June 3, 2020

The Slow Burn of America

When the mobs picked up guns and baseball bats and headed back into the streets last night, it was no longer about George Floyd. The chaos that’s erupting at dark has stopped telling his story — and started telling ours as a lost and desperate country.

When the mobs picked up guns and baseball bats and headed back into the streets Monday night, it was no longer about George Floyd. The chaos that’s erupting at dark has stopped telling his story — and started telling ours as a lost and desperate country. “It’s okay to be angry,” George’s brother said. But the man in whose name policemen are being shot, cities are being burned, and businesses are being destroyed would have never wanted this. He was “about peace.” And if the rioters cared about justice, they would be too.

But as dawn broke, even more cities had been brought to their knees by raging crowds that left officers in critical condition and communities beyond ruin. Despite curfews, low-flying military helicopters, and the deployment of the National Guard, hordes of crowds bent on violence hurled whatever they could find — rocks, fireworks, bricks — at teams in riot gear, torching cars and buildings along the way. As President Trump said earlier in the day, “These are not acts of peaceful protest. These are acts of domestic terror. The destruction of innocent life and the spilling of innocent blood is an offense to humanity and a crime against God.”

Like most Americans, the Floyd family has looked on with horror. “If his own family and blood are trying to deal with it and be positive about it, and go another route to seek justice,” Terrance Floyd insisted on ABC, “then why are you out here tearing up your community?” Floyd’s girlfriend also tried, emotionally telling them that “Waking up this morning to see Minneapolis on fire would be something that would devastate [him]. He loved the city.” Even Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s daughter, Bernice, tried to break through the madness. Peaceful protests “did not fail my father.” And, President Trump insisted, they will not fail us now.

“America is founded upon the rule of law," he reminded the country. "It is the foundation of our prosperity, our freedom, and our very way of life. But where there is no law, there is no opportunity. Where there is no justice, there is no liberty. Where there is no safety, there is no future. We must never give in to anger or hatred. If malice or violence reigns, then none of us is free.” If state leaders refuse to realize that and act, he will. “If a city or a state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.”

To the anarchists, arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, Antifa, and others, the message was simple: America won’t tolerate more. It’s time, former Cincinnati mayor Ken Blackwell said, “for local leaders to harness peoples’ grief and anger and channel it in a constructive direction.” Mayors, he insisted, “are the ones whose leadership matters the most right now… If they sit on the sidelines or if they fiddle [in fear] while their cities burn, they create a context where this sort of lawlessness is this accepted. And if you cower to lawlessness or you turn a blind eye… what you’re going to get is more of it.” And that, he warned, will rip apart the fabric of the community. In the end, Ken promised, that “will do more harm to [America] than COVID-19.”

Unfortunately, Americans have already seen what comes from a wasteland of leadership in places like Minneapolis, where Mayor Jacob Frey (D) stepped back and fueled the lawlessness by refusing to contain it. And quite frankly, he bears a lot of the responsibility for what’s spreading across the nation. He put his hands up and turned his city over to the agitators — giving leaders in other communities the license and excuse to do the same. Now look at the mess America’s in. Our law enforcers are literally engaged in hand-to-hand combat on U.S. streets. “What he did,” Ken agreed, “was actually tantamount to a dog whistle to terrorists and lawless thugs to terrorize his city.”

President Trump is taking the issue seriously, because he understands, as Ken said, “Those of us in positions of authority or influence have a duty to restore and unite for justice. Chaos and mindless destruction will destroy our communities.”

And for change to ever take root, there are deeper problems at work in this country that have to be addressed. Mob violence and police brutality spring from the same fountain: moral bankruptcy. As I explain in the Washington Times, the abuse of power, disregard for human life, and uncontrolled rage were witnessing in cities across our country, all flow from a society that is rapidly losing a sense of right and wrong, of transcendent truth. If there is an upside to this, it might be that in the quiet of our hearts, we’ll finally realize that goodness, truth, and beauty only comes from God. He’s the One who delivers hope — and in the midst of this crisis — the One who delivers healing.

For more, check out Ken Blackwell's Fox News column on what this former mayor would do in a nationwide wake-up call like this one.

Originally published here.


Churches Ask SCOTUS to Put on the Emergency Breaks


The debate over reopening isn’t just keeping pastors up at night. At the U.S. Supreme Court, justices were up well past normal business hours, weighing two states’ emergency appeals. It took until almost midnight last Friday to decide whether Illinois and California churches should be able to bypass their leaders’ orders. When Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the California opinion with the courts’ liberals, some Americans were irate. But was it really the horrible outcome they thought it was?

For a lot of congregations, May 31 was a special Sunday — the holy day of Pentecost. Pastors like Calvary Chapel Chino Hills’s Jack Hibbs had already decided, along with more than 1,200 other church leaders, to reopen. He had a massive plan in place for safety precautions: hygiene, deep church cleaning, and distancing. But despite all of that, California is one of the states that’s decided to keep churches running at a smaller capacity than area businesses. It’s unfair treatment, churches argued, so they sued.

Last week, that case was fast-tracked — first through the Ninth Circuit, where a three-judge panel sided with Governor Gavin Newsom (D) and then to the Supreme Court. Illinois’s situation was a little different, and the justices turned down the case quickly, with a two-paragraph order because the state altered its directives to churches. California’s case took a different turn. Instead of a brief explanation, the justices actually issued opinions. Roberts, in another siding with the court’s more liberal wing, wrote that coronavirus “has killed thousands of people in California and more than 100,000 nationwide,” but there is “no known cure, no effective treatment, and no vaccine.” On top of that, people “may be infected but asymptomatic” and can spread the infection without knowing it.

“The precise question," he went on, "of when restrictions on particular social activities should be lifted during the pandemic is a dynamic and fact-intensive matter subject to reasonable disagreement. Our Constitution principally entrusts ‘the safety and the health of the people’ to the politically accountable officials of the states ‘to guard and protect.’” Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas disagreed, saying they would have granted the request to treat churches like everyone else.

“California’s latest safety guidelines discriminate against places of worship and in favor of comparable secular businesses. Such discrimination violates the 1st Amendment,” Kavanaugh wrote for the trio. “[It] already trusts its residents and any number of businesses to adhere to proper social distancing and hygiene practices. The state cannot assume the worst when people go to worship but assume the best when people go to work or go about the rest of their daily lives in permitted social settings.” But, at the end of the day, the emergency appeal was denied — and the headlines, which were convenient, only told one story: that once again, Justice Roberts had become an unreliable swing vote.

Paul Jonna, special counsel with Thomas More Society, agreed that it was “disappointing” but insisted, “it’s not as significant as it might seem.” On “Washington Watch,” he explained that “this was an emergency application on a very high standard.” Justice Roberts’s opinion, which no others joined, he pointed out, “has no binding effect on the lower circuit courts.” It’s also not very significant, he reminded listeners, because it didn’t really address the situation on the merits.

The good news, on the other hand, is that four justices issued a very strong dissent, explaining “why they would actually grant the application under the much-heightened standard for emergency relief.” Let’s remember, there’s still a long way to go before this issue is settled. “Once we get back to the Ninth Circuit and fully brief the appeal, we’ll have a final decision on the merits. And the Supreme Court will then have a chance to weigh in on the merits and on with a final ruling from the Supreme Court.”

Did he wish Roberts had joined the conservative justices? Of course. But at the end of the day, Americans should be encouraged that the Trump picks are as originalist as advertised. Justice Kavanaugh’s dissent was a solid defense of religious liberty that completely tracks with the Constitution. Eventually, Paul says, he hopes that same logic will win the day.

In the meantime, it certainly brings back into focus one of the major issues heading into this election — the Supreme Court and judicial confirmations in general. President Trump has lived up to his end of the bargain. Let’s hope Americans take that into serious consideration when they head into their polling stations this November.

Originally published here.


Every Vought Counts


Like a lot of the president’s nominees, acting budget director Russell Vought doesn’t have a whole lot of fond memories about his first confirmation hearing in the Senate. Back in 2018, when he was first picked to be OMB’s second-in-command, he was grilled by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in a debate so fiercely personal it became national news. Instead of big-picture economics, the Left turned his nomination into a firefight over Vought’s Christian faith. A fight, this time around, Vought is hoping won’t be repeated.

It’s been two years since Sanders’s red-faced tantrum over Vought’s Christianity. Since then, Mick Mulvaney’s former deputy has proven himself more than capable — rising to his boss’s old post when Mulvaney was picked as Trump’s chief of staff. Russell has presided over one of the administration’s most important agencies since 2019, winning the admiration of the White House for his staunch defense of the president’s agenda. This week, the longtime economist finally has a chance to drop the “acting” label from his title. A lot of that depends on whether the hearings — one in the Senate Budget Committee and another in its Homeland Security-Government Affairs Committee — goes as planned.

Last time around, Vought thought he’d have to answer some tough questions. But, like most of us, he thought they’d be about finances — not faith. Tuesday and Wednesday, he’ll be prepared for the onslaught of hostility Democrats have for faith. The 2018 spectacle was an eye-opening one for a lot of the country, who may not have realized the level of contempt many liberals hold toward the majority religion in America. To even mainstream media commentators, it was surprising that a man who almost won the Democratic Party’s nomination for president thinks there’s no room in public service for people who believe in the Bible.

Now, with the country literally burning to the ground, we see where that kind of intolerance for faith has led. With help from eight years of Barack Obama, liberals have chased religion out of their party, their platform, our schools, and have set to work booting Him from the public square. And yet, looking around at the chaos of our cities, many of them in ashes or coated in graffiti, this push to remove God from our corporate consciousness has utterly backfired. We’ve come to a place where there’s such contempt for human life and such an infatuation with violence that we’ve descended into a lost and broken place.

Will the Senate continue that leftist march to drive faith underground, where it cannot counter the darkness of today? Or will it embrace the hope that faith like Vought’s offers to the questions roiling our country? Bigotry — against people’s skin color, religion, beliefs — they all come from the same poisonous root. It’s the same prejudice that’s brought our country to this brink. Respect for the ideals of this country and Constitution — for freedom of expression, thought, and viewpoint — start at the top. Let’s hope the Senate leads the way in charting a new path out of the division that’s scarred the process, and for too many days, our people.

Originally published here.


What Does the Bible Say about November 2020?


God’s Word speaks to a lot of things — including our responsibility to be engaged in our system of government. FRC’s David Closson explains how relevant Scripture is to everything we face as a nation in this new and updated edition of “Biblical Principles for Political Engagement: Worldview, Issues, and Voting." Hear why it matters in this special interview on Monday’s "Washington Watch.”

Originally published here.


This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.

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