One would have to be living as a hermit to not have heard the extensive news coverage as women have come forth accusing Herman Cain of sexual harassment and adultery. No actual evidence was ever presented but Herman Cain decided to step down from the run for president. Conservative radio talk show host Dennis Prager in Adultery and Politics: Religious conservatives often go wrong by focusing on candidates’ sexual sins. wonders:

…whether we should care about a politician’s sexual life, and how much the press should report about these matters.

He doesn’t argue in defense of adultery or sexual sin but rather that one can break their vows before God to their wife and it should not influence our view of their abilities as a leader. An example he uses in support of this premise is King David: Continue reading …

I originally thought I would title this something like “Tough Questions for Chris Wallace.” Obviously, being a big time television celebrity, reading our blog is not likely even on his radar much less being any sort of a priority.

Chris Wallace is a member of the FOX News network, host of FOX News Sunday and until recently I had a great deal of respect for what seemed like journalistic integrity. Recently however, he seems to have succumbed to crafting what Newt Gingrich painted as gotcha questions. They are emotionally charged and designed to spark controversy but often are false questions which serve to put the one questioned on the defensive with no real way to give a response that makes them look anything by guilty. In this past Sunday’s interview Fox’s Chris Wallace Hits Santorum from Left on Gays in Military: Continue reading …

I used to think Jesus was controversial to the modern world. I was wrong. Paul is way more vilified. If you do a search for Jesus the Rabbi, you will still get a smattering of the Jesus-was-a-good-moral-teacher-but-not-God kind of sites. But Paul, wow. Go do a google search on Paul and Christianity and pretty soon you will find that way more people hate Paul than Jesus. He was a homophobe. He was a iconoclast (and not the cool kind either). He invented modern Christianity and co-opted the Jesus movement for his own purposes etc. Here’s the incredibly badly named LGBT bible quote:

Christianity owes its evil homophobia to the closet homosexual known as the Apostle Paul, the father of all homophobic bigotry. The Apostle Paul was a devoted Pharisee who persecuted and murdered countless of Jewish Christians for a period of 20 years before he defected from the Pharisaic Law and became a Christian. The reason behind the Apostle Paul’s defection to Christianity is quite simple. The Pharisees were a family obsessed ultra conservative religious cult of Jewish homophobes. The Pharisaic Law required all Jewish men to marry and raise children. The Apostle Paul was a closet homosexual with no interest in women. For many years the Apostle Paul had concealed his homosexuality from the Pharisees by promoting homophobia as a means to conceal his own homosexuality.

Continue reading …

One of my favorite words to teach my students when I taught high school English was “neologism.” Its a word that means something like “newly made up word.” I would tell my students that the purpose of new vocabulary was to annoy and confuse your friends. After all, if your vocabulary was sufficiently erudite, you could insult someone and they wouldn’t even know it. Neologisms are everywhere. Four times a year, that bastion of all that is correct in the English language, The Oxford English Dictionary or the OED, adds a few precious words to the canon of English vocabulary. This year? For the Military minded, we have “field-strip.” For the techno-geek, the OED added “auto-complete” and the snarky are now able to add “wienie” officially to their repertoire of insults.

In theology, a neologism has a slightly nuanced meaning. Continue reading …

Ah, spring is in full swing. Flowers are in bloom, the trees have leaves, lawns are in full growth and, the dreaded mosquito is on the scene. Even as I thought about this last week, Joy and I were listening to an audio book while on our route to and from California. The book, A Rule Against Murder: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel by Louise Penny . It is a well done murder mystery set in Canada, at a large log built resort building in the woods by a lake with no internet. What does that have to do with mosquitoes? Well, everything. With the wonderful setting also comes Continue reading …

Two stories that caught my attention this week have to do with persecution of Christians in foreign countries. I’m always amazed at how many people have no idea that Christians are persecuted in other parts of the world. It is something that often escapes my friends on the far left of the political spectrum. It seems in the minds of many, religious persecution is something that happens only to minority religions or Islam. When questioned about Christian persecution, I can almost see the images of lions and Roman arenas forming in the heads of my friends, rather than say a lone Chinese preacher languishing in a cell or in recent events: A lone Pakistani member of parliment who dared protest Pakistan’s blasphemy laws as a representative of all the non-Muslim citizens of Pakistan. Shahbaz Bhatti was remarkable. I only heard of him after his assassination which is sad. I would like to have followed him before he became famous for dying. But his death is what he will always be remembered for:

I think the most poignant moment in that interview Continue reading …

Since 1971, homosexual activists have worked hard in the courts trying to have marriage redefined. In our 2006 article Whose on First … First? we looked at the history of marriage and the law in the United States. Prior to 1971 thechallenge to traditional marriage was bigamy and polygamy. Could a man be married to 2 or more women at the same time? The court cases typically ended with the general affirmation of one man, one women constituting marriage but as far as the Constitution was concerned the courts held that:

“… every civil government had the right to determine whether monogamy or polygamy should be the law of social life under its jurisdiction.” 1

The Federal Courts left the final determination on monogamy vs polygamy to the states. It wasn’t a Federal issue. The question of sex and sexual partners and governmental restrictions is not limited to the United States. It surfaced overseas in 2006 when the Dutch Court OKs Pedophile Party Why did they do this? Their thinking is consistent with what we are finding in the U.S. Courts:

“It is not illegal to try democratically to change the system – which is what these people are trying to do,” said a Hague spokesperson, summarizing the ruling of Judge H. Hofius.

“They are exercising their freedoms of speech and association, and as such cannot be banned by the state.”

These stories are related. Continue reading …