Where's the Controversy?

The headline reads "Controversial Ga. billboards link abortion, race".  In the article by Errin Harris of the Associated Press we find that there is a "Too Many Aborted" billboard campaign in Atlanta by Georgia Right to Life.  The campaign is aimed at reducing abortions within the black community.

The article itself exposes Harris' views on abortion.  The group producing the billboards is referred to as "anti-abortion".  Now they are, and on the surface this may seem innocuous, but it is a psychological ploy.  People are naturally suspicious of any group that is "anti" and Harris could have easily referred to Georgia Right to Life as being "pro-life".  One never hears of  those in favor of abortion  being referred to as "anti-life", it is always "pro-choice".

One has to wonder what is controversial about the campaign?  Are people who tell the truth and bring that truth before the public the ones causing controversy or is the controversy caused by those who do not want the truth to be told?

Planned Parenthood of Georgia spokesman Leola Reis says that "The language in the billboard is using messages of fear and shame to target women of color" and then parrots the party line euphemism that the only way to stop abortions is to provide "quality, affordable health care" to women.  This is the same as saying that the only way to stop abortions is to make them widely available.

The PR problem that Planned Parenthood has is that the billboards expose the truth.  Planned Parenthood was founded by the noted racist Margaret Sanger.  Sanger was a promoter of eugenics and abortion to reduce the numbers of what she considered to be inferior races, notably blacks.  Today in this country, black women make up 13% of the population, yet have 35% of the abortions.  The great majority of Planned Parenthood abortion mills are in black neighborhoods.  So the evidence is there that the abortion industry targets blacks.

Imagine the audacity of pro-life blacks opposing a disproportionate killing of their unborn. Where is the controversy in that?

A scientist comes to Christ

The drumbeat of modernists is that science and religion are incompatible, that only science deals with reality and religion is relegated to the realm of the subjective with no basis in fact.

Well, enter Francis Collins, MD, PhD, former director of the US Human Genome Project.  Collins has an amazing testimony of how science led him to Christ.  He was raised in a non-Christian home and declared himself an atheist in college, having little tolerance for belief in God.  He had developed a belief that science held all the answers regarding ultimate "truth".

It was only after Collins began his pursuit of a medical degree, because of his interest in DNA and RNA, that his worldview began to change.  One day, an elderly patient with heart disease shared her deep faith in God with him and asked him "What do you believe"?  From her innocent question, Collins realized that up to that point, he had rejected God because of intellectual dishonesty.  After all, a scientist is supposed to consider the evidence before rejecting a conclusion and he had never investigated the possibility that Christianity might be true.


Expecting an investigation of the rational basis of faith to shore up his atheism, he began to study world religions.  It was then that a pastor gave him a copy of C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity.  Lewis, who had once been an atheist himself, presented powerful, logical arguments for the existence of God.  A major premise that got to Collins was the idea that we all have an intuitive sense of right and wrong that spans all cultures.  This idea could have no basis in evolution, a philosophy embracing survival of the fittest.  This Moral Law was a signpost, potential evidence of a Law Giver.

Another signpost for Collins was the fact that the physical laws of the universe could be expressed in simple, beautiful mathematics.  And what about the characteristics of our universe, with fifteen constants that determine the behavior of electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces, the gravitational force perfectly calibrated to make complexity possible.  Any minuscule change in these characteristics would be catastrophic.  The implication of design was overpowering.

The more Collins investigated, the more he accepted God's existence and the more he despaired in being so far away from God's plan.  His despair was resolved when he met the person of Jesus Christ and his promise of forgiveness. In his twenty seventh year, Collins yielded his life to Christ while hiking in the Pacific Northwest. He states that, in 30 years,  he has found no conflicts between what he knows as a scientist and what he believes as a follower of Jesus Christ.

Collins work in DNA has only strengthened his belief in Christ.  DNA is the instruction book for all living things.  It is a marvelous code made up of a double helix, carrying information in a digital code consisting of chemical bases that scientists have labeled A,C, G, and T.  It is arranged in base pairs, that, if read aloud without stopping, it take 31 years to read it.  Scientist have now completed the sequence of all 3.1 billion letters of this human instruction book and Collins believes that anything this complex could have never risen purely by chance.  It points to an intelligence which he believes is the God revealed in Scripture.

So, far from being in conflict with Christianity, Collins believes that science confirms that our universe was made by an intelligent God of order who established fixed physical laws that are ours to discover.

The heavens surely declare the glory of God and life at the sub-cellular level clearly reveals His handwork.

Don't ask, Don't tell

Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that ending the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military would be the right thing to do.  

Now I served in the military for twenty-three years, retiring after a squadron command, and one thing I know is that the further up the ladder one climbs in his military career, the more political the environment.  This is especially true after an individual starts pinning on stars and finds himself in Washington. In giving his testimony, I can assure you that Admiral Mullen was speaking as a politician, parroting the position of those in the administration, and not as a warrior concerned with the welfare of his men.

Admiral Mullen stated in his testimony that the policy now in place is forcing young men and women to lie about who they are in order to serve.  He could not be more wrong. Columnists Clarence Page unknowingly framed the argument when he stated that men and women should be punished for what they do, not who they are.  The current policy has nothing to do with forcing anyone to lie about who they are, but has everything to do with forbearance in letting them conceal what they do. What they do is rightfully viewed as a perversion by most of their fellow soldiers.

Whether one believes in evolutionism or creation, the human body is designed to perform a certain way.  No one would observe someone sniffing cocaine and conclude that the nose was designed for the purpose of ingesting cocaine into the lungs. By the same token, no one would align two naked humans of the same sex and conclude that they were designed to fit together sexually.  In both cases, the acts would be a perversion of purpose.  Homosexual behavior is banned because it’s immoral, as Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter Pace said before he was shown the door for violating political correctness. The discrimination is based on actions, not inherited traits. 

As for media treatment of this issue, G.K. Chesterton had it exactly right when he said: “Men always attempt to avoid condemning a thing upon merely moral grounds. ….modern journalism has a standing fear. It will call the action anything else – mad, bestial, vulgar, idiotic, rather than call it sinful.” Unsurprisingly journalists have jumped on the civil rights bandwagon, snatching numbers involving homosexuals who serve and those who are separated out of thin air to support their case, despite the fact that there is not one scintilla of evidence to show that homosexuality is genetic. 

Since the 1991 Tailhook incident, women have moved into roles that were traditionally off limits and the results have been a degradation of combat effectiveness.  Discounting the loss of manpower due to pregnancy, the biggest problem that the services face today is fraternization between the sexes within the chain of command and the inevitable resentment due to favoritism.  Politicians have turned the military into a social experiment, forcing men and women to serve for extended periods in close proximity in the intense environment of deployment, expecting no fall out.  It hasn’t worked.  The military has its hands full dealing with this issue , but as always, it  has adapted and overcome. Now the campaign is to throw another social experiment with a sexual component into the equation. 

Surveys show a majority of service personnel oppose lifting the ban, and at least 10 percent say they would not re-enlist. More than 1,150 retired generals and admirals have signed a letter opposing this radical change.  They know that currently our military is the finest in the world, and anything that even hints of detracting from its effectiveness should be rejected out of hand.  Serving one’s country is a privilege, not a right.

Obama's New Deal

President Obama recently submitted a 3.8 billion dollar budget to Congress which includes $100 billion for job stimulus programs.  This is on top of the nearly $800 billion that he set aside for creating jobs several months ago.  Added to the $700 billion that George Bush provided for bailouts in the TARP program, the government has now spent or will spend $1.6 trillion in efforts to save the economy.  As the great Yogi Berra once said, "Its deja vu all over again".  We as a nation have been down this road before.

FDR's administration tried the same thing and for years was given credit for bringing the economy out of the Great Depression.  It was a myth.  The New Deal worsened the situation.  One year after the stock market crash of 1929, the unemployment rate stood at 5%.  One year after the Hoover-FDR New Deal went into effect, the unemployment rate was 15%.  In May of 1939, it stood at 20%, prompting Henry Morgenthou, Secretary of the Treasury to complain, "We have tried spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.....We have never made good on our promises.....I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started.....And an enormous debt to boot!".

The fact is, that every federal dollar that goes into creating jobs takes money out of the private sector, reduces spending by consumers and lessens the creation of jobs in the private sector.  Most economists are now convinced that if government had just gotten out of the way and let the economy correct itself that recovery would have occurred years earlier.

Another downside to the New Deal was that once he had brought about massive unemployment, FDR found it necessary to raise taxes to astronomical levels to pay for all of his federal programs.  The top marginal tax rate became 79%, then 90%, which discouraged investors who had already been crowded from access to funds due to massive government borrowing.  If the present economy ever starts a recovery, look for the Democrats to enact massive tax increases on the "rich" to pay the expenses of the "poor".

The current so-called stimulus package is nothing more than an updated version of FDR's New Deal, only worse in that it is not designed to stimulate anything, only to give away money that the government doesn't have in order to curry political favor.

The Dutch theologian, Abraham Kuyper, developed the idea of sphere sovereignty.  What that means in this case is that God has granted a sphere of control to government and a sphere of control to the private sector.  When government steps out of its rightful sphere and meddles in the private sector, disastrous results are sure to follow because it violates the Divine order.  All I know is that unemployment was below 8% before the stimulus and now is at 10% and not forecast to come below that for the foreseeable future.  Go figure.

Are they really pro-choice?

Super Bowl Sunday is approaching and this year it seems that the commercials are garnering more attention than the game itself.  Focus on the Family is sponsoring an ad this year that stars Tim Tebow and his mom, Pam Tebow.

I don't know what is in the ad, but from all reports, it is a celebration of family and of the decision that Pam made not to abort him when she was being urged by her doctors to do so, due to her illness and the drugs she was taking that could have possibly caused birth defects.

The rumor mill of what the ad contains has created a firestorm in the media and among the "pro-choice" crowd who has issued demands that CBS censor it.  Isn't it ironic to see people who present themselves as "pro-choice" get upset when someone exercises a choice to keep her baby.  CBS has invited the protesters to run their own ad, but so far has no takers.  They just want to squelch the Christian, pro-life message.

My question is, "If they are really "pro-choice", then one of those choices has to be to keep the baby by not aborting him.   So why all the ruckus?"

Our drift toward socialsim

 

Consider the following two quotes:

“What is government but 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. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this:  you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government”.

“Implicit in [the Constitution’s] structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism”, any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course…….”

The first quote is by James Madison, “Father of the Constitution” and our fourth President which is from Federalist Paper # 51.  The second is by Barack Obama, our forty-fourth and current President and is quoted in his book, “The Audacity of Hope”.  One has to ask, why the obvious difference in worldview?  Why would Madison feel the need to explain the case for limited government and Obama feel the need to explain why politicians can’t let the Constitution inhibit them?

I believe the difference is to a large degree the result of a state run educational system.  I’m not talking about the dumbing down of the American electorate to the point that they cannot follow anything more complex than a ten second sound bite. That is a discussion for another day.  What I am talking about is the systematic divorcing of a Biblical worldview from education over the last sixty years. [

The educator Samuel Johnson once said that the primary purpose of education is to teach students right from wrong and to get them to prefer the right.  And that is the primary difference between the educational system that was in place in this country up until the 1940’s and the educational system that we have had since then.  Those responsible for forming the nation were the products of a liberal arts education informed by a Biblical worldview.  Our present day legislators were educated with a secular worldview. They therefore reject the concept of absolute truth, the idea that man is subject to God’s laws, they do not have a proper understanding of the nature of man or understand the proper role of government.  The fruits of these different worldviews can be seen in the legislation passed by both groups.

The Homestead Act, passed in 1862, was probably one of the greatest acts of impartial legislation ever passed in this country.  It took the land in the West--one of the greatest assets held by any government in history— and gave it in 160 parcels to anyone willing to settle it.  As a result we witnessed the greatest spurt in economic development in our history.

The Homestead Act gave land to any citizen, regardless of race or economic status and with the certainty that those settling on this land would not be constrained to vote for a certain politician.  The land was available to all Americans, with no strings attached, in perfect keeping with the spirit of ‘promoting the general welfare’. It wasn’t just available some particular minority group or constituency.

What is important is the worldview behind this legislation. There were two parts:  The idea of human equality, that all men were created by God with equal rights and the idea that there were universal moral laws, i.e., the  “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and that government was subject to those laws and should be limited in its reach. It was these beliefs that allowed Congress to dispense a national asset while forgoing the opportunity to expand federal power.

For our first 100 years, legislators understood themselves to bound and limited by the laws of God.  It is precisely this understanding that is missing among our political leadership today and in fact this concept is anathema to them.  For example, when Clarence Thomas was undergoing grilling by the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings, the most intense questioning was about the idea of natural law.  This was a dangerous idea to the senators.  They did not wish to have a Supreme Court Judge who viewed himself under the authority of God.  It would hinder their political ambitions.

Today’s senators and congressmen have been educated with the idea that government is the ultimate authority and that they can and should use it as a means to change society to conform to their idea of what it should be, regardless of what the Constitution says.  Hence we get the current health care legislation that Democrats seemed determined to force on us, “for our own good”, despite the opposition of an overwhelming majority of Americans. The Democrats have forgotten the lessons of history: that once government takes the view that the king is law it quickly becomes a despot.

We have beeen educated out of the immutable truths of God and the fallout is destroying the republic. Courts and politicians have abandoned the concept of adhering to original intent and embraced the “living Constitution” so that it can be manipulated at the whim of those in power. This is why Obama refers to the thought of absolute truth being tyrannical.  Absolute truth is an impediment to  “change” and to those who have determined that their version of change is what is good.   Once the idea of absolute truth is abandoned, the definition of “good” becomes subjective and the only standard of behavior is what politicians want, and they justify bullying the rest of us to get what they want.

Health care or tyranny?

When the President, Democrats and liberals (but I repeat myself) talk abut the need for health care "reform" and mention health care as being a basic right of all Americans, the public should know that what they really mean is that they view government as having the right to forcefully take money out of one person's pocket and give it to another. If an individual did this he would be prosecuted for robbery.

This effort to insert government bureaucracy into the health care system with taxpayer money, if successful, will eventually destroy the system and bankrupt the country. Our present system admittedly has flaws, but is still the best in the world and a government takeover will most certainly lead to a decline in both quality and quantity. What we are witnessing is not about reforming health care anyway, it is grab for power and a blatant attempt to impose government control over what for 250 years has been none of the government's business.

Professor and author J.P. Moreland explains the principle paradigm behind this movement in his book, "Love Your God With All of Your Mind". To quote Moreland:

"A congresswoman made the following comment: "Government should honor children's rights. Therefore, just as government should vouchsafe a child's right not to be molested, so it should do so for a child's right to government sponsored day care".

"Now what is wrong with this argument as it stands? Do you see what I see in this piece of reasoning? It may help your seeing if I place a mental distinction in your mind: the distinction between negative and positive rights. A negative right is a right to be protected from some sort of harm. Negative rights place a duty on the government to keep others from doing something to me. A positive right is a right to to have something provided for me. Positive rights place a duty on the government to force others (for instance by taxation) to do something for me. For example, if health care is a negative right, the government must see to it that I can get whatever health care I can afford by my own labor unhindered by unfair limitations based on race, creed or gender. But if health care is a positive right, the government has a duty to raise the taxes sufficient to provide me with health care."

Viewing rights as positive rights stands in direct contrast to the political views of those who wrote the Constitution. Our Founding Fathers had a political philosophy, informed by a Biblical worldview, in which they absolutely feared a powerful federal government, which they knew would gather to itself more and more power. The Founding Father's concept of liberty embraced negative rights. They viewed freedom as being "freedom from", i.e., freedom from tyranny. etc. In their political theory, the government's role was to maintain order, provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare by ensuring justice in domestic matters, i.e., a level playing field for all citizens. In fact, the Bill of Rights is a list of negative rights providing protection from the federal government, with the 10th Amendment specifically limiting its power to intrude into the lives of citizens.

Now one has to admit that Republicans are just as guilty as Democrats in not letting a silly thing like our governing document stand in the way of creating "rights" and then providing seemingly free goodies to their constituents to ensure re-election, but this President and this Democratic Congress want to take things to a new level. When the federal government can forcefully take over banks, the automobile industry, tell corporate CEO's how much money that they can make and do a host of other unconstitutional things , then the very structure of our government has already been altered. Now Democrats and the President want to institute government control over the most elementary decisions of Americans to force them into a single payer government health care system which the country can't afford and which will give bureaucrats final say over who gets what health care.

How will they do this? Embedded in every overhaul proposal currently being considered by Democrats (no sane person would call it reform) are provisions that would force citizens to carry health insurance or face fines. In a note written by Thomas Barthold, chief of staff for the Joint Committee on Taxation, refusal to pay those fines could result in a misdemeanor charge by the Internal Revenue Service with Americans facing $250,000 in fines and a year in jail. The founding Fathers in their wildest dreams did not envision a federal government with the power to remove the freedom of its citizens with threats of fines and incarceration because they simply refused to buy a product.

There is a Constitutional right associated with government health care, but not in the sense that liberals mean when they assert that every American has a right to tax funded health insurance. The right associated with health care is a negative right. The right to be free from government tyranny.