Tag Archives: Secularism

Commentary

Which political party should Christians vote for?

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Mary sent me this disturbing story from Citizen Link, which shows how secular leftist special interests want to restrict religious liberty.

Excerpt:

A “who’s who” of Leftist, humanist, abortion and gay organizations submitted a stern letter to President Obama on Tuesday, demanding that he rescind part of the 2002 Executive Order protecting religious hiring rights.

More specifically, the coalition wants Obama to prohibit contractors who do business with the government from using religious-based hiring criteria.

The letter, signed by 52 organizations, comes days before the 70thanniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order that barred discrimination by federal contractors. His directive was then codified into law in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited employers from hiring and firing based on religious beliefs. In 1972, it was slightly amended to exempt churches and religious associations.

The timing of the letter also coincides with the federal government’s stepped-up efforts to codify into law special protections for gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender people.

Bruce Hausknecht, judicial analyst for CitizenLink, noted the biased news coverage of the weighty issue. “The liberal news media has given Americans the impression that faith-based charitable groups are pushing to rescind these protections,” Hausknecht said. “Not true. A closer look at the list of cosigners reveals the true motive: to silence people of faith and push them out of the public square.”

Cosigners include: American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for the Separation of Church and State, Catholics for Choice, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, National Education Association, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, National Organization for Women, People for the American Way, Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice and the Transgender Law Center.

When you elect a Democrat, you’re electing someone who wants to use the power of the state to marginalize and censor Christianity. In fact, if you read classical works on economics like “The Road to Serfdom”, you’ll learn that socialism necessarily leads to the destruction of all other liberties, including religious liberty. That is because the bigger that a secular government becomes, the less they are willing to allow individuals to make their own decisions based on their own personal morality and religion. Obama is one of the worst offenders in this regard – we have never had a more pro-abortion and pro-same-sex marriage President. We have never had a President who was more allied with pro-abortion lobbyists and pro-gay-rights lobbyists. And he is also in favor of paying welfare to women who freely choose to raise children without fathers. This man is anti-life, anti-family and anti-marriage. No Christian could vote for such a man.

Should Christians vote for Democrats who want to “tax the rich”?

Let’s make it clear, because a lot of Christians don’t understand this. In order for you to exercise your freedom as a Christian, you need to have money. With money, you can afford charity, private Christian schools, Bibles, apologetics books, marriages, children, homeschooling, and so forth. How do you get that money? You work for it. And how do you make it grow? You invest it.

Now let’s see how the secular left and their agenda of redistribution at wealth hurts that plan.

  1. They get you fired, like Frank Turek was fired by Cisco Systems, because you are a Christian
  2. They tax your income and give it to anti-Christian groups, like Planned Parenthood
  3. They tax your investments to fund public schools which undermine Christian truth claims (evolution) and Christian morality (sex education)
  4. They confiscate money from your employer and redistribute it to government workers and unions, which makes it harder for you to stay employed
  5. They restrict your choices for educating your children, by sending more money to public schools and legislating against private schools and homeschooling
  6. They take over health care, forcing you to subsidize secular leftist causes like abortions, sex changes, in vitro fertilization, etc.
  7. They take over health care, forcing Christian doctors and nurses to perform procedures that violate their consciences
  8. They halt military spending and pro-democracy initiatives, and coddle captured terrorists, encouraging terrorist attacks, like 9/11
  9. They spend enormous amounts of money, increasing government dependence and discouraging families from having children

And so forth. Basically, the more you vote for free market conservatism, the more small businesses there will be. The more small businesses there are, the better your chance of finding an employer who will not discriminate against your Christian faith. (Contrary to popular beliefs, conservatives DO NOT like big corporations – because they are almost ALWAYS liberal, seeking to use the government to block younger companies from challenging them with better quality and lower prices). The more employers there are to choose from, the more likely you can find a higher salary. The higher your salary, the more you have to spend on charity, as well as your family and your community. The more money you make in investments, the more you can buy apologetics books and sponsor apologetics web sites and conferences and debates. The more the government stays out of the free market, the more choice you have to buy goods and services that are in line with your Christian values – e.g. – SCHOOL CHOICE. The more the government stays out of health care, the less you will pay for health care since you don’t need coverage for abortions, sex changes, in vitro fertilization, etc. The less government regulates business, the less opportunity there will be for these secular leftist special interest groups to lobby government to discriminate against Christians.

News

Recent college graduates realizing that Obama’s rhetoric doesn’t produce jobs

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From the Daily Caller. (H/T Right Wing News)

Excerpt:

A very large proportion of recent university graduates have soured on President Barack Obama, and many will vote GOP or stay at home in the 2012 election, according to two new surveys of younger voters.

“These rock-solid Obama constituents are free-agents,” said Kellyanne Conway, president of The Polling Company, based in Washington, D.C. She recently completed a large survey of college grads, and “they’re shopping around, considering their options, [and] a fair number will stay at home and sit it out,” she said.

The scope of this disengagement from Obama is suggested by an informal survey of 500 post-grads by Joe Maddalone, founder of Maddalone Global Strategies. Of his sample, 93 percent are aged between 22 and 28, 67 percent are male and 83 percent voted for Obama in 2008. But only 27 percent are committed to voting for Obama again, and 80 percent said they would consider voting for a Republican, said New York-based Maddalone.

That’s a drop of almost 60 points in support for Obama among this influential class of younger post-grad voters, who Maddalone recruited at conferences held at New York University and Thomson-Reuters’ New York headquarters.

The bad news for Obama was underlined May 19 with a report by a job-firm Adecco that roughly 60 percent of recent college-grads have not been able to find a full-time job in their preferred area. One-in-five graduates have taken jobs far from their training, one-in-six are dependent on their parents, and one-in-four say they’re in debt, according to the firm’s data.

Let’s see. These graduates voted for Obama during college, and now they’ve just finished going through many years of indoctrination from teachers who are typically isolated from real life, i.e. – isolated from private sector employment, military service, entrepreneurship, stay-at-home motherhood, and so forth. They parroted all of the secular left-wing views of their indoctrinators, got their diplomas in social work or English or peace studies, and now they are out on their own for the first time, looking for jobs from the people they have been taught to hate and despise. Imagine their surprise to find out that the world is nothing like they were led to believe, their non-quantitative degrees are useless, and that they are now $60,000 in debt, and they will never collect a dime from entitlement programs from Social Security.

Not to mention the $534,000 dollars that each household in the US owes because of  Nancy Pelosi’s $5.34 TRILLION dollar addition to the national debt. (H/T Doug Ross)

Obama Unemployment Stimulus Graph
Obama Unemployment Stimulus Graph

Image from Conservative Compendium.

Here’s another interesting article from the Washington Examiner, by political guru Michael Barone.

Excerpt:

Barack Obama and the Democratic congressional supermajorities of 2009-10 raised federal spending from 21 to 25 percent of gross domestic product. Their stimulus package stopped layoffs of public employees for a while, even as private sector payrolls plummeted.

And the Obama Democrats piled further burdens on would-be employers in the private sector. Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill are scheduled to be followed by thousands of regulations that will impose impossible-to-estimate costs on the economy.

[…]It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the threat of tax increases and increased regulatory burdens have produced something in the nature of a hiring strike.

And then there is the political posturing. On April 13 Obama delivered a ballyhooed speech at George Washington University. The man who conservatives as well as liberal pundits told us was a combination of Edmund Burke and Reinhold Niebuhr was widely expected to present a serious plan to address the budget deficits and entitlement spending.

Instead the man who can call on talented career professionals at the Office of Management and Budget to produce detailed blueprints gave us something in the nature of a few numbers scrawled on a paper napkin.

The man depicted as pragmatic and free of ideological cant indulged in cheap political rhetoric, accusing Republicans, including House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan who was in the audience, of pushing old ladies in wheelchairs down the hill and starving autistic children.

The signal was clear. Obama had already ignored his own deficit reduction commission in preparing his annual budget, which was later rejected 97-0 in the Senate. Now he was signaling that the time for governing was over and that he was entering campaign mode 19 months before the November 2012 election. People took notice, especially those people who decide whether to hire or not. Goldman Sachs’s Current Activity Indicator stood at 4.2 percent in March. In April — in the middle of which came Obama’s GW speech — it was 1.6 percent. For May it is 1 percent.

“That is a major drop in no time at all,” wrote Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal.

After April 13 Obama Democrats went into campaign mode. They staged a poll-driven Senate vote to increase taxes on oil companies.

They began a Mediscare campaign against Ryan’s budget resolution that all but four House Republicans had voted for. That seemed to pay off with a special election victory in New York’s 26th Congressional District.

The message to job creators was clear. Hire at your own risk. Higher taxes, more burdensome regulation and crony capitalism may be here for some time to come.

Corporations do not hire workers or expand their businesses when there is uncertainty and looming tax increases.

News

Secular government uses your tax money to limit your religious liberty

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Map of Canada
Map of Canada

Often, Christians, Jews and other religious people are swayed to vote for left-leaning parties in elections. The leftists promise all kinds of goodies that they will provide, freeing us from the responsibility to provide for ourselves. And they promise that it won’t cost us a thing, because they will take the money from our rich neighbors, or from some other group of people who, they tell us, have no right to their own money. Well, what happens when religious people trust the secular government and vote them into power in order to get these goodies?

This is what happens in Quebec. (H/T Don Surber)

Excerpt:

MONTREAL — The 3- and 4-year-olds at the Childcare Center of Hebrew Foundation were always excited on Fridays. They’d get to re-create the rituals their parents typically perform for Friday night dinner, an integral part of the Jewish Sabbath, or Shabbat.

On a rotating basis, each child would be designated, if female, to light candles and say a blessing or, as a boy, bless the challah bread. The “wine” would be grape juice.

But on Friday, there was no Shabbat simulation. And there probably never will be again, if the Quebec government can help it.

“My 4-year-old daughter is devastated she can’t do her Shabbat next year,” said Sandy Jesion, who sends his child to the daycare in Dollard-des-Ormeaux, a Montreal suburb where he lives.

Nor are there any more prayers before the mid-morning snack. No stories about Noah’s Ark. No recounting of the parting of the seas.

Don Surber writes:

But the center could prevent this if it refused government money.

From the Toronto Star: “As of last Wednesday, subsidized daycare and early-childhood learning centres in Quebec have had to abide by a new directive prohibiting religious activities, which the government expects to foster the integration of all children.”

Don’t get me wrong. Canadians should fight this. But the Childcare Center of Hebrew Foundation is not helpless. It could tell Quebec where it can shove that money.

Notice though, that a much better solution that not taking the subsidies is to NOT VOTE FOR THE TAXES in the first place. Vote to shrink government, and then you get to keep your own money and spend it as you see fit. Your employer gets to keep the money, so that he will be able to raise your salary, or to not LAY YOU OFF in a recession. It is never a good idea for religious people to give a secular government their money, or even their neighbor’s money. The secular government can never spend the money as efficiently as private citizens can. It’s your money – you keep it and spend it on helping others the way YOU think is best. And if you want to have a religious education, then that’s your decision. Don’t let the government use your money and then make that decision FOR YOU. Don’t let someone else take your money, or your neighbor’s money, or your employer’s money, and then use it to PUSH THEIR VIEW ONTO YOUR CHILDREN. You keep your money and raise your own children. You call the shots with the money you earn.