March 12, 2008

The Nominees for RRRW Drama Queen Are…..

I’m guessing that the fundie churches hand out a heaping dose of fear mongering when they go to church on Sunday because yesterday’s RRRW ~~propaganda~~ news theme was hysteria. The biggest theme of the day was about the recent California decision that parents could not home-school their children unless the person providing the instruction had a teaching certificate. Needless to say the “Christian” news sources provided their own spin and bias on the matter. From WorldNetDaily:

Watch out parents; they’re after your children again, this time in California, but it could spread nationally….

Remember his name: Justice H. Walter Croskey. As he spoke of the 3-0 ruling issued Feb. 28, he added that failure to comply means that parents can be criminally prosecuted.

He’s talking about parents teaching their own children, in their own homes!…

This case came about because of a child welfare investigation in Los Angeles County. Mary and Philip Long were homeschooling their eight children. Mrs. Long is the teacher, but she’s not credentialed. The children were also enrolled in the Sunland Christian School as part of an independent study program.

Apparently, one of the children complained to someone about “mistreatment.” As part of the investigation, a juvenile court judge found the children were being “poorly educated” (because of homeschooling) but made no changes.

However, lawyers appointed for the children after child advocates got involved pursued the issue. The appeals court then ordered the children to state schools, not permitting them to continue with Sunland school because it (Sunland) “was willing to participate in the deprivation of the children’s right to a legal education.”…

It seems everything is spinning out of control. The government on every level, from local to national; the judiciary on every level; the bureaucracy in every facet of life, schools, businesses, medicine, social organizations and yes, sometimes even churches: All have spread their tentacles into what used to be our personal lives and taken control to one degree or another.

Sometimes it’s major, sometimes minor, but it adds up to loss of privacy and loss of control of our lives, families, children, homes, property, jobs, medical care, social activities and what ever else they can infiltrate.

Despite the efforts of many, we are still the “home of the brave,” but we’re losing out on being “the home of the free.”

This is the real battle on the home front. It’s a battle we must win. The alternative is totalitarianism, and it’s closer than we realize.

Now wait, champions of individual freedom and parental rights, before you get outraged. Here’s what they didn’t tell you about those poor parents whose rights have been trod upon by the Big Bad State of California.

Simpson doesn’t mention that courts have found that were was, in fact, mistreatment going on by the father against his children and that the house where the family lived was in “an endangering filthy, unsanitary and unsafe condition, and the minors were chronically filthy, and unsupervised late at night.”

Further, the judge did not conclude that the children were being “poorly educated” because they were being homeschooled; the judge made no general statement about the overall quality of homeschooled. Rather, the judge stated that, in this case, the education the children received at home as “lousy,” “meager,” and “bad,” and that the supervision by the Christian school with which the family was affiliated was minimal at best. One child testified that she “was not taught geography or history. Asked if she can add, subtract, multiply and divide, [she] stated she cannot.”

So it seems, at least to certain Christians, that personal freedoms include the right to raise children in squalor, neglect them and fail to teach them things that they need to survive in the world. Is it any wonder they hate the notion of the State requiring any form of standards, and that enforcing said standards amounts to totalitarianism? Funny how them imposing their religion on others (which they would by force if given half a chance) doesn’t count as such in their minds).

OneNewsNow chimes with their take on the matter (and I notice they’ve updated their Website by the way). Jeff Johnson says:

Adolf Hitler outlawed home schooling in Germany in 1938. The practice is still illegal in re-unified Germany to this day.

Jeff, have you heard of Godwin’s Law? Guess what? You lose.

Moving on, sort of, we discover that Janet Folger believes that Anita Bryant was right.

Last weekend I met a true hero. A woman I have long admired for a stand that cost her everything. In fact, I dedicated my book, “The Criminalization of Christianity,” to her. The inscription reads:

“To all those with courage to speak the truth in the face of ridicule, blame, assault, censorship, and the threat of being criminalized: Including Anita Bryant …”

That’s quite a martyr complex Janet has there. Maybe she should be a gaytheist for a month and learn what it’s really like to speak the truth in the face of ridicule, blame, assault, censorship, and actually being criminalized. She hasn’t the first clue what it is like to not have her Human and Civil Rights, and her claims that Christianity is being criminalized are pure hyperbole.

A friend of mine who heard about the highlight of my weekend asked, “Who is Anita Bryant?” He said he had only heard me talk about Phyllis Schlafly with “such superlatives.”

…..

This beauty queen and orange juice spokeswoman was known for saying “a day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine.” She had her own television show at the age of 12. She had a successful singing career and entertained the troops with Bob Hope. And when a candidate she had endorsed took a stand for the homosexual agenda in the public schools in Miami-Dade County, Anita Bryant took a stand against it.

That Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly are her heroes tells me all I need to know about Folger. Anita Bryant is a hateful bigot who used her fame to set the gay-rights movement back years, if not decades. She spread lies and propaganda wrapped in the name of Christianity. In other words, she’s just like most of today’s homophobes.

Enter the real “hate speech”: pies in the face, kidnapping threats, death threats, threats to her children, acts of violence to her home. Like a scene out of Sodom, homosexual activists surrounded her home screaming at the top of their lungs. Her mother was afraid to open the front door. She lost her marriage. She lost her jobs and any means of supporting herself and her four children. She was a sacrificial lamb to wake a sleeping nation. She stood alone. And yet she stood.

My heart can’t bleed for her over a pie in the face or some gay people ranting at her outside her home because they were angry over her hateful lies. Not when we’ve had an anti-LGBT hate crime at least every eight days this year so far, Congresswomen spewing hatred against us in their capacity as elected officials, and more than 1,000 anti-LGBT hate crimes last year.

“Hate crimes” legislation (which passed both the U.S. House and Senate last year –stopped only by a threat of a veto) would silence pastors in their pulpits and outlaw books like “The Criminalization of Christianity,” whose subtitle is: “Read this Before it Becomes Illegal!” The “Employment Non-Discrimination Act” would put an “ENDA” to religious liberty in the workplace and, with its transgender amendment, threaten any business that would fire a man who came to work wearing a dress. By the way, Mitt Romney favors states enacting this business-closing legislation.

Funny how Christians have hate-crimes protection and are the first to scream about “persecution”, yet fight tooth and nail to keep everybody else from having equal protection under the law. As usual, the ones who do the most discriminationg are the ones who whine the most about being discriminated against. Projection, anyone?

The textbooks in California are being rewritten to remove any references to “mom” and “dad” and revised to appear more like the Washington Blade or a homosexual newsletter.

I’d like to see an actual example of this. I’ve seen the Washington Blade, having lived in that region before, and I can’t imagine California school textbooks are now advertising massage services for gay men and providing personals columns for the LGBT community. Frankly I get the impression Folger is completely making this up and assuming her readers will just buy it–which they likely will. I may just go check out some of those textbooks myself so I can call her on it.

And now California courts are telling parents that it’s illegal to homeschool or send their children to Christian and private schools that may have teachers without “state certification.”

And there it is! She’s trying to blame the California homeschooling decision on The Gay Agenda. Is there nothing she and her ilk won’t blame on us? Sadly her readers will probably fall for it.

To those thinking about “sitting it out,” or “supporting a third party” now, consider an analogy. We are facing a burning building. There is a day-care center full of children burning down and we have three options before us.

A. We have a candidate named John who will rescue most everyone in that building. He hasn’t pledged that he’ll get everyone out just yet, but the vast majority of those kids are going to be carried out alive with his pro-life policies and judges.

B. Or you can protest (with a third-party candidate). Pick up a sign and march because you didn’t get the candidate you wanted chanting, “Rescue all the children! Rescue all the children!” while the building burns and all the children die.

C. Or you can sit it out. Don’t endorse. Don’t vote. And Clinton or Obama will deadbolt the fire exits and rip out the sprinklers. They will then lock arms and prevent any of us from entering the building to rescue the children inside. They will also prevent notification of parents whose children are about to be burned alive.

If I were the one in the burning building, I know what I would want you to do. Either we protect nearly all of the kids or none of the kids. Oh? But you think in four years we can come back and teach everyone a lesson? Really?

If B. Hussein Obama or Mrs. Clinton get elected, you can expect two to three justices on the Supreme Court to be replaced with 45-year-old rabid pro-abortion liberals who hate marriage and everything we believe. Then you can expect:

1. Thought crimes to become law and pastors to be arrested for the content of their sermons.

2. The silencing of Christian and conservative talk radio with the UnFairness Doctrine.

3. ENDA to bring an end to free speech in the workplace, shutting down business like Boston’s Catholic Charities who wanted to place orphan children with a mom and a dad rather than with homosexual activists.

4. The Union Thug Law removing the secret ballot for union membership and delivering more coerced funds to the Democrat coffers then ever before.

…..

First, repent on behalf of our nation; then put your faith to action. Because if we stand by while the building burns, it’s not just the innocent children who will remain in harm’s way. No, if we throw our influence and our vote away, each of us will face the ridicule, blame, assault, censorship and the threat of being criminalized with the same steamroller that ran over Anita Bryant. And educating our children to the contrary will become a criminal act.

Won’t somebody please think of the children?!?!

Back to OneNewsNow, their “Persecution” section has this story about a pastor who was allegedly shot for his evangelical work.

Persecution against Christians continues in Sri Lanka, as a pastor has been gunned down outside his home in the country’s eastern province of Ampara.

Pastor Neil Edirisinghe of the House Church Foundation died at the scene, while his wife was shot in the stomach and was expected to recover. The couple’s two-year-old son also received minor injuries in the attack and was reportedly being treated for trauma. Todd Nettleton with Voice of the Martyrs says persecution against Christians in Sri Lanka is not new.

“The country of Sri Lanka is one where we have seen persecution …. We don’t know all the details of that situation yet; it’s still unfolding. But we do know here is a pastor gunned down, and it seems to be targeted because of his church leadership, because of his faith,” says Nettleton.

Nettleton says the shooting is a stark reminder of the dangers Christians face in restricted nations. “There’s somewhat of a perception that every Christian is as free as we are here in America. That is simply not true,” states the ministry spokesman. “There’s also the perception that persecution happened in the Bible, in the Book of Acts, but then it stopped after the Bible was finished — and that’s not true either.”

Nettleton references the scripture found in John 15, in which Jesus reminds his disciples that the world hates him — and that the world will hate them as well if they follow him. “And that’s what we see in so many restricted nations around the world,” he adds.

Here’s a clue. When you go into somebody else’s home/country and try to force your ways on them despite their protests that they don’t want it, you can’t claim persecution if they finally fight back. Did any of you ever consider that the reason people “hate you” as you claim is because when they tell you they don’t want to hear about your religion you continue to pester them? Learn the meaning of the word “NO” and you’ll see a dramatic drop in the so-called persecution you face.

So, there are the nominees. After much consideration I’ve decided the RRRW Drama Queen award will go to…..

Janet Folger!
Drama Queen