine Son of God and I have no doubts about it.”
In 1971, messengers at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting passed a resolution that supported abortion, not only in cases of rape and incest, but also in cases where there is “clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”
This was just two years before Roe v. Wade.
I don’t mean to pile on the SBC. First, by no means were they alone… this stuff was in the air. Second, the SBC has since experienced quite a renewal, which is at least partly due to the Chicago Statement.
The Statement was about more than a particular way of reading and interpreting the Bible: It was an unequivocal assertion of biblical authority over the lives of believers and the Church, in an age when all authority was being questioned.
It was an unequivocal assertion that Christianity, while it does involve a relationship with God, is also a “religion,” in the original sense of the Latin word “religio,” which means “bond,” “obligation,” and “reverence.” It’s a faith, in other words, with content, not just a warm fuzzy feeling.
Anyone who followed Chuck Colson can see how he was indebted to this effort. For him, Christianity was objectively true, and that truth could be communicated to others, both inside and outside the Church.
And the primary way God had revealed truth to His Church was the Scriptures. Not personal experience, and certainly not popular intellectual fads.
The need to reassert biblical authority may be more urgent today than it was forty years ago. When we hear things like “the Gospel is about radical inclusivity,” that just means the Gospel is being defined without Scripture. When we hear that “Jesus would’ve baked the cake,” that Jesus is not the Jesus of Scripture. When we hear, “It’s a relationship, not a religion” still, that often means we are ignoring the significant portions of Scripture that describe the people God is calling out to restore and activate for His Kingdom.
This article originally posted at BreakPoint.org
A new controversy has erupted in School District U-46, and this time it doesn’t involve compulsory co-ed locker rooms or offensive statements from board member Traci O’Neal Ellis. This time 18 religious leaders have objected to school board member Jeanette Ward’s Facebook post about a controversial article on religion assigned in a sixth-grade class.
A teacher had her sixth-graders read an article by…
Read more here…
After an embarrassing rant about Christianity somehow disqualifying an individual from public office and impying that a religious test should be implemented for those seeking to hold public office, California Democratic U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein is doubling down on her remarks.
On Wednesday, September 6, 2017, Feinstein attacked U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals nominee Amy Coney Barrett during her confirmation hearing. Barrett, a mom of seven children, and a former clerk for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, was basically told her Catholic religion should keep her from being qualified for the judgeship.
“When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you,” said Feinstein. “And that’s of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for, for years in this country.”
WATCH: Sen. Feinstein to appeals court nominee Amy Barrett, @NotreDame law prof/#Catholic mother of 7: "The dogma lives loudly within you." pic.twitter.com/mpDgNZGRsa
— Jason Calvi (@JasonCalvi) September 6, 2017
There was justifiably a huge backlash against Feinstein’s comments, but rather than retract them and issue an apology, Feinstein instead is doubling down on her statement, while unsuccessfully trying to explain away her obvious prejudice for people of faith.
On an appearance this weekend with CNN’s State of the Union, Feinstein said:
“This is a woman who has no real trial or court experience,” she argued. “And, therefore, there is no record. She’s a professor, which is fine, but all we have to look at are her writings, and in her writings, she makes some statements which are questionable, which deserve questions.”
Barrett was nominated by President Trump to fill a vacancy on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Perhaps Feinstein is concerned with the idea of having a judge who clerked for Scalia, a “lion of the law” on the Circuit Court of Appeals. However, Feinstein’s comments are representative of a larger feeling within the Democratic party. This is illustrated by the fact that during the same hearing in which Feinstein told Barrett, “the dogma lives loudly within you,” another prominent Democrat, Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, asked her, “Do you consider yourself an orthodox Catholic?”
Questions and statements like these are entirely inappropriate and have no bearing whatsoever in determining Barrett’s qualifications and abilities.
Family Research Council President, Tony Perkins says:
The reality is, liberals have as many deep convictions as conservatives — they’re just not as often rooted in the Christian religion. So to suggest that they can be impartial and believers can’t is not only untrue, it’s unfair. Telling Barrett that the “dogma lives loudly within [her]” is to ignore the dogma that lives even louder within Senate Democrats.
C.C. Peckhold, writing for the Wall Street Journal says:
Sens. Feinstein and Durbin were troubled not by Ms. Barrett’s Catholicism, but by her failure to prove her religion could conform to a more dogmatic progressivism. The “religious test” Democrats want to impose isn’t about religion per se; it’s about ensuring that every religious claim can be bent to more comprehensive political aims. It’s about defining anyone who dissents from the mores of the sexual revolution as disqualified from public office. That’s what makes Ms. Feinstein’s questioning so chilling.
Yet Feinstein stressed during the CNN interview that she has no animosity towards people of faith. “I think Catholicism is a great religion. I have great respect for it,” Feinstein said. “I’ve known many of the archbishops who have been in our community, we’ve had dinner together, we’ve spoken together over many, many decades, and I’ve tried to be helpful to the church whenever I could.”
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