When the public school system starts forcing kids to lie to their parents about what they’re being taught, you know it’s time to homeschool.

And when what they’re being taught is homosexual sensitivity training, you have to wonder why they feel they can’t be open and honest about it. Yeah, I know the presumed reason; that parent might object. But if parents are not allowed any say as to their children’s education, it’s no longer public education anymore, is it? It’s state education. (And I really hope this school district doesn’t ever complain about not enough parental involvement.)

Click here for a link to audio from Concerned Women for America, and click here for the WND news story.

Technorati Tags: education, homeschool, homosexuality, Concerned Women for America

Would you believe that here in the United States, someone would suggest that religious freedom and parental right undermine the public school system? It’s happened. A US District Judge has used that as part of his reasoning in a recent ruling.

A federal judge in Massachusetts has ordered the “gay” agenda taught to Christians who attend a public school in Massachusetts, finding that they need the teachings to be “engaged and productive citizens.”

U.S. District Judge Mark L. Wolf yesterday dismissed a civil rights lawsuit brought by David Parker, ordering that it is reasonable, indeed there is an obligation, for public schools to teach young children to accept and endorse homosexuality.

Wolf essentially adopted the reasoning in a brief submitted by a number of homosexual-advocacy groups, who said “the rights of religious freedom and parental control over the upbringing of children … would undermine teaching and learning…”

This started in 2005 when David Parker objected to the fact that he couldn’t get his kindergarten child opted out of, or even notified of, same-sex household issues when they were brought up. The judge’s ruling gives them three options; private school, home school, or vote in enough School Committee members to get things changed. Fair enough, but can you imagine a court telling a black man that if he doesn’t like being forced into blacks-only restrooms and schools that these are his only choices? It would be unthinkable, but religious freedom, written quite plainly into the Constitution, is being afforded less protection than civil rights laws.

We are losing our constitutional rights at the hands of the judicial branch of government, and few notice, care, or even agree that it’s being eroded. The folks with the latter view are the most blind.

Technorati Tags: education, homeschool, Judge Mark Wolf, David Parker, Massachusetts, Christianity, homosexual

This would be funny if it weren’t intended to be serious (and frankly, I’m not completely sure that’s the intent). Same-sex proponents in Washington State, in an attempt to get social conservatives “dosed with their own medicine”, have filed an initiative.

OLYMPIA, Wash. – An initiative filed by proponents of same-sex marriage would require heterosexual couples to have kids within three years or else have their marriage annulled.

Initiative 957 was filed by the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance. That group was formed last summer after the state Supreme Court upheld Washington’s ban on same-sex marriage.

Under the initiative, marriage would be limited to men and women who are able to have children. Couples would be required to prove they can have children in order to get a marriage license, and if they did not have children within three years, their marriage would be subject to annulment.

All other marriages would be defined as “unrecognized” and people in those marriages would be ineligible to receive any marriage benefits.

If they were a child under the care of Super Nanny, they’d be sent to the Naughty Corner. Instead, we have adults who didn’t get their way and are pitching a fit and putting forth an obviously frivolous initiative. And the organizer of this lets us know precisely what his error is (see the bolded word below):

“For many years, social conservatives have claimed that marriage exists solely for the purpose of procreation … The time has come for these conservatives to be dosed with their own medicine,” said WA-DOMA organizer Gregory Gadow in a printed statement. “If same-sex couples should be barred from marriage because they can not have children together, it follows that all couples who cannot or will not have children together should equally be barred from marriage.”

“For many years” this debate has been going on, and he still can’t honestly represent his opposition. The faulty logic here is breathtaking, starting with the straw man constructed in the first sentence. When has any mainstream opponent of same-sex marriage ever used the word “solely” in regards to child-bearing in marriage? Even a quote that says it’s “primarily” for children or that it is the “best” for children does not imply what this initiative would cast into law, that it must.

In an attempt to sort of sound reasonable, they say they just want a dialog.

Opponents say the measure is another attack on traditional marriage, but supporters say the move is needed to have a discussion on the high court ruling.

They can’t talk about it until they get their whining done first. And frankly, the debate was pretty much over in Washington State when the same-sex marriage ban survived the path up to and including the state Supreme Court. This is just the rantings of children who didn’t get their way. If you want to talk about it, then talk, and don’t waste your neighbors’ time and money with ballot initiatives guaranteed to fail.

Technorati Tags: same-sex marriage, homosexuality, Washington state, Initiative 957, Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance, Gregory Gadow

A great article on a Christian dealing with homosexual tendencies at Blogger News Network by Warren Throckmorton, PhD, is a must-read. While I think homosexual activity is wrong, this approach to dealing with it in the Christian life makes sense. As I say in a comment to the article, hetero men have the same sexual temptations (aside from the gender), and have to deal with them spiritually and behaviorally. And just because God doesn’t heal a particular physical problem–or take away homosexual tendencies–doesn’t mean that He can’t or that we’re bad people.

Loving the sinner and hating the sin goes for sin in our own lives as well. A healthy love of self includes knowing what your weaknesses are. Just continue to seek out God and let Him work through you. Great article.

Technorati Tags: homosexuality, Christianity, Warren Throckmorton

Agencies run by churches in the UK can no longer practice what they preach.

Roman Catholic adoptions agencies yesterday lost their battle to opt out of new laws banning discrimination against homosexual couples when Tony Blair announced that there would be “no exemptions” for faith-based groups.

The Prime Minister said in a statement that the new rules would not come into force until the end of 2008. Until then there would be a “statutory duty” for religious agencies to refer gay couples to other agencies.

Why can’t that “statutory duty” be good enough? Why is government coercion trumping religious freedom? Predictably, the results of an attempt at “fairness” will chase off the principled.

Last week the leader of Catholics in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, warned that the agencies would close rather than accept rules that required them to hand over babies to gay couples.

One wonders if, in some quarters, that’s the whole objective. I mean, given a situation where there are choices, and there usually are, why would a gay couple seek out the Catholic Church for an adoption agency when there are others that have no qualms about it. It’s kind of like the standard answer you hear when folks complain about the content of TV programming. “Just change the channel”, the Left dismissively says. But when it comes to their preferences, they won’t “change the channel” themselves–choose a different agency–and instead insist that government sanction their choices and force it upon everyone to accommodate it.

Technorati Tags: England, UK, adoption, Catholic Church, Tony Blair

Canadian kids can legally have 3 parents.

(Toronto, Ontario) An Ontario boy can legally have two mothers and a father, the province’s highest court ruled Tuesday.

The same-sex partner of the child’s biological mother went to court seeking to also be declared a mother of the boy.

After hearing arguments in 2003, Superior Court Justice David Aston dismissed the application saying he didn’t have the jurisdiction to rule in the case.

Court was told the child has three parents: his biological father and mother (identified in court documents as B.B. and C.C., respectively) and C.C.’s partner, the appellant A.A.

Once this is a legal precedent after the fact–after the child-bearing arrangement–it’s a very small slip to allow this at the beginning–marrying 3 people at a time. Talk about taking a village to raise a child!

Those of you who thought that allowing same-sex marriage wouldn’t open up any uinintended doors, is the slippery slope coming into focus just a little bit more?

(Hat tip to Stop the ACLU.)

Technorati Tags: Canada, same-sex marriage, parenting

Rev. Ted Haggard, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, has left his post while allegations of homosexual sex and meth use are being investigated.

The Rev. Ted Haggard resigned as president of the 30 million-member association Thursday after being accused of paying the man for monthly trysts over the past three years.

Haggard, a married father of five, denied the allegations, but also stepped aside as head of his 14,000-member New Life Church pending an investigation.

“I am voluntarily stepping aside from leadership so that the overseer process can be allowed to proceed with integrity,” he said in a statement. “I hope to be able to discuss this matter in more detail at a later date. In the interim, I will seek both spiritual advice and guidance.”

Carolyn Haggard, spokeswoman for the New Life Church and the pastor’s niece, said a four-member church panel will investigate the allegations. The board has the authority to discipline Haggard, including removing him from ministry work.

The acting senior pastor at New Life, Ross Parsley, told KKTV-TV of Colorado Springs that Haggard admitted that some of the accusations were true.

“I just know that there has been some admission of indiscretion, not admission to all of the material that has been discussed but there is an admission of some guilt,” Parsley told the station.

If true, this is another case of a fallible human being getting caught in sin. The question will be how this is dealt with; how the church and Rev. Haggard deal with the situation. Charges of hypocrisy may be reasonably levelled, but at the same time, all of us, at one time or another, do things we ourselves think to be wrong, whatever our code of ethics. One classic quote from C. S. Lewis in his book “The Problem of Pain” deals with this.

“The moralities (codes of right and wrong) among men may differ – though not, at bottom, so widely as is often claimed – but they all agree in prescribing a behaviour which their adherents fail to practice. All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt.”

We’ve all failed our own consciences. So levelling a charge of hypocrisy may be correct, but it’s just as true of the accuser as of the accused. If the underlying charges are true, then Rev. Haggard should step down from his position of authority, at the very least for the time being and deal with this sin.

What this is not a case of is whether what he preached is the truth or not. It is also not a matter of politics. However, the accuser is trying to cover both those bases.
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During the debate over the proposed (now enacted) Georgia constitutional amendment stating that marriage was the union of a man and a woman, critics of the proposal said that it was not necessary, since there was already a law on the books banning same-sex marriage. The New Jersey Supreme Court today put the lie to that line of reasoning. To some judges, it doesn’t matter what laws are already in effect; they want to set the legislative calendar.

Saying times have changed, New Jersey’s highest court on Wednesday guaranteed gay couples the same rights as married heterosexuals but left it to state lawmakers to decide if such unions can be called marriage.

“Times and attitudes have changed,” the New Jersey Supreme Court said in a nuance 90-page ruling that was neither a clear victory nor a defeat for gay marriage, which is currently legal in the United States only in Massachusetts.

“Despite the rich diversity of this state, the tolerance and goodness of its people, and the many recent advances made by gays and lesbians toward achieving social acceptance and equality under the law, the court cannot find that the right to same-sex marriage is a fundamental right under our constitution,” the ruling said.

Stating that gay couples must have the same rights as other couples, the court said gay advocates must now “appeal to their fellow citizens whose voices are heard through their popularly elected representatives.”

With that in mind, the court gave the legislature six months to either amend the state’s marriage statutes to include gay people, or write a new law in which same-sex couples “would enjoy the rights of civil marriage.”

New Jersey’s marriage statutes define marriage as being between a man and a woman.

The ruling leaves state lawmakers with two options — allow gays to marry in the same way as others, or develop a parallel system of unions for same-sex couples. That second option would leave New Jersey with civil unions akin to those in Vermont.

While it sounds magnanimous for the court to leave it to the legislature, they still set a requirement for what the legislature must do. While they say that the appeal must be made to “their fellow citizens whose voices are heard through their popularly elected representatives”, they then go on to direct the legislature what to do, which is not at all a case of popular representation. All the people are left with are naming rights, as Hugh Hewitt notes. What a case of double-speak!

I say again, the Left has raised the bar, changed the playing field, made new rules, whatever cliche you want to use. Constitutional amendments are the only tool left to wield for those who oppose this, so it should come as no surprise when it is wielded. And no complaints, either. Either use the legislature and the courts as they were intended, or get ready to be met on the field of your choosing.

Technorati Tags: same-sex marriage, New Jersey, constitution

So says Benjamin Shapiro.

On what moral basis do Democrats condemn Foley? They have no basis for moral outrage, since they have championed the destruction of traditional morality for decades. Instead, they condemn Foley and the Republicans for hypocrisy. Foley, when he wasn’t spending his time chasing teenage boys, pushed for legislation to crack down on child pornography. House Republicans, when they weren’t busy ignoring Foley’s scummy behavior, pushed for legislation to uphold traditional values. The big sin here, according to the social left, is that Foley and the Republicans tried to bolster antiquated sexual mores while simultaneously bucking them in personal life. Were Mark Foley a liberal Democrat from San Francisco, liberals would be hard-pressed to spot a problem with his behavior.

But Republicans should not have been. The Republican Party is the party supposedly dedicated to those antiquated value systems that made this country great. It should not have been difficult for Republicans to identify the problems with Foley’s behavior: pedophilia, exploitation, and yes, homosexuality. And yet, because the Republican Party has become infected with either the unchecked will to wield power or the milquetoast tolerance of the social left, House Republicans did nothing. Shame on them.

Shapiro goes down the list of Democrats that the Left either made excuses for or simply slapped on the wrist–Studds, Clinton–and also adds Pelosi, who opposes parental consent laws regarding underage abortions. While moral outrage is well-placed on Foley’s head, I find Shapiro’s contention that Democrats are not taking that tack, rather using the “hypocrite” bludgeon.

News flash: Human beings are flawed and hypocritical. Politicians, with all the power and money flowing around them, will be put in more situations than the average person that will tempt them to abandon their principals. This is not news.

What is, or should be, news is how each political party deals with its problems. Regardless of possible hushing in the past, Foley did the right thing once the truth came out. One wishes that this would have been caught and dealt with earlier, but Foley is gone. Not censured, not reprimanded; gone.

Here’s another example: Want to know why you’ve never heard of “Speaker of the House Bob Livingston”? Because he did the right thing.
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Joseph Farah, on why the recent ruling requiring the condoning of homosexuality, bisexuality, and transsexuality in California institutions that get government money is a big deal.

I don’t want to overstate this, but this is the end of religious freedom in the biggest state in the union. The only alternative left for Christians and Jews and people of other faiths in California is quite literally to drop out. That means homeschooling. It means creating new institutions that won’t touch any public funding – even when it is as tenuous as one student accepting a state grant. When you submit yourself or your institution to government regulation in California now, you tacitly accept the official state religion of paganism.

And don’t think it will end here. It never does.

When more people choose to drop out, as they inevitably will, the coercive state will find new creative ways to come after them as well.

Just ask German homeschoolers. Yes, Farah’s editorials are generally overheated, but this time I think he’s really on to something. How far of a stretch is it, really, to imagine a law that makes this sort of coercion required for any business or institution simply operating in California, regardless of whether it gets state money? Not that much, in my mind.

Technorati Tags: homosexuality, California, education