By Bill Bumpas

A pro-family organization says it was surprised to learn that “American Girl Magazine” has decided to step into the culture war in favor of homosexuality.

“American Girl,” owned by toy manufacturer Mattel, featured a picture of a family with two dads in an article about adoption.

One Million Moms, a ministry of the American Family Association, says it supports adoption but “glorifying sin” is not how to bring attention to it.

By praising the homosexuals’ adoption, says OMM director Monica Cole, Mattel has decided it will force a conversation between parents and children, even though that’s a topic that “parents may not feel that their child is ready to have yet.”

The website for “American Girl” states that the bi-monthly magazine reaches more than 400,000 girls. The magazine is targeted at girls ages eight and up.

On its website, OMM features a photo of the magazine story on its website, describing how “Daddy” and “Dada” adopted children from foster care.

The picture was published in the magazine’s November/December issue, which could end up affecting Mattel’s bottom line.

“I believe the retailer is shooting themselves in the foot,” says Cole, “because conservative and traditional families will not be able to purchase their products in good conscience this Christmas season.”

One Million Moms is asking its members and others who are concerned to contact “American Girl” and Mattel, and urge the company to remain neutral in the culture war. Contact information is on the OMM website.

This article was originally posted here

Jonah Goldberg

It’s been a good month for champions of the traditional family, but don’t expect the family wars to be ending any time soon.

In recent weeks, a barrage of new evidence has come to light demonstrating what was once common sense. “Family structure matters” (in the words of my American Enterprise Institute colleague Brad Wilcox, who is also the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia).

And Princeton University and the left-of-center Brookings Institution released a study that reported “most scholars now agree that children raised by two biological parents in a stable marriage do better than children in other family forms across a wide range of outcomes.” Why this is so is still hotly contested.

Another study, coauthored by Wilcox, found that states with more married parents do better on a broad range of economic indicators, including upward mobility for poor children and lower rates of child poverty. On most economic indicators, the Washington Post summarized, “the share of parents who are married in a state is a better predictor of that state’s economic health than the racial composition and educational attainment of the state’s residents.”

Boys in particular do much better when raised in a more traditional family environment, according to a new report from MIT. This is further corroboration of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous 1965 warning: “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history; a community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.”

Perhaps most intriguing — and dismaying — a new study by Nicholas Zill of the Institute of Family Studies found that adopted children have a harder time at school than kids raised by their biological parents. What makes this so dismaying is that adoptive parents tend to be better off financially and are just as willing as traditional parents, if not more so, to put in the time and effort of raising kids.

Zill’s finding highlights the problem with traditional family triumphalism. Adoption is a wonderful thing, and just because there are challenges that come with adoption, no one would ever argue that the problems adopted kids face make the alternatives to adoption better. Kids left in orphanages or trapped in abusive homes do even worse.

In other words, every sweeping statement that the traditional family is best must come with a slew of caveats, chief among them: “Compared to what?” A little girl in a Chinese or Russian orphanage is undoubtedly better off with two loving gay or lesbian parents in America. A kid raised by two biological parents who are in a nasty and loveless marriage will likely benefit from her parents getting divorced.

“In general,” writes St. Lawrence University professor Steven Horwitz, “comparisons of different types of family structures must avoid the ‘Nirvana Fallacy’ by not comparing an idealized vision of married parenthood with a more realistic perspective on single parenthood. The choices facing couples in the real world are always about comparing imperfect alternatives.”

Of course, that point can be made about almost every human endeavor, because we live in a flawed world. And just because we don’t — and can’t — live in perfect consistency with our ideals, that is not an argument against the ideals themselves.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that family structure is so controversial. The family, far more than government or schools, is the institution we draw the most meaning from. From the day we are born, it gives us our identity, our language and our expectations about how the world should work. Before we become individuals or citizens or voters, we are first and foremost part of a family. That is why social engineers throughout the ages see it as a competitor to, or problem for, the state.

And the family wars will never end, because family matters — a lot.

This article was originally posted at the Los Angles Times.

Irony ‘o’ the Day: Christian bakers lose their business and are fined $135,000 for exercising their religious liberty by declining to bake a wedding cake for a homosexual anti-wedding, while Muslim truck drivers in Illinois win $240,000 for exercising their religious liberty by declining to deliver alcohol.

As sure as darkest night follows day, liberal legal eagles will start parsing legal language and cherry-picking precedents to explain why the Muslim case is soooo different and the result soooo constitutionally justifiable. But reasonable people using common sense and a dollop of wisdom know that spiritually blind people are doing what spiritually blind people have been doing since Adam and Eve made a really bad snack choice: rejecting truth.

This blindness has resulted too in the suspension of Bremerton High School football coach Joe Kennedy for praying on the football field after games. Meanwhile, gender-dysphoric, cross-dressing teachers like “Karen” Topham at Lake Forest High School or “Dane” Fox at Glenbrook North High School get to keep their jobs.

So in public schools today, the voluntary post-game prayers of a coach are wholly unacceptable, while the cross-dressing and cross-sex hormone-doping of gender-rejecting teachers is acceptable.

It’s even more outrageous, though. Public school faculty members and administrators actually expect students to lie. They expect students to refer to these gender-rejecting teachers by opposite-sex pronouns, something theologian John Piper has said Christians must not do. If Christian teachers and students in public schools truly want to be salt and light, they will refuse to refer to gender-rejecting students and teachers by opposite-sex pronouns.

Who would have thought we would come to a day when teachers—who are government employees and who used to be role models—would encourage students to reject God’s created order, reject reality, reject truth, and participate in deception?

First Amendment religious liberty and speech protections are under assault, and the target is orthodox Christianity. Don’t let the arrogant mockery of liberals dissuade you from publicly asserting this reality. Liberals, who have burnished their rhetorical weapon to a blinding glow, dismiss as outlandish and paranoid claims that Christians are increasingly persecuted in America. While Christians should “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds,” (James 1:2), we should also remember that we are actually part of “We the people.” Our Christian forbears fought for the freedom to exercise their religion unencumbered by an oppressive government. Let’s not relinquish that freedom without a fight.

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.
If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own;
but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world,
therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you:
‘A servant is not greater than his master.’
If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.”
~John 15: 18-20

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Bremerton High School in Washington state just suspended beloved football coach Joe Kennedy for praying on the football field after games, while gender-dysphoric, cross-dressing teachers like “Karen” Topham at Lake Forest High School in Lake Forest, Illinois or “Dane” Fox at Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook, Illinois get to keep their jobs.

So in public schools today, the voluntary post-game prayers of a Christian coach are wholly unacceptable, while the cross-dressing and cross-sex hormone-doping of gender-rejecting teachers is acceptable.

A pro-family activist warns the LGBT Machine isn’t satisfied with its same-sex marriage victory courtesy of the Supreme Court. Now its revving up its engines to defeat the First Amendment Defense Act and is gearing up to pass the Equality Act–legislation that would leave religious freedom in the dust.

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

Here’s a brief history:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was originally posted at the WashingtonTimes.com.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is ramping up its campaign to use the courts to force all Catholic hospitals to provide abortions and sterilizations.

The strategy is clear: Use the anecdotal exception to destroy the general rule.

In the current scenarios, the ACLU is representing women who claim they need to be sterilized because of alleged threats to their health posed by future unwanted pregnancies, or they need to have access to abortion in case they have complications.

The women could utilize the services of another hospital. But instead, they are suing to force Catholic hospitals to perform the sterilizations or abortions.

The targets are the Ethical and Religious Directives for Health Care Services of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and the First Amendment’s religious freedom guarantee.

On September 23, the ACLU of Michigan sent a demand letter to Genesys Hospital run by Ascension Health in Grand Blanc, Michigan, on behalf of a pregnant woman with a life-threatening brain tumor. The hospital denied her request for a tubal ligation at the time of her scheduled cesarean section delivery in October.

The ACLU says her doctors advised her to have the tubal ligation at the time of her C-section because another pregnancy would exacerbate risks posed by her tumor, as would another surgery after the delivery.

“Catholic bishops are not licensed medical professionals and have no place dictating how doctors practice medicine, especially when it violates federal law,” wrote ACLU of Michigan Staff Attorney Brooke A. Tucker, referring to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (1986), which requires hospitals that accept Medicare and Medicaid to provide emergency care to anyone who needs it.

The ACLU and its state affiliate also filed a federal lawsuit on Oct. 1 against Michigan-based Trinity Health Corporation, which operates more than 80 hospitals around the country. The suit contends that the hospitals’ refusal to perform abortions puts women with troubled pregnancies at risk.

“This case has no merit,” Trinity said in a statement to ModernHealthCare.com. “The Ethical and Religious Directives are entirely consistent with high-quality healthcare, and our clinicians continue to provide superb care throughout the communities we serve.”

Catholic doctors treat mother and baby as two patients, not just one. This means preserving two lives in the course of treatment.

“What (the ACLU) is trying to do is force Catholic hospitals to relax their rules,” Health care law expert and Samford University professor emeritus Leonard Nelson told ModernHealthCare. “They would like Catholic hospitals to not have any particular religious orientation, especially when it comes to abortions.”

As Catholic health corporations, Genesys and Trinity are bound by Directive 53 of the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which states:

“Direct sterilization of either men or women, whether permanent or temporary, is not permitted in a Catholic health care institution. Procedures that induce sterility are permitted when their direct effect is the cure or alleviation of a present and serious pathology and a simpler treatment is not available.”

And here’s Directive 70: “Catholic health care organizations are not permitted to engage in immediate material cooperation in actions that are intrinsically immoral, such as abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and direct sterilization.”

In August, the ACLU threatened to sue Mercy Medical Center, a facility run by the Sisters of Mercy and part of Dignity Health, which operates 40 hospitals – 22 of which are Catholic – in California, Nevada and Arizona, according to CNSNews.

Rachel Miller, a 32-year-old attorney, was rebuffed by hospital officials after she asked them to sterilize her following a planned live birth. She said that going to another hospital 160 miles away for the procedure was a hardship. After the ACLU threat, hospital officials agreed to perform the operation.

Hard cases make bad law, and the ACLU is very obviously going out of its way to destroy the unique, religious character of Catholic hospitals.

This article was originally posted at Townhall.com.

By Tim Wildmon

Indexes, ratings, and even awards pepper the culture when it comes to those who are open and welcoming to certain groups, populations, or facets of society. But now, American Family Association wants to make sure that the nation is informed about companies that honor religious liberty — and those that don’t. 

In a culture where religious freedoms are swept under the rug, not protected, and ignored, American Family Association is taking a necessary step to find and identify those companies that know the importance of protecting religious liberties. We also think it’s important for Americans to know which companies don’t care about protecting such freedoms. 

The new campaign, called the Corporate Religious Liberty Index (CRLI), is a short, simple questionnaire that seeks to gauge the importance of religious liberty for the nation’s major companies. The index is in direct response to the growing threats against religious liberty in the U.S.

The survey includes seven questions that deal with corporate policies and practices. As companies take the survey, the answers will be scored, compiled, and assigned an “index number” that will indicate whether or not companies are favorable, indifferent, or antagonistic to religious liberty. The index number will fall on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 indicating full support for religious freedom.

We know that this unique survey and research will inform faithful Americans of which companies support their values and which choose to ignore them. And Americans can decide what actions they will take once they learn these facts.

Several companies have already answered the questionnaire, and AFA will release the results in the coming weeks and months. A yearly report will also be generated and released each September.

AFA expects the report to garner widespread media attention, as well as consumer interest, especially as it highlights those companies that are champions of religious freedom and those that are hostile to it.

For more on the Corporate Religious Liberty Index, visit the AFA Journal.

 Tim Wildmon

President American Family Association

Originally posted here

By Samuel Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was originally posted at ChristianPost.com

Yet another national poll is out finding that Americans are increasingly concerned about what is happening to religious freedom. This concern is seen in all demographic groups and ages.

The Barna Group did their polling even before Kentucky clerk, Kim Davis, was jailed for her religious beliefs.  Their research reveals the tension more Americans are feeling over the topic of religious freedom.  The poll finds a significant rise in the belief that religious freedom is worse today than just three years ago.

Even among the younger millennial age group, their concern about religious freedom eroding has increased by 9 points since 2012.  Gen-Xer’s say religious freedom is worse today by 13 points over the previous survey three years ago.

Eight out of ten evangelical Christians, those most likely to feel the squeeze on religious freedom, say that things are worse today for people of faith.  This group also has the highest level of concern over the restriction of religious freedom in the next five years.

Perhaps, surprisingly, even among the more non-religious, atheists, agnostics and the religiously unaffiliated, there is an increase in those who believe religious freedom has gotten worse since 2012.  That increase has gone from 23% three years ago to 32% today.

A near unanimous 90% of those polled agreed with the statement, “True religious freedom means all citizens must have freedom of conscience.”

The Barna Group concludes the following from their new research:

“Based upon the fact that millions of Americans see an escalating threat to religious freedom, we anticipate that more people will feel the need to stand up for their religious convictions in a public manner. So, we likely haven’t seen the last of events like Kim Davis. Christian leaders have an opportunity and responsibility to help coach people toward a biblical response to the faith challenges of an increasingly post-Christian society.”

Written by Harry Torres

Recently, someone asked for my thoughts on Kim Davis (in fact, at a baseball game I recently attended) and I really haven’t given it much thought – until now. Mahatma Gandhi once said, “There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts.”

He was partly right. Liberty of conscience is indeed sacred. There is, however, a higher court before which Mr. Gandhi – before which we all – will ultimately stand. It is Kim Davis’ inevitable turn in the dock at this Supreme of all supreme courts that drives her steadfast refusal to mock God through mock “marriage.”

Let’s set aside for a moment all the legal and political wrangling over religious freedom. What is it about Kentucky’s Kim Davis that really has secularists, even some misguided and ill-informed church-goers, yanking their hair out in clumps?

While it may feel personal to them, it’s not. The “throw-Kim-Davis-in-jail!” crowd doesn’t hate this humble, non-assuming Democratic Christian wife and mother of four so much for who she is (though many elitists insist upon sophomorically deriding her as some kind of intolerant, backwoods hick); they hate her more for what she represents – for Whom she represents – and, most especially, because, while making her stand, she has been, to date, immovable.

After nearly a week in jail, Kim didn’t budge. Neither will she resign. Neither should she resign. If she did resign, you see, the precedent would be set. They want the precedent set.

And that’s what’s got them steaming.

If Kim Davis steps down from her elected position as Rowan County clerk, it would represent exile through attrition for her and her fellow believers. Christ follower? Seeking elected office? Looking for a government job? Forget it. Christians need not apply. All the same, if you do apply, be sure to keep your mouth shut, your Bible closed and your First Amendment at home.

To Kim Davis and her supporters, this courageous stand represents unwavering faithfulness to the ultimate Law Giver. To her detractors, it represents stubborn indifference to the laws of man. (The law, incidentally, remains unchanged and on the books as codified. Sections 402.005 and 402.020 of the Kentucky Revised Statutes have yet to be amended by the legislature and, even now, restrict marriage to “the civil status, condition, or relation of one (1) man and one (1) woman”).

Whatever your perspective, Kim’s stand is bold. It is that boldness that has at once encouraged biblical Christians and terrified secular-”progressives.” These things have a way of catching on, you see. This is how movements are born.

Before she was arrested, shackled and imprisoned by U.S. Marshals for her “crime” of conscience, Brian Beutler, senior editor of the New Republic, was among the torch-waving leftists demanding the government “throw Kentucky clerk Kim Davis in jail.”

“Any attempt to force her hand risks making her a bigger martyr on the religious right than she already is,” he wrote, “but that risk is small compared to the risk that allowing her to continue abusing her power without consequence will create a terrible precedent.”

And so she was thrown in jail.

It backfired magnificently. So much so, in fact, that Judge David Bunning suddenly and inexplicably walked back his contempt order and released her with no indication by Kim or her legal team that she intends to change her position one iota.

They aimed to make an example of her. Instead, they made martyr of her. And she set the example for others to follow. So, if jail won’t do it – if being thrown in jail won’t compel this brave woman to disobey God and violate her conscience, then what will?

Who knows how far we will regress as a Nation – They’ll have to burn her at the stake.

Time to ask yourself – Do you believe in God? Do you believe in Heaven and Hell? And what are you doing to prepare?

Harry R. Torres served in the United States Navy for 22 years and retired in 2006.  Mr. Torres has over 25 years of security management experience.  His hobbies include golf, hunting & fishing, baseball, rugby, classic cars, travel, music, entertaining and cooking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was originally posted at AFA.net.

TAKE ACTION: Contact your state representative and urge them to vote “NO” to SB 1564.

Written by Ray Nothstine

Pope Francis offered his support to the Little Sisters of the Poor in a quiet visit to a group of nuns fighting back against the Obama’s administration’s birth control mandate included in the Affordable Care Act.

The visit, according to Father Federico Lombardi, a papal spokesman, confirmed that the Pope’s appearance was a sign of support for the Little Sisters in their legal fight.

Last month, The Little Sisters of the Poor were granted a short-term exemption from the mandate by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, where they are hopeful their case will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“The Holy Father spoke to each of us individually, from the youngest postulant to our centenarian, and then he spoke to all of us about the importance of our ministry to the elderly,” said Sister Constance Veit, Communications Director of the Little Sisters of the Poor. “We were deeply moved by his encouraging words.”

The Obama Administration has aggressively fought the Catholic group in their petition to be exempted from purchasing health plans for employees that cover birth control.

Kishore Jayabalan, director of Istituto Acton in Rome, said in an interview with the Christian Post, that the Pope’s pledge of “solidarity” with the nuns is “very important.”

“It was very important that Pope Francis made an unscheduled visit to the Little Sisters of the Poor, showing solidarity with them in their fight against the Obama administration, said Jayabalan, who previously worked for Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

“He showed with his actions that he is on the side of the underdog against the behemoth of Obamacare and encourages us all to continue the fight against the powerful,” declared Jayabalan.

“It was a very pleasant surprise visit that I’m certain brought joy to the Little Sisters of the Poor. I think it was incredibly Christ-like in many ways.”

Mark Rienzi, senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, shared the following statement with CP:

“After Mass at the Basilica, the Pope made an unscheduled visit to the Little Sisters of the Poor where he spoke to each of the Sisters privately and encouraged them in their vocation to serve the elderly and the poor,” declared Rienzi.

“Earlier in the day, at the White House, the Pope expressed his support for religious liberty when he stated: [we] all are called to be vigilant, precisely as good citizens, to preserve and defend that freedom from everything that would threaten or compromise it.”

On Thursday Pope Francis spoke to a joint session of Congress, where he called for the protection of life at all stages, linking abortion and disregard for life as a violation of the Golden Rule taught in Scripture. Pope Francis called for abolition of the death penalty, better care for the environment, and for protection and flourishing for families.

“It is my wish that throughout my visit the family should be a recurrent theme,” declared Pope Francis. “How essential the family has been to the building of this country! And how worthy it remains of our support and encouragement! Yet I cannot hide my concern for the family, which is threatened, perhaps as never before, from within and without.”

“Fundamental relationships are being called into question, as is the very basis of marriage and the family. I can only reiterate the importance and, above all, the richness and the beauty of family life,” he added.

Rev. C.J. Rhodes, who pastors Mt. Helm Baptist Church, the oldest black church in Jackson, Mississippi, believes all Christians can learn from Pope Francis’s visit and remarks.

“As a National Baptist pastor and theologian, I often lament that we seldom have a coherent and comprehensive social doctrine,” declared Rev. Rhodes. The Roman Catholic Church does. And in Pope Francis’ visit to our polarized nation we are reminded of how valuable such doctrine is.”

Rev. Rhodes cautioned Christians against using the Pope’s message to fall into the trap of making his visit and words as another opportunity to focus on politics.

“In humble gestures he has invited us toward a broader moral horizon that transcends the imaginatively shallow Left/Right divide,” said Rev. Rhodes.

“His consistent life ethic, or what Pope John Paul II called the ‘culture of life,’ teaches us that overcoming abortion, the death penalty, racial injustice, environmental abuse, attacks on traditional families, and oppressive political economies is indeed the work of the Church and makes the Gospel visible for the common good.

“As Lino Rulli of Catholic Radio said, this Christian tradition teaches us that what matters most isn’t left and right but right and wrong. We are Christians first, then Americans, pilgrims and ambassadors of our Lord and Savior Jesus and his kingdom. The Pope reminds of us that.”

Originally published at ChristianPost.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was originally posted here