Tag Archives: Service

Commentary

Featured blog: Pursuing Holiness

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I’ve been featuring a lot of conservative women lately, and not just Marsha Blackburn and Michele Bachmann. Earlier this week I featured Dawn Eden, who is a champion of chastity, and Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse who champions parenting, men and the family. (I found a very frank, funny podcast by Dr. J where she is speaking to a Catholic church about chastity, marriage and parenting – her podcast feed is here)

How are women different than men?

Here are some ways that women are different than men:

  1. women tend to favor gun control, because guns are loud and scary
  2. women tend to emphasize having their needs met by Christianity over theology and apologetics
  3. women tend to favor compassion and forgiveness over responsibility and moral obligations

Well, let’s just see what Laura over the Pursuing Holiness blog thinks about all of that!

1. Laura likes guns

She writes:

Consider, for example, the New Bethel Church in Louisville, KY. Pastor Ken Pagano has decided to have a Gun Day at church. The Gun Day will include patriotic music and gun safety information. After all, recent shootings at churches have illustrated the need for responsible, defensive gun ownership.

I thought to myself, Sweet, maybe I should convert to the Assemblies of God and be a part of this.

Read the rest here.

2. Laura likes God

She writes:

What if church was about worshiping and learning about a holy and sovereign God?  A radical idea, I know.

…What’s the point of filling a church with benchwarmers, or in turning a church into a community organization where people perform service in order to fulfill their own moral code instead of for the glory of God?  We have a country full of people and groups intent on self-gratification.  If the church is no different, people may as well sleep in on Sundays.

Read the rest here.

3. Laura likes moral obligations

She writes:

Is there something morally wrong about being required to pay for [medical] services we willingly received? It’s far more morally wrong to have people throw in the towel and just refuse to pay, but even that is an option that society chooses to accept via bankruptcy laws.

I really don’t understand why people are buying into the idea that it’s some massive, morally unsound, unfair burden to pay for the medical services that they willingly received.  It’s entirely fair.  You asked for those services, you accepted them, and now you need to quit whingeing and pay up.

Read the rest here.

Laura’s blog is called Pursuing Holiness.

News

Why social conservatives should be fiscal conservatives

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UPDATE: Welcome visitors from the Maritime Sentry! Thanks for the link!

We socially-conservative men need lots of things in order to have a successful family, and those things are all supported by free market capitalism.

Here is what I would need to marry and to run a family:

  • a job
  • the ability to to keep almost all of what I earn
  • the ability to spend what I earn on whatever I want
  • complete freedom from government influence across the board
  • the ability to find Christian services and products in the marketplace
  • the ability to find a new job if I get terminated for being a public Christian at work

The best way to achieve my social conservative goals is by voting for the economic system that will allow me to get the money and liberty to pursue the social goals.

Here are some things that raise the price of consumer goods and reduce my opportunities to find employment: (add yours in the comments)

  • workers unions
  • tariffs
  • corporate taxes
  • regulations
  • environmentalists
  • trial lawyers

And here are some others that have other nasty effects:

  • public schools: they substitute PC leftist indoctrination for a real education
  • teacher’s unions: they deny me school choice, protect unqualified teachers and indoctrinate my children with lefty crap
  • welfare programs: they waste tax money and destroy the need for real men and diminish the role of husbands and fathers
  • gun control: they disarm the law-abiding sector of the society in order to protect criminals
  • feminists: they reduce the pool of marriage-minded women by indoctrinating women to oppose chastity, family, men, God and children… and they favor no-fault divorce
  • socialists: they want government to control how I can spend my money on things like health care – they don’t want me to buy health care myself, they want me to pay for everyone else’s health care and then get in line
  • secularists: they are annoyed by the thought that I might spend my money in ways that increases the influence of Christianity and they will try to stop me from doing so
  • naturalists: they waste money speculating about ways to explain the effects of intelligence in nature without implicating an intelligence

Many of these aggravating factors have gotten worse because of the recession. We know why we are in a recession right now: because the Democrats forced banks to make loans to people who could not afford them. Obama himself worked for ACORN to sue banks like Citibank.

Consider this article from the American Thinker to see how Obama has affected the businesses where people work to earn the money they need to fuel their marriage and parenting activities.

Excerpt: (H/T 1RedThread)

On Thursday, May 14, 2009 I was notified that my Dodge franchise, that we purchased, will be taken away from my family on June 9, 2009 without compensation and given to another dealer at no cost to them. My new vehicle inventory consists of 125 vehicles with a financed balance of 3 million dollars.  This inventory becomes impossible to sell with no factory incentives beyond June 9, 2009. Without the Dodge franchise we can no longer sell a new Dodge as “new,” nor will we be able to do any warranty service work. Additionally, my Dodge parts inventory, (approximately $300,000.) is virtually worthless without the ability to perform warranty service.  There is no offer from Chrysler to buy back the vehicles or parts inventory.
Our facility was recently totally renovated at Chrysler’s insistence, incurring a multi-million dollar debt in the form of a mortgage at Sun Trust Bank.
…This is beyond imagination!  My business is being stolen from me through NO FAULT OF OUR OWN.  We did NOTHING wrong.This atrocity will most likely force my family into bankruptcy.  This will also cause our 50+ employees to be unemployed. How will they provide for their families?  This is a total economic disaster.

Obama has destroyed capitalism and the rule of law in this country. What happens to a man who has his means of earning a living, which is the fuel of his marriage and parenting engine, removed? Obama took trillions from the private sector to spend on his own special interest groups, like ACORN and auto worker’s unions.

Wrecking the economy is good for Democrats because their goal is to replace responsible men with the federal government. Single women, who vote overwhelmingly Democrat, prefer the guarantee of security from government handouts over the responsibility of having to choose and relate to a moral, responsible husband and father.

Here is the article from the Wall Street Journal:

And the excerpt:

For example, for black males ages 20 to 24, the unemployment rate is close to 50 percent; in the black community overall, men have absorbed 100 percent of the job losses 463,000 jobs since the recession started in November 2007.

And even if the economy grows by the forecasted 1.3 percent, it’s not enough to create job growth, says Mr. Sum, who doesn’t anticipate any net job growth until 2011.

“From a fatherhood perspective, it’s going to have an enormous impact on an already fragile community,” says Roland Warren, president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, a nonprofit group aimed at “increasing the proportion of children growing up with an involved, responsible and committed father.”

“So much of the traditional view of the father revolves around his ability to provide,” says Mr. Warren, who writes a column for The Washington Times.

…Meanwhile, black women have experienced a small net job gain during this recession, mainly due to the fact that they are overwhelmingly employed in health care and education, two sectors that haven’t experienced huge layoffs since November 2007, Mr. Sum says.

The article tries to make a case that men can have an influence in the family without earning money. In the vast majority of cases that is just not going to work. Men need to have authority in the family to have a positive impact, and that authority that is guaranteed by their role as primary provider.

Let me be clear. Welfare programs that reward people for choosing to have children from the wrong sorts of men come at the expense of good men. Good men pay the taxes for the welfare, and good men are passed over because the government is a substitute – a safety net – which removes the need for women to be choosy about men. When you have compassion on people for choosing bad men, you are encouraging them to continue to do so.

Before you vote, think about whether government welfare programs are an adequate substitute for a husband and father. You can have one or the other, but you can’t have both. I know an awful lot of single-mothers who voted Democrat in the last election and had no idea that they had just voted to destroy the male roles of husband and father. Ideas have consequences.

Further study

Recently, I blogged about how government intrudes into the family and about the myth of “dead-beat Dads”. And about how the feminist state’s discrimination against male teachers is negatively impacting young men. And there is my series on how Democrat policies discourage marriage: Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here and Part 3 is here.

Videos

Selling single-payer health care with lies

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Holy Snark!

You will watch this 3 minute video about the Democrats’ plan for single-payer health care right now! (H/T Heritage Foundation)

This video is courtesy Verum Serum, the same guys who brought us that Jan Schakowsky video where she admits that Obama’s plan will destroy private medical insurance. They seem to be a Christian blog, so I blogrolled them, along with Bush White House economist Keith Hennessey, who I linked to twice.

Quick quote from Heritage Foundation’s post:

As Yale professor Jacob Hacker says in the video: “Someone once said to me this is a Trojan Horse for single payer and I said well its not a Trojan Horse, right? Its just right there.”

And then later:  “One of the virtues of it though is that you can at least make the claim that there is a competitve system between the public and private sectors.”

Don’t forget some other videos I posted on health care, (that post has a link to Laura’s amazing post on health care that was on Hot Air, which had more helpful videos!).

Michelle Malkin has some ideas about what the grassroots can do! We can fight this.

A comprehensive, point-by-point refutation of government-run health care is here, at the Heritage Foundation.

They cover:

  • the hidden costs of government-run health care, that are paid by the private sector
  • the low efficiency and low quality of existing government plans like Medicare and Medicaid
  • how government-run health care would lead to controls on your private life to reduce health costs
  • the real solution to the health care mess: competition, de-regulation and consumer choice

Some good news on health care

OK, Heritage Foundation had this story on a bill introduced by Republican senators Tom Coburn and Richard Burr. It’s called the “Patient’s Choice Act”.

Excerpt: (I bolded the stuff I liked)

As Galen Institute President Grace-Marie Turner and Joseph Antos with American Enterprise Institute note in The Wall Street Journal, the legislation “provides a path to universal coverage by redirecting current subsidies for health insurance to individuals. It also provides a new safety net that guarantees access to insurance for those with pre-existing conditions.”

By restructuring the tax treatment for health insurance, the plan would give every taxpayer direct assistance to buy private health insurance, and end the inequities that plague the current system. The bill would shift the $300 billion annual tax exclusion for employer-based health benefits toward refundable tax credits for families and individuals. Families would get $5,700 a year and individual consumers would get $2,300 a year to purchase private plans and invest in health savings accounts (HSAs).

Low-income families would receive a supplemental debit card worth up to $5,000 that would help them pay for health coverage and out-of-pocket medical bills. They’d also be incentivized to make the most of their health care dollars since the remaining balance on their card would roll over to the next year. The expected expansion of private health plans would reduce the dependence of many uninsured Americans on the hospital emergency rooms for routine care, saving American taxpayers billions of dollars.

“The combination of the refundable tax credit and debit card gives lower-income Americans a way out of the Medicaid ghetto so they can have the dignity of private insurance,” Turner and Antos add.

This is what Republicans would do if we could elect enough of them.