Columnist.
For years we have been told that homosexuality is something people are born with -- like the color of one's skin -- and that it can't be changed. Gay-rights activists insist this is so, because, they say, if people don't choose to be gay, it would be wrong to discriminate against them in things like marriage, adoption, and legal benefits. And heaven help those who disagree. Just ask actress Cynthia Nixon, who in a recent New York Times Magazine article, had the gall to admit that she chose to be gay.
Folks, we have reached the point where Christians may be called to actively defy the government of the United States. This is a shocking and sobering statement, but I'm sorry to say it's true. If you've read the Manhattan Declaration--and I pray you have read it and signed it -- you'll know that we predicted this time would come. We just had no idea it would come so soon.
No doubt you've been watching the unfolding drama of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation's decision to de-fund Planned Parenthood -- and then its stunning reversal. What you saw last week was a concerted, intentional effort by an ideological minority -- the radical pro-abortion forces -- not just to make their case in public, but to destroy the opposition. Using incendiary language, accusing Komen of endangering the lives of women, they made no pretense to pursue civil discourse.
So often we hear that allowing two men or two women to marry will not hurt anyone, and certainly not "straight" people. Well, the truth is, we already know what happens when a society promotes sexual license and devalues marriage. We just have to look at history. Way back before anyone was talking about so-called "gay marriage," radio talk show host and Jewish theologian Dennis Prager wrote a fascinating article called -- get ready for this -- "Judaism's Sexual Revolution: Why Judaism Rejected Homosexuality."
I've told you that the Obama Administration is intentionally restricting religious freedom. I've told you we are in danger of losing the right to exercise our faith in public. Well, maybe I've been too understated. The attack is relentless. Just recently, the Obama Administration announced that the Affordable Healthcare Act, otherwise known as ObamaCare, requires that employers pay for contraception, including abortifacients, and that Catholic institutions are not exempt from this requirement.
There are few things I'm more passionate about than the truth of the Christian worldview and preparing Christians to live it out in every area of life. That's why I love our Centurions Program. Our Centurions dedicate themselves to a year of intensive Christian worldview study. They learn to share and defend their faith winsomely while confronting faulty worldviews, particularly naturalistic materialism, which has begun to dominate the West. But the West isn't the only part of the planet in dire need of the truth.
A well-known expression attributed to Albert Einstein defines insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Well, if that's insanity, then most state officials are quite insane when it comes to gambling: for more than two decades, they have looked to casinos, lotteries, slot machines, and video poker as a way out of their budgetary woes.
London's most venerable toy store, Hamleys, recently underwent a make-over. The self-described "finest toy shop in the world" did away with separate girls and boys sections and, instead, organized the store by types of toys. Pink and blue signs were replaced by red and white ones. Hamleys' decision gave writer Peggy Orenstein the chance to ask the question "Should gender be systematically expunged from playthings?"
To read Kevin Belmonte's recent book Defiant Joy: The Remarkable Life & Impact of G. K. Chesterton, is to feel a powerful sense of longing. Chesterton, as many of you may know, was the twentieth-century writer of Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man, the Father Brown mysteries, and other important works. His stalwart faith influenced great numbers of people in his own time and afterwards, including C. S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers. Chesterton's time, in the early part of the century, was in many ways as religiously and politically polarized as our own. Yet Chesterton transcended the rhetoric and the propaganda with his genial good nature and wonderful sense of humor. He fought hard for his beliefs and principles; seldom has there been a Christian who defended the faith more valiantly.
In yesterday broadcast, I warned you that the Supreme Court's decision to grant religious groups a "ministerial exception" in hiring, while important, does nothing to halt the Obama Administration's relentless crusade to restrict religious freedom. Just Friday, the Administration announced it would not expand exemptions for religiously affiliated organizations when it comes to insurance. So, a Catholic hospital, for instance, will be forced to purchase insurance for its employees that would provide free contraception and sterilization services.
A central concern of the Manhattan Declaration is the increasingly perilous state of religious liberty: scarcely a week goes by without yet another report about limitations on the right to practice our faith, at home as well as in the public square. That's why a recent Supreme Court decision is both very good news, but it's grounds for caution. The decision involved a school run by Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran church in Michigan. A teacher who had gone on disability leave threatened to sue the school because it hired a substitute for the remainder of the school year.
Long after they are released from prison, long after they have “paid their debt to society,” ex-prisoners continue to pay the price for their crimes. As highlighted recently in an excellent article in the New York Times by Alfred Blumstein and Kiminori Nakamura, ex-offenders struggle to find employment, can be barred from public housing, and even be denied grants for tuition. And many are denied the right to vote, sometimes for life. That topic was pulled into the national spotlight last week during the heat of the presidential campaign.
In his book, Lost in the Cosmos, Walker Percy asked "why is Carl Sagan so lonely?" Percy's question was prompted by the popular scientist Carl Sagan's insistence that ET must be out there somewhere, despite the lack of any evidence to back it up. Percy believed that this insistence said more about Sagan and people like him, than it did about the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. According to Percy, Sagan and others who reduced everything, including man, to soulless atoms, were desperate for something to transcend this purely-material existence. Not believing in God, they hoped a phone call from ET would do the trick.
It started as a drip, drip, drip. Then the flow increased, and now it's a gusher: The Obama Administration has decided to promote and emphasize lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered rights -- and it is doing so at the expense of God-given freedom of religion. Those are tough words, but regrettably, true words. In December 9, 2009 in a major address entitled, "Human Rights Agenda for the 21st Century," Secretary of State Clinton said people "must be free to worship, associate, and to love in the way that they choose." Did you catch that? In one sentence, little noticed at the time, Mrs. Clinton showed the Administration's true priorities. In one fell swoop, she changed our God-given right to freedom of religion, a public act, to a much more restricted "freedom of worship," a private act, which any Chinese official could go along with. And at the same time, Mrs. Clinton, speaking for the administration, elevated the quote "right to love in the way they choose" as a fundamental human right.
Once again, government rushes in where business fears to tread. Just before Christmas, the National Institutes of Health made three more lines of embryonic stem cells eligible for federal funding. Could it possibly have anything to do with the fact that a month before, a major private company decided that there was no profit in embryonic stem cell research? You see, in November, the drug company Geron announced that it would be abandoning its embryonic stem cell research program. Geron was a leader in the embryonic stem cell field, the first company to be approved to run trials with these stem cells.
