It’s bad enough that public schools don’t educate children well, but they also do things like this.
Excerpt:
Some football coaches are in trouble for something they did with their players. They said a prayer.
That has the school district taking action.
And the policy, while it may be the law, has plenty of people up in arms.
Every school district has a responsibility to follow the law, and separate private faith from public school. It can be a fine line at times. One crossed in Sumner County, it seems, when the coaches didn’t say a word during a student-led prayer, but they did bow their heads.
In a town like Westmoreland, faith and football seem to matter.
“We’re just respectful, God-fearing people up here,” resident Tony Bentle said.
Bentle called games for Westmoreland High School for 42 years.
“A lot of history. A lot of changes. A lot of football,” he said.
So when he, like a lot of people, heard what happened after a recent game at the middle school.
“It actually blew my mind, that we had come to that point,” he said. “Nobody in this town is offended if you pray. Nobody.”
During a student-originated, student-led prayer, four coaches bowed their heads. They didn’t say a word.
But the principal and the district found out.
“We’ve been telling our principals to kind of be looking for those things, because that is kind of a shift in how things have been done,” Sumner County Schools spokesperson Jeremy Johnson said. “It can in no way appear like it’s endorsed by Sumner County Schools personnel.”
Where do you think this happened? It happened in TENNESSEE. But this is what you can expect from public schools – they are run by the government, and religion is a rival to the government in terms of having conflicting views of what people should be doing with their lives.
Christians really need to get serious about cutting funding for these public schools and voting for politicians who support school choice. Michele Bachmann has the best record on that issue.
Upon entering politics, Perry has maintained a record of defending religious expression in the public sphere.
He supported and signed a Texas bill in 2007, the “Religious Viewpoint Anti-Discrimination Act,” clarifying that students and school employees alike had the right to express religious views in public, and that religious groups had the same right of access to public facilities as secular groups.
[…]But one thing that distinguishes Perry from the typical right-wing politician is his unabashedly public prayer life: the governor has called on Texans to pray and even fast in response to state crises or disasters.When wildfires were raging during a drought in Texas this spring, Perry released an official proclamation over the Easter weekend asking people of all faiths to pray for rain for three days, and to pray for firemen and other officials in danger.
And:
Perry is increasingly famous for championing the 10th Amendment of the US Constitution, by which states are granted whatever powers are not explicitly reserved to the federal government.
Despite a conservative record on marriage – Perry supported Texas’s 2005 amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman – his 10th Amendment loyalties led to some confusion among pro-family advocates when he indicated that New York’s decision to legalize same-sex “marriage” in June was “their business, and that’s fine with me.”
Perry later clarified that he was not defending same-sex “marriage,” but the principle allowing states to decide without intrusion by the federal government. He added that he supported a federal marriage amendment, which would mean an agreement by 3/4 of the states, to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman nationwide.
The Texas governor also defended Texas’s sodomy law, which the US Supreme Court struck down in 2002 in Lawrence v. Texas
I still think Bachmann is better, but Perry has socially conservative accomplishments. In my opinion, this makes him better than Romney, who has nothing to show that he is a social conservative, and much to show that he is a social liberal.
Here’s more about Perry in a second post from Life News.
Excerpt:
As governor, Rick Perry signed Texas’s informed consent law, the Woman’s Right to Know Act in 2003, and legislation giving unborn children at any point in gestation separate victim status in a crime (the Prenatal Protection Act 2003). He also signed a parental consent law in 2005, and made Texas the 10th U.S. state to fund abortion alternatives beginning in 2005.
Perry also signed into law a 2005 measure banning abortion after 26 weeks gestation. The law allows exceptions in the cases where the mother faces substantial risk of death, “imminent, severe, irreversible brain damage or paralysis,” or if her unborn child has “severe, irreversible brain impairment.”
During the most recent legislative session, Perry declared a new sonogram bill an “emergency” priority, allowing the legislature to swiftly enact the law that requires abortionists to provide women an ultrasound of their unborn child and an opportunity to hear the fetal heartbeat before making a decision on abortion.
[…]Perry adheres to a strong 10th amendment, or states rights philosophy, especially on abortion. The 10th amendment to the U.S. Constitution iterates that either the states or the people retain governmental powers not explicitly given to the federal government in the Constitution.
Perry has made the case that the states would be in a better position to defend the unborn than the federal government, which has been a prime donor to the abortion industry at home, through subsidizing Planned Parenthood, or funding abortion groups overseas.
The U.S. Supreme Court curtailed the power of the states to restrict or regulate abortion with the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, making abortion a constitutional right, and therefore a federal issue. This has prevented states from passing pro-life laws that would greatly restrict or ban abortion.
Perry, however, has said that while he believes abortion is a matter for the states, he would support a Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Such an amendment would be consistent with his states-based approach, because it would require the common consent of three-quarters of the States and supermajorities in both chambers of Congress.
There’s more in those two articles.
Again, he’s more moderate than I would like, but also more electable. He sounds like he would strike a middle ground between my views and Mitt Romney’s views. He’ll have more broad appeal with Democrats and independents. He’s not conservative enough for me on social issues, but he’s conservative enough to move the ball forward on social issues from where things stand today. I still prefer Michele Bachmann to anyone else by far, but a Perry/Bachmann or Perry/Pawlenty ticket makes sense to me, if it comes to that, with the remaining Minnesota candidate running for the Senate seat in 2012 against that miserable Amy Klobuchar.
I notice that the Club for Growth has a white paper on Michele Bachmann’s record views, but none for Rick Perry, yet. Bachmann gets an excellent review from Club for Growth, naturally. And she’s tied for first place on social issues with Rick Santorum, in my opinion.
Philosopher and theologian Jay Wesley Richards discusses Christianity, the Bible, capitalism and socialism in the leftist Washington Post. He is responding to someone who thinks that Christianity is somehow socialist.
Excerpt:
His assertion that Jesus and Christianity are inherently socialist fares no better. Although he refers to Jesus as a socialist, the only biblical texts he appeals to are from the book of Acts (chapters 2-5), which describes the early church in Jerusalem (after Jesus ascension into heaven). The central text is worth quoting:
Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. . . . There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it as the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need. (Act 4:32-35)
Mr. Paul insists, “Now folks, that’s outright socialism of the type described millennia later by Marx-who likely got the general idea from the gospels.” No serious biblical scholar, or economist, would mistake the practice of the early Jerusalem church for Marxism. First of all, Marx viewed private property as oppressive, and had a theory of class warfare, in which the workers would revolt against the capitalists-the owners of the means of production-and forcibly take control of private property. After that, Marx thought, private property would be abolished, and the state would own the means of production on behalf of the people. There’s none of this business in the books of Acts. These Christians are selling their possessions and sharing freely.
Second, the state is nowhere in sight. No Roman centurions are breaking down doors and sending Christians to the lions (that was later). No government is confiscating property and collectivizing industry. No one is being coerced. The church in Jerusalem was just that-the church, not the state. The church doesn’t act like the modern communist state.
Mr. Paul completely misreads the later text in Acts 5, in which Peter condemns Ananias and Sapphira for keeping back some of the money they received from selling their land. Again, it helps to actually read the text:
Ananias . . . why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back part of the proceeds of the lands? While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, were not the proceeds at your disposal? How is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You did not lie to us but to God! (Acts 5:3-4)
Mr. Paul asks, “Does this not sound like a form of terror-enforced-communism imposed by a God who thinks that Christians who fail to join the collective are worthy of death? Not only is socialism a Christian invention, so is its extreme communistic variant.” The only problem is that the text says exactly the opposite. Peter condemns Ananias and Sapphira not for failing to join the collective, but for lying about what they had done. In fact, Peter says explicitly that the property was rightfully theirs, even after it was sold. This isn’t communism or socialism.
WINTERY KNIGHT 