News

Over 10,000 Minnesota tea partiers cheer Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin

2 Comments
Rep. Michele Bachmann speaks to over 10,000 supporters in Minnesota

Here’s the story from TwinCities.com.

Excerpt:

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin joined Congresswoman Michele Bachmann on a Minneapolis stage Wednesday, holding a raucous campaign rally of more than 10,000 fans that exceeded the size of many presidential whistle-stops.

Bachmann, an outspoken conservative whose national profile has made her a target of Democrats, is seeking re-election in what is expected to be one of the most expensive congressional races in the country. Palin, another conservative darling who infuriates Democrats, came to Minnesota to offer her endorsement and help raise money.

Calling Bachmann a “fireball,” Palin asked the cheering crowd, “What do you say, Minnesota? Will you do the rest of the nation a favor and elect Michele Bachmann?”

Waving signs and cheering loudly, women seemed to make up a substantial part of the crowd at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

[…]The Bachmann campaign initially planned a much smaller event, but demand grew so that the Republican Party of Minnesota — which teamed with Bachmann to stage the event — eventually handed out more than 10,000 tickets.

“I’ve been to presidential campaign rallies that drew fewer people,” party Chairman Tony Sutton said.

[…]The two women overshadowed another speaker, Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who has been laying the groundwork for a potential presidential campaign. Bachmann and Palin are both national figures who share an appeal among followers — that their words are the unvarnished, unwavering truth.

“Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin are galvanizing the conservative movement across this nation,” Sutton said.

There’s something about hearing Michele speak that men really, really like:

Bill Birckweg, of Brooklyn Park, took a day off from work to attend the Bachmann rally.

He arrived at the convention center at 9:30 a.m. and dashed in when the doors opened at noon to stand in the front row next to the stage.

“I’m an independent conservative, and I’m here to support Michele Bachmann,” Birckweg said. “She’s being targeted by the national Democratic Party. All she has done is stand up for American values. That’s what I stand for.”

Michele’s definitely a grassroots candidate who would shake up Washington if she were to be elected President in 2012.

Meet your future President, America

And from Fox News. (H/T Dad)

Excerpt:

When Rep. Michele Bachmann grabbed the microphone and electrified a crowd of Tea Party loyalists in her home state of Minnesota on Thursday, her words — as well as a few other characteristics — bore striking similarities to another galvanizing force within the movement: Sarah Palin.

[…]”They’re both moms so there’s a lot of similarities,” said Annette Bystrom, who traveled from Ellsworth, Wis., to hear Bachmann speak. “They both stand for God, the truth and their families.

[…]”I am the chief coupon-clipper at our house,” she told a cheering crowd of 200 conservative activists outside the Minnesota state capitol. “Whoever balances the checkbook knows we gotta bring in at least a little bit more than what you put out.”

Bachmann went on to say that she and her husband, parents of five biological children (the same number as the Palins) as well as 23 foster children, “always bought used cars” and “clothes in consignment stores.”

“We’ve lived like all of you live because we balance the checkbook,” she boomed.

You can read more about her in World Net Daily, Atlas Shrugs, and World Magazine. These stories really explain why everyone, especially men, like her so much. She’s my favorite Congresswoman, and I would be very happy if she were elected President. A good start would be for her to be selected as House Majority Leader in November, when the Republicans regain control of the House of Representatives.

We need to put a normal person like Michele in charge of the country – someone who knows what it is like to homeschool children, run a business and clip coupons. Rich liberal socialists like Barack Obama have got to lose the next election to ordinary people.

Related posts

Podcasts

Should pro-lifers argue against sexual libertinism?

Leave a comment

Consider this article from Christianity Today about the tactics of the pro-life movement by Dinesh D’Souza.

Excerpt:

Why then, in the face of its bad arguments, does the pro-choice movement continue to prevail legally and politically?

I think it’s because abortion is the debris of the sexual revolution. We have seen a great shift in the sexual mores of Americans in the past half-century. Today a widespread social understanding persists that if there is going to be sex outside marriage, there will be a considerable number of unwanted pregnancies. Abortion is viewed as a necessary clean-up solution to this social reality.

In order to have a sexual revolution, women must have the same sexual autonomy as men. But the laws of biology contradict this ideology, so feminists who have championed the sexual revolution—Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Shulamith Firestone, among others—have found it necessary to denounce pregnancy as an invasion of the female body. The fetus becomes, in Firestone’s phrase, an “uninvited guest.” As long as the fetus occupies the mother’s womb, these activists argue, the mother should be able to keep it or get rid of it at her discretion.

If you’re going to make an omelet, the Marxist revolutionaries used to say, you have to be ready to break some eggs. And if you’re going to have a sexual revolution, you have to be ready to clean up the debris. After 35 years, the debris has become a mountain, and as a society, we are still adding bodies to the heap. No one in the pro-choice camp, of course, wants to admit any of this. It’s not only politically embarrassing, it’s also painful to one’s self-image to acknowledge a willingness to sustain permissive sexual values by killing the unborn.

This analysis might help to explain why otherwise compassionate people fight so tenaciously against the most helpless and vulnerable of all living creatures, unborn persons.

Here is a podcast from the Life Training Institute discussing that article.

The MP3 file is here. (Just the first 34 minutes)

Topics:

  • Dinesh says to argue against sexual promiscuity as part of pro-life apologetics
  • LTI’s general position is to focus on the humanity of the unborn
  • should pro-lifers change strategies to argue against sexual libertinism
  • is Dinesh right to say that arguing for the humanity of the unborn is not enough?
  • how strong are the philosophical arguments for the pro-life position
  • why has the effort to de-fund Planned Parenthood failed?
  • have the best arguments for the pro-life position become common knowledge?
  • do women who have abortions believe that the unborn are human or not?
  • do the arguments against abortion address the real circumstances of the woman?
  • why do people accept the humanity of the unborn, but still are pro-choice?
  • do people accept abortion because they refuse to give up sexual libertinism?
  • what is really behind the disrespect that people for the right to life?
  • is it possible for pro-lifers to convince people to give up irresponsible sex?
  • how did people begin to believe that a sexual revolution was a good idea?
  • has the sexual revolution increased or decreased social ills like divorce?
  • can a scientific case be made that sexual libertinism is destructive and costly?
  • should pro-lifers argue abortion on moral ground alone, or on utilitarian grounds?

This first file switches topics about 34 minutes into the podcast. There is actually a second file, too.

The MP3 file for part two is here.

The second topic is a paper written by an abortionist who is performing abortions while she is pregnant. She talks about performing a second-trimester abortion in the paper. Just as she describes tearing out the leg of the baby inside the other woman, her own baby kicks inside her abdomen. It’s interesting to hear this woman explain her feelings about this occurrence, and how she wants to suppress them. You can listen to the rest of the first MP3 file and then the second file as well to hear about that topic.

My thoughts

I have a lot of friends in the pro-life movement, and I also donate to pro-life debaters and sponsor pro-life events, (and I do the same for the marriage issue). But there is something else I do, too. I feel very, very badly about how women have adopted the habit of having sex before marriage, simply because they have bought into feminist ideology hook, line and sinker. Premarital sex causes women a lot of pain and emotional damage, as I described before. By abolishing sex roles, women are left with no idea about how to make a man love them and commit to them.

So it’s not just that I oppose abortion and support traditional marriage. It’s not just that I oppose women who murder their unborn children and who raise children without fathers. It’s that I oppose premarital sex, period. And I oppose the root of all these problems – feminism. It’s feminism that abolishes sex roles, chivalry, courting, romance, traditional marriage, two-parent families, at-fault divorce laws, small government, and eventually, liberty itself. And the way that I argue against feminism is by sharing the way that I treat women with you, my readers.

You can read more about my anti-feminist, pro-woman, pro-life, pro-marriage views in the related posts below.

Related posts on chastity, chivalry, courtship and marriage

Related posts on feminism and sexual libertinism

    Related posts on abortion

    Related posts on adult stem cell research

    Polemics

    Why doesn’t God show us more evidence for his existence?

    9 Comments

    Have you ever heard someone say that if God existed, he would give us more evidence? This is called the “hiddenness of God” argument. It’s also known as the argument from “rational non-belief”.

    Basically the argument is something like this:

    1. God is all powerful
    2. God is all loving
    3. God wants all people to know about him
    4. Some people don’t know about him
    5. Therefore, there is no God.

    You may hear have heard this argument before, when talking to atheists, as in William Lane Craig’s debate with Theodore Drange, (audio, video).

    Basically, the atheist is saying that he’s looked for God real hard and that if God were there, he should have found him by now. After all, God can do anything he wants that’s logically possible, and he wants us to know that he exists. To defeat the argument we need to find a possible explanation of why God would want to remain hidden when our eternal destination depends on our knowledge of his existence.

    What reason could God have for remaining hidden?

    Dr. Michael Murray, a brilliant professor of philosophy at Franklin & Marshall College, has found a reason for God to remain hidden.

    His paper on divine hiddenness is here:
    “Coercion and the Hiddenness of God“, American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol 30, 1993.

    He argues that if God reveals himself too much to people, he takes away our freedom to make morally-significant decisions, including responding to his self-revelation to us. Murray argues that God stays somewhat hidden, so that he gives people space to either 1) respond to God, or 2) avoid God so we can keep our autonomy from him. God places a higher value on people having the free will to respond to him, and if he shows too much of himself he takes away their free choice to respond to him, because once he is too overt about his existence, people will just feel obligated to belief in him in order to avoid being punished.

    But believing in God just to avoid punishment is NOT what God wants for us. If it is too obvious to us that God exists and that he really will judge us, then people will respond to him and behave morally out of self-preservation. But God wants us to respond to him out of interest in him, just like we might try to get to know someone we admire. God has to dial down the immediacy of the threat of judgment, and the probability that the threat is actual. That leaves it up to us to respond to God’s veiled revelation of himself to us, in nature and in Scripture.

    (Note: I think that we don’t seek God on our own, and that he must take the initiative to reach out to us and draw us to him. But I do think that we are free to resist his revelation, at which point God stops himself short of coercing our will. We are therefore responsible for our own fate).

    The atheist’s argument is a logical/deductive argument. It aims to show that there is a contradiction between God’s will for us and his hiding from us. In order to derive a contradiction, God MUST NOT have any possible reason to remain hidden. If he has a reason for remaining hidden that is consistent with his goodness, then the argument will not go through.

    When Murray offers a possible reason for God to remain hidden in order to allow people to freely respond to him, then the argument is defeated. God wants people to respond to him freely so that there is a genuine love relationship – not coercion by overt threat of damnation. To rescue the argument, the atheist has to be able to prove that God could provide more evidence of his existence without interfering with the free choice of his creatures to reject him.

    People choose to separate themselves from God for many reasons. Maybe they are professors in academia and didn’t want to be thought of as weird by their colleagues. Maybe they didn’t want to be burdened with traditional morality when tempted by some sin, especially sexual sin. Maybe their fundamentalist parents ordered them around too much without providing any reasons. Maybe the brittle fundamentalist beliefs of their childhood were exploded by evidence for micro-evolution or New Testament manuscript variants. Maybe they wanted something really bad, that God did not give them. How could a good God allow them to suffer like that?

    The point is that there a lot of people who don’t want to know God, and God chooses not to violate their freedom by forcing himself on them. God wants a relationship – he wants you to respond to him. (See Matthew 7:7-8) For those people who don’t want to know him, he allows them to speculate about unobservable entities like the multiverse. He allows them to think that all religions are the same and that there is nothing special about Christianity. He allows them to believe that God has no plan for those who never hear about Jesus. He allows them to be so disappointed because of some instance of suffering that they reject him. God doesn’t force people to love him.

    More of Michael Murray’s work

    Murray has defended the argument in works published by prestigious academic presses such as Cambridge University Press, (ISBN: 0521006104, 2001) and Routledge (ISBN: 0415380383, 2007). The book chapter from the Cambridge book is here.  The book chapter from the Routledge book is here.

    Michael Murray’s papers are really fun to read, because he uses hilarious examples. (But I disagree with his view that God’s work of introducing biological information in living creatures has to be front-loaded).

    Here’s more terrific stuff from Dr. Murray:

    Related posts