Culture war

Deafening Silence, Moral Issues in the Election

Chuck Colson
Chuck Colson
10/27/2010 – Chuck Colson –

Next Tuesday, I hope you will do your Christian duty and head to the polls to vote for the candidate of your choice. I trust that your faith will guide you in your decision. Which candidate will best promote justice and preserve order? After all, those are the biblically-sanctioned roles of government.

And which candidate best exemplifies the cardinal virtue of prudence in his or her public and private life?

And which candidate will best promote the sanctity of human life, advocate for traditional marriage, and protect religious freedom? Well, if you’ve got an answer for that last question, then you’re among the few. Because for the life of me, I have never heard so little about these core issues during a political campaign. These core issues—human life, marriage, and freedom—which—all expressed so powerfully in the Manhattan Declaration and supported by half a million signatories, aren’t even on the political radar this year. And that, to me is shocking. [Read more…]

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Socialism and Reality

10/25/2010 – Steve McCann –
The images on the television screen emanating from Europe are a sobering reminder that socialism has failed wherever it has been tried and will always do so despite the best efforts of the die-hard true believers. The riots in the streets of France and Greece, the announced layoffs of nearly 500,000 government employees in the United Kingdom, and the potential national bankruptcy of Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Portugal are the current face of this failure.

Yet within the halls of power in Washington, D.C. there is a socialist/progressive cabal, and its titular leader Barack Obama, oblivious to this reality. These ideologues continue to cling to the belief that they have a unique ability to succeed where so many others have failed. The egocentric American Left know no bounds, and their determination to impose their will upon the United States has not and will not abate despite the results of any election. [Read more…]

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Democratic Ad: Catholic Church More Concerned About Abortion Than Poor

Democrat Ad Ignore the Poor10/26/2010 – Steven Ertelt –

A campaign postcard the Minnesota Democratic Party sent to voters in the Midwestern state is causing a strong reaction from pro-life advocates. It claims the Catholic Church is more concerned with abortion than helping the poor. The postcard features a large photo of a older but faceless Catholic priest holding a Bible and wearing the clearly-seen Roman Catholic collar.

The priest sports a campaign button in a red, white and blue motif with the words, “Ignore the Poor.”

The ad, in the estimation of National Catholic Register writer Matt Archbold is blatantly anti-Catholic and meant to tell voters the Catholic Church is more concerned about abortion than the plight of the poor.

“Sometimes there’s a little subtlety to anti-Catholic political rhetoric but not this time. This is in your face anti-Catholicism,” he said. “It’s anti-Catholicism is not one point of many. It’s the point.” [Read more…]

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God, Liberals and Liberty

Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager
by Dennis Prager –
America’s anomalous religiosity is very much worth celebrating — not because it leads to affluence, but because it is indispensible to liberty. Had Blow made a liberty chart rather than an affluence chart, he might have noted that the freest country in the world — for 234 years — the United States of America, has also been the most God-centered.

Yes, I know that the Islamic world has also been God-based and that it has not been free. But that is because Allah is not regarded as the source of liberty, as the America’s Judeo-Christian God has been, but as the object of submission (“Islam” means “submission”).

Since the inception of the United States (and, indeed, before it in colonial America), liberty, i.e., personal freedom, has been linked to God.

America was founded on the belief that God is the source of liberty. That is why the inscription on the Liberty Bell is from the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible (Leviticus 25): “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

The Declaration of Independence also asserts this link: All men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” [Read more…]

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The Religious Right Takes a Hard Left

10/24/2010 – Robert Huff –
We live in an age of scientific hegemony (if I may borrow a term from the Marxists and feminists), where access to intellectual power and influence is granted to those who demonstrate their loyalty to the approved theories of the ruling elite. Scientists who refuse to bow at the altar of uniformity are labeled heretics and cast out of the intelligentsia, condemned to lives of unfunded grant proposals, tenure denials, and ruined reputations. [Read more…]

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Liberty, Youth, and Fidelity to Truth in the Open Society

Dr. Pedro Blas González
Dr. Pedro Blas González

10/16/2010 – Pedro Blas González –
Traveling through the world today, I get the vivid impression that a vast number of the people I meet are living with the self-conscious belief that life is a purposeless thing to be occupied with pointless, daily tasks. I encounter this in spontaneous conversations that arise in diverse places, and with many different people. I am never surprised to hear this same complaint from others. I find it important to listen intently to what others have to say in this matter.

I suppose that to some ears this may sound presumptuous on my part. After all, we are living in a time when most people claim the right to be critics. Critics are everyone in our age. This is as comical as it is deplorable. People who have never studied or read history, literature, philosophy or much of anything else of lasting value are more interested in attacking the contemplative character of genuine ideas than they are in learning and incorporating these in their own lives. And, if these critics perceive or imagine that they are in the presence of a morally upright, righteous person, then they intensify their resistance to knowledge, to advice, to the other person before them like beasts of burden who grudgingly anticipate a difficult task. Unfortunately, today cynicism has filled in the vacuum where virtue once ruled. [Read more…]

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Hayek, Libertarians, and Conservatives

The Road to Serfdom10/17/2010 – Ron Lipsman –
Sixty-six years after its original publication, Friedrich Hayek’s masterpiece, The Road to Serfdom, continues to inspire legions of both mature and aspiring devotees of individual liberty, free markets and limited government. Hayek’s explanations of why collectivist planning must inevitably lead to tyranny are simple and logical, yet also profound and thoroughly convincing.

Hayek’s grand tome, The Constitution of Liberty, published sixteen years later, contains more brilliant reasoning and forehead-slapping insights — this time more from a “political/sociological” point of view than via the economic slant in The Road to Serfdom. But The Constitution of Liberty ends with a special postscript entitled “Why I am Not a Conservative.” This short but devastating critique of American conservatism — as Hayek saw it in 1960 — has had a demoralizing effect on the conservative movement. [Read more…]

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Social Darwinism and the Left

10/15/2010 – Jay Richards –
The charge that if you defend free markets and limited government, then you’re a Social Darwinist is a hackneyed and dishonest claim of the Left. I’m not sure who first tried to identify conservative economic policies with Social Darwinism, though Walter Mondale famously attacked (and misrepresented) Ronald Reagan in the 1980s for defending “Social Darwinism” rather than “social decency.”

In a recent column, Robert Reich indulges this nonsense once again (“Republican Economics as Social Darwinism”). The charge, of course, is that conservatives or Republicans oppose say, nationalized medicine, or a massive welfare state, or unsustainable entitlement spending, because they think society should allow the weak to be weeded out and the strong to survive. [Read more…]

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Two Steps Forward

Democrats communists10/10/2010 – Jeffrey Folks –
Lenin famously described his strategy for communist domination as “one step forward, two steps back.” Of course, by that he did not mean to suggest steps of equal length. The step forward was a lot more like two large steps, and the two steps back were more or less symbolic, designed to diffuse opposition.

Clearly, in the past two years the United States has moved two giant steps in the direction of socialism. We have seen the redistribution of hundreds of billions of dollars, the seizure of major industries by the state, the re-emergence of a hard-core welfare state, the virtual nationalization of healthcare, takeover by regulation of the energy and financial sectors, and much more. This resurgence of state control has been accompanied by the new power of labor unions, environmental lobbyists, tort lawyers, and state bureaucracies. But now, having reached the limit of what the public will stomach, the Leninists who run the Democratic Party see that it is time for two baby-steps back. [Read more…]

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The Green War on Children

10/8/2010 – Michelle Malkin –
Halloween isn’t for another three weeks, but environmental ghouls are on the haunt. A sadistic video released by global warming fear-mongers reveals an inconvenient truth about eco-radicals: They despise the very children for whom they claim to be saving the planet.

In the opening scene of “No Pressure,” a four-minute short clip produced by carbon reduction activist group “10:10,” a teacher urges her elementary school charges to fight climate change by cutting their carbon emissions by 10 percent by Oct. 10. When a few uncooperative students object, the teacher (played by actress Gillian Anderson) presses a red button at her desk — which immediately detonates the nay-saying children. Their heads explode in graphic, bloody detail. Skin and body parts splatter all over their horrified classmates. [Read more…]

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