Columnist.
Video number eight from the Center for Medical Progress has been released, containing segments of material from its previous seven videos, depicting Planned Parenthood's gruesome commerce in infant body parts. This includes commerce in intact cadavers. One segment shows an executive of one of its client firms laughing about it. This latest video has provoked a new round of demonstrations by thousands across the nation to continue to raise awareness about the sickening, inhumane, and yes, uncivilized behavior that is tolerated in our nation. And even more unbelievably, that taxpayer funds (more than $500 million dollars annually) are funneled to Planned Parenthood, which conducts this activity.
I continue to be impressed with the courage and clarity with which Marco Rubio, the conservative young senator from Florida and Republican presidential candidate, takes on the most difficult challenges facing our nation. I love his pro-life clarity and his uncompromising stand to defund Planned Parenthood. I appreciate the clear logic with which he explains the folly of our nation making deals and concessions with tyrannical regimes in Iran and Cuba, in the naive hope that they will change their ways. The other day Rubio appeared on Fox and was asked about the Black Lives Matter movement.
Unfortunately, the circus that Donald Trump has created around Fox News commentator Megyn Kelly and her allegedly "unfair" question to him in the Republican debate has drowned out the central importance of that "unfair" question. Voter frustration on the right reflects two things. One, we want to hear tough and straight talk from candidates. But two, we want a candidate who will be elected and set change in motion. All the tough talk in the world means nothing if the candidate doesn't get elected. Kelly's question to Trump was about this. It wasn't about whether Trump is courteous, or a jerk, or politically correct.
Hillary Clinton just spoke, along with Republican presidential contender and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, at the National Urban League Conference. She preceded Bush on stage and used the moment to seize his campaign slogan, "Right to Rise," and give it her own spin to attack the governor before he could speak.
A businessman once told me that in business, when things are not working, sometimes you have to "throw a brick through the window." Sometimes shock is the only thing that will shake up an entrenched status quo. A brick smashing through glass might be the only thing that will get attention. Donald Trump is a businessman who understands this. This is what he is doing and it's working. There's a lot of frustration in America today, and there should be.
But the issue is not where we are, but understanding how we got here, and deciding where we are going. And here we must talk about education.
So now the Confederate flag has been removed from the grounds of the South Carolina state capitol in Columbia. Governor Nikki Haley got the ball rolling and the job was finished by Republican State Rep. Jenny Horne, who stood before the South Carolina House of Representatives identifying herself as a descendant of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and made an impassioned plea to move the bill to remove the flag with haste and not allow it to get hung up with amendments. But this is not and will not be good enough for liberals. In 1963, newly elected Alabama governor George Wallace took the oath of office in Montgomery, former capital of the Confederacy, and issued forth his famous phrase, "segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
Coincident with July 4, the Pew Research Center published a survey asking, "Why has the U.S. been successful? Reliance on principles or ability to change?" Fifty-one percent attributed America's success to its "ability to change" and 44 percent to its "reliance on longstanding principles." Not surprisingly, 73 percent of conservatives attribute America's success to its "reliance on principles," and 77 percent of liberals attribute it to its "ability to change." But the survey question, I think, is deeply flawed.
More unsettling than the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges directing states to recognize same-sex marriage is the reasoning that went into the decision. It would be nice to believe that the men and women who wear black robes and occupy seats on America's highest court are serious people — or that they are wise. But going forth, unfortunately, it should be clear that the real thought leaders of America are in Hollywood, and that our Supreme Court, save three conservatives, is just a ship that rides the wave of public opinion.
When horrible things happen, such as the tragic mass murder that occurred at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, we try to understand because it is through understanding that we solve problems. Speaking about the incident, Hillary Clinton said: "It is tempting to dismiss a tragedy like this as an isolated incident — to believe that in today's America, bigotry is largely behind us, that institutionalized racism no longer exists. But despite our best efforts and our highest hopes, America's long struggle with race is far from finished." Some of the Republican candidates for president are taking heat because they have not come out so boldly and clearly as Clinton regarding the racial dimension of this crime.
In 1992, South Central Los Angeles exploded into riots after a jury acquitted four police officers standing trial about possible excessive use of force in apprehending a black man named Rodney King. Videotape showed the officers brutally beating King. The riots destroyed my publishing business there because businesses that were my advertisers were wrecked. I started becoming vocal about what had driven me to start this business to begin with. My eyes had opened to the destructiveness of welfare that had been destroying my own life and was destroying the minority urban communities around me. My Christian conversion gave me the faith and power to walk away from it all, get my bachelor's degree and start my business.
This is a battle about redefining the values of our nation's culture and, hence, redefining our nation itself.
"Republicans will be tempted to make this campaign about Mrs. Clinton's very dubious character."
Some are touting New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's proposal to take an ax to Social Security as an act of bold political leadership. Sorry, I see the opposite. America needs leadership to replace old dysfunctional baggage with new programs and ideas fitting for a free 21st-century country. We don't need those who think leadership is retrofitting the country into our old baggage. It's the latter that Christie proposes. His "solution" to the impending bankruptcy of Social Security is to phase out benefits for retirees earning $80,000 to $200,000 and above and increase the retirement age from 67 to 69, and 62 to 64 for early retirement.
When Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were battling for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, I was interviewed on one of the cable news shows. The host asked me which Democrat I preferred — Obama or Clinton. I replied that it depended on whether you prefer a socialist who is a black male or a socialist who is a white female. The American people chose the former. Now with Mrs. Clinton's candidacy for 2016, the central question moving forward is whether the American public is happy with the socialism they've gotten thus far. If they are, most likely they will choose the white female socialist to replace the black male. Republicans will be tempted to make this campaign about Mrs. Clinton's very dubious character.
Columnist George Will points out that Apple's openly gay CEO, Tim Cook, "…thinks Indiana is a terrible place. (But) He opened marketing and retail operations in Saudi Arabia two months before a man was sentenced to 450 lashes for being gay." Will was commenting on Cook's recent Washington Post op-ed protesting Indiana's new, now amended, Religious Freedom Restoration Act and similar initiatives around the country. World Magazine reports that Cook has recently been in the United Arab Emirates negotiating on behalf of Apple, where homosexuality is against the law and the penalty is death. Cook's duplicity is not just in deeds, but also in words.
In 1979, the year before Republicans nominated Ronald Reagan as their presidential candidate, the Rev. Jerry Falwell and conservative activist Paul Weyrich founded the Moral Majority. It was at the Christian university in Lynchburg, Virginia, Liberty University, founded by Rev. Falwell, where Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) just announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. Although Cruz made no reference to the Moral Majority in his remarks, his thinking clearly is where Falwell's and Weyrich's was when they founded that organization. That getting a widely politically inactive universe of church going evangelical Christians politically engaged can change America.
Freedom House, which publishes an annual report measuring freedom around the world, rating nations based on political rights and civil liberties, has recently issued its 2015 report. According to this report, there is only one free nation in the Middle East region. It so happens that it is the one nation that seems to trouble our American president the most – Israel. Freedom House rates on a scale of 1-7, "1" being the most free and "7" the least. Israel is rated 1.5, receiving a grade of 1 on political rights and 2 on civil liberties. The Israeli democracy just held free elections and gave a sound victory to current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
The course of history changes at special moments when courageous individuals step up to take a stand, often at personal risk, on issues burning in controversy. One of those moments was just celebrated with the commemoration of the historic civil rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in March 1965. Another such moment is unfolding before us today. A group of some 150 black pastors, the National Baptist Fellowship of Concerned Pastors, is standing in protest against an invitation from the American Baptist College, in Nashville, Tennessee, to Bishop Yvette Flunder to speak at the college's annual Garnett-Nabrit Lecture Series, March 15-18.
The Marriage and Religious Freedom Act was introduced in the last Congress – in the Senate by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) with 11 co-sponsors and in the House by Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID) with 92 co-sponsors. This legislation will soon be re-introduced in the current session and should be given priority by Senate and House leadership and passed. It is of enormous national importance. The bill will protect individuals from discrimination, under federal law, so that they may be free to express and conduct their business according to their religious conviction that marriage is a union between one man and one woman and that sexual relations take place within this framework.
