"Imposing your faith" on others: The big lie of our time.

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From the blogosphere to mainstream media to the halls of Congress, the war cry of social progressives for decades has centered on the separation of church and state.  They claim that (primarily) Christians force their faith on others if they support laws to limit abortion, stop the redefinition of marriage, or defend recognition of God in public places or documents.  This is the biggest and most dangerous political lie of the century.

The underlying premise of this political propaganda is that conservatives who hold a Christian worldview deserve no right to vote, speak, or petition the government. Voters may be informed by secularism, humanism, or even communism—but not Christianity. 

Like 1984 or Brave New World, many in government and the media are purveyors of good-think and bad-think.  They see Christian beliefs as impediments to ‘progress,’ to conformance with new manmade freedoms that are morally blind or at least incoherent.

When progressives fail to silence a believer, they try to discredit or destroy him or her by comparing Christians with the Taliban, or theocracies that oppress religious freedom.  By protecting freedom of conscious for over 200 years, America became the longest free democracy in human history.  America never became a theocracy.

Scare tactics do not have to make sense, just the news. 

Discussing this insidious lie now is not about the next election or any election.  Discrediting faith, and the faithful, creates a vacuum for progressives to fill every day.  That has consequences every day.

For example, progressives are obsessed with promoting sex as freedom: contraception, abortion, and hedonism coupled with disassociating sex from morality, procreation, marriage, parenting, and the family.  In schools, in government, in the marketplace of ideas, they see “antiquated” Christian values as the enemy.  The fallout, no matter how astounding, is ignored.

National Fatherhood Initiative finds “there is a ‘father factor’ in nearly all of the social issues facing America today…. over 24 million children live apart from their biological fathers. That is 1 out of every 3 (33%) children in America. Nearly 2 in 3 (64%) African American children live in father-absent homes. One in three (34%) Hispanic children, and 1 in 4 (25%) white children live in father-absent homes. In 1960, only 11% of children lived in father-absent homes.”

Yet, our president remains cocksure that more of the sickness is the cure:  Obamacare mandated funding of abortion and comprehensive sex education is exploding to the tune of about $3.375 billion over three years. 

None of this creates families or protects children or liberates women.  Skyrocketing billions of dollars for food stamps, welfare, and “reproductive health” are symptoms, not the cure. 

Alexis de Tocquville visited America in the 1830s.  When he reflected on America’s great democratic experiment in Democracy in America, he observed that American institutions of government depend for their existence on certain “habits of the heart.”  These habits are not government inventions but rather certain civic and religious associations.

He wondered what would happen to American democracy when these civic and religious associations, these habits of the heart, these core principals, no longer exist or are valued.

The great Czech playwright-philosopher Vaclav Havel provides an ominous glimpse.  He describes the “culture of the lie” in his essay, The Power of the Powerless.  It was penned in 1978 during the era of the Iron Curtain and “eliminating all expressions of nonconformity”.

“The complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; … the repression of culture is called its development; … banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; … the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom… Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future.”

Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did…. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it.”

Will we accept life with and in the lie?  

America joins in on the #GreatKateWait; even as they protect abortion

With Kate now a couple of days late, thousands and thousands of tweets under the hash tag #GreatKateWait are trending from common folk and journalists alike.

Many have expressed both humor and exasperation at the delay as the royal baby watch has entered its second week. It is hard to imagine such joy and near hysteria over an impending birth.

One tongue-in-cheek tweeter asked, “I know I should have learned this in Health class but when royal babies ‘crown,’ it’s a real crown, right?” Ken Olshansky, senior producer at CNN, tweeted “A dilate and a dollar short.”

Major networks all over the world are reporting the tiniest details almost hourly. While media outlets debate the Duchess of Cambridge’s due date, odds makers have opened up betting on the actual delivery time and what the baby will be named.

It has been reported that anyone born in Britain on the same day as the royal baby will receive a special coin from the Royal Mint—a silver penny that will come in either a blue pouch for a boy or a pink one for a girl.

Much import is given to the fact that Baby Cambridge—the child of Prince William and Kate Middleton—will be third in line for the throne after Prince Charles and Prince William.

No wonder celebratory gun salutes by the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery in Green and the Honorable Artillery Company at the Tower of London are planned for the baby’s arrival. What is a wonder is that all this excitement and planning is for something that, in America, has no legal identity and no right to live.

After all, according to Roe v. Wade, prior to birth, “it” isn’t a person, right? Why celebrate a mass of cells that is not yet even a human being?

In America, the future king or queen of England has no rights even hours before his or her birth. Just ask Planned Parenthood, Kermit Gosnell, or icon of late-term abortion LeRoy Carhart.

Just ask President Obama.

Yet, Baby Cambridge is third in line to the monarchy as a zygote, blastocyst, embryo, fetus, or baby. That reality is part of the fun, the excitement—and the truth.

But in America, even tonight, this baby could be swept out of existence, simply on a whim.

There may be no people in the world outside the British Commonwealth who love the royals as much as Americans do. The images of their marriages, deaths, and babies regularly grace the pages of Us and People, and the screens of entertainment shows.

We wept for Diana as we wept for JFK. From the quaint heartland to the highfalutin denizens of New York City skyscrapers, Americans forget their politics and talking points to rejoice in the anticipated pomp and circumstance of a royal birth.

What makes this cultural phenomenon possible? It is that, as humans, all of us know in our hearts that any baby—whether from Lubbock or from London—is, always has been, and always will be, a precious new life that brings hope of things and dreams yet to come.

In short, even before he is born, everyone knows a baby is a baby.

Gosnell abortion horrors are only tip of the iceberg

America awaits the verdict in the murder trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell. What is still not making the news is that the Gosnell house of horrors is merely an unintended glimpse into the daily reality of the abortion industry.
 
What Gosnell was doing is no different than what happens in Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro–Choice and other abortion clinics over 1.2 million times every year. It stems from the same mindset found in any abortuary in any building in any small town community or big city.

He named his house of horrors Women’s Medical Society. It sounded so nice and clean, almost alike a Victorian society of gentile women. That is all the Pennsylvania authorities and “pro-choicers” wanted to see.

In reality, Gosnell happily worked in foul conditions and was cavalier about death to the point of pathology. But, the abortions for which he is on trial, the murders that he committed, in the end are like any abortion—inflicting death on the most innocent for personal profit.
Gosnell just did not bother with fancy window dressing. In that sense, his operations were more honest than most: Abortion is a filthy business, a white-tiled shiny abortion chamber does not change that.

Death, deception and exploitation of women and young girls are standard operating procedure in a field that is in the business of killing preborn human beings for money. Why would abortionists not tell a girl to just flush an untimely birth down the toilet?

To do that job and live with yourself, you must either adopt the belief that a preborn baby is only potential excrement or assume that certain human beings lack the right not to be murdered. And, you must convince your customers of the same.

This sociopathology is now showing up in our children. And why would it not after 40 years of teaching our children to disregard and devalue life in order to promote legalized abortions?

We see it when we read that a 19-year-old high school girl found it acceptable to simply flush her own baby down the toilet at school and go about her day as if nothing unusual just happened.

We see it when we read about a 14-year-old junior high girl who did exactly the same. Sex means nothing to these children, so why should a child?

Ron Taffel, in “The Wall of Silence: Reinventing Therapy to Reach the New Teens (Psychotherapy Networker, May/June 2001), relates this story:

“Margaret was …  proud of being the kind of with-it mother a girl could really talk to about what it was like to be young and exploring life… .  Margaret’s dreamy vision of mutual trust and openness exploded the day she came home unexpectedly to find her [14-year-old] daughter in the bathtub having sex with two boys. Shrieking, she got the boys dressed and out of the house. Then, she confronted her daughter.

Adding insult to injury, Lauren protested that the whole incident had been entirely innocent and her mother’s mean-spirited suspicions unwarranted. “You must have been imagining we were having sex because your parents were so strict and you were wild as a kid,” she said. “Besides, there were bubbles in the tub—how could you know what was really going on?”

For a brief moment, Margaret nearly fell for it—was it possible she had gotten it wrong? Then, furious anew, she asked, “What do you think I am—a damn fool?”

“Yes,” Lauren said flatly.

“We are indeed seeing a new kind of teenager embedded in a far more raw, intense, and pervasive youth culture than ever before, complete with new rules of adolescence. True, teens have always been sexual, but 12- and 13-year-old suburban kids didn’t used to get together for group oral and anal sex parties. Indeed, studies show that the age of the onset of sexuality has decreased since the ‘70s.”

That was over a decade ago and the trend has only accelerated. Why?

“Sexuality education is a lifelong process of acquiring information and forming attitudes, beliefs, and values,” states the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. SIECUS is used as an accrediting organization for sex educators in K-12 schools.

What sort of attitudes, beliefs, and values does SIECUS and the sex education industry instill?               
Concerned Women for America quotes SIECUS: “The primary goal of SIECUS, according to [co-founder Dr. Mary S. Calderone], is to teach human sexuality ‘very broadly and deeply with awareness of the vital importance of infant and childhood sexuality.’” SIECUS believes a child’s sexuality should ‘be developed in the same way as the child’s inborn human capacity to talk or to walk, and that [the parents’] role should relate only [emphasis added] to teaching the child the appropriateness of privacy, place, and person—in a word, socialization.’”

Does “develop” sexuality and limiting the parents’ rights sound like anything to do with protecting children from sexualization and exploitation?

Calderone is the former medical director for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The major funder for SIECUS is our government—a division of the National Institutes of Health. Some things never change.

We have allowed our government to use billions of our tax dollars over the decades to fund the very people who teach our children to believe that sex is essential and recreational at any age. A baby who results is not human, but a disease to be eradicated. Discard him in the toilet, trash can or medical bag. It makes no difference.

And then we are shocked when youngsters display the very attitude that allows the Gosnells and the Planned Parenthoods of the world to exist? Gosnell is only the tip of this cultural iceberg the USS Titanic is heading toward at full speed.

We contract with abortion providers like Planned Parenthood to go into our schools and promote grotesque beliefs to our children under the mantel of diversity and healthy sex choices. Obamacare earmarks $350 million tax dollars to fund “comprehensive” sex education, which instills an amoral view of sex in schoolchildren.

Perhaps we are all damn fools.