Tag Archives: Topic: Culture

American Spectator: Other pro-family groups have been collecting petitions and urging the BSA to stand firm. The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which litigates in defense of religious freedom, has recently warned BSA that its proposed local option would potentially remove protection that courts have given BSA’s national policy. Absent a clear national standard, ADF warns, BSA would be vulnerable to litigation. “It is not legally necessary for BSA to sacrifice its history or its principles in the face of growing threats,” ADF told BSA in its appeal.

Baptist Press on Opposing Views: Even a neutral national policy that leaves membership decisions to local councils and troops would endanger the organization, ADF said, because the Boy Scouts “then will have no common message upon which to base their right to freedom of expressive association.” . . . However, to ensure ongoing protection for its national policy under the First Amendment, BSA should take steps to regulate or disassociate itself from these groups,” ADF said. “In sum, consistency is key. Organizations that strive to maintain a consistency of their message by selecting members and participants based on a shared set of values typically have their First Amendment free association rights affirmed.”

J. Daniel Hammond at Public Discourse: The positivist turn in the understanding of reality and the related claim that empirical science is the only source of knowledge have created a faith that economics, or psychology, or neurology, or evolutionary history can potentially explain all that can be known of human behavior. Modern scholars, economists included, are trapped in a ditch that was first dug four centuries ago with the dawning of the “Enlightenment.” The ditch is now so deep that they cannot see over the top. As Pope Benedict pointed out in his address to the science faculties of the University of Regensburg, if all knowledge is based on science and science is restricted to empirically falsifiable statements, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced. Economists have made a significant contribution to the reduction of marriage and family to the merely mundane.

Christopher O. Tollefsen at Public Discourse: Rather, I am interested in Leiter’s judgment that religious believers are guilty of a “culpable failure of epistemic warrant.” That judgment is important to the question that serves as Professor Leiter’s title: Religion almost certainly can deserve no positive respect if it is based on wrongful belief for which believers are responsible, and so toleration is the best that is on offer.

Christian Institute: The Government’s Bill to redefine marriage has taken a new twist, with an amendment tabled to allow heterosexual couples to have civil partnerships instead of marriage. But supporters of traditional marriage say it will further undermine marriage, and it shows the Government has opened a Pandora’s Box which they can’t control.

ABC News: Abortions are becoming illegal in America at a rapid clip.

Daniel Foster at National Review: Han van Lohuizen, a former George W. Bush pollster with a Ph.D. from Rice, is on a mission to show that opposition to same-sex marriage is a political and demographic dead end, propped up by a shrinking core of the old, the undereducated, and the highly churched. Bitter clingers, if you will, to the idea of traditional marriage.

AP: New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman urged the NFL on Tuesday to investigate whether possible draft picks were improperly asked about their sexual orientation during the league’s combine, which he said would be illegal in New York.

The Hill: Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Wednesday that while he believes in the “historic and religious definition of marriage,” he believes the federal tax code should be reformed in a way to make it “more neutral” and not exclude same-sex couples.

AP: A record number of U.S. counties – more than 1 in 3 – are now dying off, hit by an aging population and weakened local economies that are spurring young adults to seek jobs and build families elsewhere.

“We join millions in congratulating Francis I on his selection as pope. He is a leader who has stood strongly for the values of religious freedom, the sanctity of human life, marriage, and the family, often under very trying circumstances. We appreciate his many strong statements over the years on the protection of marriage and the unborn and trust he will continue to be a powerful voice on the deep importance of these issues.”

James Taranto at Wall Street Journal: “President Barack Obama said he could not imagine a circumstance in which a state banning gay marriage was legal,” the Puffington Host reports. The comment came during an interview with Clinton aide turned ABC Newsman George Stephanopoulos, who asked Obama, in the Puffington paraphrase, “whether gay marriage was a right under the Constitution.”

CNSNews: etween 1969 and 2012, when there were 49,485,000 students in elementary and high school, the percentage of students eating any category of federally subsidized lunch increased from about 40 percent to about 64 percent. At the same time, the percentage eating “free” lunches increased from about 6 percent to about 38 percent — a more than sixfold increase.

Alliance Defending Freedom explains Boy Scouts can uphold time-honored mission, avoid legal attacks

Hawaii Reporter: The Hawaii State Senate in 2010, after a lawsuit and threat of additional actions, discontinued its voluntary daily prayer prior to the start of each Legislative Session as had been the tradition since Territorial days of Hawaii. In January, 2013, the Senate announced it was reinstating voluntary prayer, but with new “guidelines.” In February, the prayer gave way to a strict “Moment of Contemplation,” limited to 90 seconds prior to the start of the Senate Session. Not all Senators have participated. Republican State Senator Sam Slom (9th-Oahu), who has taken it upon himself to deliver a closing daily session prayer since 2010, including “God,” had his turn today to deliver the “Contemplation.” Here is his “moment” for his Senate colleagues and the public . . .

Baptist Press: As public policy continues to change on the issue, a LifeWay Research poll shows 58 percent of American adults believe homosexuality is a civil rights issue and 64 percent say it is inevitable same-sex marriage will become legal throughout the United States.

Christian Institute: The poll, conducted by ICM, found 69 per cent agreed that the Tories’ appeal could be boosted by keeping “themselves on the side of traditional families”. That number rises to 84 per cent amongst Tory supporters, but even 62 per cent of Labour and Lib Dem supporters agree.

S. Adam Seagrave at Public Discourse: When intellectual arguments against abortion fail to persuade, recourse must be had to images and strategies that awake what David Hume considered our “moral sense.” . . . The pro-life movement currently finds itself in the same place as the abolition movement at the time of Frederick Douglass’s great speech. If we are to experience similar success, we would do well to follow Douglass’s advice and focus our energies on awakening the moral sense of our fellow citizens. It would help to have another Douglass for our cause, but at least we still have his words: “The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.”

Karen E. Crummy and Allison Sherr at the Denver Post(11/8/2012): How did Colorado go from the reddest of red to consecutively blue so quickly?
The answer may lie partly in the state’s changing demography. Colorado’s Latino population has grown 42 percent in 12 years, helping to transform once-reliable Republican areas into swing counties now leaning toward Democrats.

William Kilpatric at Catholic World Report: Perhaps the only good thing to come out of Muslim rioting in more than 20 countries last September is that this has been extremely helpful in clarifying what Islam teaches—and what we can expect if its influence expands in the West.

LifeSiteNews: The Boy Scouts of America are asking for citizens across the country to express their opinion about the BSA’s policy barring open homosexuals from joining the group as members or scoutmasters. In a tiny link at the top of their website, the Scouts announced their review of the policy. A second link simply asks readers, “Share your feedback.”

Frank Kacer at Washington Times: But President Obama apparently knows better. By “evolving” in his understanding of marriage, and disregarding the federal separation of powers, Obama used the full weight of the Executive Branch to file an amicus brief challenging California’s right to define marriage by claiming a violation of the 14th Amendment equal protection clause.

Washington Times: “It is not an exaggeration to call the [Proposition 8 case] Hollingsworth v. Perry the ‘Roe v. Wade for marriage . . . ’”

NC Register: But Kevin Theriot of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal advocacy group, told the Register that Phoenix’s expanded code “goes further than any I’ve seen. It has profound implications, especially for business people. It prohibits any speech that makes people feel unwelcome.”

Dave Cortman at Washington Times: In the interest of remaining this force for good, Boy Scouts has focused its membership and leadership guidelines on those things that correspond with the “morally straight” aspects of the pledge and the “high ideals and proper behavior” Fisher referenced.

At the heart of the current debates about same-sex marriage are three crucial questions: What is marriage, why does marriage matter for public policy, and what would be the consequences of redefining marriage to exclude sexual complementarity?

CBS: Blankfein was the first leader in corporate America to take a public stand supporting same-sex marriage in a commercial recorded early last year for the Human Rights Campaign. He calls it an important issue because he sees how it relates to recruiting and retaining people at the firm.

Washington Post: A new Quinnipiac poll out today drives this home with striking clarity . . . The poll finds that a plurality of Americans supports same sex marriage, 47-43. But dig into the internals and you find that the groups that increasingly make up the main pillars of the Democratic coalition support it in much larger numbers. Hispanics: 63-32. Young voters: 62-30. College educated whites: 59-32. White women: 50-40.

WBUR.org (AP): Massachusetts Democrats are faulting Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Michael Sullivan on the issue of gay marriage even as Sullivan scrambled to say he opposes a federal law that bars benefits for same-sex couples.

Doug Mainwaring at Public Discourse: While religion and tradition have led many to their positions on same-sex marriage, it’s also possible to oppose same-sex marriage based on reason and experience.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life: An analysis of Pew Research Center surveys reveals no signs of a marked resurgence of faith among Catholics in France, Germany, Spain and Italy – the four countries with the largest Catholic populations in Western Europe. Yet the picture facing the church is not entirely bleak. French, Italian and Spanish Catholics have reported low but relatively stable levels of religious commitment in recent years. In Germany, too, the overall trend in religious commitment has been fairly stable over the past decade, despite short-lived shifts in the importance German Catholics place on religion.

Todd Starnes at Townhall: Gay rights activists are demanding Tim Tebow back out of a speaking engagement at Liberty University just two weeks after pressuring the New York Jets quarterback to cancel a speaking engagement at the First Baptist Church of Dallas.

SCOTUS Blog: We present the results of a new study, which offers significant methodological improvements over past studies by combining experimental and observational elements . . . We found that even when ruling on highly controversial and politicized issues – such as the health care and immigration rulings we considered – the Supreme Court can change public opinion.

Christian Concern: Sociologist Dr Patricia Morgan issued a warning to the House of Commons that same-sex ‘marriage’ reinforces the idea that marriage is irrelevant to parenthood.

Leslie Grimard at Public Discourse: No one wants to return to the 1950s as Betty Friedan characterized them, where women felt blocked from pursuing interests outside the home. At the same time, to insist that stay-at-home moms are trapped, desperate, and unhappy is naïve, insulting, and even damaging to the roots of society.

NY Post: The numbers are staggering. Out of 120,000 live births in New York City in 2010, more than 54,000 babies were born out of wedlock. The human toll behind the numbers is devastating. Children raised without two parents face much higher odds in every facet of life. It’s as if they are forced to swim with one hand tied behind their backs.

John S. Hamlon at Catholic World Report: Why natural law arguments for marriage—while very important—are not enoug

Rasmussen: Fifty-nine percent (59%), though, say that is no longer possible, up from 55% in late January and the highest level of pessimism in over four years of surveying.

Sacramento Bee: “A democracy is only as strong as you make it, and you can’t make it strong unless you know its history,” he told high school students Wednesday at the federal courthouse.

John Flynn at Zenit: “Marriage is in crisis because it has become nothing more than an adult centric institution, no longer the foundation of the family, in the minds of an increasing number of people,” he commented.

Christian Institute: The BBC will broadcast an Easter programme saying the way Britain treats gay people is like the crucifixion of Jesus. Critics say the BBC has sunk “to a new low” by using the crucifixion to push a gay rights message. The programme will be broadcast on Radio 4 as part of a series of lectures in the run up to Easter.

AP: A new TV commercial features a good-looking young woman on a beach vacation lounging next to a good-looking young man. He bemoans the glare on his iPad and she fills him in on the Kindle Paperwhite’s sun-friendly screen

SCOTUS Blog: Greenhouse and Siegel use the source materials republished in the book to challenge the conventional wisdom that, “if the Court had stayed its hand or decided Roe v. Wade on narrower grounds, the nation would have reached a political settlement and avoided backlash.” Once again, Linda Greenhouse has graciously agreed to answer a few questions about her work on this subject.

Albert Mohler: The moral effects of pornography are, by now, well attested. The scourge of pornography has brought ruin and harm into the lives of millions of our friends and neighbors, destroying marriages, distorting sexuality, and poisoning minds. Even so, the pornography industrial complex continues to grow, representing one of the most lucrative segments of the Internet economy.

Mercury News: New introductions to the sections on eternal marriage and plural marriage emphasize monogamous marriage as the standard, says Valerie Hudson, a Mormon political science professor at Texas A&M University and co-author of “Sex and World Peace.” “In these new introductions, we see that ‘plural marriage’ (notice, not ‘plurality of wives’) is to be viewed as a principle and not as a commandment, and that the ‘standard’ of marriage is monogamy,” Hudson writes in an email.

Fox News: American voters are split down the middle over whether same-sex marriage should be legalized, with the exact same percentage — 46 percent — in favor as opposed to it, according to the latest Fox News poll.

NC Register: Catholics for the Common Good issues a ‘playbook’ for true marriage to combat attempts to redefine the institution.

The Daily Caller: Mehlman announced that he was both gay and a supporter of same-sex marriage in 2010, more than three years after stepping down as chairman of the Republican National Committee. He has since apologized for not speaking out during the 2004 campaign.

CBC.ca: A comic book shop franchise in Ottawa is taking a stand for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) rights by pulling the work of a writer who publicly opposes gay marriage off its shelves.

Chicago Sun Times: Mayfield said she scheduled the meeting at the behest of Chicago-based Equality Illinois. The group sent ACLU attorney Khadine Bennett to explain the bill, which offers same-sex couples the full rights, benefits and responsibilities, Bennett said, of civil marriage. But members of the audience, which included numerous pastors and church members, balked at Bennett’s insistence that Senate Bill 10 “is about equality,” that it does not “require any religious group to marry a couple they don’t want to marry.”

CNN: They’re all pro-marriage territory,” says NOM spokesman Thomas Peters. “You know gay marriage proponents will claim that gay marriage is inevitable, but all they’ve managed to do is pick up a few blue states.”

CNSNews: More than 60 state and local Texas lawmakers signed a letter urging the Boy Scouts of America to maintain policies that support “family values and moral principles.”

Delaware Online (includes video): At least half of Delaware’s voters would support legislation granting marriage rights to same-sex couples and two-thirds say such a law would have no real impact on them personally, according to a poll done for Equality Delaware, the advocacy group that worked to pass the state’s civil unions bill two years ago

Tablet Mag: First, gracing the cover of the Times business section was Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, who in speaking out in favor of gay marriage last month, thought he was part of a new wave. It turned out he was alone, but not for long.

Maria Santo at the Baltimore Sun: It is long past time to question the appalling intellectual dishonesty that has led us to kill 55 million children through abortion in the past 40 years. We must, as a matter of justice, find better solutions to difficult pregnancies. Civilized societies thrive through smart, creative, generous, life-giving and just solutions to their difficulties. Civilized societies do not kill children as a solution to any problem, no matter how grave. No society can claim to be just while legally killing its own children in the name of “choice.”

Helen M. Alvaré and Meg T. McDonnell at Washington Post: Pro-choice Americans must wonder from time to time what keeps pro-lifers going. Why don’t we lay down our signs, cease our marching and admit that we’ve been good and beaten for these 40 years since Roe v. Wade? One of us is a baby boomer, the other a millennial; our views may help others understand these things and, along the way, think about some rarely considered aspects of the U.S. experience with legal abortion.

Albert Mohler: The Colorado legislature is considering the repeal of laws in the state that criminalize adultery or any act that would “promote sexual immorality.” According to Lynn Bartels ofThe Denver Post, the process of repeal is now well underway, with the House Judiciary Committee voting 8-3 to take adultery and sexual immorality out of the criminal code in Colorado. | Audio Broadcasts at AlbertMohler.com – 3-4-13

Harry R. Jackson at Townhall: From the very beginning, homosexual “marriage” activists have sought to hijack not only the moral authority of the Civil Rights Movement, but also the legal arguments which liberated minorities from centuries of legalized oppression and discrimination.

Edward Mechmann at Archdiocese of NY: For a long time, apologists and advocates for legal abortion liked to say that they believed that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare”. Well, we know that they’ve given up on “rare”. And they certainly are unconditionally committed to “legal”. But it’s astonishing that they now seem to have given up on “safe”.

LA Times: The shift in favor of gay rights may have an effect on the justices. If not, it could still doom restrictive marriage laws in liberal states like California.

LifeSiteNews: A new study commissioned by the Vitae Foundation has taken a careful scientific approach to identify what drives women’s decisions to keep their child, place a child in adoption or abort one’s child. The study has determined what influences that decision, which women are most reachable, what message is most likely to reach them and from whom vulnerable women would like to hear that message. | A New Understanding of the Trauma of Abortion

Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review: Dr. Anne Nolte, a family physician, takes time today from her busy patient schedule at the National Gianna Center for Women’s Health and Fertility she directs in Manhattan to protest Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Reproductive Health Act.

Pat Buchanan at Townhall: What is it that gives a party its legitimacy, its right to rule? What holds a nation together when its cradle faith, its founding ideology, has been abandoned by both elites and the people? That is China’s coming crisis.

Adam J. MacLeod and Andrew Beckwith at Public Discourse:
Since redefining marriage requires us to deny sexual differences, even school children now have to conform to that principle at the risk of punishment.

LifeSiteNews: Much of the data revealed in this report supports the research published by the Marriage and Religion Research Institute. For example, data published by MARRI highlights the association between living in an intact, married family and higher GPAs in school. – See more at: http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/new-research-shows-all-north-american-children-in-two-parent-homes-do-bette#sthash.EoTjf1Lj.dpuf

Mike Florio at NBC Sports: The fact that the NFL isn’t ready for openly gay players continues to be proven by the words and actions of men who currently occupy, who previously inhabited NFL, and who will be joining NFL locker rooms.

Politico: Along with more than 80 prominent Republicans, the “Dirty Harry” star has signed an amicus brief in opposition to California’s Proposition 8, Breitbart News firstreported.

First Things: The Knights of Columbus should be commended for commissioning this Marist survey. The mainstream media enjoys reporting on polls that purportedly show strong public sentiment in favor of legal abortion. However, by asking people what they thought about abortion in specific circumstances, Marist is able to present a more nuanced and a more accurate view of public attitudes toward abortion.

Heritage Foundation: He argued that religious freedom “is the fundamental right on which all others are built; because if I don’t have the right to believe and practice what I believe, the freedom of speech, the freedom of assembly, those are worthless. It all starts with: do I have the right to make conscious moral decisions?”

Reuters on Yahoo: Gay and lesbian couples living together report poorer health than straight married couples, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday, speculating that legalizing same-sex marriage could reduce the disparities.

ACLU: The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Pennsylvania have sent a letter requesting that school officials at Governor Mifflin School District in Berks County stop using Internet filters that violate students’ First Amendment free speech rights. The district uses a “sexuality” filter that blocks sites that express support of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, and an “intolerance” filter that blocks political advocacy sites that are labeled as intolerant.

Radio Free Europe: The Belarusian Justice Ministry has refused to legally register a homosexual rights organization in Minsk.

Newsitem.com: The Greater Susquehanna Valley United Way Board announced Friday it will be placing discretionary funding for the Susquehanna Council of Boy Scouts of America on “pause” while the national Boy Scouts of America organization concludes its review of a policy of “not granting membership to open or avowed homosexuals.”

Gay Star News: ‘Most churches and sociologists agree that adult behaviour in all areas is shaped and influenced by what has happened in the family. ‘Spousal abuse, incest and rape, all these have irreversible negative effects on children and unfortunately and regrettably these are on the rise. ‘And I believe the root cause of some persons embracing the homosexual lifestyle’.

LifeSiteNews: A recent paper by a Ph.D. priest from Poland has been circling the globe in recent weeks and given heightened prominence by the recent revelations of a Vatican inquiry into a “gay mafia” inside the Vatican. “Standing with the Pope against homoheresy,” was written in late 2012 by Fr. Dariusz Oko, Ph.D., a priest of the Archdiocese of Krakow and Assistant Professor at the John Paul II Pontifical University in Krakow.