The political Left, usually fanatical defenders of tolerance, diversity, freedom of expression, and choice in all things sexual, is in high dudgeon about a one-hour TLC television special titled My Husband’s Not Gay scheduled to air Sunday night (1/11/2015).

The show profiles four Mormon men who admit they are attracted to men but have chosen to pursue relationships with women. Three of the men are married, at least one of whom is raising children in a normal family structure. There is no reason to doubt these men’s claims that they love their wives, because even men who feel erotically attracted to men are capable of loving women.

In an almost comical display of irony, homosexual activists—those fanatical of tolerance, diversity, choice, anti-censorship, and “narrative” variety—are calling for the cancellation of the program before it even airs.

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) claims the show “sends the wrong message.” Near as I can tell, the men in this series are saying that they choose not to place their same-sex attraction at the center of their identity. They’re saying that there are other values and beliefs that shape how they construct identity and determine their actions. They’re saying that they personally believe that homoerotic activity is wrong and that they seek to affirm only those feelings that are consonant with their religious beliefs. Are representatives from GLAAD claiming that such beliefs are objectively wrong?

According to the Associated Press, GLAAD views the show as “a sad reminder of so-called gay conversion therapy.”

How do the claims of men who admit to being sexually attracted to men remind GLAAD of “conversion therapy”?  I guess both “conversion therapy” and the decisions of these men reflect a rejection of the Left’s assumptions about the moral status of homoerotic activity, but that’s about it. Perhaps these men’s decisions are sad reminders to GLAAD that not everyone has acquiesced to the imperious ideological commands of GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

Like GLAAD, “bi-sexual” Eliel Cruz writing for Rolling Stone magazine is consumed by a fear that impels them toward oppression and suppression. They fear that if Americans hear the stories of men who freely choose not to affirm as good their unchosen, unwanted same-sex attraction, Americans may reject the Left’s perverse mischaracterization of all counseling efforts that may help men and women reconcile their faith and sexual predilections in ways that the Left doesn’t like.

Here’s what Cruz offers as evidence that this one-hour special is “dangerous”:

These men use the same verbiage and framework that’s been taught by decades by those in the so-called “ex-gay” movement. Using words like “same-sex attracted” in lieu of saying one is gay is ex-gay training 101. The show will most likely avoid using the term “reparative therapy” as it’s become known for being deeply harmful. But whether it’s explicitly said or not, that’s what this show is about.

So, using the term “same-sex attracted”—as opposed to “gay”—is common within the “ex-gay” movement, and some within the “ex-gay” movement practice “reparative therapy,” and some forms of “reparative therapy” have been found harmful by some within the highly politicized mental health community, therefore, this one-hour special is dangerous. Wow. Where is George Orwell when we need him.

In the dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell named the practice which homosexual and “trans” activists now fervently embrace: Newspeak. Here is how Orwell explained Newspeak:

Newspeak was the official language of Oceania, and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of IngSoc, or English Socialism….

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all…a heretical thought…should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever….

[T]he special function of certain Newspeak words… was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them….

[W]ords which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them.

Leftists hate the term “same-sex attracted” because it focuses (rightly) on feelings and does not carry the extra, Newspeakian connotations of “gay.” “Gay” is a rhetorical invention of the Left created to communicate that same-sex attraction is inherently good, that it’s absolutely immutable in all cases, and that fulfillment can come only if such attraction is affirmed. In other words, “gay” embodies a Leftist view of “identity.”

It’s not just the term “same-sex attracted” that our aberrancy advocates seek to obliterate. They also seek to strip pronouns of any connection to objective biological sex because objective biological sex is foreign to the new sexuality orthodoxy.

Here is risible reason #2 that Cruz offers as evidence that TLC’s one-hour special is dangerous: “TLC is giving a fringe narrative a platform.” Since when do sexual subversives object to fringe narratives? Haven’t Leftists extolled all things fringy for decades? Let’s not forget that until very recently homoeroticism, same-sex faux-“marriage,” and “transgenderism” were uber-fringy phenomena.

Cruz also objects to “Perpetuating the idea that changing one’s sexuality is possible through prayer.” First, Christians certainly believe that an omnipotent God is fully capable of changing sexual feelings and that prayer is powerful. This is not to say, however, that all people who experience same-sex attraction will see their feelings eradicated. Most Christians will experience sinful inclinations until the next life.

But, more directly relevant to the show, there’s no evidence from the trailer that the four men profiled in the TLC program are suggesting that their same-sex attraction has changed or will change. They simply don’t want to act upon it or affirm it as central to their identity.

GLAAD president and CEO, Kate Ellis, stated that “No one can change who [sic] they love, and more importantly, no one should have to.” Ellis seems to be making the breathtakingly presumptuous claim that the men in the TLC show do not love their wives and more broadly that those who experience same-sex attraction are incapable of loving people of the opposite sex.

Ellis asserts that “no one should have to” change whom they love. Why would Ellis make such a claim in response to a show in which men explain that they have freely chosen to marry women—whom they love? From all the reports, there is no indication that these men have been compelled to change whom they love. They have freely chosen the sex of the persons with whom they will be emotionally, spiritually, and erotically partnered.

The men profiled in this show evidently reject homosexual activists’ definition of “identity.” Homosexual activists believe that powerful, seemingly intractable feelings that emerge early in life must be affirmed as central to one’s identity.  Well, probably not all feelings, just homoerotic feelings and the desire to be the opposite sex must be affirmed.

For many people, however, “identity” consists in, among other things, only those feelings they affirm as good and properly ordered.  Identity for them is not merely the aggregate of feelings they experience. Therefore, those people will reject as central to their identity feelings that they believe are disordered and which if acted upon will result in illicit conduct. While the Left believes that unchosen homoerotic attraction is good, properly ordered, and must be affirmed as central to identity in order to live a happy fulfilled life, their beliefs are not objective facts, and no one has an obligation to accept them as true.

While the Left claims to value tolerance, they are intolerant of any and all public expressions of views regarding volitional homoerotic activity or relationships with which they disagree.

While claiming to value diversity, they want to censor the kinds of stories the public hears.

While claiming to value choice, they loathe and condemn the choices the men on this TLC show make.

In increasingly Orwellian efforts to purge the cultural landscape of the expression of ideas that undermine their dogma, censorious homosexual activists violate the very ideas they exploit: choice, diversity, tolerance, and freedom of expression. TLC should not cancel My Husband’s Not Gay in response to the demands of censors and ideologues. These stories offer rarely seen glimpses into the lives of people who construe homoerotic attraction, marriage, family, identity, and fulfillment differently than do homosexual activists. Their lives are part of the variegations in this diverse American life. And there may be someone out there who sees in these lives hope for a future different from the bleakly deterministic picture offered by the likes of GLAAD and Rolling Stone.

The Truth Project

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

CLICK HERE for Details

Newsweek magazine – which finally went out of print some time ago, but recently experienced a deep-pocketed resurrection – has graced its readers with a very long cover story on how Christians don’t know anything about the Bible and what they think they know is all wrong. But there’s hope because Newsweek tells us poor Christians what’s what. However, such a task takes world-class hubris and self-delusion as if Christians tried to tell Muslims they have no idea what the Koran actually means, and we do. (I’m not being overly snarky. Skim the article yourself. It’s a Hurricane Sandy of condescension.)

But that’s Newsweek for you. And they’ve done similar cover stories many times prior. The article’s seemingly countless problems can be divided into three general categories:

– The author uses the most extreme and largely unrecognizable caricatures of orthodox Christians as his canvas.

– The author makes simplistic and incorrect arguments about what it is serious Christians actually know about the Scriptures and the church’s ancient history.

– The author baldly creates “facts” ex nihilo about the development and use of Scripture in the Early Church.

Let’s address the major points by category.

I. Wild Caricatures and Oversights

1.) Their story is written about Christians who take the Bible as the reliable, true Word of God, but it characterizes these folks as if they are only American, hyper-conservative, reactionary nit-wits. They miss that Christians who accept the Bible this way live in all nations, represent a great majority of languages and adhere to very different types of political ideas stretching back many millennia, both Jew and Christian. A new low in the art of stereotyping.

2.) The article does not cite one conservative or even widely respected mainstream scholar of the New Testament. The few scholars cited are of the very liberal school of textual criticism. Not that they don’t deserve to be heard, but a good, serious story on this subject – or any – should include a diversity of views for the reader.

3.) It also refers to Christians who take Scripture as the reliable and authoritative Word of God as “biblical literalists.” This is a mistake many people make, but reasonable people should know otherwise. No Christian tradition does or has ever taken the Bible literally.

It is obvious, if we stopped to think about it, that some parts are indeed to be taken literally such as Christ’s claim about himself, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6). Others are to be taken as truth indeed, but not literally: “Unless a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God” (John 3:3). And then some seem to fit in between the literal and the figurative: “I am the light of the world” (John 18:12). The Scriptures are a collection of many types of writing and meaning. There is no excuse for any learned person not knowing this obvious distinction.

II. Simplistic Presentations at Best, Flat Wrong at Worst

1.) The first and grandest overarching mistake the Newsweek author commits is common to such gadflies. The author points out concerns about the “numerous inconsistencies” in the Bible and suggests that those who copied the documents from generation to generation made mistakes (or added things) in their transcriptions.

Truth: This is not news. Christians have long been aware of these seeming difficult valleys in the biblical texts and have worked through them carefully with serious scholarship for the last two hundred years or longer. These points are certainly not faith-wrecking problems. Most of the changes and insertions are minor or inconsequential, as the article points out.

2.) Newsweek also explains that there are troubling differences about Christ in the Gospels, stories in some books that are not in the others or they present the stories in different ways with different facts. They call this “playing telephone” with the Bible.

Examples concern Jesus’ birth and resurrection in which different writers provide facts that others do not. The article explains that “In creating the familiar Christmas tale, Christians took a little bit of one story, mixed it with a little bit of the other and ignored all the contradictions….”

Truth: The same is true if you want to know about any incident, say the facts of what happened on 9/11. The New York Times’ reporting on 9/11 includes facts that are both missing and different in ways from those reported by the Los Angeles Times. But readers don’t question the reliability of either because they accentuate or leave out various points of the story. One seeking a true and detailed story of what happened on the morning of 9/11 draws from various sources and puts these different and unique reports together into a bigger, truer picture. It is what good journalists do in their own reporting.

Thus, the seeming “contradictions” in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John give various parts of Christ’s story in their own ways from their own vantage points. Collectively, they give us a fuller picture. People know this.

3.) The author also makes the outlandishly provocative claim that “no television preacher has ever read the Bible. Neither has any evangelical politician. Neither has the pope.” What he’s getting at is that the Bible we have today is not the exact text the original writers created, so today we read “a fundamentally flawed document.”

Truth: First, it is a ridiculous quibble. Very few Christians are shocked to learn there are differences between an original manuscript and one transferred over the centuries. But are those differences enough to conclude that our Bible today is a “fundamentally flawed document”? Of course not.

One would have to say no one has ever read Aristotle’s work or Homer’s Odyssey because what the texts we have today are not what these authors actually wrote but are instead “fundamentally flawed documents.” Actually more so in that these documents are much older than the New Testaments writings and have been transferred for much longer. But scholars of these texts – and most other major ancient texts – don’t believe or explain to their students that seeking to understand what the authors truly meant is a fool’s errand.

God has not been helpless in preserving His holy Word through time. As it was first given to His people in Hebrew and Greek, He wasn’t caught by surprise that it would need copying and translating throughout time for all peoples. Obviously He chose to do it this way through the work of His people as we don’t get new editions sent down like manna from Heaven. If He’s good with this process, so too can we be.

4.) Newsweek also wants Christians to know that biblical authenticity is not possible because some Greek words don’t have precise equivalents in the languages into which it is being translated.

Truth: How many have heard your pastor explain a particular text and say, “Now, the original Greek word here doesn’t have a precise English equivalent, but it generally means (this) or could mean (this, this or this)”? Newsweek would have us believe your pastor is unwittingly pointing out the unreliability of Scripture, rather than just simply explaining the difficulty of translating the text from one very different language to another. And Newsweek is certainly smart enough to appreciate that if this is a debilitating problem for the reliability of Scripture, it is also one for any text translated from an ancient language, much less any language at all. Yes, words from language to language don’t translate cleanly. Not news, or a problem.

5.) They correctly note that most congregations hold to and even recite the Nicene Creed each Sunday in their services. But they insist, “It is doubtful many of them know the words they utter are not from the Bible.”

Truth: This one is just embarrassing. It is doubtful most of them don’t know this. Newsweek should have just asked around.

6.) Then they drop this bomb on good Christians as if it’s also faith-challenging: The Sabbath – as Christians generally practice it – is not actually Sunday but the last day of the week, Saturday. Newsweek tells us:

“The word Sunday does not appear in the Bible, either as the Sabbath or anything else. But four years before Nicaea, Constantine declared Sunday as a day of rest in honor of the sun god.”

Truth: First, Christians indeed do and have always well realized that our holy day is the day after the Jewish Sabbath. And it happened long before the Council of Nicaea and Constantine. This is obvious. The first day of the week (as the New Testament refers to it time and again) became our day of rest and worship because our Savior was resurrected on this day. He also first appeared to the disciples after his resurrection on this day and commissioned them to found His church, breathing upon them the Holy Spirit (John 20:19-23). And Acts 20:7-8 notes the meeting and communion day for Christians was the first day of the week.

Additionally, the very Early Church leaders tell us the first day of the week was sacred to the church, their special day. One such example is Ignatius. On his way to his martyrdom in Rome (and Onesimus, Paul’s dearly beloved friend from Philemon joined him in this journey to encourage and minister to him) Ignatius wrote to the church in Magnesia and explained, “Those then [the followers of Christ] who lived by ancient practices arrived at a new hope. They ceased to keep the Sabbath and lived by the Lord’s Day, on which our life as well as theirs shone forth…” (Letter to the Magnesians v. 9)

It is an utter, although long repeated myth that Constantine declared the first day of the week as the day on which the church would worship. What he did was name it Sunday as a civil holiday, thus Christianizing that pagan day of the Sun as the Son’s day. But Christians held it as their holy day from the church’s founding.

7.) Next Newsweek informs its readers that the birth of Christ was not actually December 25th but later moved to that day to satisfy a significant pagan holiday.

Truth: Likewise, it is no secret to most Christians that December 25th is likely not the actual day of Christ’s birth. The exact date of this great day is not mentioned in either scriptures or the early documents of the church. No secular accounts give the date either. No one knows.

There is even evidence by some Early Fathers that the birth of Christ was not even celebrated by the church in its early years. And records show that Early Fathers consider our Lord’s birth could have been on many different days; some among those considered are on our calendars – May 20, March 21 and April 15, 20 or 21. But by the fourth century, December 25 became the date celebrated in the Western church and January 6 in the Eastern Church. The span between these two dates is our 12 days of Christmas.

The theory that this time of year was chosen because it coincided with a major pagan festival is very doubtful.  No early documents indicate this and the tale appears to have first arisen in the twelfth century, a long, long time after its establishment and practice by the Church.

8.) Their article presents two additional “challenges” to confidence in the Scriptures that are so ridiculous any serious high-school Bible student can explain them. One, that there is no clear understanding – as well as seemingly contradictory tellings – of the important topic of when and how Christ will return. Second, that there seemingly two different creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2.

Truth: Does it really need an explanation? For the second point, see the explanation regarding the New York and Los Angeles Times above.

9.) And the last for this category is a doozy. Newsweek says “fundamentalists Christians” want certain people condemned to hell – homosexuals and the like – but that their wishes will hit a snag because “if they accept the writings of Paul and believe all people are sinners, then salvation is found in belief in Christ and the Resurrection. For everyone. There are no exceptions in the Bible for the sins that evangelicals really don’t like. So apparently, God doesn’t need the help of fundamentalists in determining what should be done in the afterlife with the prideful, the greedy, the debaters or even those homosexuals.”

Truth: They actually got this point exactly right despite so badly misunderstanding one of the basic tenets of evangelical theology, the great hope and essence of the universal Christian faith: Christ came to die for sinners. All sinners, offering salvation to each one who repent and seek him, regardless of their story.

III. Just Plain Wrong or Made-Up

1.) Newsweek’s biggest mistake goes right to the heart of what Christianity believes and has consistently proclaimed: That Jesus is God and the second divine person of the Trinity. Their article claims the texts saying Jesus is God have nothing to do with the Greek texts and that “modern translators pretty much just invented the words.” Regarding the Trinity, they offer their readers the tired and incorrect explanation that because the word never appears in the Bible it’s not biblical.

Truth: Both of these ideas – that Jesus was God and the nature of the Trinity – were not made up in later years by unscrupulous translators. The claim is fantastical. The first truths the Early Fathers of the Church sought to teach and defend passionately against rising heretics are these two:

Jesus is God: Some heretics taught that Jesus – a real flesh and blood man who was born an earthly birth and slaughtered on a cross – was not God at all and couldn’t possibly be. These were the Arianists, Docetists and the Gnostics. A great deal of energy was put forth in the early centuries of the church to make sure that the divinity of Jesus – both fully God and fully man – was adhered to and faithfully passed on church by church. Even the most basic understanding of church history gets this.

Trinity: To charge that the Trinity is not a genuinely Christian truth because the word itself never appears in Scripture is as simplistic as it is wrong. Many fundamental concepts are deeply biblical even if the words to describe them never appear there. Just one example concerning the Trinity is Matthew 28:19 even though it was Tertullian who first used the word to explain this fundamental Christian truth around 200-220 AD. As with the divinity of Jesus, the Early Fathers vigorously taught and defended the Triune nature of God against those who denied it. Nearly all the early creeds of the church proclaimed it as well.

2.) They also claim that the Early Church “butchered Christians” who did not agree with the doctrine of the Trinity, or taught that Jesus was not God or would not sign onto the Nicene Creed. And they claim that the Emperor Constantine, after his conversion, committed the same atrocities as well. Newsweek states outright that “In fact, Christians are believed to have massacred more followers of Jesus than any other group or nation.”

Truth: This is just embarrassing.

3.) Newsweek again demonstrates a dramatic lack of understanding of basic Christian theology and history by stating, “About 50 years later, in A.D. 381, the Romans held another meeting, this time in Constantinople. There, a new agreement was reached—Jesus wasn’t two, he was now three—Father, Son and Holy Ghost.”

Truth: Now one might just start to feel sorry for Newsweek.

4.) But wait, there’s more…

“… and several books of the New Testament, including some attributed to Paul, are now considered forgeries perpetrated by famous figures in Christianity to bolster their theological arguments. It is small wonder then that there are so many contradictions in the New Testament.”

 Truth: The author offers no explanation of who these “famous figures” are, what changes they made to the Scriptures or what novel theological ideas they were seeking to insert. He can’t because they don’t exist. More stuff just made up.

5.) Also, Newsweek says that in the early decades of the church, “there were no universally accepted manuscripts that set out what it meant to be a Christian, so most sects had their own gospels.”

Truth: Not even close. A canon of scripture – the New Testament as we have it today – was not settled upon until quite sometime after the founding of the Christian Church, but there were indeed accepted and reliable manuscripts that the church made regular use of. Many of these became the New Testament. Others did not, like the first and second letters of Clement, the Didache as well as the writings of Polycarp and Ignatius for example. These were widely taken by the church at large as reliable and beneficial for teaching what it means to be a faithful Christian as we might use the writings of Calvin, Edwards, Moody, Bonhoeffer, Lewis, Schaeffer and others today. Are they sacred? Of course not, but they are solid teachings that are useful to and appreciated in most churches.

There were indeed universally accepted manuscripts used regularly by the church from earliest days and there was little tussle over these. Churches certainly did not have their own unique manuscripts teaching many different, much less conflicting, things.

And the silliness just continues page after page; Christians getting the Scriptures plain wrong regarding homosexuality, flouting Christ’s command to not pray in public etc. The article never does improve in its reasoning, arguments or seriousness of scholarship.

It is certainly not being mean, cheap or unfair to say this major front-page article from an otherwise serious newsweekly is less thoughtful or burdened with any manner of truth than one would expect to find in a screed by the village atheist in one’s local alternative give-away weekly. Newsweek just provides us a longer version of it

And the only reason this one is worth responding to is because of who published it and how widely it will, unfortunately, be read.

As 2014 comes to an end, and the new year begins, we want to highlight some of the worst abuses by America’s news media in the past year. We have picked 10 stories for which there were general narratives presented by the mainstream media, which either ignored the larger truths to be gleaned from these stories, or, in some cases, the media missed the story altogether. We easily could have picked 15 topics that met those criteria, but arbitrarily chose to look at 10, and in no particular order.

Among the glaring examples of journalistic malpractice in 2014 was the Rolling Stone magazine report of an alleged gang rape at a fraternity house at the University of Virginia. There was near-unanimous agreement that the publication failed in its most basic journalistic responsibility: to attempt to verify whether or not the story they were publishing was true, and what those accused of this alleged crime had to say in their own defense.

The ongoing IRS scandal, involving the targeting of conservative organizations for their political beliefs, and a blatant attempt to cover it all up, could also have been on this list. The media went along with the Obama administration claim that the IRS story is a phony scandal, without a “smidgen of corruption.”

What the stories we have chosen have in common is that in each case, the media have gone with a narrative that is intended to put the Obama administration, the Democratic Party, or the left in general in the best possible light, all things considered. Clearly, one can find articles and interviews and TV reports that contradict those narratives, and even some that put the Obama administration in a negative light. However, this is our view of how a corrupt, mainstream media attempt to spin these stories, and a brief analysis of what is being ignored or misreported:

1. Benghazi: The Scandal that Won’t Die
2. Obama’s Cynical Leadership
3. Obama’s Foreign Policy Disasters
4. The Rise of the Islamic State & Islamic Terror
5. Covering Momentous Elections
6. Democratic Civil War
7. Continued Failures of Obamacare
8. How the Media Inflame Racial Tensions
9. Media Portray Israel as the Aggressor
10. Judges Challenge Obama Actions

      1. Benghazi: The Scandal that Won’t Die

In November, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released what it called the “definitive” report on Benghazi regarding the activities of the intelligence community in Benghazi, Libya, surrounding the deadly terrorist attacks that killed four Americans on September 11th and 12th in 2012. Reporters and pundits argued that this new report proves that Benghazi is a dead-and-buried story and that there is nothing new to learn about the attacks nor the efforts by the Obama administration to cover up the truth of what happened. They must have not read the report by the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi (CCB), nor the media coverage thereof.

Our April 22 press briefing and Interim Report outlined how Muammar Gaddafi offered a truce to discuss his abdication in March 2011, which was rejected by the Obama administration. In addition, the CCB found that the U.S. government had knowingly facilitated the delivery of weapons to al Qaeda-linked rebels in Libya, that the failure to bring military assets to attempt to rescue our people in Libya amounts to a dereliction of duty, and that what was needed was a Select Committee on Benghazi to uncover the ensuing government-wide cover-up. The CCB’s findings received coverage from the Drudge Report, the Daily Mail, Newsmax, Town Hall, Fox News, and others, but only for a couple of days. However, within about two weeks of our press conference, the House voted to create a Select Committee to investigate the Benghazi attacks. The verdict is out on whether or not the House Select Committee remains really determined, and empowered, to reveal the whole truth about what happened. If so, that will involve holding Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Barack Obama accountable for their actions before, during and after this sordid scandal.

2. Obama’s Cynical Leadership

The New York Post’s William McGurn called President Obama “shamelessly cynical” on immigration because the President had punted this issue until past the election, so that voters’ input had little effect on the President’s actions. “Like every other action this President has taken on immigration, this new one will, in fact, make genuine immigration reform less rather than more likely,” wrote McGurn. Yet the President and his administration continue to call for immigration legislation as a means to mitigate and counteract the President’s clear executive overreach.

President Obama also delayed Obamacare’s employer mandate for medium-sized employers until 2016, and an Iranian nuclear deal keeps on being pushed off into the sunset. The normalization of relations with Cuba also occurred after an election that could be seen as a repudiation of the President’s radical policies, yet we see more of the same. “[American voters are] going to see Washington working better if this president has his way,” said White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough just days after the November elections.

In the wake of such administration intransigence, POLITICO started championing “Obama libre”—the liberation of Obama from his earlier hesitancy and doubt. He is unleashed, the media argue, to be the president he always wanted to be during his lame duck session. Is that because he no longer feels accountable to the voters? Did he ever? The President must realize that what he is doing is making it highly unlikely that there will be any meaningful cooperation with Congress in the upcoming session.

3. Obama Foreign Policy Disasters

President Obama’s foreign policy disasters continue apace. In November, his administration eased sanctions on Iran provided that it “limit the growth of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium, convert or dilute its uranium that is close to bomb-grade, and not install any new machines for producing uranium fuel,”according to USA Today. What the media did not say is that this heralds the acceptance of a rogue state—which sponsors terror and threatens the international community—and its ability to move forward in enriching uranium, ostensibly under the auspices of a peaceful nuclear energy program. The administration is desperate to achieve an agreement, so that they can claim to have achieved “peace in our time.” Meanwhile, Iran has repeatedly proven itself to be untrustworthy.

The Obama foreign policy crises turned so sour that when the Islamic State rose up in Iraq and Syria, the media couldn’t help but note President Obama’s “evolving” rhetoric—which ranged from containment to utter destruction. The Washington Post gave White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest four Pinocchios for his claim that Obama wasn’t singling out the Islamic State (IS) when he called the group a “junior varsity” team in an interview with the New Yorker magazine.

By the administration’s own estimate, the military response to the war against IS will likely last three years, with the actual destruction of terrorist havens in Syria punted to the next administration. Currently, the plan is to vet 5,000 Free Syrian Army members, train them in Saudi Arabia, and bring them back to defeat and destroy IS. Meanwhile, members of the media complain that they don’t have access to any of the bombers or the ability to embed with the troops to report on what’s really happening. The truth of the matter is that Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry claim to have put together a coalition of more than 60 nations to help the U.S. “degrade and defeat” IS. In the meantime, IS continues to butcher and force conversion or death on tens of thousands of Christians and Yazidis, and the U.S. is serving as the Air Force for Iran against IS, while leaving their proxy, Basher Assad, in charge in Syria, where more than 200,000 people have already died since that war began in 2011.

The normalization of relations with Cuba was really a lifeline to a desperate, failed communist regime, but to the media, it was a welcome and long overdue act. CBS’s “60 Minutes” apparently had advance notice, as their cameras were there capturing events as they unfolded, helping to spin this into a foreign policy victory for Obama. The journalist Daniel Greenfield demonstrated what a betrayal this was to the Cuban people, yet it was an act very consistent with Barack Obama’s prejudices in favor of leftist thugs. It was also another broken promise. Obama had said that he would support and promote normalization with Cuba, reported The New York Times, only “if Cuba took steps toward democracy and released all political prisoners.” Instead, we got nothing in return.

4. The Rise of the Islamic State & Islamic Terror

Examples of beheadings, murders, and other killings by ISIS, which now calls itself the Islamic State (IS), al Qaeda and various “lone wolves” are increasing at an alarming pace, but the media dislike reporting on them in a religious context, even when it comes to the beheading of their own journalists by IS. There is a failure in the West, by the media and our government, to acknowledge and confront the threat to our freedoms and our way of life by Islamists bent on spreading their poisonous ideology.

In our coverage of the Moore, Oklahoma beheading, we noted that MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry was quick to label the Islam-inspired attack as “workplace violence” and said that the attacker’s Islamic affiliation had as little to do with his actions as what he’d eaten for breakfast. Yet we also have seen the attack at the Canadian Parliament; Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley’s murder of two Brooklyn policeofficers in December; the attack on four policemen in New York in November by a hatchet-wielding convert to Islam, called a terrorist act by Police Commissioner William Bratton; the Taliban murder of 141 (mostly children) in Pakistan; the Sydney, Australia hostage situation resulting in three deaths, including that of the Islamic terrorist responsible for the crime; jihadists driving cars into groups of pedestrians in France; and Islamic State massacres of religious minorities,burying some alive.

What does it take to spark media outrage? Instead, when the FBI decides to categorize the Moore, Oklahoma decapitation as workplace violence, we have Mark Berman of The Washington Post debating how some experts define terrorism. He quoted terrorism analyst J.M. Berger as saying, “One of the problems with an inconsistent definition of terrorism is basically, if a Muslim does it, it’s terrorism and if a white guy does it, it’s not…” What is it going to take to end this ongoing slaughter by jihadists, acting in the name of Islam?

5. Covering Momentous Elections

Throughout 2014 the public was alternately told that the Republican Party had failed miserably due to its unpopular government shutdown of last year, that the Republican-dominated House had blocked too much legislation and was a “do-nothing Congress,” and that the American people outright disapprove of the GOP as compared to the Democratic Party. And sometimes the media openly took sides. Accuracy in Media reported how “Lean Forward, an MSNBC motto developed in 2010, morphed into a campaign theme President Obama adopted in his 2012 campaign, and has come to mean, Vote Democratic.”

When the election neared and it became clear that the GOP would have a sweeping victory, the media started to downplay polling numbers that showed President Obama’s support was flagging.

Then the election arrived, and there was a shellacking. Now, states with a GOP-controlled legislature and governor outnumber Democrat-controlled states by a margin of 24 to 7, on top of GOP majorities in both the U.S. House and Senate. But the media had a different take on it. Instead of receiving a mandate, the GOP was told that the message from elections was to compromise with the President’s radical policies, although the people had clearly rejected them.

Matthew Dowd of ABC News said, “This wasn’t a vote for them, it was a rejection of the President and it was a rejection of the politics that’s been practiced the last couple of years in Washington, D.C.”  He asserted, “Well, the Republican brand is still very damaged.” But, as AIM reported, polling showed that 53% of Americans wanted the GOP to have more control over the country’s direction than Obama in 2015. For more than a year, we had heard incessantly how out of touch and unpopular the Republicans were, and how damaged they were because they had become too extreme.

6. Democratic Civil War

Conflicts within the GOP grab headlines, but what about conflicts within the Democratic Party? In the case of the Republican takeover of the House and Senate, “Republican leaders won’t be able to satisfy their restive members with the familiar…excuse that they only control one-half of one-third of government,”said the New Republic, a magazine in turmoil. Yet, the last thing Republicans want is to “allow inmates to take over the asylum.”

Contrast that with coverage given to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), whose agitation during the threatened 2014 government shutdown earned her praise as presidential material from The Washington Post. There is, in fact, a crisis in the Democratic Party, as many Democrats are running from President Obama’s record, and presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton has proven to be “not ready for primetime,” according to POLITICO. The long knives are coming out, as more and more Democrats and their media allies are calling for “anybody but Hillary” for the Democratic nomination.

We reported on Hillary’s many gaffes in what The Washington Post called her “Worst Week in Washington.” Hillary claimed that she and her husband were “dead broke” when they left the White House in 2001. (She had signed an $8 million book deal before leaving, and her husband has earned over $100 million in speeches.)  The Washington Post expressed dismay that “some Democrats fear” Clinton evokes an “imperial image that could be damaging in 2016.” But perhaps, for us, Hillary’s most evocative image remains her question, “What difference at this point does it make?”—which will haunt any presidential campaign she embarks upon.

7. Continued Failure of Obamacare

Obamacare continues to be the signature legislation of the Obama administration, and, therefore, must be championed by the press. The New York Times, and other outlets, tried in vain this year to cover the “successes” of the health care legislation, be it through anecdotal evidence or inflated health care numbers. CNNreported in July that 10 million Americans gained health insurance this year due to the Affordable Care Act. We helped expose these numbers for the fraud that they are. In reality, there is only about “a net increase in private-sector coverage” of about 2.5 million individuals. The Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal found that 71% of the increase in coverage was “attributable to Obamacare expanding Medicaid to able-bodied, working-age adults.”

Yet how many people have lost full time jobs or couldn’t find them as a result of the perverse incentives written into the law? Many Americans are unable to meet the high deductibles with these plans, and, as a result, are forgoing important medical procedures in order to ration their own health care. Yet about 85 percentof those signing up on the exchanges qualify for subsidies, a major redistribution of wealth.

Now federal investigators have found that half of listed Medicaid providers areunable or unwilling to serve enrollees. Ultra-narrow networks, which dominate the signature legislation, have also led to reduced care under Obamacare this year.

8. How the Media Inflame Racial Tensions

Our race-baiting media have fomented strife between citizens and the police,citing false statistics such as that blacks are 21 times more likely to be killed by the police than whites, driving a further wedge between the police and their communities.

MSNBC’s Al Sharpton, who headed the witch-hunt for George Zimmerman last year, has led the charge on behalf of the late Michael Brown’s and Eric Garner’s families. He has been a rallying figure behind the protests. Some of the left’s demonstrations against the police have been led by Sharpton, and were encouraged by Attorney General Eric Holder, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and President Barack Obama. Most of the speakers at the demonstrations criticized the police, or talked about racism by the police—and Ferguson, Missouri burned and protesters attacked NYPD cops. Brown’s stepfather shouted “burn the b—ch down!” Protesters even chanted, “What do we want? Dead cops!” But after a “mentally ill” man killed two cops in Brooklyn, The Washington Post provided protest leaders with a chance to point to their disclaimer statements calling for peaceful protests only, and The New York Times merely highlighted the “change in tone” after the attacks.

The evidence shows that Ferguson and Staten Island weren’t racial incidents, but they are being used to inflame racial tensions.

9. Media Portray Israel as Aggressor

Hamas planned a massive tunnel attack on Israel this year, to occur on the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. The attack would allegedly have included mass killings and kidnappings around Israel. However, the media firestorm surrounding Operation Protective Edge blamed Israel, casting it as the aggressor in last summer’s war, which was instigated by continuous missile attacks from Gaza in the direction of Israel’s civilian population. Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls Gaza, committed the double war crime of using women and children as human shields while aggressively trying to kill Israeli civilians. They used hospitals and schools to launch attacks, hoping for return fire, in order to turn the world against Israel.

Although Israel agreed to ceasefire after ceasefire with Hamas, the media highlighted when Secretary of State John Kerry played “peacemaker” by consulting Qatar and Turkey, and, as we reported, “submitting a draft proposal that completely favored Hamas.” The media assertions that “there was little substantive difference between the proposal drafted by Secretary Kerry and the one released by the Egyptians earlier” that month was “quite frankly, untrue.”

As President Obama and Secretary Kerry kept blaming Israel for the ongoing hostilities, there was massive dishonesty by the media in this respect and in the treatment of casualty numbers. Unfortunately, the media continued to get its casualty count from biased sources on the ground in Gaza, but we also set the record straight about the inflated numbers.

10. Judges Challenge Obama Actions

As of June, President Obama had suffered his 12th unanimous defeat at the hands of the Supreme Court, according to National Review. But some have observed that this may be just the “tip of the iceberg,” since not all cases have made their way to the nation’s highest court. One pending Supreme Court case, King vs. Burwell, will determine the future of Obamacare subsidies, and will come before the court in March 2015. Will the judges rule against the administration there, as well?

In December, the administration suffered a setback when federal district court Judge Arthur Schwab concluded, “President Obama’s unilateral legislative action [on immigration policy] violates the separation of powers provided for in the United States Constitution as well as the Take Care Clause, and therefore, is unconstitutional.” This was because, in part, Schwab wrote in a 38-page opinion, the executive action “allows undocumented immigrants, who fall within these broad categories, to obtain substantive rights.”

As President Obama continues his executive overreach as a means to step around Congressional oversight and ignore the nation’s system of checks and balances, many of these battles will likely continue to be fought out in the courts.

This article was originally posted at the Accuracy in Media website.

Written by Napp Nazworth

2014 may be remembered as the year of intolerant liberalism, also dubbed the new intolerance, dogmatic liberalism and illiberal liberalism.

In no particular order, here are 33 examples of intolerant liberalism in 2014:

1. “Duck Dynasty”

The year began with a controversy surrounding the popular television show Duck Dynasty. In January, A&E announced the reinstatement of Phil Robertson after he was initially suspended from the show for controversial remarks about homosexuality.

2. HHS Continues to Force Americans to Support Products for Which They Have Ethical Objections

Even after a repudiation from the U.S. Supreme Court, the Obama administration has continued its effort to force some Americans to pay for birth control and abortifacient drugs that they find morally objectionable.

Closely-held corporations must be allowed an exemption from the birth control mandate if it violates their sincerely held religious beliefs, the Court said. Nonetheless, the Obama administration has continued to require that certain religious groups, like colleges and hospitals, be active participants in something they find morally objectionable.

There were many other examples this year of liberals trying to force Christians to participate in an activity that is in opposition to their religious beliefs:

3. New Mexico Photographer Forced Out of Business for Declining to Photograph Same-Sex Wedding

4. Colorado Baker Forced to Make Gay Wedding Cake

5. NY Family Fined for Refusing to Host Same-Sex Wedding on Their Farm, Ordered to Undergo “Re-Education Classes”

6. Washington Florist Required to Serve Same-Sex Wedding

7. Christian T-Shirt Printer Ordered to Take “Diversity Training” for Refusing to Make Gay Pride Shirts

8. Gay Couple Sued Pennsylvania Wedding Venue for Refusing to Marry Them

9. Idaho Wedding Chapel Faced Fines for Refusing Gay Weddings, Before City Backed Off

10. State Laws to Protect Religious Freedom Under Attack

In reaction to efforts to force Christian wedding vendors to serve same-sex weddings, some states sought to pass or strengthen their state-level version of the national Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The federal RFRA was passed with almost unaimous bipartisan support in the 1990s and signed by President Bill Clinton. In 2014, however, the nation was deeply divided over whether religious freedom should allowed when it comes into conflict with, what some call, “gay rights.” The debate first occured in Arizona, where opponents falsely claimed that the law would allow businesses the right to deny gays access to public accomodations. The debate continued in Georgia, Mississippi and Michigan.

11. Gay Activist Groups Withdraw Support for ENDA Because It Protects Religious Freedom

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act had the support of gay activist groups last year when it was passed by a Democrat-controlled Senate. But after the U.S. Supreme Court supported religious freedom protections for Hobby Lobby, some gay advocacy and atheist groups rescinded that support, saying they could not support a bill that also protected religious freedom.

12. Gordon College Under Attack After Its President Signs Letter Asking for Religious Freedom Protections in Obama’s Executive Order

After President Barack Obama announced he would sign an ENDA-like executive order for government contractors, Michael Wear, who led the faith outreach for Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and worked in Obama’s Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, wrote a letter to Obama, along with 13 other signers, encouraging him to include the same religious exemption that was in the Senate bill.

One of the signers of that letter was D. Michael Lindsay, president of Gordon College, an evangelical college in Massachusetts. Even though the letter was not asking for any special treatment for Gordon College (the order only applied to government contractors), the letter was written by a former Obama White House staffer, and the letter was only asking for what was already in a bill passed by a Democrat-controlled Senate, the act of signing that letter made Lindsay and Gordon College a target for certain gay activist groups. As a result, the mayor of Salem, Massachusetts,ended a contract with the school and Gordon is being investigated by its accrediting agency.

13. Brendan Eich Forced Out at Mozilla for Supporting Traditional Marriage

Brendan Eich, the CEO of Mozilla, was forced out of his job because he supported a California ballot initiative to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

14. Harvard Student Called for End to Tenure to Expel Conservative Professors

Writing for the student newspaper, a Harvard student called for getting rid of tenure so that colleges could get rid of conservative professors.

15. HGTV Cancels Benham Brothers Show

HGTV cancelled a reality show with the “Benham Brothers” after they discovered the brothers were outspoken conservative Christians.

16. SunTrust Bank Cancels Benham Brothers Bank Account

For some intolerant liberals, conservative Christians should not only not be allowed to have their own TV show, they should also not be allowed to have bank accounts. After the public controversy, SunTrust Bank told the Benham Brothers they would no longer have them as a customer. After a public backlash, SunTrust reversed its decision.

17. NYT Reporter Says Traditional Marriage Supporters “Unworthy of Respect,” Deserve Incivility

In a Twitter debate with Ryan Anderson, New York Times reporter Josh Barro said it is OK to be uncivil toward traditional marriage supporters because such people are “unworthy of respect.”

18. Houston Mayor Subpeonas Pastor’s Sermons, Private Communication About Homosexuality

After Mayor Annise Parker was sued for throwing out petition signatures and declining to place on the ballot a repeal of the city’s new transgender law, her legal team issued subpoenas to five Houston pastors for all of their sermon notes and personal communication related to homosexuality and gender identity. The move, apparently an attempt to intimidate the pastors into backing off, backfired quickly. There was national outrage over the subpoenas and legal experts from across the political spectrum all agreed that the subpoenas were overly broad. Parker first changed the subpoenas to not include sermons, then dropped the subpoenas entirely. The suit will go to trial in January.

19. Wikipedia Editors Attempt to Remove Entry for the Federalist After Neil deGrasse Tyson Flap

The Federalist, a conservative news and opinion website, ran a series of articles pointing out that celebrity scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson had misquoted former President George W. Bush in his public speeches. References to that story were being removed from Tyson’s Wikipedia entry. At least one Wikipedia editor took the spat a step further and tried to remove The Federalist’s Wikipedia page.

20. Kickstarter Censors Fundraiser for Abortionist Gosnell Documentary

Kickstarter, a crowd funding website, would not allow a campaign for a film proposal about abortionist and convicted murderer Kermit Gosnell to accurately describe what Gosnell was convicted of doing (stabbing babies to death). While Kickstarter’s CEO claimed that describing what the movie was about was inconsistent with his website’s “community guidelines,” columnist Kirsten Powers pointed out Kickstarter has been selective in how it has applied those guidelines.

21. Philosophy Professor Says Global Warming Skeptics Should Be Imprisoned

Lawrence Torcello, assistant professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, wrote an op-ed arguing for criminal penalties for those who criticize scientific claims about global warming. In one of the examples he used, the penalty was imprisonment.

22. Ezra Klein Criticized for Hiring Gay Man With Different Opinions Than Most Gays

Ezra Klein, a former liberal columnist for The Washington Post who started Vox.com, was denounced by some liberals for hiring Brandon Ambrosino. Even though Ambrosino is liberal and gay, the fact that he has said some things that are slightly out of step with what liberal gay men are “supposed” to say made him a target for those close-minded liberals.

23. Marquette University Trains Employees to Report Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage as Harrassment

Marquette, a Catholic university in Wisconsin, required all its employees to undergo anti-harrassment training in which opposition to same-sex marriage is considered a form of harrasment.

24. Marquette Professor Suspended for Criticizing Teacher Who Will Not Allow Students to Voice Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage

Consistent with No. 23, a Marquette teaching assistant told her students that those who support the traditional definition of marriage should not voice their opinions in class because such views are offensive. After John McAdams, associate professor of political science at the university, wrote a blog post criticizing that pedagogy, he was suspended.

25. Radical Feminist Conference Forced to Change Venues After Transgender Opposition

The Radfem Conference, a group of self-described radical feminists, has been forced to change venues on several occasions due to intimidation tactics by certain transgender groups. These radical feminists hold views that transgender groups do not like. In particular, the radical feminists think there’s an important difference between one who is female and one who is male but thinks of themselves as female. So the radical feminists should not be allowed to hold a conference, those transgender groups believe. In the August issue of New Yorker, Michelle Goldberg wrote about the transgender group’s intimidation tactics, which included threats of violence.

26. Christian Groups Booted From California College Campuses

California state universities, the largest state university system in the country, will no longer recognize Intervarsity Christian Fellowship as a student group because the organization requires its leaders to hold beliefs consistent with the organization’s beliefs.

27. “It’s OK to Hate Republicans,” University of Michigan Professor Wrote

Susan Douglas, professor of communications at the University of Michigan, penned an op-ed for In These Times titled, “It’s OK to Hate Republicans.” Republicans vilify others, she complained in the article, vilifying Republicans as dogmatic, rigid, intolerant
 of ambiguity and supportive of authoritarianism. The title was later changed to, “We Can’t All Just Get Along,” at the request of the author.

Also in 2014, there were many attempts, some successful, to disinvite college speakers, lest students be exposed to different points of view:

28. Brandeis University Rescinded and Honorary Degree and Disinvited Ayaan Hirsi Ali

29. Brown University Disinvited Ray Kelly

30. Berkeley Students Attempted to Get Bill Maher Banned From Delivering a Commencement Address

31. Stanford Students Tried to Ban Ryan Anderson’s Appearance

32. Smith College Disinvited Christine Lagarde as Commencement Speaker 

33. Azusa Pacific Disinvited Charles Murray

For some additional reading on this issue, check out these articles:

Liberal Professor Stunned to Learn Liberals Not More Open-Minded Than Conservatives

Analysis: Why Tolerant Liberals Can Win Their Fight With Intolerant Liberals; A Response to Robert P. George

Christians Who Cave to the ‘New Intolerance’ Only Make It Worse, Mary Eberstadt Says

Political Party Analysis: Democrats Will Lose Elections if They Don’t Fix Their Religion Problem

Liberals Now Deeply Divided Over Religious Freedom and Homosexuality

These Four Liberals Believe in Diversity, Tolerance

This article was originally posted at The Christian Post website.

The Duggars are strong Christians who have taken a stand for life, abstinence before marriage, and one man/one woman marriage. Liberal activists, however, took exception to those beliefs and launched a national petition drive against them and their series on TLC. That petition, hosted on Change.org, had drawn more than 180,000 at press time.

American Family Association executive vice president Buddy Smith spoke with OneNewsNow about the ultimate outcome of that liberal push and his own group’s online petition in support of the Duggars.

“We’re celebrating just great news today that The Learning Channel has indicated that even though there was a real push from the left to get The Learning Channel to take the Duggar family off the air, they did not win,” says Smith.

According to the AFA spokesman, more than 160,000 people signed the AFA petition. “This just goes to show when Christian people pray together and stand together that we can and we do make a difference,” he states.

Smith is grateful that the Christian community took a stand and came to the defense of the Duggars and the number-one show on TLC.

“Here’s the reason that the left did not win,” he explains. “It’s because Christian people cared enough to step up and just say Wait a minute. This is not right and this family is out there standing firm for their faith and for truth and for values that only serve to strengthen our nation – and so we’re standing with them.“

A similar petition launched by LifeNews.com just before Thanksgiving also brought attention to the push by liberal activists to pressure TLC to cancel the Duggars’ program. That petition drew more than 32,000 signatures.

Please support the work of Illinois Family Institute.

Timed for a Christmas season release, director Ridley Scott’s intended blockbuster, Exodus: Gods and Kings hit the big screens this past weekend. On its opening weekend the movie shot to the top of the box office charts, displacing the latest Hunger Games movie, but falling considerably short of expected receipts.

The best single line analysis of the movie and its failure to garner either critical acclaim or more viewers was offered by Eric D. Snider of GeekNation: “This big dud isn’t blasphemous enough to be outrageous, emotional enough to be inspiring, or interesting enough to be good.”

Well, I partly agree with the first two points of criticism, but I did find the movie interesting. Indeed, I even liked much of the movie, and I would not argue that mature and thoughtful Christians should not see it, even if the concerns about it are major. And make no mistake, the concerns are major.

Earlier this year, director Darren Aronofsky offended the faithful with his distorted depiction of Noah. Aronofsky’s Noah offered a portrait of Noah as a crazed homicidal maniac who hallucinated God’s will after drinking a potion given to him by Methuselah. Humanity itself is depicted as a blight upon the earth and the director himself bragged that his movie was “the least Biblical biblical film ever made.”

Ridley Scott’s Moses is not in the same category, largely because there are so many details of the Exodus narrative in the Bible with which the director simply had to deal. There are no Transformer-like invented creatures in Moses, and many of the film’s scenes and details are explicitly true to the biblical text. Indeed, Scott’s presentation of the ten plagues God brought against Egypt is spellbinding — far more moving than the same scenes as depicted in Cecil B. DeMille’s famed The Ten Commandments. The last plague, the death of first-born sons, is absolutely riveting and deeply emotional.

Critics are piling on. Film critics tend to be rather eccentric sorts and some of them seem almost impossible to please. As a general rule, critical acclaim and popularity with the public are not directly related. Some of the concerns are quite legitimate, however. Public Radio International published a review noting that “Hollywood Has a Race Problem.” Virtually all of the leading roles are played by white actors, even though the ancient Egyptians were certainly not caucasian. As PRI noted, “Ramses, the Egyptian pharaoh who enslaved the Jews in the Old Testament, is played by a white actor. In fact, the entire lead cast of ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’ is white. Moses is white. Moses’ mother is white. The Egyptian prince is white. The African queen is white, too.”

Not only are they all white, the central characters speak as though they were educated at Oxford or Cambridge. This is rather typical of Ridley Scott’s films, with gravitas presumably added by a British accent. Needless to say, the skin tones and accents do not match the actual story.

But that fact points to an even more troubling dimension of the movie. The entire narrative does not match the actual story. It fails as a whole even more than it fails in its parts.

What is missing is the very point of the Exodus in biblical history and theology. What is missing is the truth that God acted in history in faithfulness to the covenant he had made with Abraham, rescuing Israel from captivity in Egypt. In Ridley Scott’s version, God is actually hidden from view, along with his purposes, motivations, and character. In his place we see an 11 year old boy who appears to Moses as a theophany, or divine appearance. God’s presumed words flow from the mouth of a small boy, who appears as something of an unmoved Mover in the film’s narrative.

As for Moses, the depiction offered by actor Christian Bale grounds Moses’ sense of divine call in a severe knock to the head from a rock, followed by what might well be a hallucination, with the 11 year old boy speaking to Moses beside the bush that burned but was not consumed. Completely missing from the portrayal is any explanation that God has chosen Moses as his instrument for bringing Israel out of captivity and that God was acting in faithfulness to the covenant made with Abraham. Moses appears as a tribal chief, a cunning general and killing machine, rooted in what Scott presents as Moses’ experience as a great general during his life as a prince of Egypt. Moses never seems to understand a divine purpose beyond his military exploits, and his relationship with God is troubled, to say the least.

It must be said that Moses’ relationship with God in the Bible is also troubled, to say the least. After all, Moses is not allowed by God to lead the children of Israel into Canaan. Nevertheless, the Bible steadfastly presents Moses within the context of his calling and his calling within the context of covenant. The movie leaves viewers with a depiction of Moses, riding alongside what must be the ark of the covenant, as Israel moves on from the parting of the Red Sea. But the ark is never identified, nor is the covenant.

The problems with the film could be anticipated, given the rather remarkable statements made by both Ridley Scott and Christian Bale, even before the movie’s release. Ridley Scott made clear that he did not believe that Moses had ever lived and that the Exodus account was not to be taken as historically true. He told Religion News Service that he looked at the film much as he looks at science fiction. “Cause I never believed in it, I had to convince myself every step of the way as to what did make sense and what didn’t make sense and where I could reject and accept. And therefore I had to come to my own decisions and internal debates.”

Accordingly, Scott presents the plagues and miracles as non-supernatural events with a naturalistic explanation. Unlike Cecile B. DeMille, Scott offered no version of a supernatural miracle at the Red Sea. He described his dilemma: “So I have to part the Dead Sea and I’m not going to part the Dead Sea because I don’t believe it. I don’t believe I can part the Dead Sea and keep shimmering water on each side. I’m an absolutely very, very practical person. So I was immediately thinking that all science-based elements placed come from natural order or disorder–or could come from the hand of God, however you want to play that.” Presumably, Scott meant Red Sea, not Dead Sea.

Well, Ridley Scott played it all in naturalistic terms, or at least he did his best to do so. The most interesting aspect of the film in this respect was the role played by a nervous vizier in service to Ramses, who did his best to offer a strictly naturalistic explanation for the succession of plagues. The vizier appears as an ancient demythologizer, offering natural explanations involving red clay in the Nile and a complicated series of basically environmental plagues that followed. Those explanations would be familiar to anyone versed in the liberal biblical scholarship of the last two hundred years. In Scott’s version of the story, the real story at the Red Sea was the receding of the waters due to a tsunami after an earthquake.

Despite himself, however, Scott’s depiction of the plagues appears quite supernatural indeed — especially the final plague, the death of first-born sons. Scott’s anti-supernaturalism utterly fails him on the final plague, and he does not flinch from presenting the horrifying divine judgment on the defiant Egyptians. The film’s scenes of dead and dying Egyptian boys and young men is deeply moving. By that point in the film the demythologizing vizier has been hung by a frustrated Ramses, and no character attempts to offer a “natural” or “scientific” explanation of the last plague.

The portrayal of Moses as a tribal warrior was explained by actor Christian Bale, who told ABC’s Nightline program that Moses, in his view, was “one of the most barbaric individuals that I have ever read about in my life.” Christian Bale may not read much, but those words betray his conception of Moses as quite different from anything found in the Bible. Where did he get his information about the “barbaric” Moses? Actually, in that conversation with Nightline and in other interviews, Bale revealed the real issue. Like Ridley Scott, he assumes a strictly non-supernatural storyline. Christian Bale’s comments indicate that he seemingly places the responsibility for the plagues at the hands of Moses, not God. Even so, in the film the 11 year old boy expresses frustration with Moses’ slow progress toward liberation and tells him to “watch” as he sets the plagues in motion.

The film has put the question of the historical Moses on the table of public conversation. In the Guardian, Andrew Brown declared: “There is no historical character of Moses, and no reason from archaeology or history to suppose that any of the exodus story is true.”

Brown then wrote:

“Since the central rite of Jewish identity is the Passover festival, which commemorates the moment that Moses freed his people from slavery in Egypt, the absence of evidence outside the Bible story is potentially embarrassing, says Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner, who leads Reform Judaism in this country [Britain]: ‘When I heard for the first time that the exodus might not have happened, I did want to weep … then I thought, what does this matter? You have to distinguish between truth and historicity.’”

That is the great claim of liberal theology — that we must “distinguish between truth and historicity.” Brown’s article goes on to cite several Jewish authorities as arguing that it really does not matter to Judaism if Moses never existed. Brown even cited one Orthodox rabbi who argued that it was the giving of the law that had to be historical, not Moses. Brown also noted that Orthodox Judaism requires a belief that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, leading to the obvious question of how we can have Mosaic authorship without Moses. One may presume that other authorities in Orthodox Judaism would disagree with the cited rabbi.

In any event, the fact remains that, even if the historical Moses is not central to contemporary Judaism (by at least some accounts), the historical Moses is vital and essential to Christianity. Moses is a central character in the Bible’s narrative of Israel and the metanarrative of the Gospel itself. Jesus is the new Moses, leading his people out of captivity to sin. Moses is the divinely commissioned lawgiver. Christ Jesus is the divine Savior who perfectly fulfills the law and redeems sinful humanity. The Bible clearly presents the Exodus as history, and the history of Christianity is built upon that historic foundation.

As a film, Exodus: Gods and Kings is a mixed bag. I was deeply moved by parts of the film, and puzzled or troubled by others. But, in the end, perhaps the best way to understand Ridley Scott’s Moses is to put it in the context of Scott’s own comments. He told Religion News Service: “Any liberties I have taken in terms of how I show this stuff was, I think, pretty safe ground because I’m always going always from what is the basis of reality, never fantasy . . . . So the film had to be as real as I could make it.”

As real, in other words, as Ridley Scott’s version of “this stuff” could be presented “from what is the basis of reality” as Ridley Scott defines reality. What we see in the film is Moses without the supernatural. In his own words, that’s how he decided to “play” it.

It turns out that the real vizier is none other than Ridley Scott.

Originally posted at AlbertMohler.com

Rolling Stone Magazine just issued a public apology for the shoddy journalism of writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely whose name may sound vaguely familiar to regular IFI readers. More on that momentarily.

Rolling Stone has apologized for Erdely’s failure to adequately fact-check a University of Virginia co-ed’s allegations of a brutal gang-rape that she claimed took place at a fraternity. Erdely’s article titled “A Rape on Campus” led to an investigation, campus protests, suspension of all fraternities, and public vilification and vandalism of the fraternity where the alleged crimes took place. The entire mess resulted from Erdely’s failure to interview any of the alleged perpetrators before publishing her essay–an essay that comports so perfectly with “progressive” notions about oppressive white men and privilege.

It appears that almost every detail in the accuser’s story is false, and now even the accuser’s friends, who according to the Washington Post are “sexual assault awareness advocates,” doubt her story.

The Washington Post describes Erdely’s dubious investigative efforts:

“I reached out to [the accused] in multiple ways,” Erdely said [in a Slate Magazine interview], “They were kind of hard to get in touch with because [the fraternity’s] contact page was pretty outdated. But I wound up speaking…I wound up getting in touch with their local president, who sent me an e-mail, and then I talked with their sort of, their national guy, who’s kind of their national crisis manager. They were both helpful in their own way, I guess.”

Sean Woods, who edited the Rolling Stone story, said in an interview that Erdely did not talk to the alleged assailants. “We did not talk to them. We could not reach them,” he said in an interview.

However, he said, “we verified their existence,” in part by talking to [the accuser’s] friends. “I’m satisfied that these guys exist and are real. We knew who they were.”

Once again, liberals, always eager to rush to judgment on events related to their favorite ideological causes, have harmed real people.

When asked hard questions by the Washington Post about her investigation, Erdely whined that “’I could address many of [the questions] individually . . . but by dwelling on this, you’re getting sidetracked.’” Yes, let’s not get sidetracked by facts or evidence. They tend to get in the way of ideology.

In 2012, I wrote a two-part criticism (here and here) of another troubling Rolling Stone article written by Erdely titled “One Town’s War on Gay Teens”  in which she accuses “evangelicals” of being the cause of the bullying and suicide of nine teens (presumably the “gay teens” referenced in the title) in the Anoka-Hennepin school district in Minnesota. She took particular aim at a conservative parent group that was fighting to establish a curricula-neutrality policy that would prevent teachers from using their classrooms to promote Leftist assumptions about homosexuality. But just like Erdely’s most recent journalistic debacle, her claims in the 2012 article suffer from a remarkable lack of evidence and misrepresentation of facts.

Here are just a few of the problems with her flawed and destructive 2012 story:

1.) In an article about a purported Evangelical “war on gay teens,” Erdely mentioned nine suicides, while in reality only one of the teens self-identified as homosexual and three others were called anti-“gay” epithets.  That means that only four of the nine suicides, which took place over two years at six different schools, had any connection to homosexuality. Five of the suicides had nothing to do with homosexuality, perceived homosexuality, or even “anti-gay” epithets.

2.) Though Erdely suggested that “Christian activists” were responsible for the suicides, she didn’t produce one piece of evidence that the school bullies were Evangelicals or motivated by Evangelical beliefs about homosexuality.

3.) Not once did Erdely provide evidence that the curricula-neutrality policy caused the bullying of the one homosexual student or the three who were called anti-“gay” epithets.

4.) Erdely did not tell her readers that one of the students she included in the nine, TJ Hayes, was enrolled in a “progressive” charter school that was not covered by any of the school policies on which Erdely blames the suicides.

5.) Erdely did not mention that another of the students she included in the nine, Kevin Buchman, was not enrolled in any Anoka-Hennepin high school. He was, in fact, a student at the University of Minnesota. Kevin, a bright, good-looking, popular athlete, had graduated from an Anoka-Hennepin high school 8 1/2 months before his suicide. He committed suicide during the second semester of his freshman year at the University of Minnesota. His family wrote this about Kevin’s suicide.

A situation happened his first year of college, that caused Kevin to question his character. He began a spiral downward into the dark cave of suicidal depression. He treated with a doctor [sic], was on medication, and seemed to be doing better. He kept his despair hidden and ended his life.

6.) Erdely wrote that the mother of one of the students who committed suicide “acknowledges that her daughter….likely had many issues that combined to push her over the edge, but feels strongly that bullying was one of those factors.”  This mother’s “feeling” that bullying was one of multiple contributing factors to her daughter’s suicide led Erdely to conclude with utter certitude that the school’s curricula- neutrality policy and Evangelicals were the ultimate cause. Erdely never explained precisely how the neutrality policy or Evangelicals were the ultimate cause.

7.) Erdely cited 10th-grader Sam Pinilla who said he was pushed to the ground and called “faggot” while a teacher stood nearby and did nothing. Erdely also described a 10th-grade girl who said she was called a “‘lesbo’” and “‘sinner” within “earshot of teachers” and that when she reported the incident to an associate principal, he told her to “lay low.” Did Erdely verify those incidents? Did she track down the teacher or teachers who supposedly heard and did nothing? And again how did Erdely connect curricula-neutrality policy to the teachers’ purported failure to properly enforce existing anti-bullying policy?

8.) Did Erdely talk to the bullies? Did Erdely look into the beliefs and backgrounds of any of the purported bullies? Did she ask if they were Evangelicals? Did she inquire into the motives for their bullying? Had the bullies come from dysfunctional families or single parent homes? Had they experienced violence in their homes? Did they have academic problems or psychological disorders? Had they watched a lot of violent television or played violent video games?

9.) Did she talk to any teens who had deeply held Evangelical beliefs to find out what their thoughts were about homosexuality and bullying?

10.) If Erdely were really concerned about preventing suicides, why did she spend virtually no time exploring all the factors that experts identify as contributing to suicidal ideation, like mental illness, family dysfunction and divorce, family financial problems, and substance abuse?

11.)  Did Erdely talk to any conservative teachers to ask if they thought that either the neutrality policy or Evangelicalism caused bullying? If so, how? If not, what do they think causes bullying? Did she ask them if they have ignored bullying?

12.) Did she ask liberal teachers who opposed the neutrality policy to provide evidence that the neutrality policy causes hatred or bullying?

13.) Erdely employed a deceitful modus operandi throughout her screed. She tried to make the case that the curricula-neutrality policy caused bullying without providing a single piece of evidence. She simply describes bullying incidents and then mentions the neutrality policy or conservatives who support it. Apparently in Erdely’s irrational world, geographic proximity within her article proves that the neutrality policy caused bullying.

Erdely has a nasty professional habit of promoting ugly accusations without interviewing those accused and of making claims for which she fails to provide evidence. She evidently has no regard for the damage that follows in her reckless rhetorical wake. Erdely’s newest piece of shoddy journalism will make it even more difficult for victims of campus sexual assaults to be believed.

Please support the work of Illinois Family Institute.

A veteran-related story by The Associated Press focuses on 92-year-old Rupert Starr, a World War II veteran who was captured by the Germans and earned a Bronze Star. The angle of the story, however, is that the veteran is a homosexual who opposed the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy – a policy that was lifted in 2011, allowing homosexuals to openly serve in the military.

Barbwire.com founder Matt Barber says the article is a slap in the face to veterans – on a day celebrating their heroism.  He tells OneNewsNow:

“To make this about sexual identity politics, and to focus on this individual’s abhorrent sexual proclivities and his lifestyle choices, and to somehow elevate those disordered behaviors as something to be proud of, is really offensive.”

According to Barber, the AP story – which mentions Starr’s homosexual lifestyle or homosexual activism 10 times in the 16-paragraph story – omits an important result of the military’s policy change: the “explosion” of male-on-male assaults in the U.S. military.

“I mean, immediately upon the repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ these homosexual assaults spiked and are even – according to the Pentagon’s own statistics – are utterly out of control right now,” Barber tells OneNewsNow.

A 1,400-page Pentagon report conducted in 2013 reported 26,000 service members had been sexually assaulted; approximately 12,000 were female – 14,000 were male. Seventy-three percent of male-on-male assaults occurred on base, the report found.

The Washington Times reported on the findings earlier this year, quoting a homosexual in the story who claimed the male-on-males assaults weren’t done by homosexuals – that they were more like prison rapes.

Rather than truly honoring veterans in the story, Barber says AP is “acting as activists, in fact cheerleaders, for a radical agenda that has hurt the armed services.”

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

Written by Michael Medved

A recent Washington Post piece acknowledges that “children with married parents are better off” but simultaneously claims “marriage isn’t the reason why.” The report cites research at Brookings Institution suggesting that higher family income, more educated parents, and better parenting skills help explain the so-called “marriage advantage,” not the institution of matrimony itself.

It’s well known that people with more financial success and more preparation for parenthood are much more likely to marry, so the piece argues that it’s these qualities—not the marital bond—that makes the difference for kids. What this logic ignores is the way marriage changes adults, not just children. Marriage trains people in patience, consideration, sharing, deferred gratification and goal-oriented hard work—just those qualities that make for more financial success and better parenting.

Living as a committed and stable couple serves to shape better adults even before they get a chance to parent better kids.

U.S. Republican House Speaker John Boehner (OH), who came under fire from conservatives for resisting the creation of a Benghazi select committee until the scandal got too big to ignore, is under fire from conservatives once again. On Saturday he raised funds for Carl DeMaio, a gay Republican congressional candidate at the center of a scandal to turn the GOP into a gay-friendly political party like the Obama Democrats.

DeMaio, charged with sexual harassment and exhibitionism, is one of the Republican “young guns” getting official Republican money and support. But he has also enjoyed the strong support of Fox News personalities, especially Richard Grenell, a Fox News contributor and homosexual activist who advises his campaign.

The Conservative Review calls DeMaio a “deviant” and wonders whether the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC) vetted DeMaio before the Republican Party funneled $1 million into his campaign.

DeMaio probably never anticipated that being labeled “the candidate to watch” in the GOP would turn out this way. His accuser, former staffer Todd Bosnich, said in an exclusive interview with CNN that he came into DeMaio’s office and saw him openly masturbating.

The alleged misconduct went much further than this, however. CNN reported Bosnich said DeMaio “would find him alone and make inappropriate advances, massaging and kissing his neck and groping him.” On another occasion, Bosnich said DeMaio “grabbed my crotch.”

DeMaio, a former member of the San Diego City Council, denies all the charges. But he reportedly had a similar problem when he was accused of masturbating in a San Diego City Hall restroom.

Although House Speaker Boehner is under fire for supporting the controversial candidate, the growing scandal pits two news organizations, Fox and CNN, against each other.

Back in January, Fox News had run a story about DeMaio preparing to “make history” in the congressional race, while Dana Perino, co-host of the channel’s “The Five,” hailed DeMaio for being in a “committed relationship” with another man and the first candidate “to feature his partner in campaign literature.”

“Full disclosure,” said Perino. “I am a former employee of the San Diego City Council, where I worked with Ric Grenell, now again a colleague of mine at Fox News Channel, and who currently consults on the DeMaio campaign.”

Despite this conflict of interest, DeMaio appeared on Fox News with Martha MacCallum and declared, “I don’t think either political party ought to be talking about social issues.”

Yet, his campaign website declares that on social issues:

• Carl DeMaio supports “marriage equality.”
• Carl DeMaio supports medical marijuana…
• Carl DeMaio supports a woman’s right to choose…

Boehner’s fundraising for the controversial candidate comes as prominent San Diego Christians have announced they will cast a “tactical vote” against DeMaio and in support of his Democratic opponent, Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA).

The letter from the Christian leaders, issued before the sex scandal broke wide open, says DeMaio not only supports homosexual “marriage,” but abortion rights. He supports “medical marijuana” and is reported to be open to the idea of legalizing marijuana for recreational purposes.

He also accepts the Obama line on so-called climate change, having declared that “human activity has an impact on the climate,” and that “we must continue to invest in research to determine what is happening, why, and what we can do to mitigate it.”

The Christian leaders declared, “DeMaio is an avowed LGBTQ activist (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning). The LGBTQ movement believes in a genderless society, where God’s order of male and female is denied. Their goal is much greater than that. It is to impose their views upon us, with the intent of abolishing our rights to freedom of religious conscience, coercing us to affirm homosexual practice and to forever alter the historic, natural definition of marriage.”

Despite the sex scandal charges against DeMaio, Boehner and the National Republican Congressional Committee are still in support of this “new generation Republican” candidate.

However, former Arkansas Governor and Republican pro-family leader Mike Huckabee is threatening to leave the GOP over the issue. “If the Republicans want to lose guys like me—and a whole bunch of still God-fearing Bible-believing people—go ahead and just abdicate on this issue, and while you’re at it, go ahead and say abortion doesn’t matter, either,” he said.

CNN’s coverage of the issue has noted the relationship between DeMaio and Fox News contributor Grenell.

After interviewing Bosnich on camera, CNN said it “repeatedly tried to get detailed answers from DeMaio’s campaign,” but that a conference call “was led by hired consultant Richard Grenell, a former Mitt Romney presidential campaign spokesperson and Fox News contributor. Grenell refused to answer questions and accused CNN of being on a partisan witch hunt.”

Grenell is an official of Capitol Media Partners and an open homosexual who appears frequently on Fox News. His areas of expertise include “crisis communications,” and his website declares, “Capitol Media Partners has a proven track record of working with journalists, editors and executives to mitigate developing stories and shape ongoing news coverage. We have extensive contacts and relationships with a variety of national and international reporters across industries and beats.”

But the crisis has been building for DeMaio and Boehner.

CNN noted, “This is not the first time DeMaio has been accused of sexually inappropriate behavior. Last year, a fellow city councilman, Ben Hueso, said he twice caught DeMaio masturbating in a semi-private city hall restroom accessible only to city officials.”

The Wall Street Journal previously reported that then-Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) had given DeMaio $10,000; Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) contributed $5,000; and Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) had kicked in $1,000.

Meanwhile, national pro-family leaders have sent a letter to Boehner and other Republican officials opposing official GOP support for candidates like DeMaio who are openly homosexual or pro-abortion.

The letter, signed by Brian S. Brown, President, National Organization for Marriage; Tony Perkins, President, Family Research Council; and Tom Minnery, President, CitizenLink, said, “The undersigned organizations are writing to inform you that we actively oppose the election of Republican House of Representative candidates Carl DeMaio (CA-52) and Richard Tisei (MA-6) and Oregon U.S. Senate candidate Monica Wehby and will mount a concerted effort to urge voters to refuse to cast ballots for them in the November election.”

Richard Tisei is a homosexual Republican running for the U.S. House from Massachusetts, while Monica Wehby is a GOP Senate candidate from Oregon who has endorsed homosexual marriage.

The letter said:

This decision was reached only after having exhausted all attempts to convince the Republican leadership of the grave error it was making in advancing candidates who do not hold core Republican beliefs and, in fact, are working to actively alienate the Republican base. We believe that Republican candidates should embrace the full spectrum of conservative principles—economic, national security and social issues—that have defined our party since President Reagan led us to a transformative victory. While we acknowledge that a national party must accommodate varying points of view on matters of prudence, we also believe a party must stand for certain core principles that it expects its candidates to defend.

Referring to the National Republican Congressional Committee supporting candidates like DeMaio, Tony Perkins has said it appears that “some of the GOP want to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory” this November.

Sounding optimistic, candidates DeMaio and Tisei have formed a joint fundraising committee called the Equality Leadership Fund, and plan to “build a foundation for other gay Republicans to use in their campaigns for office.”

But that depends on Republicans voting for and electing these candidates.

Pro-family advocate Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth says Republican “big shots” have failed to take into account  the number of social conservatives who will “walk away from the GOP or simply not vote,” as result of the party nominating candidates like DeMaio.

This article was originally posted at the Accuracy in Media website.

Reporter Charlo Greene of the CBS television affiliate in Alaska used an obscenity on the air, announcing she was quitting her job, and revealed that she had been president of the Alaska Cannabis Club even while reporting on it for station KTVA. She then walked off the set.

Greene announced she was going to openly campaign for passage of ballot measure 2, the Alaska Marijuana Legalization initiative, on the November 4, 2014, Election Day ballot.

In a new development, TMZ reports that Greene allegedly smoked so much pot at home that her next-door neighbor’s kid got sick from the fumes. The neighbor complained, was threatened by Greene, and got a restraining order against her.

Whether Green had simply gone nuts on the air, or else was demonstrating the effects of the use of the weed on her own mental faculties, the lesson was clear: the media can’t be trusted to report fairly and honestly on the marijuana issue. We know the media have a liberal bias. But this case caused us to wonder how many “objective” reporters covering the issue are actually secret tokers.

Kristina Woolston, the Vote No on 2 spokesperson, told Accuracy in Media, “We are shocked and disappointed at what has transpired. Our campaign has twice expressed concern to KTVA about Charlo Greene’s coverage. First, we met with the news director and walked him through our issues about her biased coverage of the marijuana initiative. Then Kalie Klaysmat at the Alaska Association of Chiefs of Police sent a strongly worded email to the news director, again expressing concern about Greene’s biased coverage.”

Calvina L. Fay, executive director of the Drug Free America Foundation, commented, “It is not uncommon to hear such inappropriate language used by the advocates of marijuana legalization.  To have used this type of language while on the air, clearly demonstrates a lack of respect for her employer and for the public. It appears that she has no problem violating the rules in the workplace. I wonder if this problem will be carried over in her management style of her company and result in abuses and violations of Alaska marijuana laws—whatever they will be come November. I hope that the media will shift the attention from her towards covering why this proposal to legalize pot is a very bad idea.”

Having come out of the closet as a pothead, Charlo Greene’s Facebook Page now shows her in a group of marijuana plants. She also changed her profile picture to one showing her lighting up a marijuana cigarette.

As shocking as this case was, less attention has been devoted to the more sensational story of Vladimir Baptiste, a psychotic pot user who drove his truck through the headquarters of WMAR-TV in Towson, Maryland. The Baptiste case demonstrates how marijuana is hardly the benign, or even beneficial, substance depicted by its apologists. He is charged with attempted murder, assault, burglary and malicious destruction of property and theft.

Before he stole a truck and rammed the building, a WMAR reporter said Baptiste had come to the front door screaming that he was God and demanding to be let in.

His mother told WNEW that her son’s behavior began changing when he started smoking marijuana. She said he had been a chronic marijuana user for eight years and needed psychiatric help.

WBAL-TV reported that, in the charging documents, “Baptiste said he was a reincarnation of King Tut and Jesus Christ and lives in a world of multiverses [alternative universes] where bad things happen to people, and they disappear because they are not real. He said the disappearance of Malaysian Flight 370 and the kidnapping of the Nigerian school girls were examples of multiverses in that they never actually happened.”

The case is not as unique as you might think. The link between marijuana and mental illness is well-established in medical literature, but has been mostly ignored by the media.

In Florida, meanwhile, a pro-marijuana initiative known as Amendment 2, is backed by famous trial lawyer John Morgan, who was recently caught on camera at a local bar cursing and appearing drunk, while praising “reefer” and urging young people to turn out to pass the ballot measure. The video carries the title, “Unplugged and Uncensored.”

Morgan is the “Yes on 2” campaign chairman. His side calls it the “United for Care” measure, designed to create the impression that it is all being done for sick people who need pot.

In this case, some in the media aren’t buying it. The Tampa Tribune said Morgan’s rant proves that the measure was not intended to help sick people, and noted that the crowd howled at Morgan’s profanity. People could be heard screaming “Smoke weed,” and “Where’s the cocaine?”

Charlie Crist, the former Republican governor of Florida, was a lawyer at Morgan’s firm. He’s now running for governor as a Democrat.

In response to the antics of Morgan and others, the “Don’t Let Florida Go to Pot coalition” has been formed.

The Charlo Greene case, however, is getting the headlines, and the bizarre incident has backfired on the pro-pot forces treating the former reporter as a heroine.

In this context, the Alaska Association of Chiefs of Police has posted “14 Reasons Against Marijuana Legalization,” including the argument that marijuana contributes to psychosis and schizophrenia, addiction for one out of six kids who ever use it once, and it reduces IQ among those who started smoking before age 18.

The IQ problem was clearly evident in the Charlo Greene fiasco.

Dumbed-down marijuana users have been praising Greene for coming out of the marijuana closet. But a liberal website called the Inquisitr said she is “every bad stereotype of the pot community rolled into one.” It explained, “She starts a cannabis club and campaigns for ‘medical marijuana legalization’ yet she shows in a short 30-second clip that she has no tact, no sense of professionalism and no concern for what her future might hold.”

The column went on, “What is so irksome about Charlo Greene and those like her is this: they hide behind the ‘medical marijuana’ argument when all they really want is to get high.”

Where did this pothead reporter come from? She says she graduated cum laude from the University of Texas. She also worked for WOWK, the CBS affiliate for Charleston-Huntington, West Virginia, and WJHL in Johnson City, Tennessee.

Bert Rudman of KTVA-11 News in Anchorage posted a “Dear Viewers” note after her outburst, saying, “We sincerely apologize for the inappropriate language used by a KTVA reporter during her live presentation on the air tonight. The employee has been terminated.”

Perhaps some drug tests are in order for his employees.

As bizarre as it was, the Greene episode could help derail the George Soros-funded campaign to legalize dope in Alaska.

The pro-pot side in Alaska is represented by the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol, whose top contributors are the Marijuana Policy Project and the Soros-funded Drug Policy Alliance.

But the group also has backers with Republican and Democratic credentials.

The spokesman for the pro-marijuana group is Taylor Bickford, who previously worked for the Republican National Committee, and says he got his start in politics interning for Alaska Republican U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski. Bickford is director of Alaska operations for the Seattle-based marketing firm known as Strategies 360.

The group’s senior vice president is Ethan Berkowitz, the 2010 Democratic nominee for governor of Alaska.

Bickford is quoted by the AP as saying, “he hopes Alaska voters look beyond Greene’s salty language” because she has an “important” message about legalizing dope.

At the same time, a relatively new group, Republicans Against Marijuana Prohibition, was active at the recent Ron Paul-sponsored Liberty Political Action Conference. The group was founded by Ann and Bob Lee, parents of Richard Lee of “Oaksterdam University” fame. Oaksterdam University in Oakland, California, is also known as “America’s First Cannabis College.” It teaches people how to grow high-quality dope.

Is this America’s future?

This article was originally posted at the Accuracy in Media website.

A coalition of groups – Parents Television Council, Citizens for Community Values, American Decency Association, Morality in Media, Illinois Family Institute, American Family Association of Pennsylvania, and Dr. Janice Crouse (with the Beverly LaHaye Institute) – has filed joint comments with the FCC claiming the merger is not in the public’s best interest.

Dan Isett is director of public policy for the Parents Television Council, which argues the merger would result in just the opposite of what consumers want: greater choice. In addition, he says, the merger sets the stage for a raid against consumers.

“Comcast is already the biggest single cable and Internet broadband provider in the country – and it would merge with its second-biggest rival,” he summarizes. “So it would create a new company of literally unmatched market power.”

He further adds there is strength in numbers – and that’s why several major organizations have banded together on the issue.

“It’s really important that folks pay attention to these proceedings when they come up and weigh in when they can,” he notes. “It really does make a difference when citizens can participate in this process – because otherwise the only voices that get heard are the ones that are paid for by the industry itself.”

PTC contends there is a “clear, pro-consumer remedy” that the FCC could impose as a condition of the merger: require the unbundling of cable networks owned and distributed by the newly formed entity.

 Faith, Family and Freedom Banquet
With Eric Metaxas on Sept. 19th!

For those who want to watch or record the pro-late-term abortion film After Tiller airing on PBS tonight, it’s being shown from 10:00-11:00 p.m. on WTTW. It’s being shown as part of PBS’s P.O.V. series, which airs documentaries with a “point of view.” (P.O.V.: After Tiller will be shown at 9:00 p.m. on WTVP-HD 47.1  in Central Illinois)

Here are links to clips that are labeled “classroom clips” on the PBS website:

How Far Does the Right to Protest Go?

Women Are the Experts On Their Own Lives

Serena’s Story

In a PBS interview, the two filmmakers, Lana Wilson and Martha Shane, falsely claim that the abortion debate is shaped by too heavy a focus on “abstract ideas.”  In reality, tireless pro-life advocates maintain a steadfast focus on the real effect of abortion on the real bodies of real babies.

While mentioning the “assassination” of George Tiller and seeking to humanize the four doctors who continue to assassinate full-term or nearly full-term babies, these Wilson and Shane seem to have little interest in humanizing the assassinated babies. They believe that if America hears the stories of women who have their full-term babies murdered, Americans will see how “complex” the issue is and viewing feticide more sympathetically.

In the interview, Shane says that many people don’t realize that third-trimester abortions are often performed because a fetal anomaly has been diagnosed late in a “wanted” pregnancy. She glibly offers physical imperfection as justification for murdering another human. If serious “anomalies” justify murder a week prior to birth, what is Shane’s justification for opposing infanticide on the day of birth if a serious “anomaly” is found?

During the interview, a clip is shown of a mother who had her son aborted due to serious genetic defects that would have resulted in a short life that involved many medical interventions. In a grotesquely euphemized description of his murder, the grief-stricken mother says, “It was really important that he had somewhat of a dignified birth.” Murdering an innocent baby by inducing a massive heart attack and crushing his skull is the very antithesis of a “dignified birth.” Civilized, compassionate humans do not murder other humans even to prevent suffering.

Over the weekend, this comment was left on the IFI Facebook page which offers a different view on the “complexity” of late-term abortion:

It’s frustrating when people characterize an ethical issue as “complex” when they actually mean the circumstances surrounding the issue are difficult. The ethics of late-term abortion are not complex. The mothers often face difficult circumstances and may indeed feel ambivalence about their choices, but the morality of the act is not complex, as though we can’t figure out what right and wrong looks like in such a situation.

Here’s a novel idea: divide air time according to the degree of suffering experienced by the person: so, a few minutes interviewing the doctor who is concerned for their life, a few minutes interviewing women who find themselves pregnant without money or support, and then hours of footage of babies ripped apart and thrown in biohazard bags like some cancerous tumors.

Take ACTION:  This film is being shown on PBS, which is funded in part by taxpayer money. There are two things you can do:

1. Click HERE to contact our U.S. Senators and your U.S. Representatives and ask them to oppose government funding of PBS. Yes, there is programming of value on PBS, and PBS can continue to solicit donations from the public.

2. Click HERE to contact PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler to demand equal time to air a film that challenges the ideas cloaked in demagoguery in After Tiller and humanizes the tiny human victims of late-term abortions.  You can also call PBS at (703) 739-5000.

Pictured above, late-term abortionists:  LeRoy Carhart, Warren Hern, Susan Robinson and Shelley Sella at the premier of After Tiller at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival

 Faith, Family and Freedom Banquet
With Eric Metaxas on Sept. 19th!

Correction: In an earlier version of this article, I used the terms “late-term” abortion and “partial-birth” abortion interchangeably. While a partial-birth abortion is a late-term abortion, not all late-term abortions are considered partial-birth abortions, which were banned in 2003. As long as a baby is murdered prior to delivery, it’s not considered a partial-birth abortion. I apologize for the error.

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In honor of Labor Day, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is showing the documentary After Tiller that follows America’s  four remaining late-term abortionists as they seek to “help” women by murdering their full-term or nearly full-term babies.

The film interviews Leroy Carhart, Warren Hern, Susan Robinson, and lesbian Shelley Sella (whose “wife” is ironically a certified midwife).

Here’s an excerpt from PBS’ description of the film with manipulative, non-neutral rhetoric highlighted:

After Tiller is a portrait of the four doctors in the United States still openly performing third-trimester abortions in the wake of the 2009 assassination of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas — and in the face of intense protest from abortion opponents. It is also an examination of the reasons women seek late abortions. The film presents the complexities of these women’s difficult decisions and the compassion and ethical dilemmas of the doctors and staff who fear for their own lives as they treat their patients.

…

After Tiller…weaves together revealing, in-depth interviews with the physicians and intimate vérité scenes both from their lives outside their clinics and the time they spend in their clinics, counseling and caring for their anxious, vulnerable patients at profoundly important crossroads in their lives. For all these doctors, the memory of Dr. Tiller remains a constant presence, serving both as an inspiration to persevere and a warning of the risks they take by doing so.

[F]ilmmakers Martha Shane and Lana Wilson…decided to go inside the lives of the last four doctors performing third-trimester abortions in America…. “We discovered that they recognized the moral and ethical complexity of doing this work better than anyone. In fact, they struggle with the issues at the heart of this debate every day.”

“The patients…were racked with guilt, sadness, anger and even ambivalence. The reason so many patients agreed to participate in the film is because they never thought they would end up in such a desperate situation and they saw that only if they shared their stories could anyone possibly understand it.

Under the film’s segment subtitled “A Profession Under Attack,” we hear a doctor saying, “I got five shots fired through the front windows of my office. Many, many times I felt so alone,” (while showing him helping his young adopted son with his homework), and “When I walk out the door, I expect to be assassinated,” and “They said I was an abomination that should be driven from the state.” Violence perpetrated by lawless vigilantes must be deplored, but the experience of threats and “feeling so alone” pale in significance when compared to the unjustifiable evil of their actions.

Another segment is subtitled “And the People Who Risk Everything.” There is no nobility and nothing admirable about risking everything in the service of incomprehensible savagery—not even legalized, sanitized, and rationalized savagery.

In the segment subtitled “No Matter What the Cost,” one of the doctors says, “If I just give up and stop doing anything after twenty weeks, some women may get desperate and do things on their own. This is something that needs to be done.” But women who choose to “do things on their own” would be choosing. The babies whose murders these doctors rationalize have no choice. And no woman will choose to have her skull punctured, her brain partially sucked out, and skull collapsed. Nor will they choose to be injected with medication that will induce a massive heart attack. True compassion does not entail the grotesque, inhumane slaughter of innocents.

One doctor asks, “What drives women to seek third-trimester abortions? Unless people understand what’s going on for the woman, it’s impossible to support it.” Yes, this late-term abortionist actually said it. She believes that  the ends justify the means—any means, including the barbaric killing of babies capable of feeling pain and surviving outside the treacherous waters of the womb.

After Tiller includes a tearful confession from a very pregnant mother who is going to have her late-term baby aborted. The licensed professional killer (aka Dr. Sella) is seen nodding sympathetically with furrowed brows. The woman says, “It’s guilt no matter which way you go. Guilt if you go ahead and do what we’re doing. Or go ahead and bring him into this world and then he doesn’t have any quality of life.” And one of the doctors complains that  “Sometimes it’s been hard for me to feel like I could continue.” I guess the message here is that a sufficient degree of guilt covers a multitude of evils.

In the 1930’s one of the Nazi attempts to efface, dilute or diminish the onus of moral offense which they bore was to twist grotesquely the concept of suffering. In order to mitigate or obfuscate their guilt, some former Nazis emphasized their profound suffering at having to perform their unpleasant duties.* Hannah Arendt explains, “The trick used by Himmler…was very simple and probably very effective: it consisted in turning these instincts around . . . in directing them toward the self…in saying…how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!”

Similarly, abortion advocates emphasize the profound suffering women experience prior to, during, and sometimes following their abortions. I do not mean to suggest that the suffering is manufactured, nor do I wish to diminish the intensity of the suffering. Rather, I’m suggesting that the focus on the suffering of women who choose abortion has strategic implications.

Suffering comes to serve an exculpatory function in regard to the moral implications of the act of abortion. Because the woman suffers, the moral offense is reduced. Although this emphasis on suffering is not an admission of guilt, it serves a similar function of cultivating a sympathetic response in one’s audience through an open acknowledgment of the moral gravity of one’s actions. It is difficult to explain, however, why a morally neutral “choice,” one so devoid of moral implications as to render it impervious to legal regulation, would cause such profound suffering.  One especially wonders at the gullibility of the American people.

We fallen, weak, and myopic humans have no business killing other humans based on our limited perspective and often wrong prognostications about the potential quality of their future lives.

A necessary word about guilt: Guilt is not a bad thing. Guilt properly ordered helps keep humans civilized. It is the head and heart mechanism that tells us when we are acting within the bounds of decency, civility, and moral uprightness. Without guilt, humans become hedonists and sociopaths.

When our friends and loved ones struggle with life’s inevitable challenges, we should help them through their dark days, so that they do not in their darkness commit evil acts.

The film quotes The Hollywood Reporter: “After Tiller provides insight into a heartwrenching and complex reality.” Does it really? Does it show an  actual late-term abortion procedure? Does it show the tiny arms, legs, and tummies of murdered babies just outside the birth canal? Does it show the doctors injecting poison into preborn, full-term babies or jabbing their torturous instruments into the heads of babies and crushing them, so they can slip more easily from the birth canal? Does it show the babies immediately after they have been delivered, with what’s left of their brains oozing out of flaccid bodies? Is this part of the heartwrenching complexity shown in After Tiller?

Here’s something that is really heartwrenching: partial-birth abortion VIDEO (**WARNING: EXTREMELY GRAPHIC**). No woman’s circumstances justify this—none. And is it really any more justifiable to poison a full-term baby or induce cardiac arrest one day before crushing its skull and delivering it?

Take ACTION:  This film is being shown on PBS, which is funded in part by taxpayer money. There are two things you can do:

1. Click HERE to contact our U.S. Senators and your U.S. Representatives and ask them to oppose government funding of PBS. Yes, there is programming of value on PBS, and PBS can continue to solicit donations from the public.

2. Click HERE to contact PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler to demand equal time to air a film that challenges the ideas cloaked in demagoguery in After Tiller and humanizes the tiny human victims of late-term abortions.  You can also call PBS at (703) 739-5000.

* What has come to be called Godwin’s law is often invoked to discredit comparisons to events of the Nazi era without having to address the substance of the comparison. What the source, attorney Michael Godwin, actually said, however, is that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches.” Godwin never intended to silence all comparisons to issues related to the Holocaust or to suggest that all such comparisons are unsound.

 Faith, Family and Freedom Banquet
With Eric Metaxas on Sept. 19th!

Former FBI informant in the Weather Underground, Larry Grathwohl, is one of the stars of Joel Gilbert’s new film, “There’s No Place Like Utopia,” which is premiering in Denver on July 18th and then goes nationwide.

Friday, July 18, also happens to be “Blog About Larry Day,” to remember his service to the nation and his untimely death last year. His friend Tina Trent says, “we are asking that bloggers, radio folks, podcasters, and others in the media use July 18th to tell the truth about violent leftist radicals like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn and their ilk.” She adds, “Their war against America began with bombs, but it continues today in our institutions of higher education, the media, and the government.”

Grathwohl was a veteran of the Vietnam War, fighting the communists in Southeast Asia, before infiltrating their ranks and fighting them on the streets of America.

Gilbert says, “Larry Grathwhol was a hero of mine because he was on the front lines protecting America from the Marxist terrorist movement that wanted to destroy America.”

In addition to highlighting the service of Larry Grathwohl, the new film shows Gilbert visiting and joking with liberals and Obama supporters in order to understand what makes them tick, and to see whether they have become disillusioned. Inside an abandoned church in Detroit, Gilbert surveys the wreckage, including the busted stained glass windows and broken pews, and sings “Hallelujah, I’m Ready to Go.”

The film is both serious and entertaining. It makes you laugh and almost want to cry, as he skillfully describes what seems like the planned destruction of America.

Gilbert goes to Chicago where he interviews a local politician, sort of a young Barack Obama, who continues the “hope and change” rhetoric. He even started out, like Obama, as a “community organizer.”

Those who think we can overturn this unfolding disaster—and learn from what has been happening to us—have to be disappointed by the comments made in the interviews that Gilbert conducted with young Chinese visitors to Washington, D.C.

One admits that Mao killed 50 million people and made “great mistakes,” but is nevertheless still held in respect. “He’s great,” one of the young Chinese visitors tells Gilbert. At the same time, they admit—and seem quite comfortable in saying—that they have no free speech rights in China. “You can’t say communism is a bad thing,” one tells Gilbert. Otherwise, you go to a labor camp.

So is there a real possibility of recognizing the dangers of Marxism before they engulf a country? Or even after? That’s the open question left by Gilbert’s ultimately disturbing film.

Of course, an awakening of any kind in the U.S. is not likely if young people turn into zombies. Gilbert travels to Colorado to learn about the widespread availability of legalized marijuana, another project encouraged by the Obama administration. One young man talks about using dope to address the problem of high arches in his feet. It is a ploy to get high.

Massive illegal immigration, another project to solidify Democratic Party rule in America, is addressed through Gilbert’s interview with a military veteran who examines how the demographics of Denver have changed and the quality of education has deteriorated.

One of the most fascinating interviews in the film is with former Soviet KGB officer Konstantin Preobrazhensky, who describes socialism as a “perverted version of Christianity” and says, “It is a temptation. It can’t bring anything good.”

“It’s a fairy tale for illiterate people,” he adds.

But the film shows that many educated people, such as the college-educated leaders of the terrorist Weather Underground, accepted the dogma of Marxism-Leninism. Later, they switched gears, from bombing police stations to infiltrating academia and government.

One of those bomb blasts, which killed San Francisco Police Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell in 1970, is highlighted in the Gilbert film. A newscast from the time describes the “heavy one-inch staples” packed in the bomb and how one of them “pierced the skull” of McDonnell. He suffered in the hospital for two days before dying.

Grathwohl describes, in old film footage, how leaders of the Weather Underground had plans to eliminate 25 million Americans after they took power in America.

The current rehabilitation of Weather Underground figures such as Bill Ayers makes the Gilbert film powerful and worth seeing. The public and the news media need to be reminded of the  communist terrorist movement in America that killed police and civilians, and also targeted our military personnel.

Joel Gilbert is a brave filmmaker who is not interested in “debating” the likes of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn as they demand rehabilitation and acceptance. Gilbert wants to expose them and put them behind bars, where they belong.

• Tickets for the film are available on Fandango.