Can Men Be Trained?

Well, civilization depends on it so it better be possible or we are all doomed. Ed West, in his blog post today at the Daily Telegraph entitled "The riots remind us that polygamous societies are naturally violent," reflects on the meaning of the urban lawlessness in Britain the past few days and says:

When we discuss “fatherlessness” in urban areas what we are talking about, effectively, is polygamy. And countless studies have shown that, the more polygamous a society, the more aggressive its males. Polygamous hunter-gather societies are absurdly violent.

Why? Because where male parental investment is low, the qualities that define a good male mate are strength, aggression and status. Where male parental investment is high, the most important quality becomes monogamy – because without it a woman’s children will starve. These qualities are partly hereditary, and on the male side this tendency for deadbeat lotharios to produce unfaithful sons was noted long before science dared to tread its feet into the field of evolutionary psychology. Science still cannot tell us to what degree male monogamy is influenced by nature; “allele 34” may influence vasopressin, the hormone associated with monogamy in male mammals, but then it may not (and even if it influences behaviour, men can still be “trained”).

It is interesting that West uses the word "polygamy" to describe the modern welfare state underclass. I would have said "promiscuity" but it comes to basically the same thing. Men want to have multiple partners and not stay with the the mother of their children and be good providers. Whether this is done through serial divorce, polygamy or unrestrained promiscuity with no marriage in the picture at all is only a matter of degree.

I find it interesting that he uses the theoretical framework of evolutionary biology to smuggle teleology back into the discussion after it was supposedly banned by modern science. But let's lay aside the pop psychology and pop biology and translate this discussion into the language of traditional Aristotelian and Biblical morality.

In our fallen world, men have a disordered sex drive. Strictly speaking, we are perverted. Our sexual desire is indiscriminate; the mere sight of a half-dressed, half-way attractive female stranger walking down the street is enough to arouse our desire. This is not normal; this is the result of the Fall into sin because lust is a perversion of natural sexual desire. Monogamy is natural; men should find their wives attractive and other women should not provoke lustful desires at all. But alas, we are sinners not only insofar as we make evil choices but because our sinful, fallen natures make us susceptible to making such choices even when we know better.

So, when West says that maybe a certain hormone makes us lustful he is simply talking about the efficient cause. The fact that our biology makes us promiscuous in our desires does not determine by itself the true purpose of our sexual desire. The fact that male sexual desire is strong is meant by nature to ensure the propagation of the race - to ensure that we get around to reproducing. But it is meant to operate monogamously -which is clear from the fact that mothers and children need fathers to help provide for the family - and not promiscuously. The indiscriminateness of male sexual desire is the problem, not the strength of the desire.

This is the germ of truth in the argument that sex is good and the Church therefore should not be against it. Of course the Church should not be against the goodness of strong sexual desire, but like any other great good, sex can be perverted and become destructive. So the Church rightly stands against the misdirection of strong male sexual desire outside the family.

This is why one of the Ten Commandments is "Thou shalt not commit adultery" and when Jesus deepens this commandment in Matthew 5 by saying that even looking lustfully on another woman is to commit adultery in the heart he is zeroing in on the real heart of what is wrong with adultery: the direction of the sexual desire away from one's wife to other women indiscriminately - promiscuity.

Civilization depends on marriage. Civilization involves training men to overcome the weakness they inherit from Adam: the fallenness of their sexual desires. Civilization depends on the family because it depends on channeling male energies constructively in support of women and children, rather than allowing they to wander all over the place indiscriminately and gradually peter out into destructive and meaningless behaviour. A society in which marriage is destroyed inevitably descends into barbarism and poverty. Does anything in today's headlines support such a thesis?

This is not some sort of novel social scientific theory. It is what your grandmother leaned from her grandmother. It is the hard won wisdom of several thousand years of civilizations rising, leveling off, declining and dying. The reason civilizations keep failing is original sin. History looks like we should expect it to look if the Bible is true. Brief periods of success punctuate longer periods of darkness and regression. There simply is no evidence for the truth of the false doctrine of Progress. You have to be an unscientific fanatic to believe in either unicorns or Progress.

If men can be trained to contain and control their promiscuous impulses through marriage, then there is hope. But if not, our civilization is destined to join the other twenty or so civilizations that once flourished but now are matters for investigation by archeologists.

The question of homosexuality is relevant here because we often hear that we must accept all sexual orientations as fixed, unchangeable and morally neutral. Does that include the orientation to promiscuity? The problem is that if we take whatever our fallen, sinful natures incline us to do as morally neutral, then we have no reason to fight for marriage as an institution that civilizes, directs and makes constructive male sexual desire. If the homosexual should just do what feels natural at the time, so should the married man whose secretary half his age seems to understand him better than the mother of his three children. Both have equally "natural" feelings. The problem with the modern sexual revolution is that it has no moral language to talk about the need to discipline and direct male sexual desire.

West's article is part of the problem because using the language of evolutionary biology is dangerous. Darwinism rejects teleology but then smuggles a different, more destructive, even demonic teleology in the back door. It is called social Darwinism and the Nazis used it logically. Once you elide the distinction between final cause and efficient cause by naively thinking the former is unnecessary, you open the door to people concluding that efficient cause (raging hormones) should be understood as final cause. Hence, promiscuity is seen as good. The will to power is natural and therefore justifiable.

The smart people who drove God out of the public schools and who rigorously exclude the traditional shame and blame morality from the curriculum didn't foresee the possibility that those taught evolutionary biology in an amoral fashion with final cause eliminated from the equation might just draw some logical conclusions from such teaching and use what they were taught to justify a descent in barbarism.

Or maybe they did foresee it and rejoiced ahead of time at what they were accomplishing. In that case, they must think the riots in Britain are just wonderful and noble.

What Stands in the Way of the Radical Homosexual Goal of Destroying Marriage? Reuban Diaz . . . and God

The radical homosexual agenda has come out into the open in recent years. No longer can an unbiased observer be justified in believing that the push for "same-sex marriage" has anything to do with tolerance for homosexuals. It clearly is all about providing a legal basis for the persecution of Christians, Jews and other conservatives who believe in traditional marriage. Consider what has been happening in New York since the Legislature made it illegal not to pretend that a man can "marry" another man.

Speaking of "crimes," on Tuesday, Bob Ellis reported on some of the very predictable fallout from the recent outrage of the state lawmaker-mandated forcing of homosexual "marriage" on the people of New York. Now appearing on the hellish stage is Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice, who has apparently been threatening county clerks who are morally opposed to issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

As Bob Ellis reported,

"...[I]n the wake of New York's recent decision to allow homosexuals to counterfeit marriage, some not only want morally committed clerks fired, they want clerks criminally prosecuted who will not participate in the counterfeiting of marriage.

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) blog highlights one NY state senator who still has a moral compass, Ruben Diaz, and a press release he sent out yesterday:

'...It is inexcusable that Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice has publicly threatened employees by stating 'the law affords no discretion to public officials charged with granting marriage licenses. Therefore, any such refusal may be subject to criminal prosecution.'

Her press statement stated: 'The religious exemptions in the Marriage Equality Act are inapplicable to town and city clerks serving in their license-granting roles, and a public official's intentional refusal to issue marriage licenses to qualified same-sex couples may constitute Official Misconduct, a Class A misdemeanor defined in section 195.00 of the New York State Penal Law.'"

Freedom of conscience? Freedom of religion? What in the world are you talking about? Oh, those United States of America constitutional rights don't apply here. When it comes to appeasing the aggressively radical homosexuals, you Christians can check your God-given rights with your coat and hat at the door.

So who is standing up to the "dictatorship of relativism," this fascist imposition of the will to power? A Pentecostal minister who also happens to be a Democratic member of the New York State Senate, Rev. Reuban Diaz, that's who. And if you are a black Democrat you can surely dissent from the party line on one issue and not get slurred and threatened, can't you? Well, actually, no - it is the lynch mob for you.

Sen. Ruben Diaz, a South Bronx Democrat is also a Pentecostal Minister and a charismatic and unshakeable man of principle. He refused to back down on what he considered a moral truth. As the 'gay marriage' debate heated up in the final week, he refused to be bullied into selling out.

... During his stand for marriage Sen. Diaz endured death threats which caused him to seek help from the police and FBI.

But now, two weeks after the vote, Sen. Diaz continues to be [the] target of a vile and disgusting campaign of personal attacks by the homosexual community. He receives a flood of vicious hate calls and emails to his home and office. The 'tolerant' homosexual community sponsored a 'F- Ruben Diaz Festival' in a gay bar in Brooklyn.

But Sen. Diaz is not backing down. Yesterday he published a press release, also posted on his web site, which re-stated his unwillingness to back down under pressure."

What does Sen. Diaz have to say? In a press release he says:

"On June 24th I voted my conscience and opposed Governor Andrew Cuomo's key piece of social legislation in the New York State Senate that redefines our marriage laws away from the traditional definition of one man and one woman. I was the only Democrat in the Senate to vote against this legislation, and I wear my vote as a badge of honor.

I have been congratulated by religious leaders and constituents not only from my district, but from districts all over New York State. I have received messages of encouragement and gratitude from people throughout the United States. Alberto Martinez tweeted: 'Jesus said: 'Whoever is ashamed of Him and His words, the Son of Man will also be ashamed of such person at His coming.' Bravo Senator Diaz.' All of these supporters know that I am unashamed to be a Christian. If we talk the talk, we must walk the walk.

Although Republican Senate Leader Dean Skelos ushered the gay marriage vote to the floor in order to make the 11:00PM news, and even though the vote passed, the hatred that has spewed in my direction before June 24th continues.

Yesterday I received a series of five emails in my Senate account from one person that read like homicidal rantings: 'You eat s-. You are s-.' 'There is no worse person on Earth than you. God has told me so.' 'You worthless pile of human excrement...' 'I hope you die. I hope you die soon. I'm waiting for you to die.' 'Satan would sooner nail a stake through your heart than admit to knowing you. Your very own lover...'

To err on the side of caution and especially since one of the messages awaits my demise, those emails were properly reported to the FBI."

The pro-homosexual movement is not about tolerance or justice or compassion for the underdog. Black Pentecostal Democrats are not the face of the Establishment; they certainly don't control society. But they have to be ruthlessly mowed down by the extremist homosexual movement as it seeks to consolidate power and eliminate all opposition to its control of our culture.

Where are the New York Baptists, Presbyterians and other Evangelical voices in New York? If it were not for the Catholics and Pentecostals the Christian voice would be practically silent. We Evangelicals are being weighed in the balance and found wanting. A hundred years ago there were no such things as Pentecostals. Now there are half a billion. Do we really think God is stuck with us and has no options?

In any case, the agenda is clear and the battle lines are drawn. Those who think there can be compromise and reasonable accommodation between Christians and Nietzschean homosexual extremists are being proven wrong systematically by events as they unfold. The agenda is the destruction of marriage and the Christian Church stands in the way of that objective.

Some liberal Protestants have been so frightened that they have scurried into line and so we witness the humiliating spectacle of so-called Episcopalian "bishops" dutifully marching like captives in "Gay Pride Parades." They are sell-outs who will do anything for the Nazis in exchange for being gassed last. The Church was built on martyrs not on pragmatic bandwagon jumpers.

For every traitor and heretic God has reserved for Himself a man like Reuban Diaz. Let us pray for him and may his courage inspire us to serve without reservation.

Archbishop Dolan of NY Stands Up to Government Overreach: Blessings on Him

In this Catholic News Agency story we have an update on the culture wars in New York state as the assault on marriage by cultural Marxists and Progressives continues relentlessly.

New York Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan is concerned that state senators might “re-invent the very definition” of marriage—society's basic institution—as five more lawmakers pledged to support a same-sex “marriage” bill.

“Not every desire, urge, want, or chic cause is automatically a ‘right,’” the archbishop explained in his June 14 blog post titled “The True Meaning of Marriage.” True freedom, he said, is not “the license to do whatever we want, but the liberty to do what we ought.”

Later that day, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo presented the “Marriage Equality Act” to the state legislature after a key Republican senator voiced support for it. Four Democrats who previously voted against same-sex “marriage” said on June 13 that they would support the bill.

Governor Cuomo's administration is reportedly pursuing a strategy of gradually pressuring lawmakers to give their support.

“We’re in a very precarious situation,” New York Catholic Conference director Dennis Poust told CNA on June 15. According to a New York Times tally, the law needs only one more committed vote to ensure its passage.

“We are doing everything we can to convince the remaining 31 senators who have not said that they are going to vote ‘yes’ that this bill is a terrible mistake, and we have not given up,” Poust explained. “There is still hope, although certainly it is hanging by a thread.”

If the bill does pass, “there is very little that can be done,” he said, because New York does not have a system of initiatives and referendums like California and some other states do.

As always, this attack on the two institutions that stand in the way of the totalitarian state, marriage and the Christian Church, has nothing really to do with so-called "homosexual rights" and everything to do with renouncing natural law, attempting to impose the triumph of the human will over reality itself and making the State (controlled by an elite class of bureaucrats) all-powerful. The Leviathan - the State without limits - seeks to take the place of God. And just as the idea that two men can "marry" each other is a lie, so is the idea that the State can be God.

Notice how destructive of marriage and family this attack is:

Archbishop Dolan warned that the proposal would exert government control over an institution more fundamental than the state itself – a prospect that he compared to the communist regimes of China and North Korea.

“In those countries, government presumes daily to ‘redefine’ rights, relationships, values, and natural law,” he observed. “There, communiqués from the government can dictate the size of families, who lives and who dies, and what the very definition of ‘family’ and ‘marriage’ means.”

The bill under consideration in New York specifies that no religious institutions will be forced to honor or facilitate homosexual “weddings.” However, it will eliminate all gender-specific language regarding the rights and responsibilities of individuals and couples.

The whole idea is (1) to marginalize, de-legitimize and minimize marriage as the foundation of the family and (2) to assert the authority of the State over all other social institutions and realities - even natural marriage and family. Since the Church seeks to protect the priority and rights of families, the homosexual "rights" campaign can be used simultaneously to weaken and persecute the Church. This is why homosexuality is such a huge issue; it is not about homosexuals, it is about destroying all opposition to the Progressive agenda and its vehicle the State.

Archbishop Dolan is to be commended for centering on the crucial issue:

Archbishop Dolan also responded in his blog post to those who say the Church discriminates against homosexuals. He pointed out that the Church seeks, rather, to maintain the truth about human nature, sexuality, and the family.

The issue is the truth about human nature. The Church did not invent this truth; rather, she discovers and submits to it in both creation and revelation. The truth is prior to human decision and impervious to human will. No society can remain free and healthy if it denies the truth and the denial of the truth will always lead to oppression, de-humanization and tyranny.

The culture wars were not started by Christians, but by those who seek to attack the truth. In this case, it is heartening to see the Catholic hierarchy defending the family, marriage, the truth about human nature and the freedom that comes from believing the truth.
_________________

Note
(By the way, the fact that this assault on the truth is being facilitated by individuals claiming to be members of Christian churches and in some cases by clergy or even whole denominations is confusing to casual observers and simple-minded people. This does not change the reality that the assault is ultimately the work of Satan and his puppets. This aspect of the situation will be discussed in another post.)

Social Conservatism and Economic Conservatism: Two Sides of One Worldview

In his reflections on the recent Faith and Freedom Conference, at which most of the contenders for the Republican presidential nomination spoke, Tony Blankley argues that social and fiscal conservatism are not alternatives or rivals. Rather, he argues, they need each other. His thesis is:

Strong support for tradition, custom, moral behavior and religious faith (so-called social conservatism) is the equal handmaiden of free-market capitalism advocacy. They are the two parts that make up the one, whole concept of political conservatism.

A few years ago, I would have denied the truth of this thesis. But now I have come to realize the truth of it, although I think there is a danger of underestimating the importance of Biblical revelation in this formulation. In the paragraph following the one I just quoted, Blankley refers to Adam Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments emphasizes the moral foundation for a free market economy as described in The Wealth of Nations. The problem is that the Enlightenment rejection of revelation undermines the possibility of natural law and absolute morality necessary to ground a free society. So, we need a different and better basis for our morality than Enlightenment theories of ethics if we are to have an enduring and culturally regenerative conservatism.

But there can be no disagreement with Blankley when he writes: "And unbridled pure materialism -- whether of the left or right --ends up in reigns of terror, gulags and holocausts." The problem is how to join an adequate ethic to a free market economics and the only way to do that is to set both in the context of a metaphysics generated by the Christian doctrine of God.

Blankley see this clearly. He quotes Barry Goldwater:

Consider how Goldwater asserted his religious "social conservative" principles to re-enforce his conservative economic principles. In his acceptance speech, he argued for "freedom under a government limited by the laws of nature and of nature's God ... Those who elevate the state and downgrade the citizen must see ultimately a world in which earthly power can be substituted for Divine Will, and this nation was founded upon the rejection of that notion and upon the acceptance of God as the author of freedom."

"Nature and nature's God," of course, is an allusion to Lincoln. Blankley goes on to quote from Goldwater's book The Conscience of a Conservative.

"The root difference between the conservatives and the liberals of today is that conservatives take account of the whole man, while liberals tend to look only at the material side of man's nature. The conservative believes that man is, in part, an economic, an animal creature; but that he is also a spiritual creature with spiritual needs and spiritual desires. What is more, those needs and desires reflect the superior side of man's nature, and thus take precedence over his economic wants. Conservatism therefore looks upon the enhancement of man's spiritual nature as the primary concern of political philosophy. Man's most sacred possession is his individual soul."

Goldwater and Blankley are right in asserting that the key difference between liberals and conservatives is their respective views of man; one has a godless view of man and the other has a Biblical view of man. One has a reductionist view of man that infantilizes and degrades man while the other has a view of man as gloriously fallen and in the process of being redeemed. The difference between these two views ultimately comes down to one's view of God.

Conservatism, both economic and social conservativism, is basically a worldview that is as wide as all creation and one which appreciates spiritual reality as well as material reality.

The Anniversary of D-Day

Here is a video of the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944 in honor of the brave men who challenged a pagan tyrant and his murderous hate:



Here is a chilling accurate spoof of how the left-wing media might have covered D-Day if it had happened on June 6, 2007:



If that last video was just too sickening, here is a speech by Ronald Reagan in Normandy on a previous anniversary of D-Day that will inspire you:

Sex and Economics: The Engame of the Cultural Revolution of the 60s

Of course sexual immorality was not invented in the 60s. What happened was that the promiscuity hitherto expressed mainly among the "upper" classes and the "intellectuals" was packaged for mass consumption, glorified, and sold to the middle and working classes as "liberation."

In the 60s the theological liberalism of the mainline Protestant churches, which had hollowed out Christian belief for over half a century, began to have wider cultural consequences. If there is no God, or if God is a remote Deity who is uninvolved in this world, then I am "free" to act as I please. And what pleases me? Only those who had already discarded the venerable Christian doctrine of original sin could be surprised when the answer was: "Vice rather than virtue."

The Spirit of 68 is the rejection of virtue and the embrace of vice in the name of human liberation. Naturally, one expression of this was sexual promiscuity. This has been the same pattern throughout human history; the throwing off of the restraints of morality and law was old hat to the writers of the New Testament. By Paul's day it was an age old pattern of behavior repeated in empire after empire and occurring again in his own day in the Roman empire, as he makes clear in his letters to the Romans and to the Corinthians.

But when a post-Christian worldview, whether in a Darwinian, a Freudian or a Marxian form, began to be preached openly to the masses as a guide to everyday behavior, the main take-away was the mainstreaming of lust: "Lust is good, lust is fun!" Lust is of course expressed through our sexual organs, but not only in that way. The other main way it is expressed is through our acquisitive nature - the drive to acquire wealth or luxuries. Lust can be seen as much in our use of our credit cards as in our use of our sex organs. The inordinate desire for sexual pleasure is closely related to the inordinate desire for material luxuries and both represent an attempt to transgress the limits life places on our desires.

If this life is all there is, then we may as well grab for all we can get during the few years of our consciousness between birth and death. The post-Christian worldview restricts our vision to the here and now and the material world. It demeans all visions of eternity and scoffs at the idea of this world as a preparation for the next. It bids us focus on getting a bit more pleasure out of this life than we would be entitled to if we stuck by some absolute standard of morality. In fact, this becomes the standard of success; have we managed to outwit Fate to snatch a few, fleeting pleasures that don't belong to us by right out of the pool before the lights go out?

So the lust for material possessions and luxuries causes us to reject the limitations of virtue and law and to strive to get as much as we can. In a curious moral inversion, the apologists for socialism have attempted to make this kind of greed into a flaw of capitalism, even though socialism is the ideology that encourages and legitimizes greed, envy and covetousness, whereas capitalism preaches hard work and refraining from coveting what is belongs to your neighbor.

Socialism is built on greed. It tells the ordinary man: "If your neighbor is richer than you are, this is unjust. You have as much right to luxuries as he. The revolution will help you take what is rightfully yours. Laws against coveting are just a tool of the rich to keep the poor down." Thus, socialism attacks the Tenth Commandment in particular and Divine Revelation in general.

Socialism is right in its belief that the institution of private property must be undermined if its message of covetousness and greed is to succeed and it is right in its belief that religion and the family must be overturned as well. Engels knew that the family, private property and the state stand in the way of socialist revolution since all three institutions are intertwined. And he and Marx both understood that God, the Bible and the Ten Commandments stand in the way of socialism.

Socialism appeals to the basest aspects of human nature: the lust for possessions and luxury. It basically tells us that all of us have equal rights to enjoy wealth regardless of how hard we work or how smart we work. This is appealing to many, especially if they have weak character in general.

But socialism, in legitimating lust for possessions and luxury is really legitimating lust in general and so it is perfectly understandable that the sexual revolution and the socialist revolution should proceed hand in hand. Breaking down the family is essential to magnifying the power of the State on the political level and breaking down moral inhibitions against coveting and fornicating is essential on the personal level.

What this means is that the sexual revolution, which swept the Western world in the 60s, must inevitably be followed by an economic crisis. We now see this inevitable economic crisis unfolding before our eyes and we need to understand its provenance.

Europe is undergoing a sovereign debt crisis. The Euro is threatened by the high national debt run up by various countries, especially Greece, Spain, Ireland and Portugal, with Italy close behind. The Northern European countries are still benefiting from an old Protestant work ethic left over from when they were Christian and they, especially Germany, are prosperous. But the southern countries have fully embraced the cultural revolution and have surrendered to their lusts both in sexual and financial matters.

In the social democracies of the European Union, the socialist ideals that everyone has an equal right to money has been institutionalized along with the idea that everyone has an equal right to sexual gratification. The problem comes down to this: material goods and services are limited but human lusts are not. Just as the unlimited gratification of sexual lust leads to the destruction of the family, so the unlimited gratification of financial lusts leads to the destruction of the State.

The European Union is threatened by the reluctance of workers and voters in countries that are living within their means (principally Germany) to forever subsidize Greeks in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. For decades now, political parties have been bribing voters with their own money by promising more and more goodies - earlier retirement ages, more vacations, higher wages, the government paying for health care, etc. - and now they can't get elected without constantly promising more and more.

The problem is that taxes are already so high they are choking economic growth and the national debt is also so high that a greater and greater portion of government revenues are going just to pay the debt. At a certain point, the debt becomes unmanageable - as has already happened in Greece, Ireland and Portugal. When the cost of further government borrowing becomes too high, the debt balloons and cannot be brought under control. Then the government either has to devalue the currency and accept high inflation and high unemployment or be bailed out by other countries. Since one country in an economic union cannot devalue its currency (the Euro), bailouts are the only option. The problem is that voters in Germany are showing signs of voting out any government that bails out Greece. German workers, who retire at 65 are naturally rebelling against the idea of sending money to bail out Greeks who retire at 55. When bailouts become impossible, the next stage is for Greece to pull out of the Euro, restore the Drachma and let inflation take its course. The last time this happened in Europe was during the days of the Weimer Republic in Germany during the 1920s and 30s and we know how that movie ended.

So Europe faces economic collapse. My point is that this is not some sort of unforeseeable and uncaused natural disaster that came out of no where. It is an entirely predictable, even inevitable, result of rejecting morality and virtue, embracing libertinism and vice, and trying to be post-Christian. The endgame of the cultural revolution of the 60s is economic collapse, social chaos and ultimately somebody grabbing totalitarian power in order to restore order. What is lost is ordered liberty. Only a self-restrained people can be a free people: both in sex and economics.

The Homosexual Ideology May be Receding

Andrew Walker at Mere Orthodoxy has an excellent post that follows up on Trevin Wax's top ten reasons why he is optimistic about the prolife cause. (See my previous post.)

Andrew is optimistic about natural marriage. Here are his top ten reasons why:

"10. The Un-doing of Same-Sex Marriage Law
9. The Unpersuasive Arguments for Same-Sex Marriage
8. The Persuasive Arguments for Natural Marriage
7. The Network of Coalitions
6. The Forcefulness of State's Rights
5. The Black Church
4. Free Speech and Religious Liberty
3. The Silent Majority
2. Tactics Exposed
1. The Permanence of Marriage as God's Institution"

I think that the push for "same-sex marriage" is not likely to be successful in America as a whole, even though it may take root in certain fringe states like Vermont and Oregon where the population of Christians is low and the culture of death well-advanced.

This story by John McCormack at the Weekly Standard is interesting: "Same-sex Marriage Stalls in Deep Blue Maryland." One interesting point McCormack notes is:

The charge against gay marriage in Maryland is being led largely by African-American pastors--"some of the most vocal opponents" of the measure, the Washington Post reports. The campaign seems to be working. Alston represents a heavily African American district in Prince George's County, and she "told reporters that her constituents have bombarded her with negative reaction to the proposal which has passed the state Senate," reports a local Fox affiliate.

He also notes that similar legislation is also stalled in nearby Rhode Island. Opposition from the churches has been unexpectedly strong.

I think Walker is right. America is not finished yet and as long as it stands, the ideal of the West - limited government, religious freedom, free speech, the division of powers, democracy, free enterprise etc. - will not disappear from the earth.

Obama Stokes the Culture Wars

Barrack Obama, in an act of political interference in the administration of justice, has ordered his Attorney-General to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act. Obama, apparently, has a problem with this law because he has now dropped all pretense of believing in marriage. Now he wants "same-sex marriage" and he wants it now.

Janice Shaw Crouse writes in the American Spectator, in an article entitled: "Obama Abandons Marriage:"

In an unexpected move (particularly in the midst of the Libyan crisis), President Obama signaled that he thinks the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional, and he has instructed Attorney General Eric Holder and the Justice Department (DOJ) to cease defending cases brought against DOMA. The wording of this surprise announcement suggests that the decision is another instance of this president's politicizing the administration of justice: the White House ordering the Justice Department what it should do in order to appeal to the extreme elements of its political base. So much for Obama's pivot to the middle, not that there was much doubt about that after his kowtowing to the unions in the Wisconsin imbroglio.

The president declared that Section 3 of DOMA (the part that prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex "marriages") "violates the equal protection component" of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. This is the president's latest bow to "gay" rights activists and his latest move out of mainstream values over to far-left policies that undermine the nation's foundations and social structure. This is but the president's latest move to disregard the laws of this country; he has repeatedly put his radical ideology and personal preferences ahead of the expressed will of the nation's citizens. He seems determined to shape America into his image, regardless of what voters want or what the Constitution and national laws state.

Let us be clear about some things. Obama claims to be a Christian. Millions doubt his sincerity, but let us take his profession at face value. This means he is now a heretic, infected by the plague of postmodern constructivism that is currently ravaging liberal Protestantism. He denies that marriage is designed by God with procreation at its center and claims that it is any close relationship between two or more people that the Government and Courts currently say it is.

Fine, it is a free country (so far) and Obama is free to break a campaign promise and reveal himself to be a very different man than many voters thought he was. It is wrong, but he can do that. In a democracy, the people simply note that the next election is in 2012.

I just want to point out that Evangelicals or the Christian Right did not start this fight. Nobody on the conservative side manufactured this issue out of thin air in order to stoke the fires of the culture wars. With all the economic, national security and other issues clamoring for his attention, Barrack Obama has pushed this to the top of his priority list and has chosen to get in the face of Catholics, Evangelicals and conservatives of all stripes. Just remember that. We did not start it.

Two other quick notes on this depressing move was made now. First, I think he probably intended it to fly under the radar with all the Middle East crises dominating the news agenda. He knows it is a vote-loser and his preference would be to sneak it through. Second, by not waiting until the second term (which apparently was his first plan), it signals that he is growing increasingly doubtful that there will even be a second term. In this, I think he is right; but while it would be going too far to claim that this move is akin to running up the white flag, it certainly signals existential angst in the war councils of this most hard-nosed of culture warriors.

Bill Kristol Goes Wobbly on "Don't Ask Don't Tell" or Why Social Conservatives are Not Giving Up on Opposing Homsexuality

I like The Weekly Standard very much and I agree with Bill Kristol on most issues. But this response to the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is the lamest, most servile, most craven, least morally courageous and most strategically inept thing I have ever read from either Kristol or TWS.

Now that the lame duck Democratic Congress has repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT), the new Congress will have to see to it that the Obama administration manages the implementation of repeal responsibly, and that the concerns of military leaders and troops are taken seriously. But over the next two years Congress can do something else. It can take an interest in ensuring that discrimination against ROTC on college campuses ends.

Though ROTC was kicked off campuses like Harvard, Yale and Columbia before gays in the military was ever an issue, DADT became the excuse offered by those universities in recent years for continuing to discriminate against ROTC. The excuse is gone.

This is the biggest punch in the gut to fusionism since Mitch Daniels ill-considered remarks about how we need a "truce" on social issues in order to focus on the economy. Kristol makes it sound like an opportunity rather than a resounding defeat for conservatism.

What both Daniels and Kristol well know, but appear to have forgotten, is that the conservative movement consists of an alliance of libertarians, foreign policy hawks, fiscal conservatives and social conservatives.

If Kristol, Daniels or anyone else in the conservative movement thinks that embracing homosexuality as normal, instead of resisting it tooth and nail, is the way for the conservative movement to prosper they are badly mistaken. That way lies splintering, loss of influence and progressivist triumph.

Giving up the military to the control of cultural Marxism is to surrender one of the last conservative institutions in America to the Left and it merely solidifies the hegemony of the Left on American culture. When Evangelical and Catholic chaplains start being hounded out of the military for repeating what the Bible teaches, social conservatives will not forget that eight Republicans voted for this fiasco and this disgraceful fact will have consequences as the Tea Party movement considers how to approach the 2012 primaries.

Want to See the Face of Pure Evil?

The United Kingdom is growing darker every year. Now the mask is coming off and evil people in the service of the culture of death are beginning to show themselves openly on TV. Have a peek at this video in which a grandmotherly woman says that of course she would not hesitate to murder a child who was, in her opinion, suffering too much. Any "good mother" would not hesitate to do the same.

Note the goofy woman in the clerical collar who looks like she can't quite believe what she is hearing. She says nothing in response to the advocate of euthanasia, which makes her a realistic exemplar of the Church of England which seems mildly preoccupied with marches for debt relief or collecting for the food bank as society degenerates into barbarism all around it.



Well, there you have it: pure evil stated openly with a "So what are you going to do about it?" kind of attitude. Hitler told the world ahead of time what he planned to do and nobody did anything to stop him. These people are doing the same. Will anybody respond to their attack on human life and dignity?

Dr. Ken Howell is Reinstated: A Step in the Right Direction

Dr. Kenneth Howell, the professor at the University of Illinois who was fired for teaching the Catholic (Christian) position on homosexuality, has been reinstated after great protests and the threat of a lawsuit.

An adjunct religion instructor barred from teaching by the University of Illinois after defending the Roman Catholic stance on homosexuality has been invited back to teach this fall.

Adjunct associate professor Kenneth Howell was reinstated today -- a day after the deadline when his lawyers said they would sue the university for violating his academic freedom if administrators failed to reinstate him.

Why was he fired?

Howell, who has taught on the Urbana-Champaign campus since 2001, was removed last month after explaining during class why the church believes that homosexual behavior violates natural moral law. He elaborated later in an e-mail that lawyers say circulated around campus, prompting one student to call it "hate speech."

"All I ask as your teacher is that you approach these questions as a thinking adult," Howell wrote. "That implies questioning what you have heard around you. Unless you have done extensive research into homosexuality and are cognizant of the history of moral thought, you are not ready to make judgments about moral truth in this matter. All I encourage is to make informed decisions."

His subsequent removal generated outcry from alumni and students, including a Save Dr. Ken Facebook page. On Thursday, the page was filled with posts celebrating victory.

Remember, if there is one group that is being persecuted today in Western society, it is traditional Christians. Radical Leftists are determined to eradicate all Christian influence from our society and our choice is either to abandon society to their tender mercies or stand and fight. Dr. Howell is to be commended for standing up to the thugs. However, this case is not over yet.

But the reinstatement is only temporary. It does not affect an ongoing faculty review, which has been investigating whether Howell's immediate removal violated his academic freedom or right to due process.

"We are going to be monitoring what happens now to make sure Ken Howell's academic freedom under the First Amendment is protected," Lorence said.

We will continue to follow this story and pray for a successful conclusion for Dr. Howell and the public witness of Christianity on the University of Illinois campus.

But, as this story and this one show, the fight is far from over as religious freedom continues to be under assault on university campuses.

Civil Disobedience: It Has Been Necessary in the Past and May Become Necessary Again in Our Time

Here is a message from Chuck Colson and Timothy George, two of the framers of the Manhatten Declaration, on the issue of civil disobedience.

As I have indicated on this blog in recent days, the threat to religious freedom for Christians and to the precious liberties bequeathed to us by our Western religious heritiage are under assault from the Left as never before. They want to degrade our countries into backwards, totalitarian, socialist states where poverty, coercion, thought-control and oppression flourish in the name of their idol: Equality. This kind of ideology creates a culture of death in which death is first seen as the solution to social problems and later is worshiped. In the face of the Left's assault on human dignity, hope and freedom, it is necessary to say that free, Christian people must resist. And this resistance must be firm and unyielding, even in the face of persecution and peril. Listen to Dr. Colson and Dr. George speak frankly on this issue.



Here is the Manhatten Declaration website. Remember that Christians did not start the culture wars: Marxists did. But Christians know that we serve a God who will still be God after the culture wars of late Western culture are long over.

"The World Turned Upside Down" by Melanie Phillips: A Review

I came to The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth and Power by Melanie Phillips (NY: Encounter Books, 2010) after having read a number of the author's columns in London's Daily Mail that I respected for independent thinking and clear analysis of current events. Educated at Oxford, Phillips is a journalist who won the Orwell Prize for journalism in 1996 and this book is one that continues in the iconoclastic tradition of George Orwell in its search for truth amid the posturing, insincerity and manipulative machinations of those who wish to destroy freedom but cannot come right out and say so lest they be made pariahs immediately.

Phillips is no conspiracy theorist, but she is attempting to reach a rational explanation for otherwise difficult to comprehend trends in contemporary thought among the Western political class and she offers an original thesis. Her contribution is to seek out what connections there may be between four seemingly disparate trends among left-leaning intellectuals, politicians, bureaucrats and members of the media (the political class). She discusses the "myth of environmental Armageddon," (i.e. global warming), "the misrepresentation of the Iraq war," "the misrepresentation of Israel," and the "scientific triumphalism" of Dawkins and company. How are these four disparate movements connected?

Phillips' answer is that they all embody a serious and worrisome irrationality and abuse of science and reason. Each of these movements turn truth upside down and degrade science and reason into a caricature of themselves in order to promote an irrational, leftist agenda. How can the alliance of Western leftists with Islamic jihadists be explained rationally? One is libertarian and the other is theocratic. What could anti-Jewish hatred, weak-kneed appeasement of Islamic terrorism, Marxism and anti-Christian hatred possibly have in common?

Phillips' answer is that they have almost nothing in common in terms of their positive vision of what they hope to accomplish once they gain power. But all have a common enemy: Western civilization, which is built on the foundations of Jewish law, Greek philosophy and the Christian revelation centered on Jesus Christ. Marxists, Islamofascists, and their left-leaning sympathizers, apologists and fellow-travelers share a pathological hatred of Western civilization and are therefore united in their desire to destroy Israel, America and the historical religious and philosophical foundations of the West. Science is a fruit of the Jewish-Christian worldview and grows out of Western civilization and this explains the anti-rational attitude and the willingness to descend into irrationality.

An implication of Phillips' thesis, which is by no means unique to her, is that anti-Westernism (as defined above) is essentially irrational. So it is irrationality that binds together movements that have nothing in common except a hatred of God and the West. The discredited Marxist Utopia is irrational, suicide bombing and endless war against the entire non-Muslim world by the Jihadists is irrational and the eagerness to tear down institutions like the family, democracy, a natural law-based legal system and so on is simply irrational.

Reason, when it is separated from a Trinitarian metaphysics in which God is integrally related to the world, which is His creation and has the Logos as its animating principle and is therefore rational, simply withers and dies. This is the story of Modernity starting with the unraveling of the participatory metaphysics of the Fathers and Scholastics in the dark 14th century. The story of Modernity is the reverse of what the propaganda in the leftist textbooks tell you; it is not the story of the rise of Reason and Science triumphing over Medieval darkness and superstition, but rather the decline of Reason and Science and a new descent into irrationality and darkness. What begins in Nominalism and the Cartesian revolution that places man in the place of God ends in Nazism and Stalinism. The rise of the autonomous self in Modernity is fully revealed in Nietzsche's Overman.

Phillips' book could not be written as a book to get tenure in most Western universities today because it challenges too many of the lazy assumptions of the cultural Marxism that dominates the academy. That there is more academic freedom today outside the academy is a sad commentary on the health of our culture. But whatever it source, we should be thankful that creative, tough-minded thinking can be published and this book deserves a wide readership.

Who Started the Culture Wars?

Tom Gilson has an excellent post at First Things' Evangel blog entitled: "Gay Rights: Distortion and Aggression."

Clay Farris Naff asked in the Huffington Post last week, Do We Really Want America to Be a Christian Iran? It only takes a moment’s reflection on that question to realize Naff’s sense of proportion (like Tavis Smiley’s) is tilted. Many of his “facts” and his arguments are too. It’s about the Manhattan Declaration, from which he quotes,

No one has a civil right to have a non-marital relationship treated as a marriage. Marriage is an objective reality — a covenantal union of husband and wife — that it is the duty of the law to recognize and support for the sake of justice and the common good. If it fails to do so, genuine social harms follow. First, the religious liberty of those for whom this is a matter of conscience is jeopardized…

He responds,

What a pantload! This has all the moral suasion of a claim that to salve the conscience of Seventh Day Adventists we should outlaw donating blood.

To which my first response was, Wow. I won’t respond with the same scatology, because it’s not civil—not that his claim here doesn’t reek of stinky thinking. The rest of the article is likewise distorted, but I’ll let this snippet be representative of the whole.

After some clarifying of issues having to do with blood transfusions and the like, Gilson gets down to the real issue:

But Naff’s most egregious distortion (at least in this snippet) is the parallel he tries to draw between outlawing gay “marriage” and outlawing blood transfusions. To put an end to blood donations would take an aggressive legal and public relations campaign, to change existing laws and practices. Where’s the parallel? Are Christians doing anything remotely like that?

No, not Christians. Here we see the magnificently mixed-up success of the gay rights PR machine. They’ve maneuvered the public into believing we’re making some kind of assault on gay marriage. We’re doing no such thing. We couldn’t; it would be strictly impossible for us to do that. You see, “marriage” in same-sex context really belongs in quotes. Marriage is “a covenantal union of husband and wife.” There is no such thing as gay marriage. There never was. There’s nothing there for us to campaign against.

Really, Tom? Then why all the fuss? Why write it into this Declaration? Here’s why: a legal and social assault has indeed been launched. But we didn’t launch it: they did. They’re the ones campaigning to overturn historic laws, customs, and morality. They speak as if we’re the aggressors, when in reality they are. We’ve had to take up a defensive position, to protect an institution as old as recorded history. We didn’t pick this fight, the other side did.

Let me re-emphasize: there are those in Western culture who have mounted an offensive. It’s not the Christians who have taken the aggressive stance, though; it is the gay rights activists.

It pays to stay aware of what’s really going on. Regardless of what some PR machine may be trying to tell you.

That quote sums up so much of the issue: "They speak as if we're the aggressors, when in reality they are." That is the tactic of the Left. Being mostly amoral themselves, but knowing that we have moral qualms about many things, they try to use our own propensity to feel guilty about doing wrong against us by accusing us of things they do routinely but which we don't do because we don't want to do wrong.

If they know we hate racism, they accuse us of racism in order to get us on the defensive and split apart our unity. If they know we find it sinful and despicable to ignore the cries of poor people, they accuse us of being selfish and hard-hearted unless we adopt their totalitarian ideology or, at least become tolerant of it. They know we just want to live and let live, so they accuse us of wanting to oppress homosexuals so that they have an excuse to change laws and impose their own religious and moral views on our children.

Conservatives didn't start the culture wars and they are not the ones who want to impose an intolerant regime. We would settle for not turning America or Canada into a Homosexual Iran.

The McCarthyism of the Canadian Left Picks Up Steam

David Warren had a good column in The Ottawa Citizen the other day about the new McCarthyism that has appeared in Canada recently.

The notion that, simply because people are Christian, they should be "exposed" and hounded out of public life, or dragged before human rights tribunals, is becoming a commonplace of "progressive" thinking. It is hardly confined to Canada: the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing an astounding case (Christian Legal Society v. Martinez), in which the most basic right of free association could be denied to Christians on university campuses; the ACLU has made the removal from public property of all visible evidence of America's Christian heritage an expression of "civil rights."

In Ottawa this week, a "scandal" has been alleged because the member of Parliament for Regina-Qu'Appelle (a Catholic!) arranged a lunch with colleagues (not all of them Catholic) to meet the Canadian vicar of the Catholic lay organization Opus Dei. Neither the organization nor the lunch was in any way secret, unprecedented, nor otherwise abnormal, and yet it was presented in Le Devoir with the gravity of the Spanish Inquisition.

This is an example of the sort of thing that promises to become, in the shadow of McDonald's much-touted book, a "meme" of agenda-driven, liberal journalism: "outing" those who quite openly practice the Christian religion and advocate for its long-received views as if they were subversives.

How does Warren suggest that Christians respond?

How should Christians respond to such attacks? To fellow Catholics, I would suggest, take the Rosary out of your pocket and wave it in their faces. To all other Christians, likewise: do not be cowed, do not retreat an inch. You have every right to maintain the beliefs that built Western Civilization against the beliefs that are taking it down and a duty in good conscience to affirm Christ, regardless of the consequences.

We must not respond passively by allowing ourselves to be browbeaten into silence. That is the coward's way out. Like Peter and John in Acts we have to speak of what we have seen and heard - it is our duty of love to those around us.

Ezra Levant has some comments on the specific individuals involved in a post called
"The McCarthyism of the Canadian Left":

Pat Martin is the NDP MP for Winnipeg Centre. Last week he told reporters that members of the Catholic lay order, Opus Dei, "give me the creeps".

I'm sure that's true. Martin doesn't like Christians in general, even when they're doing social services in his own decrepit downtown, a downtown that has got more decrepit under his watch as MP. Martin would rather have urban decay than development, if the developers are Christian. Here's his own hometown paper calling him out as "irrational" for his anti-Christian outburst earlier this year.

But Martin went further this time. In response to news that fifteen or so MPs and staff had a meeting in the Parliamentary restaurant with the Canadian vicar of Opus Dei, Martin didn't just call conservative Catholics creepy, he expressed his objection that any MP would invite such people to soil the sacred precincts of Parliament Hill. Martin "certainly wouldn't attend anything associated with them," he said.

After discussing Gilles Duceppe's contribution to the witch hunt, Levant ends with a summary of the situation:

So what do we have here?

1. The obvious: that anti-Christian bigotry remains an acceptable form of intolerance in Canadian politics.

2. This bigotry has infected the parties of the left.

3. The mainstream media, and indeed the rest of the political establishment, ignores this bigotry (and in many cases approves of it).

4. Like Marci McDonald's book on Christians, Duceppe's comments are ridiculous on the face of them: to ascribe government policy to two party volunteers without any government office. I doubt that either woman blacklisted by Duceppe have spoken to Harper in a year.

5. Like McDonald's book, Duceppe's comments are error-ridden: he says that a Conservative (MP Andrew Scheer) invited "his colleagues" to dine with Opus Dei "leaders". In fact, Scheer sent an e-mail to all of Parliament Hill -- including to Duceppe himself. And it wasn't Opus Dei leaders, but rather one man, Msgr. Fred Dolan.

6. How terrifying is Msgr. Dolan? Who was attracted to his diabolical meeting? Well, Mario Silva, for one. Who's he? Oh, just a Liberal MP. A gay Liberal MP. That just proves how deep the Christian conspiracy is though, doesn't it -- it even has left-wing gay activists as part of their master plan!

But the real point is this: anti-Christian bigotry has metastasized from quiet prejudices into full-blown witch-hunts. McDonald's hateful book was a catalyst, but as Martin's comments earlier this year (and Duceppe's comments in the Toronto Star in 2008) show, the hatred was already out there.

(By the way, look at Duceppe's comments in that Star article. The atheist Marxist Duceppe is actually giving his political opinions about what Catholic rituals are "questionable" or not. Could you imagine him inspecting an Orthodox Jew or Sikh this way?)

Back to my list:

7. Do Duceppe and Martin meet the definition of "bigot"? I think so; here's the dictionary definition: "one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance". Yeah, the shoe fits.

8. Will Canada's self-appointed anti-hate squads pounce on Martin and Duceppe? The Canadian Human Rights Commission? Of course not: they're part of the anti-Christian persecution themselves, having prosecuted Fr. Alphonse de Valk, Rev. Stephen Boissoin, the Christian Heritage Party, etc. I'm surprised they haven't gone after Msgr. Dolan yet.

9. How about the Canadian Jewish Congress? Pause for laughter.

10. Look at Duceppe's bizarre answer about McCarthyism: "McCarthy was you can’t say something because you can’t prove that you don’t have a card of the Communist Party and prove that you don’t have." We've all heard Duceppe enough to know that his English, while accented, is excellent. He is making the usual Marxist argument: censorship is only censorship if it's applied against the left. Witch-hunts against conservatives, by definition, aren't witch hunts.

11. But he saved the worst for last: he says that Opus Dei should not be allowed to participate in our democracy. He fudged it a bit; saying they ought not to participate "as a group". But that makes no sense: Opus Dei, as a group, is not involved in any political party. It is a lay organization -- it's not a group of priests. It's just a group of Catholics who have a particular belief. The very people he named in Parliament were participating as individuals -- it's ridiculous to claim they were Opus Dei candidates, for example. But they were precisely the ones Duceppe was damning.

12. One more point about the media. Duceppe's attack was either inspired by or coordinated with Le Devoir's Helene Buzzetti, who has written several breathless reports about Opus Dei in recent days. You need a subscription to read the full text, but here are some of her gems (my translation, helped by Google): Opus Dei "arouses suspicions"; it is "controversial"; it engages in "secrecy"; and my favourite: "it urges its members to pursue graduates studies and then mingle with the elite". (How suspicious! Sounds like the Jews, really!) Don't you love it when journalists put their own editorial opinions in as facts, merely by stating them without attribution? They "arouse suspicions", you know! . . .

Levant closes with this challenge:

How do you feel about people being blacklisted because they're Catholic? How do you feel about MPs calling different religions "creepy"? How about a leader of a party declaring certain private religious rituals "questionable"? How about the condemnation of even inviting such people to lunch?

If your answer is anything different than it would be if Marci McDonald and Pat Martin and Gilles Duceppe were counting Jews or Sikhs or Muslims, then shame on you.

Ugly Colonialism at Work in Africa: Europeans Go Home!

Africa needs aid but not heavy-handed, anti-Christian interference in its own culture and politics by Europeans eager to impose their decadent, dying culture on others. If Europeans really cared about the poor, their aid would not come with strings attached. Let's call this what it is: economic colonialism promoting the culture of death.

From the Church of England Newsletter via Conger comes this story: "Zambian Church Rejects Donor Pressure to Back Gay Rights"

Pressure from overseas governments and NGOs to drop the “Christian Nation” clause in Zambia’s constitution, has drawn sharp protest from church leaders in the Central African country.

The former Executive Director of the Evangelical Fellowship of Zambia, Bishop Paul Mususu, told the Times of Zambia last week that it was wrong for foreigners to dictate the terms of the constitution and promote a secular state that would support gay rights.

“It is not proper for us to get rid of what we have cherished over the years. We shall be sinking so low if we allow things like homosexuality and pornography in the name of freedom of expression,” Bishop Mususu said.

Sweden and a number of NGOs working in Zambia have urged lawmakers to adopt a secular constitution and Bill of Rights that would grant civil protections to homosexuals. The preamble to the 1996 Constitution of Zambia “declare(s) the Republic a Christian nation while upholding the right of every person to enjoy that person’s freedom of conscience or religion.”

Bishop Mususu warned Zambian political leaders not to abandon their beliefs in return for Western cash, urging civil society leaders to “promote our culture as a country and strengthen our values. We must not support wrong things just because we are getting a dollar or people are supporting our project.” The president of the Zambia Anglican Council

Bishop Robert Mumbi of Luapulu stated the homosexual lifestyle that was being promoted by the West violated Christian beliefs and African values. Traditional morality was under the twin assault in Zambia of Western pressure and the breakdown of society through the country’s rapid urbanization. “The world is not static and the more urbanized we become, the more secular we shall be,” Bishop Mumbi said.

However, God’s truth was unchanging and the integrity of the Anglican Church in Zambia was not for sale. The church would not take Western cash to support its development projects if required to endorse the campaign to mainstream homosexuality, the bishop said.

We should pray for the Church in Zambia. May God raise up other donors who actually care more about helping those in need than about imposing decadent, Western hedonism on Africa.

A Majority of Americans are Now Pro-life

From LIFENEWS.com comes this encouraging news:

The Gallup released the results of a new survey confirming, for the third time in the last year, that more Americans call themselves pro-life than "pro-choice" on abortion. That's enough for the respected polling firm to say a pro-life majority is the "new normal" in the United States.

According to a May 3-6 Gallup poll, 47 percent of Americans say they are pro-life on abortion versus 45 percent who say they are "pro-choice," supporting legal abortions.

This is nearly identical to the 47% to 46% division Gallup found last July, which was down from the 51-42 percent split favoring the pro-life position last May.

Because this is the third consecutive time Gallup has found more Americans taking the pro-life position, the polling firm calls the results "a real change in public opinion."

Looking at the Gallup polling data dating back to 1995, the pro-life movement has been successful in changing public opinion on abortion -- as Gallup found a 56-33 percent pro-abortion split in 1995. That 23 percent pro-abortion majority has shifted 25 percent towards the pro-life position to the pro-life majority the movement against abortion enjoys today.

There can be little doubt that the culture war is gong badly for the abortion industry and the political class in the US. In the election year pro-choice candidates are faring poorly and voters are installing one pro-life person after another in public office. Obama and his culture of death warriors won't be there forever because America is not ready to embrace socialism and cultural decline. Thanks be to God.

In the Name of "Equality" Christians are Driven Out of Charitable Work

A strange kind of "equality" that. In this story from the Catholic News Agency, the UK is advancing "tolerance" and "diversity" by prohibiting Catholic adoption agencies from operating unless they change Catholic doctrine and embrace the secular faith that drives the normalization of homosexuality. Very little "live and let live" here. Rather, what we have is a rigid, dogmatic, ideological agenda being driven hard by a secular government on its last legs.

"Church leaders are defending the last remaining Catholic adoption agency in England and Wales against homosexual equality laws that will force it to close. They say children in the agency’s care will suffer, charging that the government is trying to force the agency to disregard Church teaching.

Last Sunday, three bishops said that they were taking the case of the Catholic Care adoption agency to the High Court, the Catholic Herald reports. The agency finds homes for about 20 hard-to-place children each year.

Bishop Arthur Roche of Leeds, Bishop John Rawsthorne of Hallam and Bishop Terry Drainey of Middlesbrough, said in a letter read at Masses that the government is trying to force the agency to operate “with disregard to the Church’s teaching on marriage and family life.”

They said the agency consistently placed “some of the most vulnerable children” in a service that has operated for over 100 years. But despite this work, the bishops charged, “we are being invited either to stop our adoption work or stop being a Catholic charity altogether.”

The bishops stated that vulnerable children have the right to a loving family and that the closure of the Catholic agency would eliminate an “effective and well-respected resource.”

Catholic Care serves the dioceses of Leeds, Middlesbrough and Hallam. It is the only one of 11 Catholic adoption agencies in England and Wales that is continuing to fight the Sexual Orientation Regulations (SORs). The 2007 law barred discrimination against homosexual couples in the provisions of goods and services. Leaders of all the mainstream religious faiths protested the legislation.

The law obliged Catholic adoption agencies to assess homosexual couples as potential adopters or foster parents, the Catholic Herald says. Because of Catholic teaching on homosexuality, adoption agencies have either been closed or disaffiliated from the Church.

The prelates said it is in the interests of children that the agency’s work continue, adding that they are not judging other agencies which accept homosexual couples for adoption.

“We should not be forced to do so, nor is there a necessity for this to happen. We believe that this is a legally justifiable position," they wrote. “Children have a right to a family life. There are too many children awaiting adoption and Catholic Care has a vital and a special role in helping very vulnerable children by finding loving families for them.”

Catholic Care had applied to the Charity Commission to change its charitable mission so it could appeal for an exemption under a regulation allowing limited discrimination.

However, the Charity Tribunal said it could not continue as an adoption agency unless it accepted homosexual couples. The regulation could not be a defense because the proposed alteration “arose substantially out of a desire to maintain a principled stance” rather than advance the charitable purpose of care for children without families.

The appeal to the High Court began last Wednesday.

For me, the saddest line is: "The bishops stated that vulnerable children have the right to a loving family and that the closure of the Catholic agency would eliminate an “effective and well-respected resource." The agency placed about 20 hard to place children per year. So the concern of the government is not for the children in need of adoptive parents, but only for the feelings of an aggrieved minority: the homosexual lifestyle choice lobby.

It is obvious that in a liberal and tolerant society there would be room for both private Catholic charities operating from a Catholic theological perspective and also for tolerance for homosexuals to live their own lives. It is hardly as if the only adoption agencies in the UK were Catholic ones. The secular ones would, of course, naturally be open to homosexual couples. The homosexuals could always found their own, presumably, if necessary. So liberalism and tolerance are not the motivations here and the question must be asked what the real motivations are.

It is difficult to evaluate to what extent this is a push specifically for the imposition of the pro-sexual revolution ideology on the Church and to what extent it is a cowardly refusal to establish limits to the totalitarian aspirations of the homosexual lobby. Probably it is, for New Labour merely a happy coincidence of two equally appealing options.

Homosexuals apparently are so insecure, or at least those who advocate in the name of homosexuals claim that they are so insecure, that they must have total social approval now or else. Tolerance is not enough. Dissent must be crushed. I can imagine that a lot of homosexual individuals must resent being portrayed in these childish terms by the self-appointed spokesmen for the "movement" but I suppose that if they speak up they will only let themselves in for the same kind of bigotry and attack usually directed toward Christians, Jews and other traditionalists.

Sarah Palin, John Edwards and Media Bias

Here is a very interesting story from the New York Daily Post by Jamie Weinstein called: "Palin versus Edwards: A Case Study in Media Bias." Weinstein makes the valid point that the media bias against the conservative worldview that Sarah Palin holds it the real reason she is so vilified and hated. John Edwards is not objectively smarter or better qualified than Palin, but since he represented the worldview held by the liberal media he was not attacked or ridiculed as Palin has been:

"No one can confuse me for someone who is an enthusiastic supporter of Sarah Palin. I think Sen. John McCain's selection of Palin as his 2008 running mate will be counted among the very worst legacies in the Arizona senator's long and storied career.

Nonetheless, there is little question that Palin has been treated unfairly by the press, at least in comparison to other politicians.

And no comparison best illustrates the double standard the media has with Palin than how they treated another former vice-presidential nominee, Sen. John Edwards.

When in 2004 John Kerry picked Edwards, whose entire resume in public life at that point consisted of six years in the U.S. Senate, to be his vice-presidential nominee, few questioned whether Edwards was qualified for the post.

Search "Edwards is unqualified" in Lexis-Nexis from the time Edwards was tapped by Kerry through Election Day 2004, and you get 11 results. Do the same for Palin and you get 174 results - and the search period is nearly two months shorter for Palin, because she was picked by McCain much later in the 2008 election cycle.

We now definitively know just how much of a liar, cheat and phony John Edwards is. But if the media had been one half as interested in exposing Edwards as a fraud as they have been in excoriating Palin, perhaps it would not have taken the National Enquirer to discover the truth that has led to the downfall of a politician who had a very real chance of becoming President.

One of the media's favorite attacks against Palin revolves around her failure to tell Katie Couric what magazines and newspapers she regularly reads. The clumsy answer was an early flash point that led many to scoff that the Alaskan governor didn't read anything at all.

But guess who doesn't read very much either? That would be John Edwards, if you believe John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's new book "Game Change." According to their reporting, when a friend inquired if John Edwards read a particular tome, his wife, Elizabeth, apparently found the idea of her husband reading laugh-out-loud funny, saying, "Oh, he doesn't read books."

Yet this impression of her husband as an anti-intellectual "hick," as Elizabeth reportedly referred to him, never became a common undercurrent during his his 2004 campaign for vice president or his later run for President.

So why did Palin get painted so quickly as a bombastic dunce and Edwards escape without such a negative characterization?

It probably has to do with the fact that most members of the media bought Edwards persona. They liked his world-view.

They believed in his claim that there were "two Americas." So they didn't dig deeper to see if there was any substance beneath his shiny surface.

Palin was never given the benefit of the doubt, in large part because the world-view to which she subscribes is anathema to the one held by so many pundits and reporters."

Now there is nothing wrong with members of the media holding political opinions. But there is something wrong with pretending to be objective and then being allowed to get away with trying to manipulate public opinion by biased news reporting. There is a reason why Fox News exists and why it is now trusted by more Americans than the so-called "mainstream media." Things have come to a pretty pass when Fox is not the most biased media outlet in the US.

Michael Ignatieff Comes Out as Pro-Abortion

So Michael Ignatieff, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, has decided to use abortion as a political football in order to try to paint Stephen Harper's Conservatives as "right-wing." What Michael Ignatieff does not seem to grasp is that most Canadians do not think opposing abortion as a means of contraception is not even an ideological position at all, let alone a "right-wing" one. The Globe and Mail reports:

"If Stephen Harper wants to champion the health of the world's poor mothers, he'll have to go to bat for abortion, too, Michael Ignatieff says.

The Prime Minister has signalled that he plans to make maternal health in the developing world Canada's cause when he is host of the G8 summit in June.

Mr. Ignatieff said any efforts to reduce high death rates among mothers will have to include broader access to contraception. He also raised a fear that the Conservatives, like their counterparts in the United States, would shy away from funding family-planning agencies that support abortion rights.

“If we're going to improve maternal health and child health around the world, women need access to the full gamut of reproductive health services,” the Liberal leader told reporters Tuesday."

Ignatieff is now on record as the radical, no-limits, pro-abortionist. He thinks the best way to deal with poor people in the Third World is to encourage them to kill their unborn children. No people; no poverty. Brilliant! Except for the evil part, and the racist part, and the anti-life part. Kill some to save others. Get out the lifeboats but we only need enough for two thirds of the people - we can abort the rest. All this in the name of compassion!

Who needs boring stuff like wells for clean drinking water, improved agricultural methods, micro-enterprise loans. Just send them some pills and some forceps. Let them abort their babies and maybe they will stop breeding.

Politicians like Ignatieff need to be shamed for their ideology of death. Christians and others who value human life at all its stages need to let him know that scoring cheap political points by promoting abortion for the Third World won't work. It is just another reason to vote Conservative.