Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ promised and His word is true: “and on this rock I shall build My Church, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16:18)
Orthodox Churches in Russia Rise After Communist Holocaust
Christian Persecution
Defending Our First Freedom
by Archbishop José H. Gomez –
We are slowly losing our sense of religious liberty in America.
There is much evidence to suggest that our society no longer values the public role of religion or recognizes the importance of religious freedom as a basic right. As scholars like Harvard’s Mary Ann Glendon and Michael Sandel have observed, our courts and government agencies increasingly treat the right to hold and express religious beliefs as only one of many private lifestyle options. And, they observe, this right is often “trumped” in the face of challenges from competing rights or interests deemed to be more important.
These are among the reasons the U.S. Catholic bishops recently established a new Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty. My brother bishops and I are deeply concerned that believers’ liberties—and the Church’s freedom to carry out her mission—are threatened today, as they never have been before in our country’s history. [Read more…]
Does Sex Ed Undermine Parental Rights?
by Robert P. George and Melissa Moschella –
Imagine you have a 10- or 11-year-old child, just entering a public middle school. How would you feel if, as part of a class ostensibly about the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, he and his classmates were given “risk cards” that graphically named a variety of solitary and mutual sex acts? Or if, in another lesson, he was encouraged to disregard what you told him about sex, and to rely instead on teachers and health clinic staff members?
That prospect would horrify most parents. But such lessons are part of a middle-school curriculum that Dennis M. Walcott, the New York City schools chancellor, has recommended for his system’s newly mandated sex-education classes. There is a parental “opt out,” but it is very limited, covering classes on contraception and birth control. [Read more…]
Not a Single Christian Church Left in Afghanistan
by Edwin Mora –
There is not a single, public Christian church left in Afghanistan, according to the U.S. State Department.
This reflects the state of religious freedom in that country ten years after the United States first invaded it and overthrew its Islamist Taliban regime.
In the intervening decade, U.S. taxpayers have spent $440 billion to support Afghanistan’s new government and more than 1,700 U.S. military personnel have died serving in that country.
The last public Christian church in Afghanistan was razed in March 2010, according to the State Department’s latest International Religious Freedom Report. [Read more…]
Why Pastors Must Be Free To Preach On Politics
by Alan Sears –
On Sunday, October 2, hundreds of pastors all over the country did something an astonishingly large number of their fellow Americans had forgotten they had the God-given right to do: namely, address political issues and candidates during a worship service.
Across the nearly 60 years since then U.S. Senator Lyndon Johnson pushed through an amendment to the IRS code threatening any church or pastor who gets involved in politics with IRS reprisals – specifically, the loss of the church’s tax-exempt status – conventional wisdom has congealed around the idea that pastors must stay out of politics. As extraordinary as that assertion is to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of our nation’s history, it’s a theme that’s been hammered home unrelentingly for decades by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. [Read more…]
Christians Need Not Apply?
by George J. Marlin –
Christians who spar in the political arena have grown accustomed to being pounded by secular ideologists who deny the spiritual and look askance at most traditional moral constraints. Though we have taken punches, we are still standing. But the secularists’ latest offensive to eradicate all traces of our Judeo-Christian heritage from American society is, in my judgment, most disconcerting and may be the knockout blow.
Secularists have moved beyond dismissing Christians as anti-intellectual and anti-rational. They are now publicly ridiculing them and questioning their fitness to participate in public life. They portray religious beliefs as nothing more than superstitions, old wives’ tales, or legends, and claim anyone who believes such drivel is balmy. Is it any wonder, then, that agencies like HHS now think they can ride roughshod over the conscience rights of individuals and religious institutions? [Read more…]
Gay Agenda is a Serious Threat to Religious Freedom
by Kevin J. Jones –
Legalizing ‘gay marriage’ is having major repercussions for religious freedom.
Once a state recognizes same-sex partnerships as marriages or the equivalent, then naturally the argument is made that in family life classes in schools this has to be taught to be a valid partnership. Religious parents who do not want their children to be “indoctrinated in beliefs contrary to their own” are “out of luck,” said George, who founded the Manhattan Declaration project to defend religious liberty. …
Legalizing “gay marriage” is having major repercussions for religious freedom, according to observers of the latest developments. Princeton law professor Robert P. George cited the words of American Jewish Committee lawyer Marc Stern, who in 2006 said the conflict between religious liberty and same-sex marriage would be “a train wreck.” [Read more…]
The Persecution of Christians in the Middle East
The terrible violence in Oslo last month has brought the world’s attention to the ravings of a madman and a murderer — someone who was motivated to kill fellow Christians because he feels they had acquiesced to a takeover by Islam.
Our revulsion is appropriate — this was the killing of innocent people in the name of religious and political hatred. However, when the roles are reversed, and Christians are in the minority and Muslims in the majority, are we equally upset by murder, intimidation and religious hatred?
Sadly, we don’t appear to be. The world is standing silent as Christians living in Muslim-majority lands are killed, and their killers are venerated.
Today, Christians, regardless of affiliation, are being systematically harassed, persecuted, and murdered throughout the Middle East, the region of the globe from which Christianity first emerged. Churches have been bombed and those attending Christian services have been killed. Christian homes have been ransacked and cemeteries have been destroyed. Converts from Islam to Christianity are considered apostates and subject to severe punishment. [Read more…]
Islamic Supremacism Trumps Christianity at Ground Zero
While New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg works in anxious haste to build the cultural obscenity that is the Ground Zero mosque, the iconic St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which was built in 1916 and destroyed in the attack on the World Trade Center towers by Muslim terrorists, remains vanquished, unable to rebuild.
Bloomberg is lobbying for 9/11 taxpayer funds for the Islamic supremacist grifters behind the Ground Zero mosque, but St. Nicholas Church is in purgatory ten years after the worst day in modern American history.
Perhaps St. Nicholas Church should claim that it is a mosque — then Bloomberg and New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn would probably pour the cement for its foundation. [Read more…]
California Paves Way for Blatant Homosexual Promotion in Schools
“It is an outrage that Governor Jerry Brown has opened the classroom door for homosexual activists to indoctrinate the minds of California’s youth, since no factual materials would be allowed to be presented,” said Rev. Louis Sheldon, chairman and founder of Traditional Values Coalition (TVC). “By signing SB 48 today, California’s classrooms, textbooks and instructional materials will all become pro-homosexual promotion tools. If parents don’t already have their children out of public schools, this should cause them to remove them.”
Senate Bill 48, authored by homosexual State Senator Mark Leno, Democrat of San Francisco, is being called the “Fair, Accountable, Inclusive, and Respectful Education Act” or FAIR Act. But there is nothing fair, accountable, inclusive or respectful about it. This bill is so far-reaching into the structure of California’s education system that it is possible its harmful effects could be never-ending.
SB 48 would amend current Education Code sections to include lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender to the list of categories to be covered in all textbooks and instructional materials. These new textbooks and instructional materials would apply to ALL subjects in curriculum and to ALL grades K-12. [Read more…]
