Obama’s War on the Catholic Church

“It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage, and such only, as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe.” — James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance — 1785

With the Obama administration’s forcing the Catholic Church to pay for birth control and the morning after pill for employees last year you might have thought this was the last straw. When the bishops and the clergy fought back and Kathleen Sebelius, the director of HHS, did not rescind on the decision you might have thought Obama would scale back his war on the Catholic Church. But this is not the case.

While in Ireland this week he dropped a bombshell that has gone pretty much ignored by the mainstream media when he said religious schools encourage division. Barack Obama actually made this claim at a speech in Belfast on Monday, but it seems to be gaining traction overnight. His claim, aimed at both Catholic and Protestant “schools and buildings,” came in prepared remarks rather than an extemporaneous response to a question. The Scottish Catholic Observer quotes the argument accurately:

“The US President has made an alarming call for an end to Catholic education in Northern Ireland in spite of the fact that Archbishop Gerhard Müller told Scots that Catholic education was ‘a critical component of the Church.’

President Barack Obama (above), repeated the oft disproved claim that Catholic education increases division in front of an audience of 2000 young people, including many Catholics, at Belfast’s Waterfront hall when he arrived in the country this morning.

“If towns remain divided—if Catholics have their schools and buildings and Protestants have theirs, if we can’t see ourselves in one another and fear or resentment are allowed to harden—that too encourages division and discourages cooperation,” the US president said.

The US politician made the unfounded claim despite a top Vatican official spelling out the undeniable good done by Catholic education in a speech in Glasgow on Saturday and in his homily at Mass on Friday.”

I’ll quote the passage from Obama’s speech in its full context:

“We need you to get this right. And what’s more, you set an example for those who seek a peace of their own. Because beyond these shores, right now, in scattered corners of the world, there are people living in the grip of conflict -- ethnic conflict, religious conflict, tribal conflicts -- and they know something better is out there. And they’re groping to find a way to discover how to move beyond the heavy hand of history, to put aside the violence. They’re studying what you’re doing. And they’re wondering, perhaps if Northern Ireland can achieve peace, we can, too. You’re their blueprint to follow. You’re their proof of what is possible -- because hope is contagious. They’re watching to see what you do next.

Now, some of that is up to your leaders. As someone who knows firsthand how politics can encourage division and discourage cooperation, I admire the Northern Ireland Executive and the Northern Ireland Assembly all the more for making power-sharing work. That’s not easy to do. It requires compromise, and it requires absorbing some pain from your own side. I applaud them for taking responsibility for law enforcement and for justice, and I commend their effort to “Building a United Community” — important next steps along your transformational journey.

Because issues like segregated schools and housing, lack of jobs and opportunity — symbols of history that are a source of pride for some and pain for others — these are not tangential to peace; they’re essential to it. If towns remain divided — if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs — if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation.

Ultimately, peace is just not about politics. It’s about attitudes; about a sense of empathy; about breaking down the divisions that we create for ourselves in our own minds and our own hearts that don’t exist in any objective reality, but that we carry with us generation after generation.”

Does that make the context any better? Not really. He’s speaking in terms of Northern Ireland, but pretty explicitly calling for that to be a model for the rest of the world. His argument makes two very large assumptions, which is that the conflict in Northern Ireland was about religion, and that parochial schools make people inclined to violence. The first is a gross oversimplification; the conflict in recent times was political, dealing with ethnic conflict and sovereignty issues, with religion used more for tribal identification than a core of the conflict.

The second is just absurd. Catholics and Protestants have thousands of schools in the US, and we don’t have warfare in the streets in the US between the sects. The issue wasn’t the schools, or the belief systems of Catholics and Protestants that such schools teach. However, this makes a handy mechanism to call for the displacement of private education and religious instruction from education, with nothing left except state-controlled schools that indoctrinate children into whatever norms the governing/ruling class deem acceptable.

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a foreign visit to an Islamic nation where he told people on his arrival that they shouldn’t have madrasas. Can you?

Did he say when visiting Israel, say “You Jews shouldn’t have synagogue schools and you Muslims shouldn’t have mosque schools.” I can’t remember. Did he?

If Obama wants to talk about religions causing division, hate, and war I suggest he take a look at his beloved Islam where Shia’s and Sunnis have been killing Christians, Jews, and themselves since the seventh century.

Archbishop Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, told an audience in Scotland that Catholic education provided a rare place where ‘intellectual training, moral discipline and religious commitment would come together’ while giving the prestigious Cardinal Winning Lecture on Saturday to officially launch the St Andrews Foundation for Catholic teacher education at Glasgow University. During Mass at St Andrew’s Cathedral, Glasgow, on Friday night he said that ‘the Catholic school is vitally important a critical component of the Church,’ adding that Catholic education provides young people with a wonderful opportunity to ‘grow up with Jesus.’

Obama is now insisting on enforcing an ObamaCare regulation that would force Catholic individuals, business owners and institutions to provide health care plans that cover sterilizations, contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs. The Catholic bishops of the United States have unanimously declared this regulation an "unjust and illegal mandate" that violates the constitutionally guaranteed right to free exercise of religion.

Dozens of Catholic business owners and institutions are now suing the Obama administration over this regulation. The University of Notre Dame and Catholic University of America are among those who have filed suit. A number of Protestant business owners and institutions have also sued the administration over this regulation because it forces them to provide abortion-inducing drugs and IUDs in contradiction to their moral and religious beliefs.

The Catholic Church and Catholic religious orders run schools in the United States and elsewhere that are designed not only to teach children reading, writing, arithmetic, history and other academic subjects, but also to teach them the theology and moral views of the faith, and to train their characters in keeping with those moral views.

As a product of a Catholic school education through the 8^th grade I can say that it taught me much more than the reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, and civics. It also taught me morals, love of God and family, and living by the Ten Commandments — something we direly need in our schools today.

In a fit of ignorance I enrolled my three children in government schools in the early 1970s. By the time my youngest reached fifth grade all were enrolled in Catholic school where they graduated high school from. All received a fine college preparatory education allowing them to continue on to college with no problems.

Millions of children have matriculated through their K-12 education in Catholic and Christian schools. Not only has this been good for the kids it has saved the taxpayers billions in school costs if all of those children had been enrolled in our failing public school system. Just think of all of those teachers union pensions we would be on the hook for.

Obama never fails to enlist children in his secularist crusades, whether at home or abroad. Last week he trotted out two nine-year-old girls to introduce him at a White House event celebrating “LGBT Pride Month.”

“We could not be prouder of Zea and Luna for the introduction,” he said. “Zea and Luna are here with their moms, and also I think with Grandma and Grandpa — correct? And so feel free to congratulate them afterwards for their outstanding introduction.”

Zea and Luna proved useful to Obama not only as props for LGBT rights but also as mouthpieces for his gun-control agenda: “When Zea and Luna wrote me last December, they told me they would have voted for me if they could have — thanks, guys. They also laid out quite an agenda. I hope Congress is listening to them. But I want them and all of you to know that I’m not giving up the fight to keep our kids safe from gun violence.”

It just so happens that Zea and Luna also support additional funding for Arne Duncan’s Department of Education. According to Obama, Duncan has lots of innovative ideas on how to jumpstart America’s sluggish schools and needs more money to enact them. Chicagoans may remember one of them: his thwarted plan to start a “gay high school” in the Windy City that he hoped to call “Social Justice Solidarity High School.”

This week Obama took his Brave New World propaganda to the youth of Northern Ireland. He has visions of a secularist utopia for them too. With uniformed school children arrayed behind him, he in effect called for the elimination of religious education in Northern Ireland:

“If towns remain divided — if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs — if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation.”

Obama’s presumption knows no bounds. The Northern Irish, already enjoying a “chic” culture, as he put it, are evidently capable of his level of enlightenment, provided that they listen to their youth. Apparently referencing his own claimed evolution on gay marriage — recall that he credited his daughters with stimulating his moral imagination by bringing over to the house the adopted children of homosexual couples — he urged Northern Irish youth to keep liberalizing their elders:

“Politicians oftentimes follow rather than lead. And so, especially young people helped to push and to prod and to protest, and to make common cause with those who did not look like them. And that transformed America — so that Malia and Sasha’s generation, they have different attitudes about differences and race than mine and certainly different from the generation before that. And each successive generation creates a new space for peace and tolerance and justice and fairness. And while we have work to do in many ways, we have surely become more tolerant and more just, more accepting, more willing to see our diversity in America not as something to fear, but as something to welcome because it’s a source of our national strength.”

If the point wasn’t clear enough, Obama said that he hoped that one day they could “fall in love with whomever” they want.

Gay marriage, abortion on demand, free contraceptives, Plan B at the local drug store, an all-pervasive secular culture — this is the glorious future Obama implied for the Northern Irish. But he sternly warned the teens that the choice is theirs: “Whether you let your kids play with kids who attend a different church — that’s your decision.”

For Obama, “peace” and secularism are always one and the same, and if you don’t choose the latter you are a violent bigot. The arrogant Brave New World babble he dumped on these children is impossible to comprehend apart from that assumption. Never mind that plenty of blood, flowing from “chic” addresses like those of his friends at Planned Parenthood, gushes in secularist countries too.

Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, once remarked, “In order for Israel to be counted among the nations of the world, it has to have its own burglars and prostitutes.” In Northern Ireland’s case, pace Obama, it can’t be considered civilized until it has fewer religious schools and more abortionists.

However, Obama’s arrogance did not go unnoticed by the Irish. Far-left Irish politician Clare Daly, formerly a leader in the country’s Socialist Party, is being called “disgraceful” by her compatriots after lashing out against President Obama in the wake of his visit to Ireland for the G-8 Summit.

A member of Parliament of Dublin North, Daly mocked the Obama family for repeatedly referring to Ireland as “home” before ripping into the U.S. president’s foreign policy.

“It’s hard to know which is worse,” she added, “the outpourings of the Obamas themselves, or the sycophantic fawning over them by sections of the media and political establishment.”

She called Obama the “hypocrite of the century” for telling Irish youths the United States supports those who choose peace, while providing arms to Syrian rebels and increasing drone strikes by 200 percent.

“The reality is, by any serious examination, this man is a war criminal,” Daly declared. “He has just announced his decision to supply arms to the Syrian opposition, including the jihadists, fueling the destabilization of that region, and continuing to undermine secularism and knock-back conditions for women.”

She proceeded to excoriate the country’s Prime Minister Edna Kenny, for making Ireland “a nation of pimps, prostituting ourselves for a pat on the head” and a “lapdog of U.S. imperialism.”

We cannot hear him liken Catholic and Protestant schools to racial segregation in America without a sense of alarm. Clearly, President Obama dismisses religious freedom as a basis for parents' choosing different schools for their own children.

Mr. Obama's own grandparents exercised their choice in sending him to Honolulu's prestigious Punahou Academy. This pricey ($20,000/year) prep school was founded by Congregationalist missionaries. With roots in the faith-based community, it hardly qualifies as a segregation academy. Similarly, the president and Mrs. Obama have chosen Washington, D.C.'s very posh Sidwell Friends School for their daughters. They have every right to do so, but no one would credit this Quaker-founded school as part of a segregation system.

Mr. Obama has been zealous in trying to block other parents' exercise of education choice. His administration has been eager to shut down Washington, D.C.'s Opportunity Scholarships. This program permits low-income parents of area students to choose a private or parochial school for their kids. Most of these scholarships go to minority students and many of them choose Catholic schools where a majority of their classmates are non-Catholic.

It is a shocking thing for the President of the United States to show such open hostility to faith-based schooling. As their motto goes, these are "schools you can believe in." And the record of religious schools in America is a great one.

We need to view Mr. Obama's comments in the context of his other policies. His administration is pushing for ever more pre-K programs nationwide. Despite the documented failure of Head Start, he wants to enlist more very young children in school programs that will replace church-based child care and care in the home.

This is what secularists have wanted in our country, too: All children under the guise of the all-powerful state. This has always been a goal of Marxists.

We should not be surprised that President Obama, who attended Marxist scholar’s conferences in New York City when he was a student at Columbia University in 1983, is so openly hostile to schools you can believe in.

The fact is that in Northern Ireland, the religious schools have been leaders in reconciling historic antagonisms. And this is true in America, too. Here, for example, Evangelicals, Lutherans, Orthodox Christians, and Orthodox Jews have joined with Catholics in resisting the menacing HHS Mandate. That mandate is the gravest threat to religious freedom in this country since 1786.

Mr. Obama should reread his Constitutional Law texts. There, he would find the landmark ruling of the Supreme Court in 1925, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters. The KKK had pushed through an Oregon referendum that outlawed private and religious schools.

Unconstitutional, said the high Court:

“The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments of this Union rest excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.”

President Obama continues his relentless drive to "fundamentally transform America." He does not appreciate the historic fact that religious freedom was the foundation for civil liberty in our country. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison all believed this. So did Protestants, Catholics, and Jews of the Founding Era. Respect for the convictions of others does not breed hostility. It is the beginning of civility.

The Pierce Court decision concluded with this ringing affirmation of parental rights and religious freedom:

“The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations. Those "obligations" included then, and continue to include, our obligations to our Creator.”

President Obama continued his War on Christianity Monday and the broadcast networks continued to ignore it. Obama used a town hall meeting for youth in Belfast to show his contempt for religious education. The president criticized separate religious schools for promoting “division.”

The story drew attention in conservative media outlets and was linked on the Drudge Report. But no major network news show covered the event in the two days that followed. ABC, CBS and NBC all skipped the story, even though it made the rounds in conservative media especially on Wednesday.

Some of the news Wednesday night wasn’t particularly compelling. ABC “World News with Diane Sawyer” took two minutes to devote to “flash mobs for hire.” NBC “Nightly News” found 36 seconds to devote to the decline of the Houston Astrodome, the “cathedral of sports once known as the eighth wonder of the world.”

The Obama administration has angered people of faith on several issues from gay marriage and abortion to birth control mandates and hiding a cross when Obama was speaking at Georgetown. This time, his attack was directed at Catholic and Protestant education.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

“And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.” — Luke 2:10 KJV

As the feast of Christmas is almost upon us it is time for me to wish all of my readers a very Merry Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous New Year.

As a person growing up in the 1940s I have many warm memories of Christmas. As my father was exempt from the draft in World War II due to his work in factory producing materials for defense I was fortunate to have him at home during the Christmas season. Unlike some of my friends and school mates, who had fathers in far flung corners of the world fighting for our freedom, my dad was able to celebrate each Christmas during WWII with the family.

Those WWII Christmases, while sparse when it came to toys and gifts, were always great family affairs with the entire family gathering at the house for Christmas dinner and celebrating the holiday. As a said toys were sparse as metal was used for defense, not children’s toys and there were no toys or games that required batteries. I still recall one Christmas gift, a toy gun that was a replica of a Colt .45 made of compressed sawdust. The gun lasted for a couple of days until I dropped it and in broke into pieces and my dad attempted to glue it back together. After that it took a great deal of my child’s imagination to think of it as a gun. Another toy was a bomb sight made of cardboard and a mirror that you held to your eye over a cork target and dropped darts in the shape of little bombs. Of course the cork target had maps of Germany and Japan on it.

After the war ended and steel was available I remember going with my dad to the store to pick up my first erector set. For those who are not familiar with the AC Gilbert Erector Set is was a collection of small metal beams with regular holes for nuts, bolts, screws, and mechanical parts such as pulleys, gears, and small electric motors. that allowed you to build things like oil derricks, building frames, and bridges. It provided hours of educational entertainment for my father and I.

Of course there were no outdoor lights on houses and department stores had great Christmas displays in their windows. We never had outdoor lights on our house until 1959. The lights on the Christmas tree were always a problem as they were wired in series so that when one bulb burned out you had to spend time taking each bulb out a replacing it with a “good” bulb hoping the string of lights would go on again. Of course there were the bubble lights that were filled with liquid that bubbled when the bulb heated up.

As a child going to Catholic elementary school I sang in the choir. We performed at Sunday Mass and for the Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. We would sing the Mass responses in Latin with Christmas Carols intermixed. I can still recall walking to church with my parents on those cold Christmas Eves.

After the war Christ began to become more and more secular. I remember that when people began using “Xmas” instead of “Christmas” they were a campaign to put Christ back in Christmas. There nativity scenes and Christmas trees in the public square and elementary schools had Christmas pageants depicting the birth of Jesus along with traditional Christmas carols. No one complained — it was expected and welcomed. Salvation Army Santa Clauses were commonplace in front of department stores with their bells and kettles — no one complained, no one was offended. People wished you “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year” “happy holidays” was rarely heard.

There were great Christmas movies and TV shows where the mention of the birth of Christ was commonplace. Films such as “It’s Wonderful Life”, ”Miracle on 34^th Street”, and “ A Christmas Carol”, staring Alistair Simms were traditional favorites.

Of course there were the numerous albums of Christmas Carols and songs by recording artists like Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, and almost anyone you can think of. TV shows always had a Christmas themed episode in December. When someone mention mentioned “Black Friday” you thought they were referring to the stock market crash of 1929 — not the obscene shopping orgies that take place on the day after Thanksgiving where people riot over the chance to buy the latest smart phone or some other popular toy or gadget.

Houses decorated with Christmas lights came into vogue and neighborhoods would enter competitions as to who could use more lights to decorate their homes and people would come from miles around to view the displays. In my neighborhood there are several homes that have spectacular displays of lights including one house where even the interior is decked out in Christmas trappings. The home owner opens his house to the public and welcomes people to walk through to marvel at all of his work. All he asks is that you bring some can goods to donate to those who are in need.

As godless secularism becomes more and more entrenched in our culture, the Christmas season is one of the most contentious times in our calendar. Every year, there are stories in the news of banned Christmas trees or of Christmas trees renamed "holiday trees." Christmas concerts at public schools draw threats of a lawsuit (even when the poor in Africa are the beneficiaries!), and U.S. congressmen are barred from wishing their constituents a "Merry Christmas" in their official mailings. This ban also applies to school children and even the exchange of Christmas Cards is outlawed. This year, even Charlie Brown is creating controversy.

Actually, when it comes to A Charlie Brown Christmas, there was controversy from the beginning. In 1965, just as the culture wars were heating up in the U.S., the "enlightened" executives at CBS balked at the Peanuts classic containing Bible passages. Most every American has heard Linus, in teaching Charlie Brown the true meaning of Christmas, perfectly recite the King James Version of Luke 2:8-14. Of course, the Scripture reference is what was "controversial."

Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts (the most popular and influential comic strip of all time), was insistent. As Lee Habeeb of National Review puts it, "[Schulz] knew that the Luke reading by Linus was the heart

Today children (and adults) are bombarded with deceptive (but alluring) messages about "Christmas spirit" and how Christmas is about "spreading joy throughout the world" and "a time for warmth and brotherly love" (as a recent TV cartoon declared). Even Dickens's iconic A Christmas Carol is bereft of the complete message of Christmas.

Of course, brotherly love and spreading joy are not bad things, but they are far from the "heart and soul" of Christmas. Schulz was right. The "heart and soul" of any Christmas story is "behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord."

Or, as C.S. Lewis put it, Christmas is the story of how "the rightful King has landed." Just prior to His death, as Jesus stood before the Roman governor Pilate, Pilate asked Him, "Are you the king of the Jews?" After some discussion, Pilate concluded to Jesus, "You are a king, then!" Jesus answered him saying, "You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world."

Of course all of these so-called bans on based on the fact that schools and public officials are fearful of lawsuits by disgruntled people who have a personal axe to grind — not on the law, the Constitution or Supreme Court rulings. According to the American Center for Law and Justice Several federal district courts have ruled that under certain circumstances, it is permissible for a public school to display religious holiday symbols in school calendars and in holiday displays. For example, a district court in New Jersey directly addressed this issue in Clever v. Cherry Hill Twp., 838 F. Supp. 929 (D.N.J. 1993). In Clever, the plaintiffs challenged a school policy that provided for religious symbols to be used in school calendars and in a Christmas display. After noting the importance of context and the absence of denominational preference, the court upheld the policy:

“Christmas and Chanukah are celebrated as cultural and national holidays as well as religious ones, and there is simply no constitutional doctrine which would forbid school children from sharing in that celebration, provided that these celebrations do not constitute an unconstitutional endorsement of religion and are consistent with a school’s secular educational mission.”

There are numerous other Federal Court rulings permitting the celebration of Christmas in Public Schools and the Public Square. I am happy to report that in my town we have Christmas displays on public property and in neighboring cities there are nativity scenes in the public square.

So Christmas is a celebration of the birth of our Savior King. "Hark! The herald angels sing; glory to the newborn King!" This is the reason for the all of the conflict and contention when it comes to Christmas time. This is why so many fear a Nativity scene, a Christmas tree, or even a meek "Merry Christmas."

Who wants to be confronted with the idea that maybe they are ignoring the most significant event in human history? Who wants to be reminded that perhaps Jesus Christ really was (and is) a King?

And He's not just any king, but a king with a holy mission. "Amazing love, how can it be, that you my King would die for me?" Jesus was the Christ, the "Messiah," the "Anointed One." As the angel reported to the shepherds, "today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you". Jesus was a king who was born to die — not only to die, but to rise again and rule forever.

His death was to "redeem" us and to serve as "atonement" for us. Jesus came into the world so that the world, through Him, "might be saved." And on the third day after his death, our King, born in a stable, conquered even death so that we could live forever with Him.

When Christians truly celebrate Christmas, we celebrate not just a birthday, but the beginning of a sequence of events that would change the world forever. He was born, He lived, He died, He arose, and now He is preparing a place for all of those who would believe in Him. Just as sure as all of the other events took place, we who celebrate Christmas look forward to His return, and we will celebrate for all eternity.

Have a Merry Christmas and may God's light shine bright upon you, your family and our great nation in the coming year!

It Didn’t Take Obama Long

“For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. They have exchanged the truth of God for falsehood, by worshipping and serving created things, rather than the Creator.” — St. Paul, Romans 1:21, 25 (CEV).

On Friday in Newtown, Connecticut at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, more than two dozen, mostly children, were gunned down in an act of evil.

Children cry out for their mommy and their daddy. Young men on the battlefield, as death comes over them, do the same. It is a natural instinct at life’s end for the young. Just the thought of the children crying out for their moms and dads as they died overwhelms the senses of those of us far removed from the tragedy. It is an instinct, though, that we should confront.

Instead, two days removed from the horror of Friday, we are beginning again the debate and confrontations about gun control. It is a debate probably worth having and, whether we want to or not, we will have it. Much, if any, of what will be proposed would not have stopped the massacre.

It only took Obama a mere sixty hours to bring his entourage of black GM SUVs with flashing red and blue lights and a myriad of armed secret service agents, staff members, and teleprompters to Newtown for national televised address where he could bathe in the light of the tragedy.

President Barack Obama used the Sunday evening memorial service for the murdered kindergartners and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School to launch a partisan campaign that could expand government intrusion into parenting and gun control.

“The job of keeping our children safe, and teaching them well, is something we can only do together, with the help of friends and neighbors and the help of a nation,” Obama said at the vigil, which was held only a short distance from Sandy Hook Elementary School.

“We will have to change. If there is even one step we can take to save another child, or another parent, or another town, from the grief then surely we have an obligation to try.”

It is not clear if Obama actually will develop a national anti-violence crusade that would reshape families’ ability to raise their children. He may simply be using the Sandy Hook shooting to paint Democrats as defenders of the nation’s children from the GOP-backed gun industry.

But Obama promised imminent action via Democratic-affiliated lobbies, such as the mental-health sector and the teachers’ unions.

“In the coming weeks, I will use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens — from law enforcement to mental health professionals to parents and educators — in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this,” he declared.

Through his 18-minute speech, Obama’s language promised a partisan and divisive project.

For example, he suggested the voters’ only choices are either to do nothing, or to follow his yet-to-be-described plan to combat gun violence in schools and street corners throughout the U.S.

I recall his emotional tearful speech at the University of Arizona Memorial service for the victims of the shooting at the Tucson shopping center where 6 people, including a 9-year old girl were murdered, and 12 were wounded including a U.S. Congresswoman. In this speech he blamed our uncivil society and the ranker of his political opponents, especially conservative talk radio. At the time he called for a more “civil society” with tolerance towards those with whom you do not agree. Yet, in 2012, he and his minions ran one of the most uncivil, divisive political campaigns in the history of the country. What hypocrisy utters forth from this man’s mouth.

Now as Rahm Emanuel his close advisor and Mayor of Chicago, one of, if not the most, the most gun violent city in the United States where gangs rule the streets, says; “never let a good crisis go to waste.” Obama, tutored on the writings Saul Alinsky, is taking Emanuel’s advice to the nines. It should be noted that Obama made no such speech after the shootings at the Aurora, Colorado theater complex because he did not want to broach the subject of gun control during the presidential campaign.

“We can’t accept events like this as routine,” he said. “Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children — all of them — safe from harm?” he added. “Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?”

Before the bodies of murdered children had been removed from Sandy Hook Elementary on Friday, Barack Obama was, shamefully, stacking up the coffins of innocent kindergartners as a platform for his disarmament agenda, which he and his socialist cadres will conceal behind a thin façade of "concern for public safety."

Just one paragraph into his brief remarks, on Friday, about the murders in Newtown, Obama tearfully exclaimed:

"We've endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years. We're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics." (Emphasis added)

New York Democrat Rep. Jerrold Nadler was less discreet in his insistence that Obama use the deaths of these children to advance the Left's gun prohibition agenda: "I think we will be there if the president exploits it." Sen. Charles Schumer added, "I think we could be at a tipping point where we might get something done."

Within hours of the deaths, Sen. Dianne Feinstein promised, "I'm going to introduce in the Senate — and the same bill will be introduced in the House — a bill to get weapons of war off the streets." That should solve the problem. What about commando knives and bayonets?

At the Sunday evening vigil in Newtown, Obama again politicized the attack, framing his remarks around his gun-prohibition agenda. He asked rhetorically:

"Can we say that we're truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose? If we're honest with ourselves, the answer is no. And we will have to change. What choice do we have? Are we really prepared to say that we're powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?" (Emphasis added)

For the record, Connecticut already has banned "assault weapons," and the Newtown school was already a "gun-free zone," but that didn't prevent the murders of these precious children and six adults.

Of course Obama’s rhetoric ignored many measures that could reduce gun violence without further increasing government’s role.

At the federal level, such modest reforms could include funding for the institutionalization of disturbed people, or for training teachers who choose to carry a weapon to work. The federal government also has some authority to restrict the sale of high-capacity bullet magazines and body armor, as well as the ability to boost the financial rewards (through the tax code) for parents who stay married.

State and local government are also free to adopt similar measures.

In Texas, for example, at least one school district — Harrold Independent School District — encourages teachers to bring guns to work.

Some states, including Connecticut, have experimented with stringent control on guns, partly because many influential university-trained professionals abhor guns being sold to poor Americans. But Connecticut’s stringent anti-gun laws did not stop the murders at Sandy Hook

Any honest American should be deeply offended by politicians who are so calloused that they would use the deaths of innocents as political fodder for their agenda.

Could Obama not exercise the most basic decency and allow time for genuine grief to pass before exploiting this incident? Obviously not, according to the first chapter in his political playbook: "Never let a crisis go to waste."

It is no small irony that the political party that has made killing children prior to birth a pillar of their platform expresses such indignation when a sociopath places so little value on life that he murders children. Of course, it's easier to kill children who are faceless — and I am certain that in the eyes of the sociopathic killer in Newtown, his victims also had no faces.

"Obama has asserted erroneously, “The vast majority of Americans would like to see serious gun control, but it doesn't pass because there is this huge disconnect between what people think and what legislators think and are willing to act upon.” Endeavoring to close that gap every time there is tragic mass murder where the assailant used a gun Democrats offer the disingenuous rationale that violence is a "gun problem" rather than a cultural problem. Of course it's easier to blame guns than culture, and that serves the Left's political agenda.

After years of arguing that Democrats should be willing to bear the political costs — lost votes in the South, in particular — of gun control measures, advocates Saturday began cautiously to make a different case. Gun control leaders and other progressive figures told BuzzFeed that, whether or not Democrats can get new legislation through Congress, they should be winning elections on the issue of guns.

Gun regulation "is moving to the center, and past it,” said Jim Kessler, who helped Sen. Charles Schumer pass gun control policy in the 1990s before founding the D.C. think tank, Third Way.

“For the first time in decades, Republicans are losing on social issues — they’re losing on same-sex marriage, they’re losing on contraception, and now they could lose on guns because their position is so intractable,” said Kessler. “Except for a vocal minority, people know and expect that something can be done.”

However, acknowledging that the majority of murders and other violent crimes in our country are the direct result of social and cultural degradation on urban welfare plantations would be, first and foremost, an indictment of the socialist welfare state advocated by Democrats. Thus, they call for more gun control — on top of the myriad of gun control laws now on the books.

Fact is, on average almost 50 people are murdered every day, two-thirds of them with guns. It is statistically notable that about one-third of murders are not committed with guns, and moreover, blacks and Latinos commit a grossly disproportionate number of all murders and the victims are predominantly blacks and Latinos. Just watch the 11 pm local news.

In fact, the very weekend that Obama and his race hustlers attempted to politicize the shooting of Trayvon Martin by "white Hispanic" George Zimmerman earlier this year, the Chicago Sun-Times (Obama's hometown paper) reported that in just 48 hours, 10 people were murdered and at least 40 others were seriously wounded. Most of the assailants and victims were black or Latino, but not a word from Obama about those murders.

As for the media misrepresentation of the Newtown attack, though virtually every news outlet is reporting that this was the "worst school attack in history," the most lethal attack on a school occurred in 1927, when a disgruntled Bath, Michigan, school-board member murdered 45 people, including 38 elementary students — with a bomb.

Additionally, virtually every media reference to the assailant in Newtown refers to him as "the shooter." Well, there are some sixty million Americans who are "shooters." The assailant who murdered 27 women and children in Newtown was a sociopathic murderer who used a gun. He murdered them, not the gun.

"Arguments over the merits of gun control are made all the more difficult to navigate by the Left's stubborn denial that we are already having a debate on the issue. Gun control propositions are by no means new, and nor is there a lack of a 'national conversation on the subject.' Instead, the national conversation is ongoing, and the Left is losing it badly. Gun control advocates may talk of national soul searching and dialogue, but in truth that already exists; what they mean is that they'd like to win for a change. ... There are at least two hundred million privately owned guns in America, and Connecticut regulates access to them more strictly than most. To believe that [Friday's] crime could have been prevented, you have to presume either that a man willing to go to such grievous lengths could have been deterred from doing so by stronger laws, or that those stronger laws could rid America of privately available guns completely -- thus making the killer's task an impossible one. I believe neither thing. To pass a law is not to achieve its aims, and one suspects that any attempt at gun control in America would be destined to be filed next to Prohibition and the War on Drugs in the annals of man's folly. American liberties, including the Second Amendment and the 40-plus state-level guarantees of the right to bear arms, pre-exist the federal government, and are defined and protected in the same document from which the state derives its authority and its structure. In a free republic, the people cannot be disarmed by the government, for they are its employers, and they did not give up their individual rights when they consented to its creation. There is no clause in our charters of liberty that allows for the people to be deprived of their freedom if and when a few individuals abuse theirs." National Review's Charles C. W. Cooke

Of course it is not possible to enforce laws against illegal immigrants, but the progressives want to have law enforcement take on citizens who have not broken and laws. 11 million illegals who can get away with anything from illegally entering the country to drunk driving and murder, yet the progressives want to impose sanctions against 30 million constitutional and legal gun owners.

On September 10, 2012 John Lott wrote for Fox News:

“So why did the killer pick the Cinemark theater? You might think that it was the one closest to the killer’s apartment. Or, that it was the one with the largest audience.

Yet, neither explanation is right. Instead, out of all the movie theaters within 20 minutes of his apartment showing the new Batman movie that night, it was the only one where guns were banned. In Colorado, individuals with permits can carry concealed handgun in most malls, stores, movie theaters, and restaurants. But private businesses can determine whether permit holders can carry guns on their private property.

Most movie theaters allow permit holders carrying guns. But the Cinemark movie theater was the only one with a sign posted at the theater’s entrance.”

As you can see James Holmes, like most of these killers, pick their targets very carefully. They do not want someone shooting back at them. I doubt a killers like Holmes or Lanza would select a school in the Harrold Independent School District.

But though the proposals that will soon be most seriously considered would most likely not have prevented what happened, men and women of goodwill — and most are — will make the proposals because it lets them feel in control. People want to do something. People, acting corporately, want to legislate and regulate because it is, next to election of leaders, the most powerful act of a democracy.

The efforts, even if they are successful, will not stop this cycle of violence.

Discussions of gun control are easier to have than discussions about mental health. But they too are easier to have than those about the collapse of the American family. History and multiple studies show that the most stable foundation of a society is a two parent nuclear household with multiple children.

God and good exist. The devil and evil do as well — the incarnation of the absolute void left in the absence of God.

Colossians 1:17 states, “[Christ] is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” As our society drifts further and further from Christ, our society holds itself together less and less. The rise of secularism coincides with the decline of family and the rise of societal chaos.

In our society, it is political incorrect to say this. Many who reject this mock Christians. They wonder why God or Jesus was not in that school room protecting those children. Liberal gay-rights activist Dan Savage on Friday was openly ridiculing Christians and mocking God when he tweeted: “God is everywhere. Except your kid's school. God too busy pouting about separation of church & state to save your kid”. Liberal pundits were retweeting him.

They choose not to understand. They have chosen the very society that generates the heinous act we saw on Friday — a society replacing ourselves and our standards with those of God. It is a society St. Paul described quite accurately in Romans 1.

“For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator. Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.”

On Friday in Connecticut, an evil creature entered a classroom and gunned down children in our ever increasing Romans 1 society.

At this Christmas season we should remember the part of the Christmas story we often do not dwell on. Two thousand years ago, King Herod sent his soldiers to Bethlehem where they slaughtered all the boys age 2 and under. The coming of the Risen Lord was answered by this world with the loss of the innocents.

The world is full of sin. It is easy for the non-Christian to look at what happened and rationalize away that the person was mentally ill, we need gun control, etc. It is harder, especially at this time of year, for those who do believe in God to find comfort in him instead of demanding “why?” But God does not spare us the effects of sin in the world, nor does he spare the little children.

But we know by faith that “Jesus wept.” He weeps now. He welcomes home the little children and calls for us to persevere and, if we will, to turn back toward him and bring our society with us. But our society must be prepared to have larger conversations than whether or not we should regulate guns or bullets.

As a person who had a family member murdered by an alcoholic, abusive, and sociopathic husband with a shotgun I understand the difference between the weapon and the killer.

In the words of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, circa 45 AD, "Quemadmoeum gladuis neminem occidit, occidentis telum est." (A sword is never a killer, it is a tool in the killer's hands.)

The Intolerance and Bigotry of the Left

"Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." — George Washington (Farewell Address, 1796)

Today we live in a society where morality is considered relative to the times. In many cases there are no absolutes when it comes to morality and those who believe that religion and morality go hand in hand, as George Washington did, are considered to be either intolerant or racist. This is the mantra that the Left tosses around on a daily basis in the mainstream media and our TV and films.

The latest example of this appears in Salon Magazine in an article by Mary Elizabeth Williams writing about Olympic Gold Medalist Gabby Douglas and her expression of Christian faith. Rather than simply ignoring Ms. Douglas’ comments on her religious faith when she tweeted; “Let all that I am praise the LORD; may I never forget the good things he does for me” Ms. Williams felt compelled to write a negative article ridiculing Douglas’ expression of faith by stating:

“I’ve often wondered what it is about Christians like Douglas that unnerves me so. The closest I’ve been able to figure it is that Douglas and her ilk seem to espouse a faith based on what is commonly referred to as “The God of Parking Spaces.” It’s the deity that grants wishes to those who ask nicely. Douglas is a girl who has described God as the figure who’s “waking me up every morning and keeping me safe in the gym every day.”

There was no need for Williams to make such statements about a 16-year old girl who won a gold medal and expressed her believe in God and Jesus Christ. Williams could have written about numerous positive aspects of Douglas’ life but instead she had to take a whack at her Christian beliefs. Why?

Evidently, quite a few liberals amongst us are just as patriotic as the rest of us; unless our athletic avatars tarnish their medals with the stain of faith. According to Salon sourpuss Mary Elizabeth Williams. I understand the reasons for watching the Olympics extend well beyond the usual jingoistic expressions of sports fandom. Anyone who has seen Usain Bolt rocket through the 100 meters like a gazelle on amphetamines knows what I mean. Just as art can be appreciated for its own sake, so can athletic accomplishment.

So, who are these miserable curmudgeons like Williams? They’re the people who sneer at us for chanting “U-S-A,” but don’t bat an eyelid when the Europeans bellow their way through most of Wagner’s Ring Cycle while watching a 1-0 soccer match. They’re the people who just can’t bring themselves to be patriotic; even for a moment. We know who they are; we also know how they vote. To paraphrase Ms. Williams: they’re “commonly referred to as “liberals.”

I was raised in an extended family that voted for the Democrat no matter who he was. They considered themselves to be progressive and liberal and believed the Democratic Party was the party of the working people and would bring them the most benefits, especially when it came to unions. The exception to this was my father, who while professing to be a progressive did not like unions and was not a member of one.

These progressive family members and many of our middle-class neighbors who held similar beliefs were also intolerant of other nationalities, races, and ethnic heritages. Yet they considered themselves to be “liberal”.

Somewhere along the way I broke with this tradition of “liberalism” and progressive ideology and became a conservative — a Constitutional Conservative who was more in tune with the philosophy of our Founders, The Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution than the oft failed schemes of the progressives and their big government ideology. Perhaps this is due to the fact that I became a professional who was not beholden to a union and was an entrepreneur who started and successfully ran a professional engineering consulting business for over thirty years.

It was during this time that I was able to travel the world and see the damage done by progressives with their socialistic policies and the tyranny they imposed on the people. I was also able to develop some theories about liberals and progressives and how they group think. You can see is these theories have any validity by watching TV news shows, reading liberal publications and listening to liberals speak.

American progressives hold these truths to be self-evident:

All cultures and religions are equally meritorious (except for Christianity)

There is no objective truth (until and unless progressives declare the truth)

You cannot legislate morality, therefore everything is "moral" — except Christian morality.

Progressives celebrate diversity and are tolerant, inclusive, and accepting of all fellow humans — except conservative, white and Christian people)

Progressives are intelligent, thoughtful, reality-based, and benevolent

Objective? Diverse? Inclusive? Thoughtful? Reality-based? Benevolent? Not really. Progressives and liberals are the worst offenders of their own axioms when they talk about the "evils" of those who dispute liberal versions of facts, policy, or, especially, morality. The bigotry liberals direct toward those with whom they merely disagree is staggering.

Liberals believe in free speech, unless it offends someone's tender sensitivities (meaning only that liberals disagree with it). They protest the "wealthiest 1%," but exempt from their condemnations billionaire liberals and wealthy movie and rock stars, most of whom share the same ideology. Many liberals believe corporations and capitalism to be evil, even though the capitalist system and many of the corporations of which they disapprove have created the products and standard of living liberals enjoy.

But the American left reserves its ugliest bigotry for Christians. When liberals speak or write about practicing Christians, especially evangelical Christians and, in this presidential election year, Mormons, no slander is unacceptable and no religious custom is off-limits. America's most prominent liberal has condescendingly denigrated Christians as "bitter clingers" to guns and religion. Liberals have seriously asked: "Do All Evangelical Leaders Believe Gays Should Be Put to Death?" They worry about reports that evangelicals are voting in record numbers. And they invent scenarios which question whether religious convictions resonate in the political arena. Every Christian, of any age or gender, is fair game for liberal animosity — or left-wing redefinition. Liberals bash Christians with impunity; because Christians are Christian, and behave in a Christian manner from which liberals fear no reprisal. Ironic, huh? And opportunistic, too.

Thomas Jefferson believed in something called the “American Mind.” It was Jefferson who said, our Constitution was the product of “the American mind” and was made with the same purpose as the Declaration—to establish a regime where the people are sovereign, and the government protects the rights granted to them by their Creator.

The basis of Jefferson’s beliefs, and those of our founders, was the philosophy of classical liberalism (not to be mistaken for today’s liberal thinking) of economic and social writers such as John Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke. They believed in small government, free markets and personal freedom. The classical liberals advocated policies to increase liberty and prosperity. They sought to empower the commercial class politically and to abolish royal charters, monopolies, and the protectionist policies of mercantilism so as to encourage entrepreneurship and increase productive efficiency. They also expected democracy and laissez-faire economics to diminish the frequency of war.

However, liberalism in the United States shifted between 1877 and 1937 from laissez-faire constitutionalism to New Deal statism, from classical liberalism to democratic social-welfarism. Another regularly asserted contrast between classical and modern liberals. Classical liberals tend to see government power as the enemy of liberty, while modern liberals fear the concentration of wealth and the expansion of corporate power. Classical liberalism has grown into two divergent philosophies since the beginning of the twentieth century: social liberalism and market liberalism.

So what do today’s liberals believe in if they do not subscribe to the ideology of tradition classical liberalism as expressed by John Locke and our Founders. After observing thousands of interviews with liberals over the years here is my take on the “Liberal Mind.”

Liberals believe they can change human nature.

Sure, human beings can be shaped and molded to a certain extent. Any parent who has spanked a child can tell you that. However, most people care more about what they're having for lunch today than an earthquake that kills ten thousand people on the other side of the world. We're just built that way and no amount of sensitivity training, preschool classes, or Michael Moore documentaries is going to "fix" it.

Our Founders knew that human nature was flawed and that the best way to counter the ambition of one group was to place it in opposition to the ambition of an opposing group or as James Madison stated to pit ambition against ambition. Madison stated in Federalist No. 10:

“The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well as speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.”

Madison wrote on Human Nature in Federalist No. 51:

“It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

No race or class of supermen, who can govern us, exits. There are no masterminds. There are no Philosopher Kings as Plato describes. Madison believed that man had a nature to abuse power: “If given the opportunity human beings will violate each other’s rights. The protection of individual rights is the primary purpose of government. Without government there is no effective security for our rights.

Liberals believe we can talk everything out with our enemies.

One of the weirder quirks of liberalism is their belief that many of our bitterest enemies have rational reasons for disliking us and that can easily be talked away if they realize we're good people. Hence, the common liberal refrain of, "Why do they hate us?" The reason this is a particularly odd belief is that liberals don't even believe this about conservatives in the United States. The average liberal thinks that if we're nice enough, we can reach an understanding with Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck can't be reasoned with.

Throughout the last 100 years history liberals have been wrong. They have been wrong about Nazi Germany when Neville Chamberlain and his European ilk believed they could negotiate with Adolph Hitler over the fate of Europe only to find out that they were being used by the Nazi dictator. Liberals were wrong about Ronald Reagan when he took on the Soviet Union in a direct and powerful manner. Liberals were wrong when they felt Castro was a liberator of Cuba. In fact liberals have a problem dealing with problems head-on. They would rather talk than act. As most liberals are so closely tied with academia they would rather talk than. If today’s liberals (not the classical liberals of the sixteenth and seventh centuries) were in the majority in 1776 we would never had had the Declaration or Independence and we would still be subjects of the British Monarchy. Liberals just can’t face up to tyranny. If you don’t believe this just think about the masses of liberal European Jews that believed they could deal with Hitler and the Nazis.

Transforming questions of fact into questions of intent has been the great achievement of twentieth-century totalitarians. It is a dangerous achievement which has survived the collapse of both fascist and Communist empires and has become a hallmark of much of the Western intelligentsia.

Liberals have no respect for our culture and traditions.

To liberals, our cultural, economic, and political norms were formed by backwards troglodytes making arbitrary decisions based on superstition and racism. Unfortunately for them, as a general rule, that's not so and proceeding as if it is, will often lead to exactly the same difficulties that our ancestors already dealt with in times past. No matter how smart we are, as Thomas Sowell would say; "For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.”

The German composer Carl Orff once said; Tradition is the glue that holds a society together.” It is tradition that holds families, communities and nations together; it is also something liberals frown upon. To a liberal morality is relative to the times and not absolute. There are three things that make a people into a nation — borders, language and culture. Without these three items a nation cannot exist. Today’s liberals despise all three. They want open borders where anyone can cross with impunity. They don’t want one language in our schools, government, and businesses. And they believe in multiculturalism, something that the Europeans are drifting away from as they have found out the problems and class separation it has caused in nations like France, Germany, and The Netherlands.

Liberalism is a fundamentally immoral political philosophy.

Ironically, given all their talk about "shades of gray," liberals have a very moral dualism view of the world. They consider their fellow travelers to be on the side of the angels, while the people who disagree with them are treated as evil. This leads to an "anything goes" mentality when dealing with their foes: ignoring the law via a "living constitution," politically based prosecutions, shouting down opposing speakers, and treating lying about their agenda or opponents to be moral. On the other hand, liberals will support other libs, no matter how corrupt, sleazy, or vile they are as long as they're politically useful to the left. See Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, John Murtha, and Robert Byrd for examples of that. In other words, as Margaret Thatcher has said of the Left, "For them, the end always seems to justify the means."

Today’s liberals believe there is no absolute morality. They believe morality is relative to the times and situations. Liberals believe that the killing of the unborn is not immoral when it comes to women’s rights, but they have a right to withhold baby formula from a new mother if she does not want to beast feed. They believe there are no sin and no judgment.

Fay Voshell writes provocative article in American Thinker about the mind of the progressive when it comes to religion and morality.

Liberals believe merely being liberal makes them good people.

Liberals who're obsessed with money think they're compassionate because they give away other people's tax dollars. They believe they care more about the earth than other people, even as they fly around in private jets, because they babble on about global warming. They can be dumb as a rock, but believe they're smarter than most other people because they're liberals. In other words, in the minds of most liberals, liberalism is an all-purpose substitute for actual virtue instead of just another political philosophy.

Liberals believe conservatives and free-market capitalists are evil because they believe in free-market solutions, individual freedom, and personal responsibility. I think Frédéric Bastiat said more eloquently then I could have when he stated in his treatise on the Law when talking about the mind of the socialist:

"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain."

You must remember that in Bastiat’s day “liberals” were of the classical type and socialist were considered those masterminds who believed in big government, as today’s liberals do.

Liberals have too much faith in government.

Even most liberals would admit that government regularly fails the people. If you don't believe that, just ask them about the Bush Administration and they'll give you an earful. However, liberals tend to believe that with the right person in charge and with enough of other people’s money, government won't be so slow, stupid, inefficient, and badly run. Human history proves that they're wrong about that deal.

Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

The secret to the power and success of the United States has been in the family, entrepreneurs, and morality. Our Founders knew this from the get go. They believed government had only one purpose and that was to protect the rights and property of its citizens — not to become the nanny state the liberals so desire. People such as Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller did not rely on government for their success — they relied on their ideas and faith in those ideas. When they failed they simply tried again and again until they achieved success.

Once again as Sowell states:

"The presumed irrationality of the public is a pattern running through many, if not most or all, of the great crusades of the anointed in the twentieth century--regardless of the subject matter of the crusade or the field in which it arises. Whether the issue has been 'overpopulation,' Keynesian economics, criminal justice, or natural resource exhaustion, a key assumption has been that the public is so irrational that the superior wisdom of the anointed must be imposed, in order to avert disaster. The anointed do not simply happen to have a disdain for the public. Such disdain is an integral part of their vision, for the central feature of that vision is preemption of the decisions of others."

Liberals have minimal interest in whether the programs they support work or not.

To most liberals, whether a government program betters people's lives is completely irrelevant to whether they'll support it. A program that doesn't work and costs billions, but sounds compassionate and helps Democrats politically is a huge success in the eyes of the Left. Once you understand that liberals think this way, their baffling support for programs that make no "common sense" is much easier to understand. As Thomas Sowell stated:

“In their zeal for particular kinds of decisions to be made, those with the vision of the anointed seldom consider the nature of the process by which decisions are made. Often what they propose amounts to third-party decision making by people who pay no cost for being wrong--surely one of the least promising ways of reaching decisions satisfactory to those who must live with the consequences.”

How many liberal programs costing trillions of dollars have failed over the past century? The list is long. The New Deal failed. The War on Poverty failed. The onerous regulatory policies of the EPA have failed. Just consider how many African children have died from Malaria when DDT was banned by masterminds who did not consider or care about the consequences of their actions. They were playing to unfounded fears, flawed and biased academic reports and the media.

It was government intervention that was the root cause the crash of the housing bubble by forcing banks to make loans to people they knew would not be able to pay them back. Government intervention into the college loan business is the main contributor to the inflationary rise on the cost of college today.

In their haste to be wiser and nobler than others, the liberal anointed masterminds have misconceived two basic issues. They seem to assume (1) that they have more knowledge than the average member of the society and (2) that this is the relevant comparison. The real comparison, however, is not between the knowledge possessed by the average member of the educated elite versus the average member of the general public, but rather the total direct knowledge brought to bear though social processes (the competition of the marketplace, social sorting, etc.), involving millions of people, versus the secondhand knowledge of generalities possessed by a smaller elite group of academics and masterminds. A farmer in Nebraska has far more knowledge and a vested interest in the land they farm than any ten masterminds in Washington.

Why are the horrors of Nazism so well-known and widely condemned but not those of socialism and communism? What goes untaught — and possibly is covered up — is that socialist and communist ideas have produced the greatest evil in mankind's history. You say, what in the world are you talking about? Socialists, communists and their fellow travelers, such as the Wall Street occupiers supported by our president, care about the little guy in his struggle for a fair shake! They're trying to promote social justice." Let's look at some of the history of socialism and communism so touted by liberals.

What's not appreciated is that Nazism is a form of socialism. In fact, the term Nazi stands for the National Socialist German Workers' Party. The unspeakable acts of Adolf Hitler's Nazis pale in comparison to the horrors committed by the communists in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People's Republic of China. Between 1917 and 1987, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and their successors murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, China's communists, led by Mao Zedong and his successors, murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese. The most authoritative tally of history's most murderous regimes is documented on University of Hawaii Professor Rudolph J. Rummel's website here, and in his book "Death by Government." According to Rummel 262 million people have been killed by government in the twentieth century with the bulk be exterminated by so called “liberal” socialist or communist regimes. Rummel states:

“Just to give perspective on this incredible murder by government, if all these bodies were laid head to toe, with the average height being 5', then they would circle the earth ten times. Also, this democide murdered 6 times more people than died in combat in all the foreign and internal wars of the century. Finally, given popular estimates of the dead in a major nuclear war, this total democide is as though such a war did occur, but with its dead spread over a century.”

How much hunting down and punishment have there been for these communist murderers? To the contrary, it's acceptable both in Europe and in the U.S. to hoist and march under the former USSR's red flag emblazoned with a hammer and sickle. Mao Zedong has long been admired by academics and leftists across our country, as they often marched around singing the praises of Mao and waving his little red book, "Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung." President Barack Obama's communications director, Anita Dunn, in her June 2009 commencement address to St. Andrews Episcopal High School at Washington National Cathedral, said Mao was one of her heroes.

Whether it's the academic community, the media elite, stalwarts of the Democratic Party or organizations such as the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, Green for All, the Sierra Club and the Children's Defense Fund, there is a great tolerance for the ideas of socialism — a system that has caused more deaths and human misery than all other systems combined.

Today's leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from those of Nazi, Soviet and Maoist mass murderers. One does not have to be in favor of death camps or wars of conquest to be a tyrant. The only requirement is that one has to believe in the primacy of the state over individual rights.

Today's leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from those of Nazi, Soviet and Maoist mass murderers. One does not have to be in favor of death camps or wars of conquest to be a tyrant. The only requirement is that one has to believe in the primacy of the state over individual rights.

The unspeakable horrors of Nazism didn't happen overnight. They were simply the end result of a long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for "social justice." It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans — who would have cringed at the thought of genocide — who created the Trojan horse for Hitler's ascendancy. Today's Americans are similarly accepting the massive consolidation of power in Washington in the name of social justice.

If you don't believe it, just ask yourself: Which way are we headed tiny steps at a time — toward greater liberty or toward more government control over our lives?

The Genesis Code

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” — Genesis, Chapter 1, Verses 1-3.

Last night my wife and I watched the Genesis Code on our cable pay-for-view. I had heard about this Christian themed film (both positive and negative) and I wanted to see for myself what the film was about.

The Story:

Kerry Wells (Kelsey Sanders), a college journalist and committed Christian with an effervescent personality, has been assigned to do a story on Blake Truman (Logan Bartholomew) the college’s newest and very popular hockey superstar. As a relationship between them begins to develop Kerry finds that Blake, who hides behind a tough and independent façade, is actually struggling through a difficult personal crisis and that he bears the cross of a secret he has kept hidden for years. Blake rebuffs Kerry's suggestion that prayer might help ease his burden; he is convinced that modern science completely disproves the Bible, especially the opening verses of Genesis. Kerry — who is herself suddenly confronted with a challenge to her faith on another front — sets out to prove that science and Genesis are not in conflict and her quest leads to a startling revelation. Could it be that what science teaches us about creation and the story as told in Genesis are both true! The Genesis Code takes on three current social and cultural issues: Evolution vs. creation, End-of-life decisions and perceived discrimination against Christians on the college campus.

Before writing this blog I read two on-line reviews and found critical opinions of the film from a pseudo-scientist (a dentist) and an Evangelical Christian Minister. Both reviews blasted the film, but for different reasons.

The Dentist, a graduate from the University of Michigan, review is critical based on his interpretation of Cosmology and physics. In his review he states:

“The real purpose of the movie, however, is to serve as a vehicle to promote the idea that science and the Bible can be reconciled, with particular emphasis on the creation account of Genesis. Of course, operational science (measurable, testable, and observable science) is a “friend” of the Bible, and when properly understood, we can use science to support the historicity of Genesis (see Creation: Science Confirms the Bible Is True). Unfortunately, this movie immediately gets off on the wrong foot by unquestioningly embracing, as indisputable scientific fact, the speculative claims of scientists regarding the age of the universe—that the universe is about 15 billion years old. The movie then tries to startle viewers with the revelation that there is a special “code” hidden in the Book of Genesis that roughly agrees with a long age of the universe.

The film has much discussion about the physics of time dilation: how the perceived passage of time is dependent upon the perspective of the observer, and how the passage of time can be affected by mass, acceleration, and the stretching of the fabric of space. Some of this is operational science, and can be experimentally verified, and it actually may well help biblical creationists explain how we can see light from distant stars in a young universe. But by taking extensive liberties with the interpretation of certain Hebrew words in the Bible, along with the use of time dilation and God’s perspective from heaven, the movie seeks to impose a billions-of-years, progressive-creation timeline into the Genesis account. The movie claims that this is a better explanation of what is observed in the rock layers and the fossil record as opposed to molecules-to-man evolution.”

The second review I read was from a Christian minister who was also critical for its loose interpretation of the Bible. He writes:

“The Genesis Code is a full-featured film that pits the biblical six-day creation against the big bang theory of origins. In this contest, the viewer will notice that The Genesis Code never contemplates that the Bible should govern science; rather its presupposition is reversed. It is ‘science’ that is established as a seemingly inerrant source of ultimate truth.

However, science (and there are multiple definitions of what science, and even the ‘scientific method’, actually is anyway) can never be a standard of absolute truth. The sort of science with which most of us are familiar involves watching things happen (observation), and using repeatable experiments. Call it operational, or observational science if you like. But, when we try to understand events of the past, we are asking an historical question, which means that ultimately we have to use historical, not scientific, categories (see ‘It’s not science!’ and Naturalism, Origins and Operational Science). This doesn’t mean science can’t contribute to historical questions, but only that science can never provide us with the final answer. And the science involved in such things is a different sort of science—we can call it historical, forensic or even ‘origins science’.

That sort of science, which is what cosmology (the discipline that proposes ideas such as the ‘big bang’) is categorically placed in, involves a great deal of speculation, because it attempts to determine events of the past based upon fragments we have in the present. Events from the past cannot be directly observed or experimented on, tested, or repeated in the same way as observational science can.”

In fact, one expert has recently gone even further by claiming that cosmology is not even science, period! A recent article in the prestigious journal Science stated:

“‘Cosmology may look like a science, but it isn’t a science,’ says James Gunn of Princeton University, co-founder of the Sloan survey. ‘A basic tenet of science is that you can do repeatable experiments, and you can’t do that in cosmology.’”

This film attempts to win over unbelievers through argumentation in the name of ‘science’, or rather, commonly understood scientific principles. But it really uses origins science instead; this misleads viewers into thinking that a historical science like cosmology can determine such things.

The story is driven by a growing relationship between college hockey star, Blake Truman, who is an unbeliever, and a college news reporter, Kerry Wells, who is a professing Christian who interviews him.”

I can only guess at the agenda of the dentist who used his knowledge of science to dispute the Bible, but the minister is using his knowledge of the Bible to dispute the film.

What both reviewers are missing is the point that this is a fictional movie not a documentary you would see on the History, Science, National Geographic, or the Investigative Discovery channels. If it were not many people would pay money to see it.

Movies are meant to entertain by telling stories and this movie tells a compelling story. I am not a Biblical scholar or a Cosmologist or Astrophysicist so I cannot critique the theology or science portrayed in the film. However, I have read the Bible and watched numerous documentaries on the origins of the universe and believe there are multitudes of interpretations of both. It was Albert Einstein who said; “God does not place dice with the universe.” Science is continuing to evolve as man gains more knowledge and understanding of the world we live in. The Bible, while being believed to be absolute truth has been debated by theologians for centuries.

The average person of faith (such as me) believes in both. As a person with a technical education I have seen scientific evolve from theory to fact over the years. When in high school many years ago our physics books stated that the atom was the smallest particle known to man. Of course the book was written before the Atomic Bomb was exploded.

Likewise our understanding of the Bible has increased over the years. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient texts have allowed Biblical scholars to gain a better understanding of the Aramaic language — the language it was originally written in.

Beside the contrast between science and the Bible the film touched on an issue that I do understand — he conflict between those of faith and the secular non-believers who dominate academia today. There is a scene in the film where Kerry meets with her academic advisor to discuss her potential for going on to pursue a doctorate paleontology — a subject near and dear o Kerry. The female advisor tells Kerry that she needs two letters of recommendation and that her “dogmatic” Christian beliefs should be tempered if she wants to go on. The advisor goes into a diatribe telling Kerry that is she wants to become a part of the elite intelligentsia and a member of the masterminds who will mold the “new world order” she needs to abandon the absolute morality of her Christian beliefs. The advisor believes we live in a world of changing morality based on relativism. To me this was one of the more important scenes in the film — something the reviewers did not touch on.

Jeffery Osontisch writes a very good piece on the Paradox of Secular Scientism in American Thinker. He writes:

“It has become an accepted tenet of conventional wisdom to begin all discussions about science and nature with the understanding that religion has no place in such debates and that, in fact, faith is diametrically opposed to reason and scientific thought. To this end the concept of classical education, including any mention of God has been thoroughly removed from all Western public schools and replaced with a rather drab and mundane scientism.

This, however, need not be and was not always the case; in fact, Christian scholars had been on the cutting edge of scientific thought since the Middle Ages and the application of human reason to theological and later scientific questions has been a hallmark of Christianity since its very beginning - a fact which is evident to anyone who has read the work of Augustine and Aquinas, among others. How, then, did this notion of religion as the enemy of science first take root? And what are the dangers it poses to man and society?

The rise of radical secularism in philosophy and government first emerged as a formidable force in eighteenth century France and was characterized by an antipathy to objective moral standards and a belief in the perfectibility of man which spawned the humanist search for an egalitarian utopia and led to the horrors of the French Revolution. When this political philosophy was apparently validated by science, it proved to be a witches' brew which led directly to the bloodiest century in human history, the twentieth.

Its manifestation in science came about a century later with the publication, in 1859, of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. In this landmark book the British naturalist was the first to present a cogent evidentiary argument in favor of the theory he labeled natural selection - the theory that all life on earth evolved naturally - and quite by accident - from a single common ancestor over millions of years. This work and the strong feelings it inspired in its supporters and opponents alike marked the fork in the road which permanently split science from religion.

In his much vilified, yet misunderstood Papal address at the University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006 Pope Benedict XVI lamented this gradual severing, by Western academics, of faith from reason - a process he believes has done great harm to both theology and science. He also compared the secular left's adherence to relativism to Islam's concept of the nature of God as not bound by reason, contrasting these concepts with the Christian tradition (inherited, in part, from the Greeks) of a rational God in whose image rational man was made. Christian doctrine teaches that God in creating the physical universe bound it to immutable laws and thus there is a divine order to it that may be theorized upon, observed, and explained by man. To Christians proof of God's adherence to His laws may be deduced from His incarnation in the person of Jesus Christ for the purpose of the redemption of man before God. Were He so inclined and not bound by His own nature, God may have simply forgiven man for his rebellion without ‘putting on' human form to suffer and die on the cross. That He chose the latter is clear proof to Christians of the existence of a Divine order to the universe.”

With the recent shootings in Aurora, Colorado we are hearing a great deal about evil and why psychopaths like James Holmes do what they do. It is this age of relativism we live in today that lies at the root of these actions.

It was Ayn Rand in her book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, who said:

“The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.”

As Mr. Osontisch states:

“Clearly faith in God need not and should not be a disqualifier when discussing scientific questions. A proper foundation in the moral as well as the physical laws of God's glorious creation should be a requirement of a well-rounded educational curriculum. And the moral restraints placed upon science by faith need not be a hindrance to discovery and progress, but merely a rudder to help point progress in the proper direction. And if this means that certain core beliefs of the secular scientific community need to be re-evaluated this does not mean mankind is regressing to a past mired in superstition and unreason. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, if we have made a wrong turn somewhere along the line we will be no nearer our destination by stubbornly continuing on; it is truly progressive at such times to double back to where you veered off track and find the proper path.”

The conflict between those who only believe in science and the fundamental creationists will not be tempered by one film but is is a start. Hollywood is loath to produce films of this nature as they believe they will not be box office hits. My hat’s off to the producers, directors, actors, and writers for taking the risk to give us the Genesis Code. I suggest you view the film yourself and make your own decision on the value of the film.