Written by David French

There is no longer a common American living experience. There is no longer even the possibility of consensus around the the proper role of government in American lives. The decline of the family is altering American life so profoundly that the two parties are increasingly forced to choose the demographic groups they aim to serve, and to win elections by mobilizing and turning out those groups rather than persuading undecided voters.

This is a bleak picture, but it’s perhaps the only reasonable conclusion one can draw from the leading social science, from the strategies of the two leading political parties, and from simple experience — from living outside our own bubbles and understanding the hopes and fears of fellow citizens.

Single parents and other economically vulnerable populations tend to crave security. A single mom of three public-school children working as the bookkeeper for a struggling small business may well, ultimately, be better off under an economic system that drives growth and creates better-paying job opportunities for her. But such a system must seem a remote concern when weighed against the need to pay the rent while her kids’ deadbeat dad is behind on child support, and the difficulty of affording health insurance when her employer’s contribution keeps shrinking. If the battle is between the hope of opportunity and the promise of security, won’t a rational person choose the latter every time?

Now, imagine a different, married mother of three. She and her husband both work, and they make enough money that if one were to become unemployed, the family would still have enough to get by. But they don’t want to “get by.” They want their kids out of their struggling public school — there’s a great private school down the road — and on the path to a good college education. Their combined income puts them solidly above-average, but they don’t feel rich, because they can’t afford their entirely reasonable family goals: They’ve skipped vacations two of the last three years, and their Honda Pilot just passed 150,000 miles. They have security. What they want is opportunity, a chance to get just a bit further ahead. A tax and regulatory burden that depresses the job market, makes it harder to start businesses, and funnels cash directly out of their pockets is a burden — a burden that provides them with zero discernible benefits.

You’re the single mother. If you’re watching the GOP debate, is anyone speaking to your personal economic experience? Unless you’re strongly pro-life and a committed Christian, it’s highly unlikely that anyone on that stage can offer much promise of the security — the certainty — that you so desperately crave.

Conversely, if you’re the married mother in a reasonably prosperous family, the Democratic debate — unless you’re strongly pro-choice and a committed social liberal — is likely to seem appalling. More taxes? More regulation? Socialism? Are you serious?It’s the language of security, not opportunity, and it guarantees that you’ll pay more money to the government while continuing to see virtually no meaningful return. In frustration and disbelief, you turn to your husband and exclaim, “Other people make terrible life choices, and we pay for it.”

#share#No wonder political parties spend so much time talking about social issues. Shared religious and cultural values represent one way to bridge the country’s economic and demographic divides. Single moms may crave security, but if they’re revolted at the killing of unborn children, or if they don’t want to see their public-school children barred from praying on campus, they’ll vote Republican. Married moms in Massachusetts may pour countless thousands into a broken and wasteful combination of local, state, and federal welfare programs, but if they want to keep abortion legal and celebrate the upcoming nuptials of their lesbian neighbors, they’ll crawl over broken glass to vote Democrat.

Every four years conservatives and liberals look for the right messenger, the right person to make their case to the public. But you can package conservatism as appealingly as possible, and it’s still conservatism — it’s still, at base, a message of hope through opportunity and liberty, a message that’s terrifying to the most economically insecure. You can package liberalism as appealingly as possible, and it’s still liberalism — it’s still, at base, a message that millions of Americans who don’t feel prosperous, who have their own concerns and struggles, should pour more and more money into systems that won’t help their families, that won’t adequately educate their children, and that keep holding back their own hopes and dreams.

There’s no real political answer to this great American divide. While we can certainly tweak the tax code and other policies to eliminate marriage penalties and incentivize two-parent child-rearing, what government policy is going to give young people who’ve never seen an intact marriage the fortitude to hang together when times are tough? What political initiative is going to fill our impoverished urban and rural enclaves with eligible, employable bachelors? The sexual revolution — by detaching child-rearing from marriage — has done great and lasting damage to the fabric of American life, damage that no politician can repair.

In 2016, one party will win the White House, but no party will repair the cultural breach. That’s a job for parents, for pastors, and for those of us who reach out to provide others with the model of a life that pop culture scorns but history shows is indispensable to human flourishing, a life of faith and fidelity. It’s no longer enough for us to live our own values. We must help our fellow citizens rediscover ancient truths — always against the headwind of a political and cultural movement dedicated to the lie that they can live as they wish while attaining the security they wish for. It’s a daunting task, but it’s far more consequential than any vote we’ll ever cast.

— David French is an attorney and a staff writer at National Review.

This article was originally posted here

By Rebecca Downs

Planned Parenthood claims to represent the welfare and interests of women, but how do the facts and figures add up?

Live Action created some helpful graphics to illustrate the fact that most Americans do not depend on Planned Parenthood.

While supporters of Planned Parenthood tout the organization’s services for women and claim that women’s health care will be over if Planned Parenthood is defunded, the facts show otherwise.

The abortion giant receives $1.4 million a day—over $500 million a year from taxpayers, and it has steadily obtained more taxpayer dollars over the years.

But this money need not fill the coffers of Planned Parenthood, who, in many ways, behaves more like a wealthy corporation than a non-profit. There are over 13,000 comprehensive health clinicsacross the country that can, will, and already do serve women and their families. These effective clinics could do so much more if the $1.4 million a day were redirected to them.

While Planned Parenthood touts its clientele, that figure has drastically gone down over the years, and it pales in comparison to the amount of patients served by comprehensive health clinics, which outnumber Planned Parenthood facilities 20 to 1. The abortion business has lost over 400,000 clients since 2006, according to the organization’s annual reports.
In fact, most women currently do not depend on Planned Parenthood. Based on the group’s own annual reports, 98 percent of women in the U.S. will never visit a Planned Parenthood facility in a given year. Women’s health care will not be negatively affectedif the flow of taxpayer dollars to the group is cut; however, health care will actually improve when the money is channeled more appropriately to these comprehensive health clinics.

The numbers are even more revealing when it comes to basic women’s health services, such as breast exams. Planned Parenthood claims it provides this critical service for women; however, the abortion business has steadily cut health services, while increasing abortions. Only 0.8 percent of women of reproductive age went to Planned Parenthood for a breast exam last year, according to the group’s own numbers.

These numbers show why it does not make sense for the federal government to pour $1.4 million a day into an organization that perpetuates a litany of human rights abuses. If we wish to fund women’s health, it’s time to redirect Planned Parenthood’s funding into the clinics that truly serve women.

Post originally found here

If you’re wondering how America and Western Europe went from marriage-centered societies to post-Christian sexual anarchy abetted by massive government growth enforced by brutal political correctness in just a few decades, let’s just say it was no accident.

Here’s a brief history:

The progressive left has been in a death struggle with religion, the family, capitalism and morality itself since becoming a political and philosophical force during the French Revolution.

With the advent of Marxism in the mid-19th century, the battle intensified, with the left eagerly expecting the collapse of capitalism.

When the West failed to succumb to an economic and political upheaval of the type that seized Russia in 1917, the strategy changed. To liberate people from free market capitalism, it became necessary to liberate people first from bourgeois morality.

Man’s natural inclination is to provide for himself and his own extended family, then for his neighbors and community. Socialism must remove existing loyalties and institutions in order to replace them with government power. That’s why progressives have been a major force behind abortion, easy divorce, single-parent welfare incentives, pornography, collective child-rearing and sexual excess of all kinds. All of these manifestations of the progressive disease weaken the natural family. As families crumble, the state steps in to take their place.

Italian communist Antonio Gramsci saw the value of this in the 1920s, calling for his fellow revolutionaries to “capture the culture,” that is, infiltrate the institutions that transmit cultural values. So they did, especially in the universities.

Revolutionaries such as John Dewey, Margaret Mead, Margaret Sanger, Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, all of whom waxed poetically about the Soviet Union, inspired progressive educational and social policies that weakened support for organized religion, marital fidelity and the family while empowering the state.

With the help of like-minded people in Hollywood, they hammered away at social conventions of all kinds. The weapons of choice were radical individualism and moral relativism, which they peddled on college campuses to credulous liberal faculty who passed it on to their students.

By the time the 1960s rolled around, with the advent of the pill, Playboy magazine and mass communications, Western civilization was ripe for takeover by a heretofore alien, ideology of limitless sex. Of course, people weren’t told about the downside of “free love” — the destruction of families, social chaos, the loss of freedom to disagree, and a tightening statist grip on economic and intellectual liberty.

In his masterful new book, “Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage,” author Paul Kengor traces a direct line from the founders of communism to today’s liberal social “reformers.”

The elements change with the times, but not the ultimate objective, which is to “progress” indefinitely toward an evolved, socialist Eden where all is shared and all are equal. Mr. Kengor notes that the progressive canon changes rapidly, and in ways that even progressives cannot always predict.

“But we do know this much: what is seemingly inconceivable to all of us right now, including to progressives themselves, may become the dogmatic position of progressives in a generation,” he writes.

For example, “just five years ago, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton” supported “retaining the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman by 2012, that was completely gone. Now, anyone who opposed redefining marriage — and who stands now where virtually all Democrats stood a mere two decades back — is derided as a bigoted extremist.”

A case in point: The ninth World Congress of Families, which will be held this coming week in Salt Lake City, has drawn fire from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Human Rights Campaign and other leftist organizations, which falsely and strategically portray the pro-family gathering as a “hate” event and the speakers as bigots. I have done some writing for the WCF, and will be on a panel about “How the Culture Undermines Life and the Family.”

In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx, who had an affair with his children’s nurse and mistreated his own family badly in other ways, railed against religion and the middle-class family: “The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.”

His co-author, Frederic Engels, was a prolific philanderer who preached free love in an 1884 essay as a benefit of political revolution, a few decades before abortion became the holy sacrament of the political left:

“With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not. This removes all the anxiety about the ‘consequences’ … Will not that suffice to bring about the gradual growth of unconstrained sexual intercourse …?”

The progressives’ contempt for the family contrasts with the timeless definition of marriage given in Genesis 2:24 and reiterated by Jesus: “A man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

This article was originally posted at the WashingtonTimes.com.

Written by Jim Tankersley

There is a story gaining steam among some academics that suggests the institution of marriage — particularly marriage for parents of young children — could play an important role in strengthening the American economy. It is a story about growth and poverty, about responsibility and work ethic.

And largely, it is a story about men.

According to new research, states with a high concentration of married couples experience faster economic growth, less child poverty and more economic mobility than states where fewer adults are married, even after controlling for a variety of economic and demographic factors. The study, from the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies, also finds that the share of parents who are married in a state is a better predictor of that state’s economic health than the racial composition and educational attainment of the state’s residents.

It’s impossible to say for certain, from the research, whether higher marriage levels drive economic strength, or whether strong economies drive higher marriage levels. But the researchers say there is strong evidence that the two factors reinforce each other. “There’s a reciprocal tie between strong families and strong economies,” said W. Bradford Wilcox, a University of Virginia sociologist with ties to AEI and the Institute for Family Studies, who was the lead author on the report. “That tie goes in both directions. There’s a connection between what goes on in the home and what’s happening in the larger marketplace.”

What might be behind those links? The researchers suggest it’s the effects of marriage on men – particularly younger, lower-educated men. They believe getting married and becoming a father motivate those men to work more hours, bargain for more money and make better strategic decisions — such as drinking less and not quitting a job before another one is lined up — to improve their earning power.

“Marriage does seem to encourage men to get their act together,” Wilcox said. “They have a sense of responsibility. Their parents, their in-laws, their spouse, their neighbors and friends, all these people in their lives are expecting them to be more responsible, and they expect themselves to be more responsible.”

The study finds labor-force participation is substantially higher among married men with children than it is among unmarried men without them.

The opposite is true of women, though to a smaller degree: As they marry and have children, they work less. The researchers suggest the boost to male participation from marriage outweighs the drag on female participation, in terms of overall economic impact.

It’s well documented that marriage rates have fallen in America over the last generation. Children today are less likely than their parents were to grow up in a household that includes two married parents. That’s especially true of low-income and lower-educated Americans. Wilcox has long warned against that trend and its effects on society and the economy.

His new report, co-authored by Robert I. Lerman and Joseph Price, finds large differences between states with relatively high and low levels of adults who are married with children. Being in the top 20 percent of those states, as opposed to the bottom 20 percent, correlates to having a state economy that is $1,451 larger per person, with a median family income that is $3,654 higher. It also correlates to a 10.5 percent improvement in the chances that a child of a low-income family will climb the economic ladder as an adult, and with a 13.2 percent decline in the child poverty rate.

The analysis controls for a variety of factors that might have the effect of making the marriage-economy link look stronger. Those include state tax rates and infrastructure spending, educational levels, race, age and violent crime.

The report drew praise from a Elisabeth Jacobs, senior director for policy and academic programs at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, an inequality-focused think tank. “Economic insecurity and wage stagnation for the bottom 90 percent of Americans are undoubtedly contributing to family instability,” she said. “A growing body of research, including the new study from Dr. Wilcox and his colleagues, supports the idea that policymakers need to view economic stability and family stability as part of a feedback loop.”

Some candidates for president already talk about the links between marriage and mobility on the stump, including Republicans Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush. Wilcox and his fellow researchers suggest that policymakers should pursue a multi-pronged agenda to promote marriage, as an economic strategy.

Their ideas include eliminating so-called “marriage penalties” in federal aid programs that cut off benefits once married couples begin to earn a certain amount of combined income. They worry that by counting incomes jointly, the government is discouraging lower-income workers to shun marriage for fear of losing assistance.

They also propose strengthening vocational education, to boost ” skills, earnings, maturity and self-confidence of young men and women” in order to make them better candidates for marriage; efforts to reduce divorce rates, in part by requiring most couples to wait at least a year before divorcing; and launching a national public-service campaign to promote marriage among young people. They compare that potential campaign to previous campaigns to reduce teen pregnancy – another social trend that researchers have found negatively affects the economy.

This article was originally posted at the WashingtonPost.com

“The science is settled.”
~Al Gore, creator of the internet

It’s becoming an incessant catchphrase. More and more frequently, this simple statement is used as conversational pepper-spray to discourage contention and dissuade any who would continue to press their objection to the status quo. Those foolhardy enough to persist in their dissent are often labeled science-deniers; which in today’s culture of scientism, is tantamount to being branded with the Scarlet Periodic Symbol and cast from the village.

We’re told that the science is settled on a myriad of issues. Settled science has definitively shown that sexuality is genetic and immutable…except when it isn’t. Closely related is the settled scientific fact that gender is a social construct and open for molding, changing, redefining, or even ignoring. The science around evolutionary theory and its ability to demonstrate that all living beings are descended from a common ancestor was settled long ago, so we’re told. Not yet settled is what this common ancestor might have been, where all of its fossils are located (also missing are the fossils of any of its tens of thousands of mutant descendants), or how genetic mistakes could proceed toward greater complexity when we observe the exact opposite progression in our day.

We’ve been assured that the science is quite settled regarding a fetus being merely a blob of cells, devoid of any nerve endings, personality, or consciousness; unless the pregnancy is desired, at which point the blob of cells somehow becomes a pre-born human, able to be named and celebrated. And of course, the science was long ago settled on the actuality of climate change (formerly global warming) being REAL, brought about by evil mankind and the flatulence of cows.

So we’ve heard that all of this science is settled and no longer open for discussion or scientific inquiry, but how exactly did this come to be? How does science become settled, after all? In a fascinating clip, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) recently engaged with the head of one of the largest and most influential environmentalist organizations during a hearing on Capitol Hill. If you haven’t watched the exchange, it’s well worth your time.

Aaron Mair, Sierra Club President, does a wonderful job of exposing precisely how bare the intellectual cupboards of settled Science really are. If the Science is definitively settled, it should be able to hold up under scrutiny and examination, yes? When Sen. Cruz brings up the fact that data transmitted via satellite shows that we are in a sustained period of no warming activity on Earth, Mr. Mair is so reluctant to countenance this fact that he refuses to even acknowledge the existence of the data, which has been widely-accepted by people on both sides of the issue.

Instead, Mair retreats behind a bulwark of scientific consensus, as if communal agreement could replace the veracity of empirical observation. Mair trots out a shop-worn mantra in which he affirms his solidarity with “97% of scientists” who agree that global warming is in fact occurring. He repeats it robotically for the rest of the dialogue, doing substantial damage to his position in his intransigence, but it does raise some interesting questions. Is he referring to 97% of all the scientists in the world? Turns out, he is not. The consensus to which he is referring was drawn from a 2-question online survey answered by slightly more than 3,000 scientists. That’s still a somewhat substantial group though, right? I mean, it’s nowhere near 97% of all the scientists in existence, as he tries to infer, but it’s nothing to sneeze at, as long as all of  these scientists are climatologists or have some climate-related specialty. But unfortunately, only 5% of these respondents are actual climate scientists, or so they self-report. Okay, not as impressive, but if 97% of all of the climate experts agree, that’s still something! Buuuuuut, the 97% number was taken from a subset of the subset who were (again self-reportedly) climate scientists and who had 50% of their work on climate change peer-reviewed….

So this subset of the subset ends up being a group of just 79 scientists.

The head of the Sierra Club rests his case for anthropogenic global warming on the online response of 79 (self-reporting) climate scientists.

Sounds preposterous, but this is apparently more than enough for the settlement of a scientific issue in our day. What typically happens is that a political agenda emerges which has to be foisted on the populace. It has to be foisted because it is usually against the best interests of the citizenry and serves to benefit a) the politicians foisting the issue, b) some special interest group who funded the politician’s campaign, or c) both. The politicians find a cause which will provide adequate emotional cover for their unpopular agenda and they ask the sheep to begin their incessant bleating: “4 miles-per-gallon GOOOD, 2 miles-per-gallon BAAAAAD.” The sheep commence immediately because, well they’re sheep and they do what they’re told. The emotional cause, and the political agenda which it conceals, are never logical or helpful, so any honest inquiry will be viewed as a threat. The easiest way to forestall investigation is to go on the offense, ergo if you question the settled science you are a modern-day Luddite who denies science itself.

As Saul Alinski once wrote, “Ridicule is man’s greatest weapon.”

One wonders what the infamous David Hume would’ve thought of this political strategy. According to the 18th century philosopher from Scotland, not even empirical knowledge and inductive reasoning are “settled,” so how much less settled is scientific observation based on this knowledge and reasoning? He argued that one could drop an apple from your hand 500 times, watching it fall and hit the ground each time, yet remain unable to definitively assert that it will not fall up the 501st time you drop it. His theory suggests that because we don’t completely understand the dynamics at work in the world around us, we cannot simply assume that because something has always done X that it will continue to do so tomorrow. If I see a fruit I’ve never tasted before, the only way I could know what it tastes like is to compare it to fruit which is similar in appearance and I’ve eaten. However, this assumes a correlation between fruit of similar appearance and this is not a definitive assumption. Short of being all-knowing, I have no way to know or predict anything with any certainty, Hume reasoned. To introduce Hume to the question at hand, actually settling the science would be predicated on Mr. Mair having acquired omniscience (something only our President would have the chutzpah to lay claim to).

Hume’s skepticism effectively crippled philosophy for quite a while and is just not actionable, so I don’t want to seem as if I agree with him or support his conclusions. But I do appreciate the question which he raises: upon what right can we claim to have arrived at a definitive scientific understanding? How have we gained an omniscient understanding of our planet and the climate, which would be necessary to suggest that any further inquiry is opposed to science itself? What key breakthrough or revolutionary research have we uncovered to justify the conviction that human sexuality is genetic and immutable? Ironically, an accidental repercussion of this position is that by ignoring the stringency of Hume and stating that the natural laws are immutable enough to end all further investigation, these ascientists are tacitly acknowledging an absolute order to the universe. In a sense, they are disavowing the spontaneous and capricious Mother Nature, who supposedly brought us the Universe, deviant sexuality, genetic mutation, et al, by random variation and chance.

Like most of the rhetorical positions taken by modern liberalism, anyone who holds the view that science is settled will soon find that he’s painted himself into a corner and the only method of extrication is a trail of gaudy footprints left behind as he is forced to trample over the intellectual paintjob which he gurgitated previously. In other words, a belief that the science has been settled on global warming, or any other issue, also requires belief in an absolute order in the universe which could underpin the immutable natural laws necessary to justify the end of further scientific inquiry. However much of modern liberal thought is founded on relativism and subjective morality, both of which are incompatible with a universe sustained by absolute forces.

So it turns out that the only thing settled is the fact that the hacks who peddle this catchphrase are charlatans running a shell game with our money. Call me a science-denier all you please, but I remain convinced that any legitimate, worthwhile science will stand up under scrutiny and that those who discourage honest inquiry are dealing from the bottom of the deck.

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You may have heard some in the media say that the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage has finally settled the divisive issue of marriage. The courts have now determined that both genders are no longer necessary in marriage.  That assumption is probably just wishful thinking on their part.

I have been teaching a worldview class this fall at a home school co-op.  In setting the table to discuss the life issue, I went back to look at the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton court decisions which forced abortion on America in 1973.

The two issues of abortion and marriage are strikingly similar.  In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court attempted to rewrite the biological truth of conception upon the nation.  In 2015 the U.S. Supreme Court attempted to rewrite the biological truth of gender upon the nation.  Over 40 years later, people still know the truth that when a woman gets pregnant she is pregnant with a human being.   Forty years from now, I believe people will still know that men and women are uniquely different and by design children innately need a mom and a dad.

Here’s some confirmation of this.  On February 5, 1973, TIME magazine wrote an article called “A Stunning Approval for Abortion.”  They described how, in a 7-2 decision, the court expanded abortion in all 50 states.  They stated that even those that allowed abortion already would have to expand it.  They also noted how Justice Harry Blackmun, under a “right to privacy” he found in the 14^th Amendment allowed abortion, and since a fetus was not human, it had no rights that trump this right of privacy.   (TIME totally missed the cruel irony of the 14^th Amendment being an amendment intended to prohibit the return of slavery because the courts and many states had thought slaves were not humans with rights.  This is why a judge’s view of original intent is so important.)

TIME underplayed the opposition to abortion as a weak movement made up mostly of some religious conservatives and Catholic priests.  They also did the exact same thing that is being done today to the opponents of genderless marriage.  They compared the opposition to the Roe v. Wade ruling with those who opposed court rulings on racial desegregation, implying that pro-lifers were similar to racists of the 50’s and would fade away.

However, in their very last paragraph, TIME did concede that according to a poll taken right before the court ruling, the nation was split right down the middle on the abortion question.  Those supporting abortion in 1973 had a 1% lead. TIME noted that it was “a lightning rod for intense national debate.”

How did the U.S. Supreme Court do in settling that divisive social issue with a ruling finally deciding the legality of abortion?  The answer is – not very well.    Forty-one years later, Gallup polling reported that 48% of Americans oppose abortion calling themselves “pro-life” and 47% say that they are “pro-choice.”

Likewise, numerous polls have found that Americans were evenly split on the issue of marriage.  A national poll in April conducted by the Associated Press found that 50% said the U.S. Supreme Court should rule in favor of same-sex marriage, 48% said that is should not.   In July, two weeks after the ruling, the AP surveyed again to find that 41% opposed the ruling, while 39% supported it.

By Samuel Smith

Christian ethicist Russell Moore has said that congregations too afraid of being political to speak out against acts of immorality, like abortion, are similar to churches in the 1800s that remained silent on the issue of slavery.

As the featured speaker at the Institute on Religion and Democracy’s fifth annual Diane Knippers memorial lecture, Moore, the president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, criticized mainstream Christian congregations that have relaxed their teachings on key issues of sexual morality and other social issues in order to blend in with the “ambient culture” and appeal to today’s society.

Moore explained that religious conservatives need to “preserve” the biblical truth for future generations. Although secular society likes to claim that Christian conservatives are on the “wrong side of history,” Moore told the audience that Christian conservatives should not be afraid to have their biblical convictions conflict with mainstream society and that they should really embrace the distinctive Christian message.

“It’s a recipe for death, precisely for the same reasons that Jesus is speaking to Pilate about a Kingdom that does not originate from the world. Christianity always thrives the best when we have a distinctive word and a distinctive word that is rooted in a specific view of authority. Jesus said, ‘I have come to bear witness for the truth.'”

“The arguments that we see happening right now over issues of human sexuality are not really about human sexuality,” Moore continued. “These are debates of apostolic authority.”

Despite the fact that religious conservative views on issues like gay marriage and abortion directly conflict with the views of a secular world, Moore assured that the historic Christian message has always conflicted with the world’s understanding.

Although many congregations in the last 50 years have altered their views and teachings to accommodate the modern worldviews, Moore warned that churches that have historically distanced themselves from the biblical truth eventually failed to exist.

“The miraculous was startling in the first century and in every other century, so the churches who discarded it no longer had anything distinctive to say and withered and died into obscurity,” Moore stated. “The churches who were willing to speak with a voice of authority about resurrection, the coming of Christ, supernatural regeneration by the Holy Spirit are the churches who had a witness to be able to bring forward.”

Moore further argued that secularism is not the world’s final “stopping point.”

“Secularism is just a stop along the path,” Moore said. “We must have a distinctive word in terms of claim to authority, and we must be willing to bear witness. We must be a conversionist people, which means that if we truly believe that the spirit of God is able to transform someone from sinner to saint, we will be the people who will not hesitate to speak the truth and to speak what often will be unpopular truths.”

Churches have long been responsible for speaking the unpopular truths on social issues, not just in today’s world where abortion and gay marriage are the hotly contested subjects, Moore said.

“The churches in 1845 Georgia that did not speak to slavery, were speaking to slavery,” Moore said. “If you stand in the pulpit and call people to repentance for drunkenness and sexual immorality, but you do not call them to repentance for man-stealing and kidnapping and pretending to own another human being, you have spoken to that issue by saying that it will not be something for which one must give an account at the judgement.”

“The churches in 1925 Mississippi that spoke about drunkenness and adultery, but did not speak about lynching, were speaking to lynching,” Moore continued. “They were baptizing the status quo by not calling people to repentance for a grave sin against God and against a neighbor.”

“The churches in 21st century America that do not speak to the personhood of the unborn are speaking to the personhood of the unborn by baptizing the status quo and leaving consciences that are wounded and in need of Gospel liberation exactly where they are under accusation, rather than freeing them with a witness that is thought to be political.”

This article was originally posted at ChristianPost.com

By Charles Butts & Jody Brown

The public is being cautioned not to place a great deal of faith in a new study that suggests the existence of a “gay gene.” Observers may also want to consider the source: a researcher who himself is gay.

Dr. Tuck Ngun reported to the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics last week that his research has resulted in the ability to predict sexual orientation of males. “Epigenetic Algorithm Accurately Predicts Male Sexual Orientation” reads the Society’s press release, adding “with up to 70 percent accuracy” in the first paragraph.

Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality points out that Ngun conducts research for the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA – and suggests why observers should be cautious of this particular study.

“David Geffen, a homosexual activist, gave a donation – probably a very, very large one – to UCLA, and they end up studying the gay gene, looking for the gay gene,” he tells OneNewsNow. “And now they say they’ve found something with 70-percent accuracy that could predict it.”

Fox News reports that genetics experts are warning the research has important limitations, notably the small sample size: 47 sets of identical male twins – 37 of which consisted of one homosexual and one heterosexual, and 10 of two homosexuals.

LaBarbera says it’s another in a string of studies claiming to prove the existence of a homosexual gene – but he says homosexual activists shouldn’t get excited.

“You know, there’s a really strong desire of the homosexual lobby to say that this is not a moral issue, that people are not responsible, that homosexual behavior is not a sin. There’s a strong, strong need to justify their immoral lifestyle,” he states. “I think that’s what these studies are all about.”

The UCLA study has not been replicated and proven. When other studies claiming a homosexual gene have gone through that process, they have been debunked. In addition, Ngun presented only an abstract at the conference – not a published paper.

According to New Scientist, Ngun abandoned his research the week before the conference, fearing his findings could be used to identify and punish individuals for being homosexual. “I don’t believe in the censoring of knowledge,” he is quoted as saying, “but given the potential for misuse of the information, it just didn’t sit well with me.”

Ngun identifies himself as “Big gay nerd” on the Google+ social network. The data researcher also has posted numerous photos and videos from various “gay pride” events on Google+.

This article was originally posted at OneNewsNow.com

In an article in the Journal of Law and Religion, Law Professor Helen Alvare of George Mason University, examines  the inevitable clash between new legal rights to sexual expression and our constitutional right to the free exercise of religion. According to Alvare:

“Claimed rights to sexual expression unlinked to the creation of children, are among the strongest challenges facing the free exercise of religion in the United States today… Laws and regulations protecting and promoting sexual expression detached from children are powerfully affecting religious institutions that operate health care, educational, and social services available to all Americans.”

Though lengthy, the paper may be helpful in trying to understand the profound significance of cultural trends and legal decisions such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage in the Obergefell case. While professor Alvare’s paper is written primarily with the Catholic church as the subject, her observations are true for all Christians and could even apply to non-Christian faiths.

To read the article, click HERE.

By Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D.

Allowing physician-assisted suicide (PAS) would be a grave mistake for four reasons, as explained in a Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, “Always Care, Never Kill.”[1] First, it would endanger the weak and vulnerable. Second, it would corrupt the practice of medicine and the doctor–patient relationship. Third, it would compromise the family and intergenerational commitments. And fourth, it would betray human dignity and equality before the law. Instead of helping people to kill themselves, we should offer them appropriate medical care and human presence.

This Issue Brief focuses on how PAS threatens the weak and marginalized. It explores who is most likely to be coaxed into PAS and how PAS has led to voluntary—and even involuntary—euthanasia in Europe. This lethal logic has even been extended to children and the non-terminally ill disabled.

Physician-Assisted Suicide Threatens the Weak and Marginalized

Physician-assisted suicide will most threaten the weak and marginalized because of the cultural pressures and economic incentives that will drive it. The New York State Task Force on Life and the Law, established by Governor Mario Cuomo (D), explained in its report:

The Task Force members unanimously concluded that legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia would pose profound risks to many patients.…

…The practices will pose the greatest risks to those who are poor, elderly, members of a minority group, or without access to good medical care.…

…The clinical safeguards that have been proposed to prevent abuse and errors would not be realized in many cases.[2]

The people most likely to be assisted by a physician in their suicide are suffering not simply from terminal illness, but also from depression, mental illness, loneliness, and despair. “Researchers have found hopelessness, which is strongly correlated with depression, to be the factor that most significantly predicts the wish for death,” write Dr. Herbert Hendin and Dr. Kathleen Foley. As Dr. Hendin reports:

Mental illness raises the suicide risk even more than physical illness. Nearly 95 percent of those who kill themselves have been shown to have a diagnosable psychiatric illness in the months preceding suicide. The majority suffer from depression that can be treated. This is particularly true of those over fifty, who are more prone than younger victims to take their lives during the type of acute depressive episode that responds most effectively to treatment.[3]

From their decades of professional medical practice, Drs. Hendin and Foley report that when patients who ask for a physician’s assistance in suicide “are treated by a physician who can hear their desperation, understand the ambivalence that most feel about their request, treat their depression, and relieve their suffering, their wish to die usually disappears.”[4] They conclude: “Patients requesting suicide need psychiatric evaluation to determine whether they are seriously depressed, mentally incompetent, or for whatever reason do not meet the criteria for assisted suicide.”[5]

Yet only five of the 178 Oregon patients who died under the Oregon assisted-suicide laws in 2013 and 2014 were referred for any psychiatric or psychological evaluation. Remarkably, patients were referred for psychiatric evaluation in less than 5.5 percent of the 859 cases of assisted suicide reported in Oregon since its law went into effect in 1997.[6] “This constitutes medical negligence,” writes Dr. Aaron Kheriaty. Dr. Kheriaty concludes, “To abandon suicidal individuals in the midst of a crisis—under the guise of respecting their autonomy—is socially irresponsible: It undermines sound medical ethics and erodes social solidarity.”[7]

The World’s Experience with Physician-Assisted Suicide Laws Confirms the Lethal Logic

While many assisted-suicide laws attempt to limit PAS eligibility to the terminally ill, and while many laws attempt to provide protections ensuring autonomous consent, the experience of countries with PAS and euthanasia suggests that safeguards fail to ensure effective control.

In 1989, while teaching law and medical ethics at the University of Cambridge, Professor John Keown began to investigate PAS and euthanasia in the Netherlands. He found that key Dutch guidelines, such as requiring an explicit request from the patient, have long been widely violated with virtual impunity.[8] He pointed out that the first of several official surveys conducted by the Dutch found that in 1990 “the total number of life-shortening acts and omissions where the doctor’s primary intention…was to kill, and which are therefore indubitably euthanasiast, is 10,558.”[9]

Shockingly, the majority of these cases were nonvoluntary. Oxford legal scholar John Finnis, commenting on the Dutch data, remarks: “[W]ell over half…were without any explicit request. In the United States that would be over 235,000 unrequested medically accelerated deaths per annum.”[10] In 2013, 1.7 percent (1,807 patients) of all deaths in Belgium were due to euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide.[11] A 2010 study discovered that 66 of 208 identified deaths in Belgium were administered without an explicit patient request.[12]

Keown confirms that “the undisputed empirical evidence from the Netherlands and Belgium shows widespread breach of the safeguards, not least the sizeable incidence of non-voluntary euthanasia and of non-reporting.”[13] In October of 2013, three judges of the High Court of Ireland voiced the same concern: “[T]he incidence of legally assisted death without explicit request in the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland is strikingly high.”[14] And the numbers of those assisted in committed suicide keep growing.[15]

Part of the reason for these troubling statistics is that any purported legal safeguards can be and have been abused, and over time the logic of a “right to die” is extended to ever-wider groups of patients, including the incompetent. Keown describes the logic of PAS as based on judging some lives as unworthy of life:

Once a doctor is prepared to make such a judgment in the case of [a] patient capable of requesting death, the judgment can, logically, equally be made in the case of a patient incapable of requesting death.… If a doctor thinks death would benefit the patient, why should the doctor deny the patient that benefit merely because the patient is incapable of asking for it?… The logical “slippery slope” argument is unanswerable.[16]

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, affirms that this is the lesson to take from the Netherlands and that proposed American PAS laws cannot avoid the same outcome:

The Netherlands studies fail to demonstrate that permitting physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia will not lead to the nonvoluntary euthanasia of children, the demented, the mentally ill, the old, and others. Indeed, the persistence of abuse and the violation of safeguards, despite publicity and condemnation, suggest that the feared consequences of legalization are exactly its inherent consequences.[17]

The Lethal Logic Extends to Children and Disabled

In 1996, two doctors prosecuted in the Netherlands for the nonvoluntary euthanasia of disabled infants were acquitted when they argued medical necessity.[18] The Dutch courts simply followed the inexorable logic that drives the case for PAS and voluntary euthanasia to a new extent. If necessity justifies ending the life of a suffering patient who requests it, it equally justifies ending the life of a suffering patient who cannot request it. Dutch pediatricians have now devised a protocol for infanticide.[19]

A 2005 study in the New England Journal of Medicine recorded that in the previous seven years, 22 cases of infant euthanasia were reported in the Netherlands.[20] A 2013 Netherlands commission on euthanasia argued that as many as 650 infants per year should be eligible for euthanasia on the basis of the children’s diagnosis as “babies who in spite of very intensive treatment are certain to die in the short term, babies with a poor prognosis and very poor expected quality of life, or babies who are not dependent on intensive treatment but who face a life of severe suffering with no prospect of improvement.”[21] The U.N. Human Rights Committee formally condemned this Dutch infanticide: “The Committee is gravely concerned at reports that new-born handicapped infants have had their lives ended by medical personnel.”[22]

In March 2014, Belgium became the first country to legislatively allow doctors to euthanize “consenting” minors, despite the objections of 160 physicians.[23] In an open letter, these doctors argued that legalization without age restriction was unnecessary, as palliative care is sufficient, and the bill would create excessive pressure on both children and parents to choose premature death.[24] Nevertheless, Belgium went forward and removed the age restrictions.

Diagnoses of disability are now considered sufficient grounds for death. In December 2012, Marc and Eddy Verbessem, 45-year-old deaf twins, were euthanized in a Belgian hospital after they discovered they were going blind.[25] Nancy Verhelst, a 44-year-old transsexual Belgian whose doctors made mistakes in three sex change operations, was left feeling as though she was a “monster.” She then requested—and was granted—euthanasia by lethal injection.[26]

In the Netherlands, the euthanized include Ann G., a 44-year-old woman whose only ailment was chronic anorexia.[27] In the beginning of 2013, Dutch doctors administered a lethal injection to a 70-year-old blind woman because she said the loss of sight constituted “unbearable suffering.”[28] In early 2015, a 47-year-old divorced mother of two suffering from tinnitus, a loud ringing in the ears, was granted physician-assisted suicide in the Netherlands.[29] She left behind a 13-year-old son and a 15-year-old daughter.[30]Gerty Casteelen was a 54-year-old psychiatric patient with molysomophobia, a fear of dirt or contamination. Her doctors decided that she would not be able to control her fear and agreed to administer a lethal injection.[31]

The Alternative: True Compassion and Care

Instead of embracing PAS, we should respond to suffering with true compassion and solidarity.[32]People seeking PAS typically suffer from depression or other mental illnesses, as well as simply from loneliness. Instead of helping them to kill themselves, we should offer them appropriate medical care and human presence. For those in physical pain, pain management and other palliative medicine can manage their symptoms effectively. For those for whom death is imminent, hospice care and fellowship can accompany them in their last days. Anything less falls short of what human dignity requires. The real challenge facing society is to make quality end-of-life care available to all.

Originally posted here

Chicago Tribune columnist Rex Huppke demonstrated his usual glib condescension yesterday in his ridicule of a Tennessee county commissioner’s odd proposed resolution. What is striking in Huppke’s relentless efforts to mock anyone who believes marriage has an ontology central to which is sexual differentiation is that he studiously avoids engagement with the ideas expressed by the foremost scholars defending the historical understanding of the nature of marriage. Such avoidance smacks of intellectual dishonesty and cowardice.

Does Huppke believe that marriage has no ontology or does he believe it does but that no one apprehended it correctly until homosexual activists did in the late 20th Century. Perhaps if he spent less time mocking those who are easy targets for his attacks—targets that don’t require him to make any actual arguments that he must defend with evidence—and more time engaging with substantive ideas, we would learn more about his beliefs.

For example, does he believe that marriage has a nature that societies merely recognize and regulate, or does he believe marriage is wholly a social construction—a social invention created by a vast, millenia-old, cross-cultural, patriarchal conspiracy?

If marriage is merely a social invention with no inherent nature, why not recognize unions constituted by platonic or storge love as “marriages”?

If marriage is wholly a social construction, then why not expand marriage to include any number of people of assorted “genders” (or no “gender”)?

If marriage is wholly a social construction and, as the Left argues, has no inherent connection to procreative potential, then why prohibit consenting brothers from marrying?

If, on the other hand, Huppke believes marriage has a nature but that nature is devoid of any connection to procreative potential and is solely constituted by love, then why erotic love? Other than procreation, which the Left argues is irrelevant to the nature of marriage, what is so special about erotic love that would render it of interest to the government? If marriage is wholly unrelated to procreative potential, then why is the government involved at all? After all, the government isn’t involved in recognizing and regulating other non-reproductive types of loving relationships.

Here’s an idea, why doesn’t Huppke spend some time reading and writing about the substantive, deeply intellectual ideas of Princeton University law professor Robert George, John Finnis (shared by Notre Dame and Oxford), Ryan Anderson, Michael Brown, Anthony Esolen, Robert Gagnon, and Doug Wilson. Yes, mocking their ideas may be a tad more challenging for Huppke, but his refutations would make infinitely more interesting reading than his ridicule of culturally non-influential people from small Tennessee towns.

Help us with the cost of our state-wide educational efforts!

When a decorated soldier was told to turn a blind eye from intervening in the case of a child who was being repeatedly raped and beaten, he knew it was an order he had to refuse. Now, doing the right thing will cost him his career.Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martland, a Green Beret, learned from a 12 year-old Afghan boy’s mother that an Afghan police commander had chained her son to his bed in order to repeatedly abuse him…all occurring on a United States military base. The commander was being trained under Sgt. Martland’s mentorship.

Sgt. Martland confronted the Afghan rapist on a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, who admitted and laughed off his sexually abusive actions, disregarding the concerns. Like any red-blooded American would (and should) do, Sgt. Martland would not stand by and allow the child to be hurt any longer.

A physical altercation broke out between Sgt. Martland and the Afghan commander. Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martland admits he confronted the Afghan police commander and physically threw him off the base because he was fed up with the commander’s brutal sexual abuse of a village boy.

For protecting a child against an admitted rapist, Sgt. Martland has been told he will be dismissed from the military in November.

Did you catch that? Instead of standing with a soldier who was protecting a child against an admitted rapist, the military is kicking him out! I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t have done the same thing in Sgt. Martland’s boots.

I certainly wouldn’t punish any man for doing what any man should do…stepping in to protect a defenseless child from physical abuse!

No matter where our soldiers serve, no matter what local customs may dictate, every person serving in our military has a moral obligation to protect children anywhere and anytime abuse occurs.

TAKE ACTION:  Click HERE to sign our petition to the U.S. House and U.S. Senate Armed Services Committees, urging them to demand the Pentagon clear Sgt. Martland’s record and allow him to return to his regular duties.

This article was originally posted at AFA.net.

I had the privilege a few weeks ago of speaking together with Anthony Esolen at the Illinois Family Institute. His talk was fantastic — he has the kind of subtlety that is vigorous, lively, understandable, and brave. He is not like that scribesnpharisees seminar prof doing nuance to beat the band, watching his own hand as it languidly gestures toward the mahogany wainscot, the wainscot that, incidentally, was bought and paid for by some evangelical donor a hundred and fifty years ago. No — to lurch wildly to a different metaphor — his subtlety is the kind that a fencing master shows just before your foil flies across the room, and you find yourself rubbing your wrist.

While I was there in Chicago, I picked up this book of his, Defending Marriage, one that I did not have, and am pleased to mention it to you all as my next book of the month. It is simply magnificent. This robust defense of marriage as marriage is, I think, the best thing to pick up if you want to defend marriage against its barbarian critics, or simply if you want to stirred up to love and good works in your own marriage. Fantastico. Arresting. Superb. Smashing. Did I mention that I like it?

On the subject of marriage, not only has secularism kidnapped us all, duck-taped our hands and feet, and thrown us into the trunk of their car, as we are going down the road it slowly dawns on us that we are in the trunk of a clown car escaping from the circus.

The subtitle is “Twelve Arguments for Sanity.” Each chapter tackles a different argument — on why we must not give the sexual revolution the force of irrevocable law, why we must not grant that sexual gratification is a personal matter only, why we should not give godlike powers to the state, and so on.

This book is instructive, helpful, and invigorating. It is moving. It is everything a book on marriage needs to be — political, cultural, spiritual, and personal. In fact, I can’t believe you don’t have it yet.

This article was originally posted at Blog & Mablog.

One of the things we must absolutely learn how to do better than we do is distinguish things that differ, especially things that look similar but which differ radically. We must learn to say, as Dorothy Sayers once famously said, distinguo. I distinguish.

There is a profound difference between the doctrine of interposition/lesser magistrates on the one hand and the doctrine of liberty of conscience on the other. There are places where they overlap, but there are also instances where they have nothing to do with each other. When a magistrate decides to interpose, he is doing it as a matter of conscience. But he is not exercising his liberty — he is discharging a duty.

A citizen has the right to be left alone in any number of areas. We ought not to tell him what days on which he must mow his lawn, we ought not require him to photograph homosexual unions, we ought not to tell him that the Department of Agriculture requires him to floss daily.  Even if he is mistaken, and his conscience along with him, we should still let him close his shop in honor of the coming of the Great Pumpkin. What he does with his time, his money, his business is, in fact, his business.

Now in some instances, a person’s private religious convictions can become a public matter, as when the Thugs of India used their free exercise of religion in the pursuit of killing and robbing people. The point is that the exact boundaries of the liberties of every citizen is a religious issue, and is a issue that cannot be settled from up behind the Agnostic Bench. If you don’t know what truth is, then the first thing you should do is quit deciding what truths are acceptable. A Christian judge would say that the Thug’s religious liberties are a matter of no consequence. The Communist judge says that the Christian’s religious liberties are a matter of no consequence. The Agnostic judge doesn’t know what is going on, but just sits there, trying to look wise. He thinks nobody will notice, but we have.

An agent of the state occupies a different station than does the private citizen; it is a different office entirely. The law that governs his behavior cannot be neutral any more than the law that bounds the private citizen’s liberties can be neutral. Scripture asks, “Can two walk together, except they be agreed?” (Amos 3:3). The answer, in case you were wondering, is no.

So that means that a society has to decide what it will allow its citizens to do and why, and what it will require its officers to do and why. The religious framework that encompasses both of these needs to be the same one. Because I am a Christian, I believe that this framework needs to be a Christian one. When it comes down to differences between Christians, and it is an area where the state must act or not act (e.g. divorce), the state must decide which of the two Christian positions is right. When they do this, they must take great care to be right. Neutrality is impossible.

Kim Davis refused to issue a marriage license to homosexuals, and she was right. But would a devout Roman Catholic, on the basis of an absolutist rejection of remarriage after divorce, have the right to refuse a marriage license to Kim Davis on one of her later marriage? I would say no, but my purpose here is not to get into that debate. My point is that the society cannot be neutral about that debate. The applicants must either be served or refused. One or the other must happen. So if we say no, and are asked why, we need to be able to say more than just because.

This is why secularism is dead on its feet. We have gotten to the reductio ad absurdum portion of the Q&A session and we are no longer bound together by a hidden-generic-protestant-north-american consensus. For decades, we thought that this consensus was what everyone “just knew.” Turns out they don’t.

The doctrine of interposition means that Christian magistrates must be looking for an opportunity to just say no, and to do so on an issue of sufficient moral magnitude as to justify the societal dislocations that will result. Whether the municipal snowplows should run on the sabbath (and when do sabbath hours start anyway?) is not one of those issues. The two issues that I think are ripe candidates for interposition are abortion and same sex mirage. Mayors, judges, governors, county clerks, etc. should simply refuse to cooperate with evil mandates concerning them, and should issue decisions of their own restricting them. A Christian governor should simply outlaw abortion in his state.

Some are concerned that this would lead to a shooting war, but I don’t think that is necessary at all. If the feds send in the troops to keep the abortion clinics in Texas open, then another three states should follow suit and ban abortion. They can’t put everyone in jail. The Civil Rights movement didn’t lead to a shooting war. All that is necessary for this to become completely unwieldy for the bad guys is for enough good guys to say enough. As Edmund Burke might put it, were he here, all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to have reservations about the doctrine of interposition.

These issues — abortion and same sex mirage — are good issues. They are weighty issues, whether weighed in the balances of Scripture, nature, or history. They are pressing issues — everyone knows a great deal about both of them. They are issues where victory is actually attainable. If everyone who objected to abortion acted like it, it would be gone this time next week. The same thing is true of same sex mirage.

The problem is not that we don’t have enough people who object. The problem is that those who object are so darn sweet. The problem is not that we don’t have enough resources. Our problem is that we won’t use what we have.

And so in the meantime it is fully appropriate for us to be fighting for “carve outs” in the law for private citizens. Pacifists shouldn’t have to fight in the army, and evangelical photographers and bakers should not be forced to celebrate abominations. But officers have a duty to interpose. They have a duty to prevent. A photographer should accept the carve out when it is offered. The official should not. For an officer of society to ratify high disobedience to God is as much compromise as would be exhibited by a florist who celebrated a same sex reception.

The secularist says that if you are not willing to issue a license to a same sex couple, then you should resign the position. I say something that sounds similar, only reversed. I would say that if you are not willing to interpose, you should resign the position. Why? Because you are not willing to fulfill the obligations that God assigned to that office. It is the will of God that all lesser officials, all lesser magistrates, hold their offices in the fear of God, which means that they must be willing to interpose when the greater magistrates mandate broad social rebellion.

And that is exactly where we are right now. We need leaders, at every level, who will refuse to participate in the rebellion.

This article was originally posted here

“Haters are going to hate” is how Shepard Smith of Fox News referred to supporters of Christian clerk Kim Davis on his Tuesday afternoon show. It was another example of the anti-Christian bias that has been rearing its ugly head on a channel that many conservatives had looked to for “fair and balanced” coverage of the issues they care about.

But calls to several Fox News officials, asking for reaction to Smith’s anti-Christian comments, were not returned.

In other controversial comments about a pro-Davis rally being broadcast during his show, Smith ripped conservative Christians for “a religious play again,” saying, “This is the same crowd that says, ‘We don’t want Sharia law, don’t let them tell us what to do, keep their religion out of our lives and out of our government.’ Well, here we go again.”

Smith seems not to understand the difference between Christianity, a foundation of the American system that protects religious rights and liberty, and Islam, an authoritarian religion which wants to impose its values on others.

It was expected that the liberals in the media complaining about “mass incarceration” would make an exception for Davis to go to jail. That’s just the way the liberals are. But it was somewhat unexpected that Fox News would break its promise to air “fair and balanced” coverage of the issue by permitting Smith to take such a crude stand against Davis on the “Shepard Smith Reporting” 3:00 p.m. ET show.

All that Davis had asked for from the beginning was the right to have her religious views respected by the government, and for her name as county clerk to not be put on marriage licenses for homosexuals. She was let out of jail on Tuesday despite the federal judge in the case, David L. Bunning, having failed to resolve the issues in the case. As a result, she could return to her job and decide again not to authorize gay marriage licenses.

With his reckless comments, Smith, regularly featured by Out magazine as a powerful homosexual media personality, has embarrassed his channel and turned himself into a liability with the channel’s conservative viewers. He has completely dropped any pretense of objectivity on his show, by apparently taking it personally that many people find the gay lifestyle to be morally repugnant.

His coverage of the pro-Davis rally on Tuesday was openly hostile to the clerk, as he denounced her and her supporters as the equivalent of racists who objected to interracial marriage. The idea of comparing blacks to homosexuals is a frequent claim made by the gay lobby and its adherents. However, skin color is a fact of life, and sexual orientation can be learned, chosen, and even rejected.

It was during her legal counsel Mat Staver’s defense of Davis at the rally that Smith said “haters are going to hate.”

But rather than being a “hater,” Staver is a well-respected attorney and legal scholar who “holds Bachelor, Master, and Juris Doctorate degrees and an honorary Doctorate of Laws and a Doctorate of Divinity,” his bio states. “He has argued two landmark cases before the United States Supreme Court as lead counsel and written numerous briefs before the High Court. Mat has argued in numerous state and federal courts across the country and has over 230 published legal opinions.”

Despite his liberal and pro-homosexual views, Fox News says that Smith “has played a major role in the network’s innovation of the way news is presented.”

If so, this can only continue to hurt the image and reputation of Fox News, which still promotes the slogan of being “fair and balanced” in order to maintain its conservative viewers.

A recent edition of Out said about Smith that his “sexual orientation and centrist ideology are some of Fox News’ worst kept secrets.” The magazine went on, “Despite 2014 reports that his desire to come out led to his demotion, Smith continues to provide nuanced, grounded, and logical reporting as managing editor of Fox’s breaking news division, and host of Shepard Smith Reporting.”

But with his bashing of Kim Davis for her Christian actions and views, the idea that Smith provides “grounded” reporting will be increasingly difficult to believe. The venom which came from him is something Fox viewers would expect from MSNBC.

While it cannot be confirmed that Smith was demoted “for his desire to come out” publicly as a homosexual, he might as well come out since he has really left no doubt in the minds of viewers how he feels on this very personal matter. He has confirmed with his wild and opinionated statements that he is not an objective news anchor who can be counted on to fairly report the news.

In addition to attacking Christians as “haters,” Smith complained on the air that those turning out in support of Davis were being “divisive,” and that Davis was surrounded by “grandstanders,” such as the “ridiculous” Mike Huckabee, a presidential candidate and former governor of Arkansas who served as a host of a talk show on the Fox News Channel. He is a Southern Baptist pastor who helped lead the “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day” for the restaurant when its CEO was criticized for supporting traditional marriage.

On his show last week Smith had mocked Davis for having been married several times and having kids out of wedlock, not mentioning her religious conversion to Christianity four years ago that turned her life around and led to her take a stand against signing the gay marriage licenses.

Smith said, “Ms. Davis apparently believes in the sanctity of marriage to the degree that she’s been married a total of four times. In fact, she got pregnant with her third husband’s children while married to her first husband. But fear not: her second husband adopted them.”

Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth called the comments a “cheap shot” that ignored her born-again experience in becoming a Christian four years ago. “She knows that that’s her past. She’s probably ashamed of it,” he noted. “But she now has a strong allegiance to the Bible and to her God and wants to follow her God.”

Despite her religious conversion, Greg Gutfeld repeated the smear of Davis, based on her previous marriages, on the Fox News show “The Five” on Tuesday afternoon. Not one member of the panel took Davis’s side during the discussion or mentioned how Christianity had changed her life.

The basic facts of the case, given short shrift by Fox and other media, are simple: Davis had objected on religious liberty grounds to putting her name and government title on licenses for homosexual marriages. Legal experts also noted that a Supreme Court decision “legalizing” same-sex marriage was not sufficient to alter Kentucky law and the Kentucky constitution, which forbid legal recognition of same-sex marriages.

Nevertheless, Davis was found in contempt by Judge Bunning, who claims to be a Christian, and was put in jail without bail, only to be freed after five days.

Despite what the Supreme Court said in its ruling, dissenters called it a threat to democracy and predicted resistance from the people, who are supposed to have the power in our Constitutional system through elected representatives to make the law. That resistance, as far as the media are concerned, has started with the Davis case. It is shocking that religious conservatives cannot count on Fox to respect their side of the argument.

However, this isn’t the first time that Shepard Smith has been able to spout pro-homosexual views on the air. He denounced Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day as the “National Day of Intolerance” because supporters of the restaurant chain turned out in support of the CEO’s pro-traditional marriage views.

Fox actually pours money into the homosexual lobby. As reported by AIM, Smith and other Fox News personalities, including Megyn Kelly, have raised money for the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA), a special interest lobby which has guided pro-homosexual coverage in virtually all major media organizations. In April, the Fox News Channel joined CBS News and CNN as “silver” sponsors of the NLGJA 20th annual New York “Headlines & Headliners” fundraising event. A male stripper performed at the event.

This columnist, who tried to cover the affair, was told that if he recorded the event he would be thrown out.

“When I tried to reach Roger Ailes, Chairman and CEO of Fox News at the switchboard number of 212-301-3000, I was told he was unavailable for comment and that his office would not even accept my inquiry.”

Post originally found at aim.org