Marriage is not a right . . .hear! hear!

Contrary to what we hear incessantly, marriage is not a right; it is an
estate, a condition. There are conditions of life that have nothing to do with
rights. One doesn’t have a right to go through puberty. One either does or
doesn’t. What is the condition of being married, and what makes it possible to
attain it? Franz Rosenzweig’s anthropology—in which religion is a response to
man’s sentience of death, and the sentience of death is not only an individual
but also an communal characteristic—may help answer that question. Humankind
fights mortality in two ways. The first is to raise children who will remember
us, and the second is to seek eternal life through divine grace. The estate of
marriage involves both.

snip

It is not the nature of some of the other mammals to breed in captivity; it is not the nature of homo sapiens to breed in the absence of the hope of eternal life. The first principle of Augustine’s anthropology, that we are made for God and restless until we come to him, coheres well with what we observe in societies that abandon God. Our restlessness in that terminal case can reach levels that tear us to pieces. It is entirely possible to devise other means of perpetuating the species than marriage, for example, the collective raising of children as in Plato’s dystopia and the various attempts to realize some of its features. But none of them has taken, not even for short periods of time. They have no interest for human beings. It is not only that people want to raise their own children, rather than the state’s children: Without the expectation of eternal life within a faith community, mating couples do not evince interest in reproducing at replacement levels. An often-cited exception to this rule seems to be Sweden, where only sixty percent of women will marry at current rates (compared to eighty-five percent in the United States), and fifty-six percent of births occur outside of marriage, compared to thirty-five percent in the United states. Twenty-eight percent of all Swedish couples cohabit without marrying, compared to eight percent in the United States. Swedish fertility, to be sure, is an unsustainable 1.6, so the problem will liquidate itself over time.
Marriage as an institution that fulfills our nature: It is a holy estate that permits the mating pair of humans to embed their reproductive activity in the eschatological hope of their faith community.

Mike Huckabee and John Stewart on abortion

Stewart pressed Huckabee: "Do you think that on the side of choice, that
they don't believe that every human life has value?"

"I don't think
there's anybody that wakes up and says, 'I really think abortion is a wonderful,
wonderful thing," Huckabee replied. "I don't truly believe that even people who
would consider themselves 'pro-choice' like abortion - I think that they haven't
thought through the implications and the logical conclusion."

Noting
that 93% of abortions in America are elective rather than health-based, Huckabee
pointed out the consequences of training future generations "that it is OK to
take a human life because that life represents to us an interference, or an
interruption to our lives either economically or socially."

"What
happens when our children one day look at us and we're old?" he asked. "I do not
want to give my kids the opportunity to say, 'Dad, you are an interference.
Coming to see you in the nursing home is really messing up my social life. You
are very expensive, Dad.'"

Stewart, who questioned the comparison,
softened his objection by admitting his affection for his own children before
birth.

"Look, I have kids, and I think it is very difficult when you
look at an ultrasound of your child and you see a heartbeat - you are filled
with that wonder and love and all those things," he said. "I don't just feel
personally that is a decision I can make for another person."

Huckabee
also pursued the question of equal rights in a parallel to slavery, asking:
"Does a person have a right to own another person? ... Can the mother totally
own the child?"

"I just think our culture ought to do everything it can
to support and encourage her to make a life decision and to be honest with her
and to explain to her: this is a heartbeat, this is a child," he said.

Flying the friendly skies of United when your luggage goes AWOL

I flew to Phoenix, Arizona yesterday.

The problem is my luggage went to Denver, Colorado. So I am sweltering in the Phoenix 'burbs without a change of clothes other than a pair of my son's old gym shorts and a t-shirt. I jumped in his pool this morning, wearing the clothes I wore on the plane.

I am not amused. Especially since for the first time in my life I had to PAY for bringing the suitcase on the plane. So, what do I get for the $11 CDN per suitcase? This, folks, was the one suitcase each that most airlines (still? used to?) allowed you to bring aboard for free.

That $11 per is the price if you don't have the savvy to pay online in advance. At the airport, they ding you for $15 a bag. And what a glum bunch of people at the United counter at the Ottawa airport. They should be happy those stupid kiosks you have to use to get your boarding pass from (unless you got yours online first) haven't put them out of a job. No they were slow, sullen, not giving a poutine curd that the line was extending to Quebec. I estimated they spent about 15 minutes with each customer. Not because they were giving extra special attention, but because they were not going to let anything rush them. I recalled what my mom and aunt told me about their trips to the Soviet Union and how "great" customer service was when you had to get in line for a coupon to buy an onion, then get in line for the onion, then get in line to pay for it. It might take two hours to get a simple staple that one could never predict could be found on the usually empty store shelves. When my great aunts came to the United States in the 1970s, they wept when they saw an American supermarket. They could not believe the aisles of fresh produce and other goods. Are we trending in the wrong direction?

We had a short time between flights when we arrived at Dulles yesterday from Ottawa, so I can understand that maybe there was a bit of a problem loading the bag onto the Phoenix flight. The lady at the airport in the missing baggage area said the bag had gone to Denver.

DENVER?

Why Denver? Because there is only one flight a day from Dulles, but lots from Denver. Okay. I could deal with that if my bag arrived this morning. But no.

So I called several times today and the bag was still sitting in Denver, despite the fact that four flights had left already for Phoenix. They have one of these automated voices that tells you to spell out the missing baggage code that is a combination of letters and numbers. It makes you try three times until it passes you on to an attendant, by which time you are either ready to shoot yourself or shoot someone. And pressing zero does not work, so you can't short-circuit your frustration.

Why don't they have a code that you can punch in with your phone keypad? Maybe my accent is too Canadian or something, eh? EH? I feel sorry for the many travelers who have very strong accents trying to deal with crappy voice recognition software probably set in some third world country by an exploited engineer who doesn't speak English himself as a first language.

The people who have answered the phone have all been polite and as helpful as they could be, but all they have are their little bar code tracking thingies and it doesn't sound like there's a lot they can do. And the website they have? Hopeless. According to that my luggage has not even been located.

Flying used to be kind of fun, but increasingly it is becoming a nightmare. The airline that starts to get customer service instead of dinging you right and left for a bit of luggage here and leg room there is going to turn a smart profit.

The last time I called they said the luggage had arrived in Phoenix and was with the delivery service. They say it will be here by 9 p.m. tonight.

I do not think they have any idea of what an inconvenience it is to be luggageless. You know, if that $11 paid for a crackerjack system of locating and expediting my suitcase to me then maybe
I would not mind so much.

But I feel dinged for inferior service. So I am not amused. Anyone else have an airline nightmare they want to share?

Use the comments section.

UPDATE:

The luggage just arrived. 9:57 p.m. (which is almost midnight Ottawa time).

And everything seems to still be intact. So, United is spared the irate phone calls I had started rehearsing for tomorrow.

Stories that are a joy to write

My work places me in a privileged position to be able to write stories like this. Being around such ministries blesses me so much and I hope you will find reading this as encouraging as I found writing it. From this week's Western Catholic Reporter:

OTTAWA - NET Ministries Canada
founder James Mikulasik calls himself a "logger of men," instead of "a fisher of
men" because of his 12 years in the logging industry in his native British
Columbia.
That's why NET alumni gave him an axe with their signatures on the
handle June 7, as the ministry marked its 15th anniversary in Canada with a
weekend of celebrations and worship in Ottawa.
"I am logging men for
Christ," Mikulasik told the 100 alumni from across Canada who attended.
"It's so beautiful to see the youth evangelizing youth," Mikulasik said,
noting how that evangelization spread to families, from priest to priest, to
evangelizing one's fellow workers in the workplace.
"This is the new
evangelization the popes lately have been talking about," he said. He praised
their "ministry of hope" that gives people "hope in the Lord Jesus Christ."
Mikulasik, 46, and Tiffany Scott, 37, originally from Anola, Man., were the
first NET Ministries team to minister in Canada 15 years ago.
Since then,
400 people have participated as members of the National Evangelization Teams
(NET) in Canada and have touched thousands of lives across the country through
parish and school ministry.
Scott, who is now finishing up a doctorate in
clinical psychology, said she learned how a ministry reaching many lives could
grow from something very small, from simple beginnings.
"When the two of us
just started, we didn't know if this was what God wanted," she said. "Looking
back now, it was really blessed by God and inspired by the Holy Spirit."
Ottawa Archbishop Emeritus Marcel Gervais, who served as NET's president
from 1994 to 2007, recalled how he first met Mikulasik.
"I don't know this
man. I have never seen him before," Gervais said. "He comes to the archbishop of
Ottawa and says, more or less, I want to change the world."

Short hiatus

Hello all,

I'm going to take a short hiatus from blogging. So check out Free Canuckistan for the latest on the fight for freedom of expression. The Binksmeister has links to all the important blogs.

I may check in from time to time, but I hope to get a bit of a spiritual rest from anything but the Good News.

See you soon.

Oswald Chambers on the fact of sin

Many years ago a friend gave me a copy of Oswald Chamber's My Utmost for His Highest.

I often found these devotionals uncanny in how they, as the Quakers say, speak to my condition or give me a profound spiritual insight.

Today's devotional goes like this:

June 24th.
	RECONCILING ONE'S SELF TO THE FACT OF SIN
This is your hour, and the power of darkness." Luke 22:53 It is not being reconciled to the fact of sin that produces all the disasters in life. You may talk about the nobility of human nature, but there is something in human nature which will laugh in the face of every ideal you have. If you refuse to agree with the fact that there is vice and self-seeking, something downright spiteful and wrong in human beings, instead of reconciling yourself to it, when it strikes your life, you will compromise with it and say it is of no use to battle against it. Have you made allowance for this hour and the power of darkness, or do you take a recognition of yourself that misses out sin? In your bodily relationships and friendships do you reconcile yourself to the fact of sin? If not, you will be caught round the next corner and you will compromise with it. If you reconcile yourself to the fact of sin, you will realize the danger at once - Yes, I see what that would mean. The recognition of sin does not destroy the basis of friendship; it establishes a mutual regard for the fact that the basis of life is tragic. Always beware of an estimate of life which does not recognize the fact that there is sin. Jesus Christ never trusted human nature, yet He was never cynical, never suspicious, because He trusted absolutely in what He could do for human nature. The pure man or woman, not the innocent, is the safeguarded man or woman. You are never safe with an innocent man or woman. Men and women have no business to be innocent; God demands that they be pure and virtuous. Innocence is the characteristic of a child; it is a blameworthy thing for a man or woman not to be reconciled to the fact of sin.

The Nativity of John the Baptist

Here is the Liturgy of the Word from our Mass today in the Anglican Catholic cathedral in Ottawa, June 24. May you find these words edifying and soul-stirring.

THE COLLECT.

ALMIGHTY God, by whose providence thy servant John Baptist was wonderfully born, and sent to prepare the way of thy Son our Saviour, by preaching of repentance: Make us so to follow his doctrine and holy life, that we may truly repent according to his preaching, and after his example constantly speak the truth, boldly rebuke vice, and patiently suffer for the truth's sake; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

With the following, for CANADA, if desired.

O GOD, who didst lead the fathers of our nation into this land of Canada, and hast increased us by thy favour: Grant, we beseech thee, that we who now enter into their inheritance, may prove ourselves a people mindful of thy mercies and ready to do thy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

THE LESSON. Isaiah 40. 1.

COMFORT ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned; for she hath received of the LORD'S hand double for all her sins. The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a high-way for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain. And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and it all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it. The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, because the Spirit of the LORD bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth; but the word of our God shall stand for ever. O Zion, that bringest good tidings, get thee up into the high mountain: O Jerusalem, that bringest good tidings, lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid: say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God. Behold, the Lord GOD will come with strong hand, and his arm shall rule for him: behold, his reward is with him, and his work before him. He shall feed his flock like a shepherd; he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.

THE GOSPEL. St Luke 1. 57.

ELIZABETH'S full time came that she should be delivered; and she brought forth a son. And her neighbours and her cousins heard how the Lord had showed great mercy upon her; and they rejoiced with her. And it came to pass, that on the eighth day they came to circumcise the child; and they called him Zacharias, after the name of his father. And his mother answered and said, Not so; but he shall be called John. And they said unto her, There is none of thy kindred that is called by this name. And they made signs to his father, how he would have him called. And he asked for a writing-table, and wrote, saying, His name is John. And they marvelled all. And his mouth was opened immediately, and his tongue loosed, and he spake, and praised God. And fear came on all that dwelt round about them; and all these sayings were noised abroad throughout all the hill-country of Judaea. And all they that had heard them laid them up in their hearts, saying, What manner of child shall this be? And the hand of the Lord was with him. And his father Zacharias was filled with the Holy Spirit, and prophesied, saying,

Blessed be the Lord God of Israel:
For he hath visited and redeemed his people,
And hath raised up an horn of salvation for us
In the house of his servant David;
As he spake by the mouth of his holy prophets,
Which have been since the world began;
That we should be saved from our enemies,
And from the hand of all that hate us;
To perform the mercy promised to our fathers,
And to remember his holy covenant;
The oath which he sware to our father Abraham,
That he would grant unto us, that we, being delivered out of the hands of our enemies,
Might serve him without fear,
In holiness and righteousness before him all the days of our life.
And thou, child, shalt be called the Prophet of the Highest:
For thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways;
To give knowledge of salvation unto his people,
By the remission of their sins,
Through the tender mercy of our God,
Whereby the day-spring from on high hath visited us;
To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death;
To guide our feet into the way of peace.

And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit; and was in the deserts till the day of his showing unto Israel.

Doesn't that verse from Isaiah make your heart sing?

The Roman Catholic Archbishop Terrence Prendergast has this to say in his homily at Notre Dame Cathedral today:

John's prophetic call to serve both Israel and the nations lay hidden within the designs of God. It was issued before his birth, as he was being carried in the womb of Elizabeth: "The Lord called me before I was born; while I was in my mother's womb He named me".

The majority of Israelite names, like ancient Semitic names in general, had readily understandable meanings. Parents consciously chose such names, which could be translated into sentences, to describe the identity of, or aspirations they had for, their child. The name "Zechariah" means, "The Lord remembers", while "John" means "God has been gracious".

John's name was assigned him by the angel Gabriel when Zechariah was told that his wife would conceive and bear a son in her old age. Though Zechariah had been rendered mute for his momentary unbelief, Elizabeth in a wondrous manner had arrived at the divinely appointed name. She insisted on naming her son John.

John's birth is mentioned only cursorily so that attention may be given to the drama of his naming and the end of Zechariah's speechlessness. When Zechariah wrote "His name is John", people were amazed, Zechariah's tongue was loosed and he began praising God, uttering the Benedictus (Luke 1:68-79), which the Church prays at Lauds every morning.
In the passage from Acts, Paul described the closing of John's preaching career as a selfless one, his humility leading him to speak thus about Jesus: "'What do you suppose that I am? I am not He. No, but one is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of the sandals on His feet'".

Just as at the time of the winter solstice—December 25—when the course of the sun begins to rise in the northern hemisphere, the Church celebrates the birth of Christ, the shining sun born from on high and the true light of the world, so, at the summer solstice—June 24—when the course of the sun begins to decline, the Christian community recalls the birth of John the Baptist, who, though not himself the light, bore witness to the light (cf. John 1:6-9).

John himself testified, "He must increase, but I must decrease" (John 3:30), a saying that the Church's liturgy has applied to the location of these feasts in the solar calendar.

There's more. Go on over to the archbishop's blog to read the rest.

I am going to buy this CD, I promise

Third Day does it with this song:



Wouldn't you like to feel born again?

Remember what it felt like to be born again?

Would you like to be born again?

Some after-birthday thoughts . . .here's one for you Jennifer

I went to mass the morning of my birthday, June 19, where we celebrated the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I arrived early and had some time to recollect and I remembered the Psalm I chose as "my psalm" years ago because it so expressed my debt to Jesus Christ.
It goes like this:

Psalm 116

I love the Lord, because he hath heard my voice and my supplications.

²Because he hath inclined his ear unto me, therefore will I call upon him as long as I live.

³The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell gat hold upon me: I found trouble and sorrow.

⁴Then called I upon the name of the Lord; O Lord, I beseech thee, deliver my soul.

⁵Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; yea, our God is merciful.

⁶The Lord preserveth the simple: I was brought low, and he helped me.

⁷Return unto thy rest, O my soul; for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee.

⁸For thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling.

⁹I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.

¹⁰I believed, therefore have I spoken: I was greatly afflicted:

¹¹I said in my haste, All men are liars.

¹²What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits toward me?

¹³I will take the cup of salvation, and call upon the name of the Lord.

¹⁴I will pay my vows unto the Lord now in the presence of all his people.

¹⁵Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.

¹⁶O Lord, truly I am thy servant; I am thy servant, and the son of thine handmaid: thou hast loosed my bonds.

¹⁷I will offer to thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving, and will call upon the name of the Lord.

¹⁸I will pay my vows unto the Lord now in the presence of all his people,

¹⁹In the courts of the Lord’S house, in the midst of thee, O Jerusalem. Praise ye the Lord.

So before the Blessed Sacrament, all I could do is weep because I am so thankful and because I deserve none of the grace and love that He continually pours down on me.

Around three that afternoon, a dear friend sent me a Catholic electronic greeting card featuring the Sacred Heart and it quoted this from Catholic and Loving It.

Sacred Heart of Jesus

The central truth of the heart of Jesus is that God loves us with a human heart and a human love.

—Catholic and Loving It

Think about that for a moment. God's love is not some kind of impersonal force. Our names are carved in the palm of His hand. To Him, we are each individual, unique, special, and loved beyond our comprehension---yet still loved in a way that we can recognize as divinely human.

One of the readings at mass that day was this:

THE EPISTLE. Ephesians 3. 14.

FOR this cause I bow my knees unto the Father, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints, what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled with all the fulness of God. Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto him be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus, throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.

That is a beautiful passage to pray, inserting the name of whomever you wish to pray for at the "you" and the "ye" portions. And I pray this for my readers today. Even you, Jennifer Lynch, I pray this for you, too. You can put that in your file, okay? I genuinely wish you well. I pray you will have the wisdom, the strength and the courage to do the right thing.

I pray for another Great Awakening of the Christian faith in North America. I pray this for Canada. I pray this for America, my two homelands. Imagine how much we would not need human rights commissions to monitor our respect for others if a critical mass abided in Christ and were filled with His love. Then how would we treat the stranger in our midst, the prisoner, the unborn child, the frail elderly, the disabled, the person of another race or religion?

Remember, God's love is not a mushy, spoiling and corrupting love that let's you get away with anything. He is a Father and He can be stern and correcting. I used to lament that I never had anything that I wanted---the boyfriend I wanted at the time, the job I wanted so desperately---whatever, and while other people were allowed things, I seemed to have a strange hedge about me. Unless I was putting God first, nothing in my life worked out. Did I ever suffer! I would look around with quasi-envy at how everyone else seemed to be getting their way, but not me. I'd head off in my headstrong, rebellious direction and boom! I would experience God's chastisement. Yet at the same time, He protected me in circumstances that might have killed me.

Do you realize what kind of love it takes to risk correcting someone?

I think of the Father as so much wanting us to love Him back and yet even in the Church we walk around a lot of the time with stony faces and cold hearts, nursing this and that little grievance against someone, perhaps shaking our inner fist at the sky.

The Binks has this interesting Father's Day meditation:

We’re in the midst of endless hateful social engineering seeking to undercut and replace fathers in general and male in particular.

In the end, it’s all about fighting with THE Father. God the Father, maker of heaven and earth. His rule, his will, his Kingdom, his love and purpose. After all, these days we’re told that all human family and roles are social constructions, amenable to engineering and fiddling according to the powers of the experts. But what it– just if– it’s the other way around, and our earthly institutions are the reflections of a transcendent order which we express in our moral and social ordering.

That’s certainly the Judeo-Christian model– as St. Paul says in Ephesians 3:15, “For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named”– it’s a right-side up thing.

To those who will then bring up abusive, negligent, or deadbeat dads, that’s the dark side– the absence of a great and necessary good, for which Our Heavenly Father is also the answer, since he is faithfulness, love, and wills all good for his children. Earthly fatherhood is– and should be– an image of The Father.

Yeah, this is pretty funny

New JibJab 'Obama' video (pretty funny)

H/t FFoF

Big Sister is watching you!

Jennifer Lynch has a file! Joseph Brean reports in the National Post:

"Please, please, look. We have experienced 16 months of invective hurled at us, and at any time when anybody has tried to speak up and correct misinformation, gross distortions, caricaturizations, then the very next day there's been some full-frontal assault through the blogs, through mainstream media. I have a file. I'm sure I have 1,200, certainly several hundred of these things," she said.

He gives her plenty of time to hurl her accusations. Then he adds:

While rebutting what she calls outright lies, the report makes barely any reference to the more sober criticisms of her hate speech mandate from mainstream critics, such as the Canadian Civil Liberites Association and Jewish advocacy groups, and also almost every newspaper editorial board in Canada. These include the lack of a legal defense of truth or scholarly or journalistic intent; the practice of accepting identical complaints simultaneously in different jurisdictions; controversial online investigative procedures such as joining white supremacist discussion groups to investigate targets; and the potential for human rights tribunals to be hijacked as political platforms.

He adds some interesting points by Richard Moon. Read the whole thing.

I'm sorry, folks. I was going to resist making fun of Jennifer Lynch because I am not crazy about personalizing this debate. There really are substantive problems with HRCs that existed long before she arrived. She just makes herself such an irresistible target of mirth.

Admitting that you Google yourself on a regular basis is, I dunno, not cool.

It's funny, but she is as guilty of personalizing this debate as any of the victims of HRC abuses. Yet she is strangely unable to step into their shoes. Here she is taking in a $300K ? salary and having to bear criticism on Google that pales in comparison to the abuse that someone like Kathy Shaidle's name might dig up if she bothered to check her name out, but she has no conception of how unjust it is to be prosecuted in three separate jurisdictions for the same complaint. For her, the dismissals are evidence the system works, not proof the process is the punishment. And narry a mention of Barbara Hall's drive by verdict.

Jennifer insisted to John Oakley the other day that he not use prosecutorial language to describe the CHRC, since they are a "remedial" institution. Yeah, and the remedies they mete out---make some criminal prosecutions and punishments look like a walk in the park. Life time speech bans, computers seized, remedy-payments for hurt feelings to third parties who complained on behalf of victims groups to which they do not belong.

People like me and the people I quote in the news stories I write, or the debates I used to book when I was a TV producer at the CBC did deal with the substantive issues.

I've been on this for years. But it's taken the satire, the ridicule, the occasional hyperbole for effect (that anyone with any literary training and an ear for popular culture and a sense of humor understands as hyperbole, satire, etc.) to catapult this issue to the public square.

Jennifer, instead of trying to demonize your opponents, how about showing some leadership and answering some of the substantive complaints about your CHRC? Your report does not address them. Be a big girl and ignore the baiting. Instead of making blanket accusations about "misinformation, gross distortions, caricaturizations" be specific. But please, make allowances for such things as humor, sarcasm and fair comment. Where the facts are wrong, tell us. Otherwise you are sounding pretty scary.

Victor Davis Hanson nails it

If anyone is wondering why Obama has taken so long to say anything about the Iran crisis, Victor Davis Hanson has the best explanation I have seen. Here's an excerpt. Please read it all and support National Review Online.

Of all the puzzling reasons one can adduce both for Barack Obama recent serial apologies abroad, and now his strange silence about human rights abuses from Venezuela to Iran, I think one of the most likely is his Manichean notion of world affairs—one also reflected in most of the curricula of our major universities.

The binary oppressor/victim narrative goes something like this: the United States for the last half-century—through its embrace of neocolonialism and imperialism, and then again through its birthing of globalized capitalism—is at fault for most of the mess outside the West.

We as the bad guys impose, dictate, exploit, ignore, and manipulate the more noble Other to such a degree that he is forced to lash out in understandable, though often dangerous ways.

This is a sort of all-inclusive worldview that in postmodern fashion pits those with “power” against those without it. And in such a simplistic bipolar world, only a few gifted Western elite intellectuals, of superior intelligence, empathy, and insight, can reach across the divide, understand the Other, and find common ground, by accommodating the West to alternate paradigms of politics, culture, and economic and social life—different of course, albeit not intrinsically in any sense inferior.

Obama says good things about fatherhood

This is a good message. Some on the right side of the blogosphere are going nuts that he's paying more attention to Father's Day than he is the violent Iran crisis. But whatever the timing, this is a good message and a necessary message.

“When fathers are absent, when they abandon their responsibility to their children, we know the damage that does to our families,” Mr. Obama told teenagers and community leaders in the East Room of the White House, beginning what he called a “national conversation on responsible fatherhood and healthy families.”

Mr. Obama sprinkled his talk with references to his own absent father, who left him with his mother in Hawaii when he was 2 and visited him only once after that.

“I say this as someone who grew up without a father in my life,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s something that leaves a hole in a child’s heart that governments can’t fill.”

He said children raised without fathers were more likely to drop out of school and abuse drugs. But aware of his own example, he told his audience — a diverse group that included Darryl McDaniels of Run-DMC and the skateboarder Tony Hawk — that growing up fatherless did not mean a person could not succeed.

It's interesting the "hole in a child's heart that governments can't fill" comment. Does Obama feel a hole in his heart that government can't fill? That even being president isn't enough?

We all have a hole in our heart that no government and not even a good human father can fill. A good human father sets us up to find the best source for filling that hole and that's the love of the Father through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

It's too bad that the ever-expanding government and the Savior State that progressives like Obama stand for has a negative effect on families.

More on that some time later. I have to start the barbecue.

The Eucharistic Congress one year later

QUEBEC - A year after the 2008 International Eucharistic Congress in Quebec City, Cardinal Marc Ouellet sees much fruit growing in his diocese.

He notes a rise in priestly vocations, a stronger passion for the new evangelization and a new unity among parishes, religious communities and new Catholic movements.

"It is very uplifting to see a new enthusiasm," he said in an interview from Quebec City June 16. "We've been re-evangelized by the Eucharistic Congress.

"The joy of the faith has grown in our hearts and we are more determined and full of confidence to bring the Good News further."

To mark the anniversary, the diocese held several days of events, starting with a special Mass on Corpus Christi June 11, followed by a two-hour Eucharistic "march" through the Old City.

It included a stop for prayers outside the Quebec Parliament that served as "a message we are still on the front lines of proclaiming the Gospel to the world," he said.

The HRCs comin' at ya from the FAAAAAR Left

Jennifer Lynch has painted those opposing the abuses of so-called human rights commissions as representative of the far right. While I consider myself a conservative, I am hardly far right unless from her perspective everything to the right of comedian Guy Earle is extreme.

Well, Ezra Levant has found that the Daily Kos (!!!!!!!) is panning her latest chilled speech whine.

The Daily Kos is a large left-wing blogger collective in the U.S. that is a substantial faction in the Democratic Party's base of activists. Needless to say, I was delighted to find support for reforming Canada's abusive human rights commissions from them. But that goes to my point that freedom of speech isn't a right wing or left wing thing -- it's for anyone who cares about ideas and believes in the right to disagree with each other. And, more importantly, the right to disagree with the government, and megalomanic czarinas like Jennifer Lynch.

Here's the item. An excerpt:

Well, Canada’s empire of speech suppression has struck back, as George Lucas taught us empires are fond of doing. Apparently, all this criticism of the Canadian Human Rights Commission and their ways have led to a – drumroll, please – "chilling" of free speech in Canada.

At this point it seems important to note that, just like Dave Barry, I am not making this up.

More on Jennifer Lynching the context

Tyranny of Nice co-author Pete Vere weighs in:

In reading reading Jennifer Lynch's recent complaints against critics of the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC), what strikes me most is how she appears to have little understanding of context. This is frightening given that Lynch is the CHRC's Chief Commissioner. The most egregious example, which you can read here, is her following accusation against Mark Steyn:

One human rights expert who wrote a letter to a major daily paper faced an accusation in a response letter by a journalist the next day asking, “is (name of person) a drunken pedophile?”

This sounds nasty at first. But like the snippet of the conversation with my hunting buddy, it misses the context. So as Mark Steyn would say (and did say), here's the expanded version:

Let me take just one sentence: “Are Levant and Steyn hatemongerers? Maybe not. But no one has decided that.”

Overlooking her curious belief that “hatemongerers” is a word, whatever happened to the presumption of innocence? Eliadis stands on its head the bedrock principle of English justice and airily declares that my status as a “hatemongerer” is unknown until “decided” by the apparatchiks of the HRC.

Can anyone play this game? “Is Pearl Eliadis a drunken pedophile? Maybe not. But no one has decided that.” In her justification of the HRC process, Eliadis only confirms what’s wrong with it.

A couple points:

1 - Steyn was using a rhetorical technique called reductio ad absurdum to demonstrate the absurdity of Eliadis's argument. He wasn't calling Eliadis a drunken pedophile; he was pushing Eliadis's own argument to the extreme.

2 - Eliadis and Lynch appear to have missed the point.

Does this surprise me? No. After all, the is not the first time that context and references to popular culture have completely escaped Eliadis and Canada's human rights racket. As Kathy Shaidle and I wrote in Tyranny of Nice:

Pearl Eliadis is well-known human rights lawyer and a former director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. The National Post reports that during a panel discussion at a national human rights conference, Eliadis denounced popular blogger Blazing Catfur as "poisonous" for having compared the panel to a "Texas cage match." Ms Eliadis probably wasn't clear on exactly what a "Texas cage match" was, but she certainly didn't like the sound of it.

Yes, Canada’s human rights industry is really that clueless about popular culture. What many ordinary Canadians consider a staple of Monday night wrestling, or merely a commonplace idiomatic expression, the commissions and tribunals trumpet as potential hate crimes. One can imagine the hysterics were someone to accidentally expose them to Weird Al Yankovic’s song “White and Nerdy”.

Which is what scares me. Lynch and Eliadis have directed Canada's two largest government "human rights" commissions. Yet in their public statements neither individual shows understanding of context or popular culture.

More reaction to Jennifer Lynch's speech

The National Post has an editorial today reacting to Jennifer Lynch's speech to the so-called 'human rights' industry's annual conference, where the chief commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission accused people like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant of chilling their freedom of speech. The Post says:

But claiming that the commissions have overstepped their original purposes and outlived their usefulness is a legitimate argument. It is clearly one Ms. Lynch disagrees with, but she does not get to be the final arbiter of what is and isn't acceptable in debates about the commissions' future.

Still, she can be forgiven for believing she is. The CHRC acts as investigator, prosecutor and judge in complaints of racism and hate speech. Moreover, it gets to decide what constitutes hatefulness in print or the spoken word. No wonder Ms. Lynch cannot understand why she should have to tolerate those who advocate the end of human rights commissions. In her daily working life, she gets to define away those she disagrees with, so why not in the broader public debate on rights and who should protect them, too?

She also claimed that those who accused the CHRC and its provincial counterparts of "chilling" free expression with the prosecutions of writers such as Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant were themselves guilty of "reverse chill." Harsh criticism of the commissions in the media had discouraged many of their supporters from coming forward to defend their missions, she said. Others who had been brave enough to speak out had been subjected to withering personal criticism in opinion pieces and letters to the editor -- so much so that "50% of interviewees for an upcoming book on human rights have stated that they feel 'chilled' about speaking up."

There is a significant difference, though-- one Ms. Lynch seems unwilling to acknowledge -- between criticism and prosecution. It is the difference between name-calling and sticks and stones.

Kathy Shaidle is having a "words fail" experience. After making this observation:

Lynch reveals that the bullies on her staff are, like all bullies, really just cowards -- and completely unable to detect irony...

She can only respond:

Awwwww! Gooo-gooo, gaaaa-gaaaa!!

But on a serious note, until this speech I was one of the few people on the free speech side of the blogosphere who urged people give Jennifer the benefit of a doubt. I also recognized publicly that under her watch there have been some incremental improvements in the administration of the ghastly Section 13, which is so broad that anyone could run afoul of it for whatever reason any bureaucrat cooks up. I saw her as a bit of a Gorbachev of 'human rights.' Of course the whole regime has to come down, but she was at least a reformer. Well, now I wonder if her efforts at reform were merely pure self-preservation, akin to Gorbachev's trying to modernize just enough so the Communism could remain firmly in place.

Mark Steyn spent thousands of dollars of his own money and countless hours of his precious time fighting the triple jeopardy of jurisdiction shopping, enduring the process which is the punishment. He is the victim here, not Jennifer Lynch. But somehow Jennifer Lynch entirely lacks the ability to put herself in his shoes. Instead, as commonly happens with people who wrong others, she tries to demonize him without having the courage to name him. I'll let Mark explain in more detail what she did in that speech.

I didn't know Jennifer Lynch, QC until she decided to insert herself into my life. And, for most of last year, I tried to keep an open mind about her personal motivations, etc. But I regard the speech she gave to her fellow pseudo-rights enforcers at the "CASHRA" knees-up in Montreal as deeply dishonest. One assumes that she was aware that two-thirds of the statements she quoted were made not by "the media" in general, but rather by the target of her investigation: me. That makes her attribution of them profoundly misleading. Likewise, her mischaracterization of the "drunken pedophile" line. To be kind, it may be that the speech was written for her by some minion while she was off lunching a visiting delegation from the Iranian Human Rights Commission. But neither alternative - disingenousness or laziness - is acceptable. Even if you thought it a good idea to give the state extensive powers to regulate speech, Jennifer Lynch's speech makes plain that she's either too dishonest or stupid to be entrusted with the task.

Compare Commissar Lynch's remarks with those of Commissioner Denton at the CRTC, and decide for yourself who has the greater historical perspective and philosophical understanding. "Human rights" are about rights for humans, citizens, individuals - and about restraints on government. When a "human rights" commissar complains about citizens insulting the government, it would seem to be a near parodic example of how an obtuse and ugly nomenklatura has precisely inverted the principles of human rights and turned it into a vehicle for government power and bureaucratic self-preservation. When Queen Jennifer talks about the "human rights system", she gives the game away: It's about the "system", not human rights.

Take a look at the CASHRA program. Look at the array of speakers and their concerns.

Check out this on "demographics and human rights:"

Canada is facing major challenges in connection with demographic change. An increase in the number of new arrivals has created an ethnic, cultural and religious mosaic, sometimes seen by the majority as a threat to their “shared values”.

The "scare quotes" around "shared values" is what this crew thinks of our Western heritage folks, the same heritage that brought us freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of conscience. It is a heritage that is mindful of the dangers of tyranny and sought to limit the powers of the state. The relativistic, multicult mindset, reeking of identity politics, is a cancer eating away at real civil rights. AND WE'RE PAYING FOR THIS WITH OUR TAX DOLLARS.

Martin Luther King Jr. must be spinning in his grave at this nonsense. He appealed to our Western heritage to widen its inclusiveness so that black people were treated fairly within that context. He helped us to better understand the heritage to ensure that it includes us all, whatever race, whatever ethnic background we bring. If human rights commissions were about this kind of justice, I would not have a problem with them.

But they are not. They are against equality of opportunity and equality before the law. They are against judging on the content of characters and on merit. When Alan Borovoy and others first set them up, they had a Martin Luther King Jr. type vision to widen the application of civil rights, to ensure that all races and classes were treated equally before the law. That is no longer the case. This post-modern, living tree version of rights is soft totalitarian and creating a burgeoning bureaucracy of ideological enforcers who think our shared values belong in scare quotes. We must bring them to an end.

The Anchoress dreams strange Obama dreams

Sometimes dreams are just dreams. Sometimes they are prophetic. As the Fox News folks say: "you decide."

The Anchoress dreamt detailed vivid dreams of Obama and she is not feeling a thrill up her leg. Here's an excerpt, but do read the whole thing:

In my dream, I was teaching a class in a local school, and Obama came to visit. I was excited with the rest of the children, and he was wonderful. He rolled up his shirtsleeves and got down into the small desks, and helped them with reading, and math and I thought, “he’s a born-teacher; he should be in the classroom, where he shines. I just love him like this.” The students were in awe of him – they looked upon him, with the same mesmerized gaze of adoration we see in some members of the press, as though he was a god, and that brought me down to earth. “You should not encourage that,” I said to Obama. “You should stick to teaching.” And he looked up at me, smiled charmingly, but suddenly, my feelings went cold as I sensed a flick of cold steel within him. That’s the only way I can describe it. He looked at me, understood that my newly-discovered admiration had fled, and turned back to the children, saying, “We’re going to learn a new song. We’re going to sing a new song, are you ready?”

I awoke and jotted down the dream quickly, then fell back to sleep. This time, we were at a community pool, splashing in the water; everyone having fun. But people kept coming up to me, rising from beneath the water, clearing hair from their eyes and saying, “Obama is over there; he wants you to come by.” Obama was there, in a far corner, surrounded by many, all having a great time. I kept refusing. Then there was a party – a huge gathering and once again it was all about Obama, everyone was having a great time. Lots of famous people. At one point Bono offered to sing a song he’d written especially for the occasion if only someone would volunteer to play piano for him, and I thought, “he’s richer than Midas, and there are musicians struggling for work; why didn’t he just hire one to bring with him. Why does someone need to volunteer?” Bono, unable to find that volunteer, did not sing, and I looked around, gathered my family and tried to leave. Obama was at the microphone announcing that he would be talking to us every Sunday for the next three weeks, from every television channel, every available media outlet, and he set his agenda. “The third Sunday, we will be releasing a new song, called “Sing a new song,” and you will all want to learn it; we will all be singing together.” Some in the crowd cheered, but many looked around uncomfortably, and clapped perfunctorily and briefly. “You are not clapping,” a man said to me. “No, I’m keeping my hands free, so I can throw my copy of 1984 at the television screen for the next few Sundays.” The man smiled a tiny smile, and turned away.

I went off and tried to find greeting cards to welcome back a friend who had gone, and was due to return shortly. But the cards were all vapid poems or garishly sentimental, and I awoke.

Turning 60---it ain't gonna be so bad

My friends threw a surprise 60th birthday party for me last night. Mostly organized by my friend Barbara, who could have a second career as an event planner if she ever tires of medicine!

Barbara delegated tasks to other friends like Michele, Pam and Dave and Wendy who fanned out and brought myriad birthday greetings and well-wishes from far and wide that Barbara put in a lovely scrapbook. I am basking in the love and good will. Thank you everyone!

Barbara somehow managed to obtain a greeting from the retired bishop of the Anglican Church of Canada Bishop Robert Mercer who now lives in the U.K. and doesn't, as far as I know, have email."

He wrote:

"Don't be glum. Life only begins at 60! Before then you are too young to know what to do with it."

Then he explains some things about the Deborahs found in the Old Testament.

"As to the more militant and famous poetess of Judges 4 and 5, you might not wish to emulate her blood thirstiness but you will appreciate her skill with words. And she played a part in the eventual unification of the twelve tribes. I like to think of you playing a part in the eventual unity of evangelical Christian with catholic Christian, each contributing to the common good under the unifying presidency of the Bishop of Rome."

Funny, but he nails what is an abiding passion for me.

If you want to hear how he says "Bishop of Rome" you can hear him say it in an interview he did for Salt and Light TV in a Focus piece David Naglieri did on the Traditional Anglican Communion and its hopes for unity with the Holy See.



It was nice to see old friends from Kanata Baptist, lots of people from my parish at the Cathedral of the Blessed Virgin Mary and many of my newer Roman Catholic friends.
What a night!

CHRC grilling by Conservative MP Russ Hiebert

Must see TV, thanks to John Pacheco over at Socon.ca


June 17th, 2009 by Pacheco

The CHRC guy denies that employees have posted hate speech on the Internet. Well, it was admitted under oath.

You have to listen to this guy's answer to a question on where the right to freedom from hatred originated. Of course it is nowhere in the Charter. He says it comes from Parliament, in their mandate, including Section 13.

Me oh my.

New York Times covers story of man

who decides to have penis cut off, including shots of him going into surgery.

Everyone lives happily ever after of course, now that the man has been transformed into the woman he always wanted to be.

Of course our "gender" is only a social construct. We've mostly thrown the biologically-based "sex" under the bus. Of course there are social construct elements in our understanding of our sexual identity---biology is not destiny

I'm sure the person at the heart of this story is very nice and someone I certainly would treat with respect for his/her basic human dignity. I would not want this person persecuted on the job, in living accomodations, or on the street. But I find the societal collusion in this man's physical mutilation rather sad, including the puff piece with no dissenting voices by the once great New York Times. And what I find sadder is that increasingly that collusion is becoming compulsory and soon a surgeon who would refuse to do such an operation on conscience grounds might find that she has lost her license because her licensing body has brought its regulations under a human rights code.

Some great arguments for marriage

The Doctor Is In blog has compiled Anthony Esolen's ten reasons for the preservation of traditional marriage.

Thought-provoking stuff.

Most interesting analysis of the Iran situation

Check out what "Spengler" has to say:

Ahmadinejad's invective may be aimed at Jerusalem, but his eye is fixed on Islamabad. That explains the decisions of his masters in Tehran's religious establishment who may have rigged, or at least exaggerated, his election victory. Pakistan's ongoing civil war has a critical sectarian component which the Shi'ites never sought: the Taliban claim legitimacy as the Muslim leadership of the country on the strength of their militancy against the country's Shi'ite minority. Were the Taliban to succeed in crushing Pakistan's Shi'ites, Iran's credibility as a Shi'ite power would fade, along with its ability to project influence in the region.

As Middle East analyst Daniel Pipes asks, "Why did [Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei select Ahmadinejad to "win" the election? Why did he not chose a president-puppet who would present a smile to the world, including Obama, handle the economy competently, not rile the population, and whose selection would not inspire riots that might destabilize the regime? Has Khamenei fallen under the spell of Ahmadinejad or does he have some clever ploy up his sleeve? Whatever the answer is, it baffles me."

The issue is less baffling when raw numbers are taken into account. The issues on which Iran's supposed moderation might be relevant, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, are less pressing for Tehran than the problems on its eastern border.

Jennifer Lynch's says her freedom of speech is being chilled

I am gasping at the irony in this. If I'm reading this correctly, then Jennifer Lynch is claiming that people like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant are chilling her freedom of speech!!!!!!!

The problem is, Jennifer, they do not have a government body with all the levers of power and a $25 million dollar budget to persecute people like you do!

Also, get this, Lynch is crying to her sympathetic listeners that $25 million is not enough money for her bureaucrats and investigators to do their work!

Here is a big excerpt (my bolds, except hers in italics) so that you too can gape with astonishment:

A key concern for us is how to manage resources – our mandate and the number of organizations under our jurisdiction has expanded over the years without matching budget with expectations; then again I expect all of my colleagues also experience this.

The major concern is one that I know that most of us share: the need to strengthen the overall human rights system and ensure the public understands what we do.

Fundamental to the administration of justice is access to justice – entry points for the most vulnerable to have their voices heard. [Yes, this was the rationale in the beginning, but when ideologues and political appointees have subverted this noble purpose to socially engineer outcomes, and special interest groups have hijacked it to silence criticism, then the whole thing needs to be abolished and something new created if there still is a need for the vulnerable to gain access---but to real justice that respects the rule of law]

Over time, access to administrative tribunals has been deemed to be an effective vehicle for the disenfranchised minorities, among others. Certainly all of us here who work at Commissions and Tribunals provide that vital access. [No you don't. Not if you are a traditional Catholic and experiencing a poisoned work environment because of your beliefs]

The debate is now the larger debate – beyond balancing rights – and it has become about the human rights system itself. [Only a real court should try to balance rights]

We are in a time when a mounting campaign suggests that equality has been achieved in Canada. Certain detractors seek to caricature the human rights system, and undermine its legacy and ability to ensure equality for all Canadians.

This began with a complaint brought against Rogers Communications by the Canadian Islamic Congress, in three jurisdictions: Federal, Ontario, and British Columbia. All three dismissed the complaint. [Why no comment about the unjust jurisdiction shopping in this case? The triple jeopardy? The huge legal costs to Rogers, despite the dismissals?]

Even before the three complaints were dismissed, many commissions and tribunals experienced a cacophony of protest – by those who felt that exposing mainstream media organizations to formal complaints is inconsistent with Canada’s commitment to freedom of expression.

The debate moved to one of discrediting Commissions’ processes, professionalism and staff. Much of what was written was inaccurate, unfair, and at times scary:

Articles described human rights commissions and their employees in this way:

• “Gestapo”
• “human rights racket”
• “welcome to the whacky world of Canadian human rights.”
• “...(i)t sounds like a fetish club for servants of the Crown”
• “a secretive and decadent institution”

In addition to this mounting discredit for our institution:

• blogs worked to destroy our investigators and litigators’ reputations and credibility with untrue accusations;
• groundless complaints were lodged with the law societies; and
• a Commission employee’s life was threatened.

Some human rights experts tried to respond and correct this misinformation. One human rights expert who wrote a letter to a major daily paper faced an accusation in a response letter by a journalist the next day asking, “is (name of person) a drunken pedophile?”

As personal attacks were made against anyone who tried to correct the record, the number of people willing to make the effort dwindled. There is tangible proof of this: 50% of interviewees for an upcoming book on human rights have stated that they feel “chilled” about speaking up.

Ironically, those who are claiming that human rights commission’s jurisdiction over hate speech is “chilling” to freedom of expression, have successfully created their own reverse chill.

Can you believe this?

Of course, if someone made a death threat against any employee of the commission that is terrible and I hope the police bring the perpetrator to justice. If there are untrue allegations, then I do not support that either. That's known as defamation and there are laws against that. But again, what about the law society complaints people on her side have been lobbing? And the SLAPP suits? And fair comment is fair comment, even if it might tend towards hyperbole.

I would agree words like "Gestapo" are over-the-top, and I'm not crazy about jackboot images either. We aren't there yet by any stretch of the imagination. But the other stuff is fair comment and is frankly, all of the accusations are quite mild compared with being judged a racist, a homophobe, or an Islamophobe by a government agency, forced to pay a remedy of tens of thousands of dollars and put under a lifetime speech ban that could destroy a journalist's livelihood.

What Jennifer Lynch and the people who are too afraid to speak up to defend their human rights industry are experiencing is the power of public opinion that also serves to keep in check the vile racists and Holocaust deniers in our midst. See, we don't need the state to step in unless someone's life is threatened, someone is telling lies about someone (defamation), someone is directly inciting violence against an individual or a group, or saying things to defraud the public.

I see a total lack of proportion in this speech. A bunker mentality. Someone who is used to speaking only to the converted in a milieu where nothing is ever challenged and nanny is always right.

Omigawd, there's more:

Critics of the human rights system are manipulating and misrepresenting information to further a new agenda: one that posits that human rights commissions and tribunals no longer serve a useful purpose.

Because the Maclean’s case was about a journalist, it naturally attracted the attention of many other journalists, who quite rightly see their role as a bulwark against incursions on freedom of expression.

I do believe that some are unwitting accomplices in a gross oversimplification of the issue, who flame the controversy by repeating inaccuracies.

It seems that fundamentally detractors do not believe that access to administrative tribunals in search of equality is something that our country should ensure.

Well, I agree with her last paragraph. I do not believe access to administrative tribunals is the way to ensure equality. Maybe once upon a time they were, but now they have become vehicles for identity politics and grievance groups using government power to silence unpopular opinion or to bankrupt their critics or just harass poor ordinary businesses that don't want men using their women's change rooms pre-sex change operation or people smoking medical marijuana in the doorway of a family restaurant.

No administrative tribunal should have the power to adbridge a Charter right. Equality does not trump freedom of speech. And there is no right to be free from hatred. Here's a bit of an IM conversation I had with Iain Benson today about the CHRC report tabled last week:

I think that there is more real burden in a CHRC framework than the Criminal Code which, due to the fact that there is a third party check (prosecutorial discretion) on the process, protects citizens against ill informed or malign challenges by other citizens with axes to grind.
The whole idea of "hate speech regulation" disconnected from imminent threats to actual violence is mischievous which is why Moon advocated dropping it. Hate is far too much in the eye of the sensitive citizen. Violence is subject to a meaningful standard.
We've seen "feelings" elevated to legal tests and that is always a mistake.
Human Rights has overextended its jurisdiction and continues, as do most administrative settings, to continue to do so. It is time for some basic gardening. Start trimming the overgrowth. I'd start with Section 13 as Moon advocated and for the reasons he gave.
The CHRC in this Report shows its unwillingness to exercise restraint from within. In that circumstance it needs to come from without. Time for legislators to act.

I saw Amen to that.

Notes from Rotterdam that you won't find in the MSM

This account by a gay American whose parents were born in Puerto Rico gives us a glimpse of what lies ahead for vulnerable minorities in Europe in cities like Rotterdam.

Getting jumped by six Moroccans after I left a gay bar in Rotterdam a few weeks ago brought home — with brutal clarity — my feeling that this Dutch port city is a nervous place on the verge of breakdown.

Having studied in two European countries, lived and worked in three, and visited about two dozen over a 20-year period, I usually feel extremely safe meandering around the “old countries” of our Western civilization. But there’s something rotten in Rot-town.

The city has been hard hit by the economic crisis. Unemployment is already twice the national average and over the next year could match the 20 percent rate of the 90s downturn.

But economics only partially explains why Rotterdam may see blood in the streets this summer.

Some posts to help wake you from your stupor

A while back the Archbishop of St. John's experienced carbon monoxide poisoning when a furnace in his home malfunctioned. He said it was a terrifying experience to awake and know something was terribly wrong but to be physically incapable of doing anything about it. Luckily someone noticed he did not show up to preside at mass. That person had a key to his house, went over, discovered the Archbishop in a semi-conscious state. Archbishop Currie is fine now, thank God.

I often think of Archbishop Currie's predicament when I think of the political stupor the West is falling into as the Nanny (or Savior State, to quote Douglas Farrow) increases in influence. Have we passed the point where we can no longer help ourselves?

We are slowly dying in her embrace because she isn't a savior at all, but a goddess of spiritual death, both for individuals and for civil society.

Here are some articles that stood out today that remind us of the deepening effects of this stupor. Are we at the point where we can no longer rouse ourselves and act? Are we expecting someone with a key to come in the door, discover us and call 9-11? Sorry, but we have to get up off the bed and crawl, if need be, to the front door and gasp for oxygen. And then we have to act before it's too late for all the others still intoxicated. All the bolds in the posts below are mine (except those in italics, which are Dr. Sanity's).

Here's what Mark Steyn has to say:

"Health" is potentially a big-ticket item, but so's a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System – or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America.More importantly, there is a cost to governmentalizing every responsibility of adulthood – and it is, in Lord Whitelaw's phrase, the stirring up of apathy. If you wander 'round Liverpool or Antwerp, Hamburg or Lyons, the fatalism is palpable. In Britain, once the crucible of freedom, civic life is all but dead: In Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, some three-quarters of the economy is government spending; a malign alliance between state bureaucrats and state dependents has corroded democracy, perhaps irreparably. In England, the ground ceded to the worst sociopathic pathologies advances every day – and the latest report on "the seven evils" afflicting an ever more unlovely land blames "poverty" and "individualism," failing to understand that if you remove the burdens of individual responsibility while loosening all restraint on individual hedonism the vaporization of the public space is all but inevitable.

Dr. Sanity adds her observations about creeping Nanny State from the point of view of a physician:

I'm done. If Congress passes Obama's destructive zombie health plan in any form, I quit.

I will simply not practice medicine anymore. I will take my psychiatry books and my years of experience and do something else. I used to wait tables when I was in college. It's an honest living and Obama isn't interested for the time being in nationalizing restaurants--yet.

Let me be clear. I don't believe that people have a "right" to health care; because, what advocating such a "right" basically means is that you believe you have a "right" to my mind; you have a "right" to my professional competence; i.e., you have a "right" to enslave me.

Having chosen to work primarily in the public sector most of my life, I have watched this entitlement and victimhood mentality grow to incredible proportions in parallel with number of laws, regulations, administrators, and oversight agencies. I have watched the decline of personal responsibility and the rise of endless demands and impossible clinical and psychosocial conundrums that I am expected to solve, even if my patient has no desire to change. I have been demoted to the near-mindless activity of pushing pills to the point that I understand why my collegues see every clinical situation as a biological malfunction--the old adage that says, to a hammer everything looks like a nail, comes to mind. Psychiatrists are the mental health profession's hammer; and drugs are the nail. And, the same powers that tell me to prescribe drugs, warn me against the evil of working too closely with any of the drug companies, for fear I might be corrupted, God forbid, by the dastardly profit motive.

I have watched as the quality of care has inevitably deteriorated even as spending went up. I have watched the system abuse patients and doctors alike--to the point that the frustration level just keeps going up and is simply not worth it anymore.

Unfortunately, with the Savior State's impatience with any viewpoint that acknowledges a transcendent Savior and transcendent moral law beyond the positivist conception that the rule of law is whatever the state decides it to be, many more doctors with alive consciences will be either forced out or will opt out of medicine as well. So you'll only have doctors left who will gladly abort girl babies or those that are less than the perfect designer child, or who will happily dispatch Grandma with a lethal injection.

Carbon Monoxide poisoning is silent and deadly because the odorless gas replaces the oxygen in our bloodstream. That's what's happening in our body politic. The oxygen of the West's foundational principles and Judeo-Christian spirituality is being replaced by alien ideas that sound good on the surface but slip into the blood stream and rob our society of life.

This piece is not related to the health care issue, but shows another side of the Savior State. In fact, combining Nanny and Savior gives us the Goddess state, no? Kevin Libin writes about how the Goddess State in Canada has already grabbed jurisdiction over children away from their real biological parents.

Canada's child-welfare agencies, says University of Manitoba social work professor Brad McKenzie, have among the broadest intervention powers in the Western world.

Caseworkers come armed with vaster powers than any police officer investigating crime. It is an immense authority easily abused, without vigilant restraint.

It is time, critics say, they were reined in.

"The social worker system, as it applies to children, is out of control, seriously out of control," says Katherine McNeil, a children's advocate who has worked with families in Nova Scotia and B.C. "And nobody's doing anything about it."

Child-welfare agencies step in when kids are homeless, exploited, hungry or abused. They do not stop there. As the highly publicized neo-Nazi case in Winnipeg demonstrates, they might seize children from parents for teaching racist views, or for "emotional neglect." They have taken newborns from parents considered insufficiently intelligent; from religious families believing the Bible commands them to discipline kids with a rod. They order homeschooling parents to enroll children in public school, deeming them inadequately socialized.

"They violate all kinds of privacy and rights," says Chris Klicka, senior counsel for the Home School Defense League, which represents Canadian and American parents.

Whether we wanted it or not, knew it or not, over time, the work of child-welfare organizations has become "parenting by the state and the imposition of their value system on other people," says Marty McKay, a clinical psychologist who has worked on abuse cases in the U.S and Canada.

But how can we stop this if our politicians are so cowed they will not even talk about these things publicly?

Catholic Civil Rights League calls CHRC report "inadequate"

Here's some good analysis from the folks at the CCRL (my bolds):

“Previous commentators, including the League and Professor Moon, identified the inadequacy and danger posed by the existing provisions of s.13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. It now appears that after eight years of prosecutions against Internet applications under this section, the Commission acknowledges that there is a problem The Commission now wishes to try to continue its work in this area, under new rules. We find that most of the recommendations amount to fairly superficial changes to a system that is fundamentally flawed,” said League President Phil Horgan. “Cases involving limitations on a Charter right such as free speech should not be addressed by human rights commissions.”

The recommendation to remove the tribunal’s ability to levy fines against offenders is an improvement, but does not address the heart of the problem: Cases involving freedom of speech and freedom of religion should not be dealt with by a non-judicial tribunal. Freedom of expression and freedom of conscience and religion are fundamental values of our democratic tradition. Any judicial curtailment of them should face the standard of proof required by a court.

The League’s involvement with Section 13 cases has been motivated by the Commission's investigations of expression of opinion based on religious belief. It appears that the Commission is now recommending the ability to award of costs in exceptional circumstances where the Tribunal finds that a party has abused the Tribunal process, and to include a provision to allow the early dismissal of Section 13 complaints.

If the Commission itself is recommending that these amendments be made, is it also not acknowledging that abuses occurred in the past? A true recognition of the imbalanced playing field between complainants and respondents would result in the recovery of the out of pocket expenses incurred by innocent parties.

In the case of Catholic Insight magazine, for example, the publisher ended up paying over $40,000 in legal fees to defend the right to publish views based on Catholic teaching. That case remains outstanding, as the complainant has sought judicial review of the Commission's dismissal more than a year ago. Will the Commission acknowledge its complicity in this charade, and reimburse the magazine for its expenses?

The Commission's report makes even more problematic proposals with respect to the hate provisions of the Criminal Code. The League raised concerns about changes to those provisions in 2002-03 that included "sexual orientation" as a further enumerated ground for complaint (BillC-250), and insisted that specific defenses for religious speech be incorporated. The report contains a recommendation that the requirement for the Attorney General to authorize prosecutions under the hate provisions of the Criminal Code be removed, and that "truth as a defense" in the Code be limited to some extent, especially in respect of group defamations.

Yup, the CHRC wants to introduce group defamation into the criminal code and get rid of truth as a defense.

Balanced analysis??

Just noticed this concluding paragraph in Jennifer Lynch's op ed:

To be sure, the debate over freedom of expression and hate messages will continue. The commission welcomes that debate; it is a positive and democratic exercise. By presenting its special report, the commission's aim is to contribute a balanced analysis for those interested in developing informed opinions on this passionate topic.

In other words, Jennifer Lynch, is the Canadian version of "sort of God," floating above the fray and contributing a "balanced analysis" that is the final "synthesis."

And her message is: shut up! Debate over!

As Jay Currie writes:

Out of balance? Certainly if this self serving tripe is any indication. Lynch has declared critics of the HRC’s to be dangerous thought criminals.

Jennifer Lynch's sock puppet goes on Power Play

Jennifer Lynch says the debate over hate speech is unbalanced so she's trying to set the record straight, first with her report on the Moon Report, second with her op ed in the Globe and Mail and third, with her foray onto political television this afternoon.

But she refused to debate Ezra Levant on CTV Newsnet's Power Play today. As Ezra describes it, she even tried to get him kicked off the show.

In the end, she sends out Philippe Dufresne, her sock puppet, who while cute and articulate, is so young it's hard to believe he could possibly be philosophically grounded in a true understanding of civil rights. And of course, he isn't. He's got his talking points and he's fully indoctrinated on the post-modern "humans rights as a matrix" pablum. It's not his fault. He was probably born after the 1960s. We Boomers are to blame for his dreadful lack of exposure to the canon of great literature and philosophical thought that any educated person once had.

Ezra writes:

This evening, Jennifer Lynch, the chief commissar of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, tried to have CTV Newsnet kick me off their interview program Power Play, hosted by Tom Clark.

To their great credit, CTV refused to be bullied -- and it was Lynch who wound up off the show.

You can watch the episode here.

What an embarrassment Lynch and her CHRC have become to this government -- and to all Canadians.

Here's the story -- it's pretty simple. Lynch and I were both invited on Clark's show to talk about the CHRC's memo issued to Parliament this week. The CHRC is demanding that they be allowed to continue their censorship, and in fact arguing that Canada's police should be more active in laying censorship charges, too. I wrote about the substance of it yesterday.

Lynch's spin is that she wants to "start a debate" about censorship -- how Orwellian is that? Well, CTV was happy to provide a forum for such a debate. But CTV made the honest mistake of thinking Lynch actually meant it. They didn't realize that the CHRC's idea of a debate is Lynch lecturing, and Canadians listening obediently.

When Lynch heard it would be me against whom she would have to debate, she tried to veto my appearance.

She tried to censor me -- and, much more ominously, CTV.

She tried to bully CTV into blackballing me from their show.

She tried to tell them how to run their news business.

In other words, she was just being herself: a soft fascist; a censor; a bully; someone who thinks the government can tell people what they can hear or say.

Tom Clark has suddenly catapulted sky high in my estimation. I didn't think anyone could replace Mike Duffy. Of course, Mike can never be replaced. But Tom Clark, you have a fan now. You can watch the segment here.

And Ezra points out how Dufresne was not exactly being truthful in saying that the CHRC has only dealt with the most hateful speech and not controversial speech. He lists three examples of the CHRC going after Christian expression that was in line with traditional Christian theology.

Ezra also points out how the CHRC wants to expand the power of censorship of the police and remove the defence of truth from the Criminal Code.

So, really, why won't Jennifer Lynch appear on the same show with Ezra Levant? And why won't she allow her sock puppet to debate him? I'm reminded of when I used to book television panels and some guests, usually leftists, would not go on with someone they considered "beyond the pale." So does she think Ezra is beyond the pale? That he is so vile that he does not deserve to be in polite company?

Her actions today speak volumes. They tell me she doesn't really want to debate, she wants to censor.

She wants her propaganda to prevail. She uses the straw man argument, too, by saying that critics of HRCs want absolute freedom of expression. Sorry, Jennifer, but no one on this side of the debate wants absolute freedom of expression. But we do want truth to be a defence, we do want standard rules of evidence, a presumption of innocence and all those other good things that protect the citizen from tyranny and unjust state coercion and punishment.

And we would like to see EQUALITY before the law. The CHRC has treated legitimate Christian expression to costly investigations and individuals without a hateful bone in their body, like Father Alphonse de Valk, end up shelling out upwards of $20K in legal fees even when the complaint against them is eventually dismissed. Yet people who carry signs urging another Holocaust, who wave terrorist flags and who shout death to the Jews do not get prosecuted. THE PROCESS IS THE PUNISHMENT.

Oh yeah, if you're a Christian and have a complaint about workplace harrassment because of your Catholic faith, well, forget about having the Canadian Human Rights Commission come to your assistance. Just as Susan Comstock and Dave MacDonald.

HRCs should be out of the censorship business altogether. And if there's a need for dealing with workplace issues like harrassment on the basis of religion, race or sex etc., it looks like something new is going to have to be built from the ground up and all the ideologues kicked out so that principles like equality before the law begin to take hold again.

What the latest CHRC release does

is remind me that Canada is where the United States is going under Obama. I bet this latest CHRC report is something that would be applauded by the Obama administration and probably represents the latest in post-modern-affirmative-action-identity-politics jurisprudence a la Judge Sotomayor.

In other words, this kind of transposing of international law to undo American exceptionalism is all the "modern" rage, you know, the "matrix" and new rights that Jennifer Lynch et. al. are so interested in creating and promoting to expand the size of the Savior State and thus keep their jobs, their junkets and their jurisdiction. Obama even said he wasn't all that crazy about the negative rights in the Constitution -- rights that in our Anglo-Saxon legal heritage are judged to be inherent in the individual. They are God-given rights,rights the state recognizes as pre-existing the state and limiting the state. But the Jennifer Lynches and Obamas and Sotomayors of this world think the state confers rights. They also see the Constitution (both the American and the Canadian) as "living trees" with malleable meanings that change as times change. In other words, the very protections for minority rights these folks claim to defend have become the tyranny of the majority (or elite opinion with its finger on polling numbers) that deTocqueville warned of. Thus take any term in a constitution--like rights--and just make up your meaning as you go along. If you have the levers of power, your definition is the one that holds. It's a travesty and a rape of our great legal heritage. It's also a rape of reality and common sense.

Ezra Levant has a lengthy response to the CHRC report with some background for those who don't remember who Professor Moon is. Ezra writes:

The CHRC's report is grotesque -- as Steyn points out, even the name of the report is a lie: Freedom of Expression and Freedom from Hate in the Internet Age. Freedom of expression is indeed a true civil right; but "freedom from hate" is not. You don't have the legal right to stop someone feeling a certain way about you. And even the qualifier "in the Internet Age" shows the shallowness of the CHRC's thinking. Freedom of speech is an eternal, natural right. It is the same now as it was in John Milton's day and, frankly, the advent of the Internet doesn't change a thing. As Debbie points out, the CHRC has cooked up some Third World, UN-ish claptrap about a "Matrix of rights" replacing our old ideas of fundamental freedoms like free speech. I've heard or read a dozen official speeches given by CHRC honchos, and they always come back to that theme: they want to replace our British tradition of freedom with some new UN version of human rights -- a watered down, nanny-state replacement for our real heritage of liberty.

Mark Steyn has more this morning as well:

Oh, and you gotta love Jennifer Lynch, QC. Deborah Gyapong all but chokes on the hectoring post-modern utopian mumbo-jumbo as Queen Jennifer "reconceptualizes" human rights as a "matrix". Yeah, I saw that movie, and we're already way too far down the rabbit hole. Meanwhile, Her Majesty calls for "balance":

While the furore over Maclean's generated fierce debate, Lynch said the debate “has not yet been balanced.”

Well, why's that? It's because you and your gang got used to operating in the dark, living out your silly little secret-agent fantasies as Internet sock puppets, attempting to keep the press and public out of your kangaroo courtrooms, refusing even to show your faces when defendants paid routine calls to your offices. But, if at this late hour you really want to have a debate, why not propose a date? I'll be there, Maclean's can sponsor it, Steve Paikin or some such to moderate...

I'd pay $50 admission to see a debate like this.

My head is going to explode

I am too tired to do more than a cursory look tonight at the Canadian Human Rights Commissions report on the Moon Report.

But that cursory look has me appalled and disgusted.

First of all, now I see why Jennifer Lynch has been on all those junkets. It's not to bring a Canadian conception of freedom of speech, freedom of religion and conscience to the less enlightened world.

NO.

It is to bring all sorts of international conceptions of human rights, compiled by countries that are traditionally far less enlightened than Canada, and transpose them into the Canadian context and treat them as somehow superior to our 800 year Common Law tradition and what was left of it that found its way into Canada's Bill of Rights and the less satisfying Charter.

The lecturing in this document is nauseating: (Cue the pompous school marm voice)

"The modern conception of rights is that of a matrix with different with different rights and freedoms mutually reinforcing each other to build a strong and durable human rights system."

Say what? Jennifer Lynch I DO NOT WANT A MODERN CONCEPTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS.
Because this "modern" conception is really postmodern, and this bogus new right of "freedom from hate" is not equal to the right to freedom of speech. (Which is really the right to be left alone by government so we can think and say what we want. Most genocides, by the way, have been orchestrated by---guess what!!!!---governments!!!!!!)

She says there is "no hierarchy of rights" but she adds a whole bunch of new rights to the matrix which are like metastasizing from the cancerous so-called "right to equality."

This is not equality before the law, folks, i.e. the good equality. Can you can smell the dusty whiff of Marxist utopianism in this document? Can you see that equality, for this progressive, "modern" mindset, trumps every other right because it breeds like bleepin' rabbits, creating new rights exponentially that government must make everyone else pay for and shut up about to make sure that structural racism and prejudice is eliminated. But if there is racism or prejudice expressed against Catholics, you are out of luck.

In other words, this document is utterly opposed to everything I ever thought about equality of opportunity but is totally focused on equality of outcome.

In the debate about freedom of expression and freedom from hate, Canada’s commitment to equality lies at the centre.

See what I mean?

Words and ideas have power. That power, while overwhelmingly positive, can also be used to undermine democracy and freedom. One classic argument in favour of unrestricted freedom of expression posits that in the battle of ideas, good ideas will inevitably win out over bad ideas. While good ideas gain sway over bad ideas most of the time, history tells us that this is not always the case.

No, the Canadian Human Rights Commission is undermining democracy and freedom with this gobbledygook.

B'nai Brith is not pleased with this response to the Moon Report either.

“What the Commission is recommending is, in essence, cosmetic tinkering to deal with a human rights system that is in need of a major overhaul.

“The Commission fails to address head on the need for strong enforcement of procedural protections and instead focuses on legislative amendments, which would not be necessary if an active enforcement regime of current policies was already in place. For example, amending section 41 of the Canadian Human Rights Act to allow for the early dismissal of frivolous complaints is a power that the Commission already holds. Its suggestion to add definitions of hatred and contempt under Section 13 is yet another example of skirting the need for actual reform as these definitions already exist under the governing decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada.

“Conspicuously absent from the report are many of B’nai Brith’s key recommendations, notable amongst them the urgent need to educate and train staff so that they have a keen understanding of the geo-political context within which they operate. A training and awareness campaign is essential if investigators are to recognize frivolous complaints at the outset and act accordingly. As well, while the Commission identifies ‘forum shopping’ as a problem, that is the filing of complaints in more than one jurisdiction, it offers no concrete recommendations on how to resolve this problem.

“We urge the Commission to implement a full package of substantive reform, so that it does not leave the door wide open for future ongoing abuses. We call on Parliament to examine in Committee the report tabled today and be guided by the many recommendations submitted by B’nai Brith Canada in its report to Prof. Richard Moon.”

More at Mark Steyn, Five Feet of Fury, Blazing Cat Fur, Jay Currie, and soon Binky will have a big update at Free Canukistan. And I look forward to Ezra's evisceration.

The appalling misogynist David Letterman

David Letterman's attacks on Sarah Palin and her 13 or 14-year old daugher Willow are beyond the pale.

A campaign is building to make sure CBS knows that this kind of misogyny should not be allowed. Hillbuzz.org is marshalling a boycott of CBS sponsors. They have a list.

Don't eat Mars Candy Bars. Or stay at Embassy or Best Western Hotels. And let them know why.

But what about how racist Letterman's attack was. When he talked about professional baseball player Alex Rodriguez in effect raping (she is jail bait, after all) a white girl, he was trafficking in a disgusting racist stereotype about black men, a stereotype that led to lynchings.

Just in case you think the Holocaust Shooter is a right-winger

Kathy Shaidle sets the record straight with material that I bet will not appear in the MSM:

The anti-semitism of von Brunn is the first thing one notices when visiting
these bizarre websites. However, like those of most "white supremacists", many
of von Brunn's political views track "Left" rather than "Right." Clearly, a
re-evaluation of these obsolete definitions is long overdue.
For example, he unleashed his hatred of both Presidents Bush and other "neo-conservatives" in online essays. As even some "progressives" such as the influential Adbusters magazine publicly admit, "neoconservative" is often used as a derogatory
code word for "Jews". As well, even a cursory glance at "white supremacist"
writings reveals a hatred of, say, big corporations that is virtually
indistinguishable from that of anti-globalization activists.
James von Brunn's advocacy of 9/11 conspiracy theories also gives him an additional
commonality with individuals on the far-left.
None of this will surprise readers of Jonah Goldberg's bestseller Liberal
Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics
of Change , which clearly demonstrates that "fascism" of the kind advocated
by the British National Party (BNP) and the likes of James W. von Brunn is just
as likely to reflect "leftwing" views as "rightwing" ones.

Tradition as a bulwark against untrammeled power

From the great First Things Magazine website's On the Square blog:

First, a society that is deaf to tradition is more likely to err in social
policy and do inadvertent damage to itself. Burkean conservatism contends that
society is an intricate web of relationships, institutions, and mores, the whole
of which is too complex to be grasped by the reason of any individual, or even
of any single generation, even one claiming for itself extraordinary
enlightenment. It is impossible, on this account, to make any changes in society
without causing unintended and unforeseeable consequences, consequences that may
be, for all we know, harmful to society. According to traditionalist
conservatism, any functional society, whatever its imperfections, has, by
standing the test of time, earned a certain deference for its traditional social
arrangements. This argument has been repeatedly made by conservatives over the
last two centuries, repeatedly ridiculed by social engineers of all kinds, and
repeatedly vindicated by the course of events. Every experiment in social
engineering, from extreme versions like Soviet communism to mild ones like the
Great Society, has brought in its wake socially damaging, or even devastating,
consequences that were not foreseen by its authors but that conservatives warned
about.
Second, traditional conservatism warns that rejection of the rule of
tradition is an invitation to oppression. As Burke noted in his Reflections on
the Revolution in France, a society that will not be ruled by tradition will be
left with no law but “the will of a prevailing force”—that is, the will of the
most powerful present faction. Liberal social reformers, preoccupied with the
various ways that they think tradition oppresses the weak, forget that tradition
very often also imposes restraints on the strong. Spokesmen for the left
frequently complain about being ruled by the “dead hand of the past.” They too
often forget that the alternative may be the rule of the very much alive, and
very powerful, hand of the present—a hand that is necessarily wielded not by the
whole society buy by some members against others.

This speaks to the American in me

My ethnic background is varied. I have a lot of Russian blood on my mother's side, but I don't speak Russian. I have a great grandfather who was English; a great grandmother who was Estonian. My great grandparents on my father's side were Trans-Carpathian Russyns, who spoke a Ukrainian dialect. So I'm Slavic, in case you are wondering where the nose, the almond shaped eyes and the cheekbones come from.

I sometimes feel a sense of, well envy isn't quite the word, but a longing, a sense of missing out, when I am around people who are rooted in a long heritage that they can celebrate in language and song. I felt it at a Ukrainian birthday party where the musical tunes were so familiar from my childhood, but ...I have no words to be able to join in. I love the Irish heritage I experienced when living in Nova Scotia and the music, the stories and the dance. Same thing being around French Canadians. I get wistful. Who am I?

I grew up in the United States of America and the way were were taught in public schools back then about the Pilgrims on the Mayflower and the first Thanksgiving, and Christopher Columbus before the era of multiculturalism and political correctness, well, I felt like I came over on the Mayflower. They made Americans out of us. A citizen who embraced the civic religion and the story of George Washington and the Cherry Tree, Abraham Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address, the whole shebang. We were taught to love our country. So the story I embraced as my own is the American story. American is in my blood. I guess, too, now that I am an Anglican Catholic, England is in my blood and English is my mother tongue and I love the King James English and the Book of Common Prayer as an heirloom of English literature.

But now Canada is in my blood, too. And so is Quebec. I felt that so strongly last March when I went there to do some advance stories on the Eucharistic Congress. Those Jesuit Black Robes, those first sisters who ministered in the settlements. I felt like I was grafting in to those stories, too, even though I do not speak French well.

So anyway, that is a long preamble for this eloquent defense of America by Rush Limbaugh:

Let me tell you what Barack Obama "inherited," as president of the United
States. Barack Obama inherited greatness. He inherited the
birthplace of the individual. He inherited the defender of liberty at home
and abroad, the United States of America. He inherited American
exceptionalism. He inherited the concept of equal opportunity and the
right to fail and to try again. Barack Obama, as president, inherited the
financial center of the world. He inherited the country that has
successfully championed capitalism and widespread prosperity. Something
else that President Obama also inherited: great responsibility. He
inherited the great responsibility to lead the world's lone superpower. He
inherited the responsibility to preserve and to strengthen free markets.
He inherited the responsibility to continue the philosophy and tradition of a
country founded on Judeo-Christian morals, ethics, and principles. He
inherited the Constitution of the United States. He did not inherit the
right to unilaterally rewrite it or to remake it. He swore to uphold
it! Barack Obama did not inherit a mess.
He inherited the United States of America, where anything is possible, where greatness has been delivered to the world time after time in the form of private sector inventions, innovations, and advancements in products that improve people's lives for over 200 years. Barack Obama inherited all of that and a country of individuals energized by their liberty, individuals strengthened by their character.
Barack Obama inherited a country that liberates the oppressed. Barack
Obama inherited the greatest economy in the history of human civilization.
That's all. Nothing more; nothing less. There is nothing to
apologize for what he inherited!

Camille Paglia's take on the Cairo Speech and more

She writes:

Obama projected himself as a floating spectator of other people's beliefs (as in his memory of hearing the call to prayer in Indonesia). Though he identified himself as a Christian, there was no sign that it goes very deep. Christianity seemed like a badge or school scarf, a testament of affiliation without spiritual convictions or constraints. This was one reason, perhaps, for the odd failure of the speech to acknowledge the common Middle Eastern roots of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, for both of whom the holy city of Jerusalem remains a hotly contested symbol.

Obama's lack of fervor may be one reason he rejects and perhaps cannot comprehend the religious passions that perennially erupt around the globe and that will never be waved away by mere words. By approaching religion with the cool, neutral voice of the American professional elite, Obama was sometimes simplistic and even inadvertently condescending, as in his gift bag of educational perks like "scholarships," "internships," and "online learning" -- as if any of these could checkmate the seething, hallucinatory obsessions of jihadism.

The Cairo speech will certainly not be Obama's final word on this important subject, which I hope will remain on the front burner throughout his presidency. But before he can sway hearts and minds, the president will need to show that he understands the ultimate divergence and perhaps incompatibility of major creeds. At the finale, his recitation of soft-focus quotes from the Koran, Talmud and Bible came perilously close to a fuzzy New Age syncretism of "all religions are the same" -- which they unequivocally are not. The problem facing international security is that people who believe something will always be stronger and more committed than people who believe nothing -- which unfortunately describes the complacent passivity of most Western intellectuals these days.

H/t FFoF

Who is a Christian?

A lot of people believe that all have to do to be a Christian is to call yourself one. In fact, some people get offended if you draw the line and say, well, there are certain things you have to believe about Jesus and the Holy Trinity in order to truly be Christian. (And of course, a true Christian does not just hold a set of doctrinal propositions; he is involved in a love relationship with Jesus Christ that transforms his life). There are many, many beliefs about Jesus floating around and many of them are not consistent with the eye-witness accounts as handed down by the first Apostles and preserved from generation to generation.

So it's kind of interesting to see this article about Obama and the fact that those who do word counts about these sorts of things say that he has actually mentioned Jesus by name far more than his predecessor, George W. Bush.

Eamon Javers writes over at Politico (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/23510.html):

In his speech Thursday in Cairo, Obama told the crowd that he is a Christian and mentioned the Islamic story of Isra, in which Moses, Jesus and Mohammed joined in prayer.

At the University of Notre Dame on May 17, Obama talked about the good works he’d seen done by Christian community groups in Chicago. “I found myself drawn — not just to work with the church but to be in the church,” Obama said. “It was through this service that I was brought to Christ.”

And a month before that, Obama mentioned Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount at Georgetown University to make the case for his economic policies. Obama retold the story of two men, one who built his house on a pile of sand and the other who built his on a rock: “We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand,” Obama said. “We must build our house upon a rock.”

But I have already written about how disturbing I found Obama's use of the "house on a rock" parable from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. (http://deborahgyapong.blogspot.com/search?q=Obama+Sermon)

Because the Rock in the parable is Christ, the only sure foundation. The rock Obama was talking about is his economic plan. That's a total misuse of the parable. But alas, so many journalists are utterly ignorant on religious matters so they can't spot these things.

And the story of Isra, which sounds like an Islamic version of the Transfiguration, prompted this analysis by Frank Gaffney (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/09/americas-first-muslim-president/) :

• Then the president made a statement no believing Christian -- certainly not one versed, as he professes to be, in the ways of Islam -- would ever make. In the context of what he euphemistically called the "situation between Israelis, Palestinians and Arabs," Mr. Obama said he looked forward to the day ". . . when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus and Muhammad (peace be upon them) joined in prayer."

Now, the term "peace be upon them" is invoked by Muslims as a way of blessing deceased holy men. According to Islam, that is what all three were - dead prophets. Of course, for Christians, Jesus is the living and immortal Son of God.

As I said earlier, if you do not believe that Jesus is the living and immortal Son of God then you are not a believing Christian, no matter how much you purport to love and follow Jesus.

I find all this pandering to religious believers rather disturbing. Does it mean he really does not take religious faith at all seriously?

Oh yeah, Gaffney noticed another thing in the Cairo address:

• Mr. Obama established his firsthand knowledge of Islam (albeit without mentioning his reported upbringing in the faith) with the statement, "I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed." Again, "revealed" is a depiction Muslims use to reflect their conviction that the Koran is the word of God, as dictated to Muhammad.

I dunno. I don't like this kind of postmodern mixing and matching of religions, religious figures, and theologies. I have far more in common with a devout orthodox Jew or a faithful Muslim than I do with this relativist cafeteria style religious buffet.

Those of us who practice our faith believe we have found absolute truth. But that does not mean we fanatically try to stuff our faith down the throats of others. We know that some things we believe in are paradoxical and mysterious and can not always be explained with our finite intellects. The relativist often tends to be, oddly enough, the most absolutest among all the believers I have ever met.

I'd be very curious to see what Mark Steyn thinks

about this analysis of the Cairo Speech by David P. Goldman, aka. Spengler. Goldman has a most interesting take over at First Things (www.firstthings.com) where he is now associate editor.

In some ways, they may be talking apples and oranges, because the birth rate can be down in Iran and parts of the Arab world, but still quite high among Muslims in Europe and countries like Yemen that Mark writes about. (Blogger's not letting me put in the links so here they are in long form: http://www.firstthings.com/on_the_square_entry.php?year=2009&month=06&title_link=obama-and-cairo)

Goldman writes:

Obama's speech, though, did not address truth, but rather psychological truth. In Arab eyes, the humiliation of the Palestinians is just as grave a crime as the Nazi murder of six million Jews, because humiliation means death. It would be facile to ascribe such an attitude to the exaggerated sense of honor in tribal society, or for that matter to Islam's emphasis upon worldly success. Not only illiterate people earning two dollars a day believe such things. During the 1930s, mainstream German opinion held that a Jewish conspiracy was close to exterminating the Aryan race through miscegenation and syphilis. One thinks in this context of Muslim belief that polio vaccine is a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls has stopped vaccinations in large parts of West Africa, resulting in the return of a disease that nearly had been eradicated—a fact of which Obama made indirect mention in Cairo.

Obama is a man of the third world, and he understands how fragile the thread of existence looks to third world eyes. An obsession with national death dominates the Arab dialogue, which is accessible to Westerns with a modicum of curiosity in widely available English-language sources. Ali Allawi, a leading politician in Iraq's American-backed government, wrote this year in a widely reviewed book, "The much heralded Islamic awakening of recent times will not be a prelude to the rebirth of an Islamic civilization; it will be another episode in its decline. The revolt of Islam becomes instead the final act of the end of a civilization." The Syrian poet "Adonis" (Ali Ahmad Said), the only Arab writer on the Nobel Prize shortlist, warns, "We [Arabs] have become extinct. . . . We have the masses of people, but a people becomes extinct when it no longer has a creative capacity, and the capacity to change its world . . . The great Sumerians became extinct, the great Greeks became extinct, and the Pharaohs became extinct."

Western observers stuck on the stereotype of Arab hordes overrunning a depopulated Western Europe may find this strange, but the much-vaunted Muslim womb is failing. Iran's fertility decline is the fastest ever observed, and by some accounts has fallen below the level of 1.9 births per female registered in the 2006 census to only 1.6, barely above Germany's. Collapsing fertility is accompanied by social pathologies, including rates of drug addiction and prostitution an order of magnitude greater than in any Western country. Of the fifteen countries that show the biggest drop in population growth since 1980, eight are in the Middle East, and the head of the United Nations population division calls the collapse of Islamic population growth "amazing." Underlying this demographic revolution, I have argued in the past, is a crisis of faith in the Muslim world.

As Obama said, "The sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam." But it is even worse: Modernity and globalization are killing the Muslim countries. Wealthy countries such as Europe and Japan barely can avoid national bankruptcy due to rapid aging of the population; for third world countries, the outcome is apocalyptic.

This gives me a whole new perspective on things. I find it most interesting. It reminds me of a talk I heard David Warren give about five years ago where he discussed a book he was working on. That manuscript has never seen the light of day, unfortunately, but the thesis was the both the West and the Islamic world were experiencing crises of faith that manifested in different ways. In the West, the collapse of Christianity could be seen in the "peace at any price" mentality of anti-Globalist demonstrators and others on the Left as a kind of perversion of Jesus' teachings; for Islam, which he described as a great religion that as a Christian he believed was false, but "splendidly false" the corruption of civilization-nourishing great religion is the terrorist extremist and suicide bomber who is basically a nihilist.

I hope David Warren does resurrect that book and publish it because it is an intriguing take on things and if what Spengler aka Goldman writes is true about demographic collapse in part of the Islamic world, there is all the more reason it needs to see the light of day.

And of course, Mark Steyn's overriding concern has been the civilizational suicide of the West that he has compared to an AIDS patient whose immune system is so compromised that any opportunistic infection can finish him off. The pneumonia or the flu that would not seriously harm a person without a compromised immune system is mistaken for the killer.

Melanie Phillips explains what the BNP victory means

The Canadian body politic needs to pay attention to this. It shows the danger of crying racist too often and of marginalizing legitimate public debate with ad hominem attacks. The result is that it gives oxygen to real, harmful, beyond-the pale racists while still leaving legitimate concerns orphaned by fearful politicians.

She writes:

Both fascism and communism have their roots in counter-Enlightenment, obscurantist thinking which replaced reason by emotion, Judeo-Christian ethics by paganism, and the rejection of the primacy of the individual in favour of collectively imposed authority. Read Ze’ev Sternhell’s classic work, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France to get the picture.

Not for nothing were the Nazis called ’national socialists’. In similar fashion, the BNP fuse ultra-nationalism and racism with economic ideas which would sit well on the left of the Labour party. It is more helpful, and more accurate, to regard the BNP as opportunists. In the tradition of all fascist and neo-fascist parties, they prey upon a decaying body politic by taking up genuine grievances which are of overwhelming concern to the public but which, for one reason or another, mainstream politics is ignoring. By doing so, they serve to camouflage their own anti-democratic and noxious ideology.

The BNP under Nick Griffin have been particularly skilled at this, getting their people to grow out their shaven heads and get into suits, and sanitising their literature of anything that might frighten the voters off. They remain, however, a deeply and truly racist and antisemitic party, as is demonstrated by the fact that they will not allow black people or Jews to be members because they don’t regard black people or Jews as properly British.

Nevertheless, they have been able to seize their opportunity – and not just because of the expenses scandal. No, the rot in our culture that has let in the BNP goes far, far deeper than that. It is because it has turned attachment to national identity itself into a crime. Anyone who objects to multi-culturalism is called a bigot; anyone who wants to curb immigration is called a racist; anyone who objects to the Islamisation of Britain is called an Islamophobe; anyone who wants to leave the EU and regain the power of national self-government is called a xenophobe; anyone, in short, who wants to retain Britain’s national identity rooted in the shared particulars of religion, law, history, traditions and culture and its powers as a self-governing nation finds themselves ostracised as a pariah.

Voters have been told in effect that there is nothing standing between national suicide on the one hand and racism on the other. If you don’t want the former, you are automatically branded with the latter. And so the BNP have been able to make hay. What’s more, the BNP have had a further devastating impact upon public discourse. Because they do indeed stand for beliefs that are beyond the pale, they toxify everything they touch.

A retrosexual manifesto from the Binks!

HOW DID WESTERN MANHOOD become so patsified? Metrosexual? Whiny? Stupid men on TV; men and boys falling behind in schools and universities? Men treated badly in divorce and family law, and not allowed to have a say in abortion?

The Binks is a proud retrosexual: I hold doors & do the “ladies first” thing; use my skills and strength to help others; take the final decisions at home with all the input of everybody in mind. I hope I’d be one of the guys helping people onto the Titanic lifeboats, and not in a dress trying to sneak to safety. I consider my family and neighbourhood and the kids of the area to be under my care; and the wider world, too (witness the blogs).

I’m doing my best to follow Doug Gile’s sage advice, and raise my boys to be the kind of people feminists will hate, because they are manly men.

After all– we can’t forget that aside from the legitimate suffragette part of the women’s movement, the later part was taken over by Marxist radicals like Betty Friedan and others, who wanted to separate men and women, sex from child-bearing, and children from families. It’s classic revolutionary stuff, to break down the institutions of Western civ, and make individuals more dependant upon the state than one another, let alone in families.

Thus, male authority and roles are a prime target, and radicals continue to devalue, undefine, and attack it as oppressive, sexist, illegitimate, and fathers and men as disposable. This is a pernicious, inhuman, and decivilizing doctrine, and it’s all around us– and contributes to the atomization a deformation of civilization. Hence the retreat of men from so many areas of life– to the worse for everyone.

Mary DeMuth and the mark that attracts predators

I love Mary DeMuth. She's a terrific writer and someone who has shown real courage and authenticity in navigating her healing from sexual abuse without glossing over any of the struggle to find healing in Christ. I look forward to reading her latest novel Daisy Chain because I have enjoyed her previous novels and nonfiction so much. And I look forward to her upcoming memoire Thin Places that will come out in January.

She has a most interesting post today over at The Master's Artist, a group blog that I have been a proud member of, though I'm on haitus right now. She writes:

I was sexually abused by neighborhood boys throughout my kindergarten year. That was nearly forty years ago, but the mark they left on me, though faded, is still there.

Some would argue that once someone comes to Jesus, the mark is beautifully erased. Perhaps for some that is true. But I liken that hellish year to healing and scars. Yes, I've been healed. But the scars remain. I am marked.

I knew this growing up. Other predators had some sort of mark locating devise.

-snip-

Once I was married to the man of my dreams, the antithesis to the predators, I settled into a kind of comfortable safety. No one would see my mark now!

And for many years, that was true. As a stay at home mommy, I didn't see many men, didn't interact much, other than at church.

Enter the Christian writing world. And a little of my own naivety.

I wrote a post here dealing with boundaries in professional relationships, so I won't reiterate that in this piece. But what I will say is this: the mark re-emerged. As if dormant from a long, happy sleep, it awoke with a vengeance. And predators once again saw it, noticed it, and sought to exploit it.

Mary shares some wise advice about boundaries and so on. But she also reminded me of how we are all marked in some way and it may not be by sexual abuse. There are ways that the enemy of our souls hopes to harm us and it may come in a host of ways, depending on how he is most likely to throw us off our relationship with God.

Her post made me think about something I read somewhere by someone who was involved in Christian counseling. This pastor wrote that he could often tell how Satan was trying to attack a person who came into his office by the feelings that would arise unbidden in him while in that person's presence. A woman who came into his office and drew up temptations of seduction or lust or romance or whatever variation, he came to realize was the enemy's way of targeting that woman for her soul's destruction. He also realized that when someone irritated or annoyed him that too was a way that the enemy was targeting that individual, prompting in him and probably many others, to have an impatient, irritable response that would somehow confirm in that person that he was unworthy and unloveable in some way. I think the example he used was of someone whose greatest fear was abandonment, but who prompted a great desire in others to abandon him!

While Mary's advice is most wise for those navigating the male-female dangers that can arise when boundaries are not respected and how the mark of sexual abuse can inspire predators, a woman does not need to have been sexually abused as a child to be vulnerable to the "worship" that goes with romantic love. And because romantic love feels so good, it often does not feel like predation to the predator or the prey. And yes, neediness does draw it up. Which is not to blame the victim here, but to warn that anytime one seeks to have needs filled that are properly ordered by God first and everything else to be added runs the risk of being roadkill on Satan's highway to hell. Often the neediness and the idolatry in romantic love goes both ways---each person falls in love with the way the other person makes them feel through their projection on each other.

But what about the person who is marked for impatience, for irritated, negative responses from us? There is a woman I know (not terribly well) who inspires negative and irritated responses in some of the most profoundly Christian people I know. Her presence, her voice, her manner is like nails scraping a blackboard.

I had that response too, until I remembered this devotional from Oswald Chambers.

If we are not heedful and pay no attention to the way the Spirit of God works in us, we will become spiritual hypocrites. We see where other people are failing, and then we take our discernment and turn it into comments of ridicule and criticism, instead of turning it into intercession on their behalf. God reveals this truth about others to us not through the sharpness of our minds but through the direct penetration of His Spirit. If we are not attentive, we will be completely unaware of the source of the discernment God has given us, becoming critical of others and forgetting that God says, ". . . he will ask, and He will give him life for those who commit sin not leading to death." Be careful that you don’t become a hypocrite by spending all your time trying to get others right with God before you worship Him yourself.

One of the most subtle and illusive burdens God ever places on us as saints is this burden of discernment concerning others. He gives us discernment so that we may accept the responsibility for those souls before Him and form the mind of Christ about them (see Philippians 2:5 ). We should intercede in accordance with what God says He will give us, namely, "life for those who commit sin not leading to death." It is not that we are able to bring God into contact with our minds, but that we awaken ourselves to the point where God is able to convey His mind to us regarding the people for whom we intercede.

The pastor I wrote of above had the discernment to see this, to know that instead of seeing a woman before him as a seductive slut or a possible object of romance, to see that the enemy of our souls was tempting him to treat her like that instead giving her the kind of chaste, fatherly love of God through Christ that could set her free.

But there are many other "marks" that people have: marks that set people up for unspeakable loneliness because everything they do makes even generally kind and patient people bristle and not want to be around them. Some people are marked by anger that makes people respond in kind, or cower in fear. Some are marked by invisible "kick me" signs that draw up cruelty and bullying in others.

Many of us are not able to discern that sometimes our feelings are not our own, but that we are picking up on the miasma of feelings and impulses and temptations that surround another person. We may think it is our irritability or resentment when if fact we are picking up on that belonging to someone else.

Too often I am guilty of becoming critical rather than realizing I have received a call to pray for that person.

Christopher Hitchens on Gitmo and the Cairo speech

I look forward to the day when rabidly anti-religious Christopher Hitchens becomes a Catholic.

I pray for that. Why? Because he would be such a good guy to have on our side, minus his occasional boorishness. He does have courage and a certain moral clarity that is rare for those on the left.

He makes this point about Obama's Gitmo speech:

This sort of naiveté is worrying, and it means that among the global Muslim audience, the wrong sort of people were laughing at us, while the ones who ought to be our friends and allies were shedding a disappointed tear.

I think of how differently things might have been had Ronald Reagan sought to appease Communists at the Brandenburg Gate instead of describing the results of their totalitarian oppression. His words gave such hope to the dissidents behind the Iron Curtain because he confirmed what they were seeing about the regime where history books were frequently changed, where the news media were under government control and the newspaper Pravda, which means 'truth' in Russian, was a joke that had to be read between the lines.

What if Reagan instead had apologized to Communist leaders instead, saying, we know that we have failed to provide equality to all our people, that we have a gap between the rich and the poor. We know that we have sometimes had a poor attitude towards Communists in our midst and have blacklisted them or launched witchhunts against them and have not lived up to our values. Here's a snippet of what Reagan did say:

In the 1950s, Khrushchev predicted: "We will bury you." But in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind--too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself. After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor.

And now the Soviets themselves may, in a limited way, be coming to understand the importance of freedom. We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness. Some political prisoners have been released. Certain foreign news broadcasts are no longer being jammed. Some economic enterprises have been permitted to operate with greater freedom from state control.

Are these the beginnings of profound changes in the Soviet state? Or are they token gestures, intended to raise false hopes in the West, or to strengthen the Soviet system without changing it? We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

I hope I am wrong but I fear that Obama's Cairo speech has left Muslim moderates and reformers feeling abandoned and that it has strengthened the hand of those who are seeking a worldwide Muslim caliphate, whether through violent or non-violent means.

It's sad that we have a president of the United States who has none of the civilizational confidence in the West that Reagan exuded with every word.

Bill Whittle on Obama as Spock

This is terrific.

Lessons from a water dispute

Victor Davis Hanson is one of my favorite columnists. Here he has a practical lesson for President Obama from his farming experience in a dispute over communal water:

I felt sorry for him, really did, that he had reduced a dispute over something as mundane as “water” into some sort of existential issue of regional peace. What did he wish me to do-descend down to his level, to become exactly like him, to settle differences on the basis of primate strength?

I thought about this for yet another seven days, compulsively so as I looked out at the parched vines. Couldn’t I just pay the power bill, pump for 10 days, and feel as his moral better that I had not descended to his cave-dwelling status? Oddly, I began to hear a once familiar voice in my head whisper, “He’ll take your crew next right when you need it. He’ll take over your alleyway. He’ll drive on your place like he owns it. He’ll…”).

The Inevitable Overreaction?

Then in a trance-like fashion, I went out to restore deterrence. I got a massive chain and lock, and simply shut down his communal lateral. Locked the gate so tight, he couldn’t even get a quarter-turn. He’d be lucky if he got a 100 gallons in a week. Then I got a veritable arsenal of protective weaponry, got in my pickup, drove back over to the gate, and waited with ammo, clubs, shovels, etc.

In an hour he drove up in a dust cloud. He was going to smash me, get his football playing son to strangle me, sue me, bankrupt me, hunt me down, etc. He swore and yelled-I was a disgrace to my family, a racist, a psycho, worse than my grandfather. He was going to lock my gates, steal all my water, and indeed he leveled all sorts of threats (remember the scene in Unforgiven when Eastwood walks out and screams threats to the terrified town?-that was my neighbor). I got out with large vine stake and said something to the effect (forgive me if I don’t have the verbatim transcript-it has been 29 years since then), “It’s locked until you follow the rules. Anytime you don’t, it’s locked again. Do it one more time and I weld it shut. Not a drop. So sue me.”

He got up, screeched his tires, blew a dust cloud in my face, and raced down the alleyway-honking even as he left.

Pax

For the next ten years until his death, he was the model neighbor.

"Obama . . . he's sort of God"--Evan Thomas MSNBC host

Newsweek editor Evan Thomas brought adulation over President Obamas Cairo speech to a whole new level on Friday, declaring on MSNBC: "I mean in a way Obama's standing above the country, above above the world, he's sort of God. (hat tip JM)

Wow! Read Sotomayor's speech and wake up

We keep hearing about one phrase about the "wise Latina woman" that Obama and his feckless spokesman have said was something she would have phrased differently and that the rest of her speech shows her respect for the rule of law.

Well, Andy McCarthy over at the Corner directed me to this piece by Jennifer Rubin in the Weekly Standard:

However, the president had already weighed in, pronouncing, "I'm sure she would have restated it. But if you look in the entire sweep of the [speech] that she wrote, what's clear is that she was simply saying that her life experiences will give her information about the struggles and hardships that people are going through that will make her a good judge."

But that is precisely not what the entire sweep of the speech conveys. Indeed, Sotomayor took nearly 4,000 words to say the opposite. The president's characterization of the speech is as false as Sotomayor's reassurances to Feinstein are misleading. The White House is no doubt banking on the media and public's unwillingness to seek out the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal and read Sotomayor's musings in their entirety. In contrast to Judge Richard Paez of the Ninth Circuit, a liberal Hispanic appellate judge who addressed the same Berkeley audience, Sotomayor propounded not warm and fuzzy feelings of ethnic pride but radical views of multiculturalism and of judging itself.

and

The notion of a shared American tradition is considered a dodge for maintaining white, male domination of society. Instead, they aim to secure the levers of power, to empower disadvantaged groups to pursue their distinct ideology, culture, and language. It is not enough to eliminate barriers to entry in business, universities, government, or the bench; numerical quotas are essential to securing each group's "fair share." And most critically, group identity and goals supplant individual identity and professional obligations. Each of these elements, the core of the most extreme variety of contemporary multiculturalism, is prominently featured in Sotomayor's speech and law review article.

Andy McCarthy has a link to the speech itse
lf, which I have read. Get a load of this (my bolds):

Yet, because I accept the proposition that, as Judge Resnik describes it, "to judge is an exercise of power" and because as, another former law school classmate, Professor Martha Minnow of Harvard Law School, states "there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives - no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging," I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that--it's an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others. Not all women or people of color, in all or some circumstances or indeed in any particular case or circumstance but enough people of color in enough cases, will make a difference in the process of judging.

How postmodern and relativist of Sotomayor! Judging is an exercise in power. There is no objective stance. Does she mean there is no objective truth?

There is a measure of truth in the fact that we all do have prejudices and we all see truth from our own relative standpoint and that perhaps people from very different backgrounds will bring perspectives we have not thought up and that's valuable. But that's a different thing from saying basically that judging is only an exercise of power and there is no real objective truth to discover together (hence that a wise woman or man of any color or background, if they were truly wise would come to similar conclusions because they would arrive as close as possible to objective truth).

But it's not only our judicial system that is going postmodern and treating the truth like it's merely an epiphenomenon of power and the narrative of the winners and hence "truth."

Journalism has abandoned the idea of objectivity as well, including the existence of objective facts. It's only competing narratives and lies don't matter as long as the narrative is compelling.

Robert Gibbs reminds me of Saddam Hussein's ridiculous Baghdad Bob, you know, the guy who was predicting that Saddam would win when Baghdad was literally falling to the Americans. But the big difference is that we were all laughing at Baghdad Bob and we knew his lies were preposterous. The news media laughs at Gibbs, too, but they let him get away with his lies because they are in such a thrall to Obama. They like Obama's narrative.

8:00 a.m. Sunday hear my speech broadcast on 93.1 FM

Tony Copple who helped organize and MC'd the wonderful event honoring Dr. Allen Churchill's 50 years in ministry has decided to broadcast the short speech I gave at the event on Christian Communication in a Secular Age on his radio program "Over My Head" on CKCU-93.1 FM in Ottawa. You can listen live via the station's website.

Tony Copple has quite a ministry in Ottawa--from his work as a financial planner, to his involvement in Alpha, in furthering Allen Churchill's radio ministry via CFRA, his own radio programs, his work in Anglican renewal and lots more. You can find out more about Tony at his website.

I'm honored to know him! And more than honored that he would think my speech is worthy of broadcast.

Here's how Tony describes my talk to his internal email list:

The show will end with Deborah Gyapong’s vigorous defence of biblical orthodoxy from the Allen Churchill Celebration 24 May, and in the middle will have live songs from Cathy Goddard who sang at that event.

Cathy Goddard is well worth listening to, by the way.

Some reflections in the final stretch

I'm approaching one of those milestone birthdays, one that is making me pause to reflect on what is now likely to be the final quarter of my life. This year my birthday on June 19th falls on the day we celebrate the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

I was born on Father's Day. I want to dedicate the rest of my life to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. How that will pan out, I leave to Him. But I want to resist the urge to gradually "retire" or fade into just looking after myself and my needs, to give up, to rest on my laurels as modest as they may be. Some day I may not be able to be as outwardly active, but I pray that the Lord will draw me into intercessory prayer and other forms of more hidden ministry.

It has been a big temptation in recent years to feel a slight pall of discouragement, to feel that I've gone past my best-before date and everything is downhill from here. I know I'll never be a great writer, just kind of average for a professional journalist. But I am reminded of something Cardinal Ouellet told a conference of Catholic journalists last year. I can't find the text, but it was something like this: "Jesus didn't save the world by using beautiful words. He saved the world by dying on the Cross."

That was a powerful reminder to me that it is Jesus who gives the words life that I or any other Christian writer use. I may have a limited amount of talent in the natural realm, but he can take even the simplest of words or the simplest of gestures, like finding someone a glass of water, and imbue them with holiness, life and a glimpse of divine love. That is if we are willing to get out of the way to let Him.

Writing can be a lonely enterprise. I spend hours and hours alone at home at a computer and my schedule is so wonky that it's hard to make anything but spontaneous plans to see friends. And a lot of the friends who share my passion for Christ are busy with their own ministries and families. So sometimes, I wish just to have someone around to shoot the breeze with, but my husband's busy at work, and so are my friends.

This spring, as I was experiencing a bout of loneliness, I picked up a little booklet of homilies by St. Josemaria Escriva and began reading. It was as if Jesus came alongside me as I read and told me He is my Friend, that if I'm feeling lonely and like there is no one to talk to, I can always talk to Him. I've been a Christian for a long time and I've always known that, I have sung "What a Friend we have in Jesus" and experienced His friendship in the past. But this time, I really knew it. I really know it.

During Lent, I heard a talk by John Beaulieau of the Franciscan University of Steubenville who was in Ottawa. Here's an excerpt of a story I wrote then:

He urged them to seek a “personal Pentecost,” where the Holy Spirit would set their hearts on fire for Jesus.

“Don’t build a fireplace for God, a safe little place for God,” he said. What if God is saying, “I want to come into your house and burn it down and replace it with a mansion”?

Let the Holy Spirit “take it all,” he said.

A father of five, Beaulieu acknowledged it is not always easy to choose among the many competing goods in one’s life.

“On Christmas Eve 2007, Pope Benedict XVI came to my house and smacked me between the eyes with a two-by-four,” he said. “Not literally.”

The “blow” came from reading Benedict’s Christmas Eve homily that spoke of how Mary and Joseph were looking for a place to rest so she could give birth. There was no room for them.

“In some way, mankind is awaiting God, waiting for him to draw near,” he quoted the pope saying. “But when the moment comes, there is no room for him.

“Do we have time and space for God?” Beaulieu asked.

As part of my Lenten meditations, I started praying that the Holy Spirit would burn my proverbial house down. And ever since, I am seeing so many signs of the love of Jesus. Isn't that what the Holy Spirit does? He testifies to Jesus.

Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. As Paul writes in Romans 8:

5Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? ³⁶As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. ³⁷Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. ³⁸For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, ³⁹Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

And I am coming to see more and more that this love is particular, unique and individual like that of a Father to a beloved child, who is special in her own way that no one else is. Love is not an impersonal force. But everyone is uniquely special to God, just as a good parent loves each child equally and at the same time each child is irreplaceable.

Here's a beautiful Third Day song that my son Chris sang at my son Sam's wedding in 2001. This is the original group singing and I hope it blesses you and makes you aware of how far Jesus has gone to show you He loves you. But I often think about how little love is reflected back to him.

Here for those who are more inclined to traditional worship, is a beautiful meditation on the Sacred Heart of Jesus.



The picture was taken last September in Rome. There's a rainbow behind me.

Reaction in the Arab world to Obama's speech

A mixed bag, I'd say.

Ezra debates HRCs on Michael Enright's show

Sometimes I catch a bit of Michael Enright's Sunday morning radio program on my way to church. That's often a bad idea, as it has a way of triggering spiritual Tourette's the way a flickering florescent light can trigger a migraine. I find the program so biased, starting first with its guest selection. So I'm surprised and delighted that Ezra Levant got invited onto the program.

Ezra writes:

Lamarche goes first -- and for about sixty seconds she actually made a little bit of sense. She even joked about the difference between HRCs and "real courts". She keeps it together for a little while -- and even pretends that she's "neutral" about whether the censorship provisions should be scrapped.

But she loses her grip at 1:25 when Enright challenged her on the lack of due process and natural justice in HRCs. Her first response is to dismiss the horrors of HRCs as my own personal story. When I pushed back, citing the very section of the Alberta act that allows warrantless search and seizures, and pointing out that targets of HRCs don't get legal aid, she just collapsed, saying that "discrimination is about attitudes... and transformation. It's not only about due process."

Oh. So to hell with the law or fairness. Guys like me need to have our attitudes transformed. It's not law. It's brutal politics pretending to be the law.

I like this Lucie Lamarche -- for her honesty.

After a few minutes of her reading her talking points -- likely authored by the battallion of PR flacks at the Canadian Human Rights Commission -- she just stops pretending that HRCs are about justice. They're about politics and propaganda -- making political dissidents like me conform to the "official line". And the high costs? That's just an additional punishment for our thought crimes.

Seriously: when she ran out of her prepared talking points, she said what she truly believed: this was about transforming attitudes.

Of course that's what 'human rights' commissions have become. Government-funded attitude changers. I suppose there will be some with the notion that maybe it is good to have some government agency making sure that people do not discriminate on the basis of race---i.e. that someone makes sure there is a bully pulpit and some carrots and sticks to make sure every Canadian is judged on the content of their characters and not the color of their skins as Martin Luther King Jr once dreamed. That, however, would be wrong. The new "racism" is a Marxist construct that applies to anyone who opposes the statist march to utopian egalitarianism where some identified victim groups are more equal than others, where all cultures are equal except Western Civilization, which is uniquely evil. And those Jooos and Christians, are the root causes of everything that's wrong with the West. Thus discrimination against those perceived to be the "power structure" is fine and dandy and de rigeur, but racism on the part of identified victim groups is the fault of "the oppressors" and can't even be called racist because it is not their fault.

When David Frum is not attacking conservatives

he is definitely worth reading. . . he is extremely perceptive about Obama's speech today.

Looking for reaction to Obama's speech?

The folks at National Review Online have assembled it here.

Most interesting with pros and cons. There are pages of responses. Go and read.

Come ses "Media Malpractice" on June 15

Come and see how Obama won the election with the help of a fawning media. This is from an email I received from The Free Thinking Film Society. The film will be shown Monday June 15 at 7:00 p.m. Cost is $8. It's on my calendar.

On Monday, June 15, 2009, The Free Thinking Film Society will present John Ziegler’s “Media Malpractice”, a look at the mainstream US media’s gleeful abandonment of fairness during both the 2008 Democratic primary and the subsequent Presidential election. Ziegler shows how double standards, deliberate omissions, and blatant cheerleading by for Barack Obama’s candidacy by the press first thwarted Hillary Clinton’s White House ambitions before the journalistic elite launched a blatant smear campaign against Sarah Palin.
“This film isn’t about fighting the US election all over again. What this film is about is the very disturbing lack of ethics among many of those journalists who we, the voting public, rely on for information,” commented Fred Litwin, Director of the Free-Thinking Film Society. “The vitality of a press corps that calls it down the middle is something that small d-democrats of all political stripes should agree on, and ‘Media Malpractice’ clearly demonstrates that those responsible for maintaining that trust fell far short in the 2008 Presidential campaign due to their flagrant pro-Obama bias,” he added.
John Nolte of Andrew Breitbart’s “Big Hollywood” says, “(I)t’s worth pointing out that ‘Media Malpractice’ is not anything close to an anti-Obama screed. Obviously within the mission of the film, William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and other cuts from our current President’s Not So Greatest Hits get some play, but for you reasonable Democrats who were horrified by the media corruption even as it benefited your guy, there’s nothing to fear here.”
According to America Online’s liberal blogger Tommy Christopher, “Media Malpractice” “is an entertaining film. It is a crowd-pleaser to the millions on the right who voted for Senator McCain, and a comedy for those on the left who have a sense of humor. Either way, it is a funny film. If Ziegler errs, it is by omission or conflation, but his film is well-documented and openly credits all of its sources.”
Finally, Ed Morrissey of the influential Hot Air website says, “(t)he sheer weight of the evidence John expertly documents, and the clever and telling juxtaposition of the widely varying treatment Obama and Joe Biden received from the media from Palin will have even the skeptics admitting that John has a point. In fact, John saves his best evidence for last, in two widely-remarked polls showing and confirming that Obama voters were significantly less knowledgeable about politics and the specifics of the election. That is John’s entire point; the media served the nation poorly in one of its most important functions and left an electorate drowning in ignorance. John claims that he bears no ill will towards Barack Obama and hopes he succeeds, but that the media failed — utterly.”
For trailers, reviews and more information on Media Malpractice, please go to www.howobamagotelected.com.
The Free Thinking Film Society was established in 2007 in Ottawa to provide an alternative to what’s usually presented by both art houses and public broadcasters. To that end, The Free Thinking Film Society is dedicated to showing challenging films of a conservative or libertarian bent - films that would otherwise NEVER play in Ottawa, on either the large or small screen. For more information, please go to www.freethinkingfilms.com or see us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/groups.php?ref=sb#/group.php?gid=5497857286

Wow, sometimes I do feel battered

Jeanne Donovan over at American Thinker compares Republicans to battered spouses. But her list could apply up here in Canada, too. Check this out:

• Do you feel nervous when you're around a liberal?
• Are you scared of disagreeing with liberals?
• Do you remain silent in front of a liberal because you want them to like you?
• Do you try to please a liberal, only to be rebuked for your efforts?
• Do liberals criticize you, or humiliate you in front of other people?
• Do you have to control your behavior or your language to avoid their anger and ridicule?
• Do you feel pressured by them to participate in activities you find offensive?
• Do liberals mock you when your express profoundly held beliefs about capitalism, religion, sex and gender issues?
• Do liberals demand that you think, speak, and even support ideas that are disgusting to you?
• Are liberals always calling you names?
• Do liberals repeatedly and wrongly accuse you of being something you're not, such as racist, homophobic, and uncaring?
• Do liberals tell you that if you changed, they wouldn't have to say these awful things about you?

And that's not even half of the list. Like in those magazine surveys, if you answer yes to some of these questions, then you may be suffering from the battered conservative syndrome. And Donovan recommends what you need to do to wrest yourself out of the bad relationship.




H/t Dr. Sanity who has more good links over at her blog.

My favorite gay American bloggers on the signs of the times

I love Hillbuzz. In this post they reflect on the signs of `hope and change` under Obama.

It also made us think about all the small business owners we know who went
out of business in the last six months — many of whom, like the two in the story
above, are big Dr. Utopia supporters. Realtors, web developers, landscape
designers, caterers, event planners, fashion designers, cupcake bakers, and
freelances of all stripes. All of these people are very well-educated, and all
catered to the needs of people with disposable income that suddenly became not
so disposable after all. They are all now still waiting for all of their
hope and change, and all the miracles they were promised by Candidate Utopia
before he became our 44th President.

-snip- (but go read the whole thing!)

It’s funny to see the neo-hippies realize 2008’s Hope/Change-palooza was all a load of crap, just as ultimately in their 40s, if not sooner, these same twenty-somethings quite often realize they’ve truly wasted the last 10-15 years of their lives on leftist
nonsense, that patchuli smells terrible, and no one ever wants to listen to
people with grating South African accents lecture about all the many problems
America has (while simultaneously whining about no longer being able to live
here, and going on and on and on about what’s going to happen to the cat she’s
had for a year that South Africa won’t let her bring with her when she’s
deported). But, it’s sad and frustrating, more so than funny, because
slowly we see people waking up and realizing what we warned about back in 2008.

This is why, once Hillary Clinton suspended her campaign, we fought
tooth and nail for John McCain first, and ultimately with our whole heart for
Sarah Palin.

None of Dr. Utopia’s promises were real — but his
determination to push this country onto a destructive Marxist track was VERY
MUCH REAL, and could very well be the end of all of us.

On the streets of Boystown and Andersonville in the last several days — we kid you not — we saw nicely dressed people, just a little dirty, but wild-eyed and desperate looking, digging through trash bins on the street or dumpsters behind restaurants.
One man yesterday looked like one of the random, slightly overweight,
middle-management accountant types indigenous to every cubicle farm in America
(and obsessed with red Swingline staplers on occasion). He still had the
ubiquitous nylon badge holder/key ring straight out of central casting dangling
around his neck, the kind his ID used to be on when he swiped in at Aon every
day (the name of the insurance giant on the nylon, given to him at orientation
his first day or as some worthless prize at a training seminar or other event,
we’re sure). And, there he was, in The Golden Age of Hope and Change, in
dirty khackis, excited to find a styrofoam cup with a lid still on it in the
trash outside Potbelly’s. Feral-like, he scooped that cup right up to his mouth
and slurped up its contents, savoring it as the only food he’d had that day,
most likely.

It was stunning and sickening and heartbreaking and TERRIFYING
all at the same time, because when we were kids and asked our grandparents what
the Great Depression was like and how they first realized there was inescapable
trouble coming, THIS IS WHAT THEY SAID THEY NOTICED FIRST.

LifeSiteNews has more info man accused of Tiller's murder

The alleged murderer has a history of mental instability.

However in the aftermath of the murder and subsequent arrest, information has surfaced that shows Roeder to be a mentally unstable individual, who as early as the 1990s adopted quasi-biblical beliefs to compensate for his moral failings, and fell under the influence of two violent radical organizations, especially a fringe anti-abortion group far outside the sphere of the pro-life community. This group is the so-called Army of God, a group that advocates domestic terror, violence, and murder against abortion facilities and those who work there.

The Anarchist Origins of Scott P. Roeder

Roeder’s first links with violence and terrorism began with his association with the anti-government “Freemen” movement. The Freemen claim that the individual has sovereignty above the government, making them largely exempt from laws, regulations and taxes. Among other things, they began operating their own legal system, and printing their own paper currency independent of state and federal governments.

Roeder’s ex-wife, Lindsay, told the Kansas City Star that Roeder began to break down in the early 90s, when he began having trouble paying bills and acting normal in daily life.

"One day someone told him that paying income taxes isn't constitutional," Lindsey Roeder told the Star. "And he realized if he stopped paying his taxes he could pay all of his bills. From there things just started like a snowball. He became very obsessive."

There's a lot more. It's pretty sad.

So, where's the condemnation of the shooting?

President Obama was quick to denouce the "heinous" attack on the abortion doctor.
Rightly so.

But even though he did make a statement today to the news media, he did not mention anything about yesterday's murderous attack on a military recruitment office.

Michelle Malkin notices the following:

The news is what he left out.

Not a word about the jihadi attack on the two Army recruiters in Arkansas. No condemnation of the heinous attack and senseless violence. No condolences for the families of the targeted men or praise for the military recruiters who have been under increasing attack on U.S. soil. No statements from the DOJ or Pentagon, either.

Help me get the word out about Mohamed's Moon

Mohamed's Moon is the latest novel by my friend Keith Clemons, an award-winning Canadian writer who has written several contemporary novels that are not only great reads but also well-researched.

Mohamed's Moon is about identical twins, separated at birth in Egypt. They meet again in the United States while the brother who was adopted by a Christian family is attending medical school and the other brother who was raised by his Muslim Brotherhood uncle--the Mohamed of the story--has been prepared all his life to wage jihad, but by non-violent stealth.

First of all, this is a book I could not put down. I enjoyed every minute. I have to read so much that if a novel does not grab me, I do not have the patience to force myself to read it, unless someone pays me. This was pure pleasure. I looked forward to reading it any chance I could snatch some extra time.

Keith knows how to set a scene and put you there in a way that engages all your senses in addition to writing a page-turner. But this book is also a deeply insightful story about the differences between Christianity and Islam; about the plight of converts from Islam to Christianity in many Muslim countries; about how those waging jihad may not be groomed to explode bombs but instead trained to speak perfect English, to fit in smoothly into Western society and infiltrate various institutions so as to facilitate the colonization of the West and the imposition of Sharia law by increments. IN other words, Keith doesn't fall for the loner/misfit trope for those waging jihad. And his Mohamed is a conflicted, well-developed character.

If Mark Steyn were a novelist, he might write something like Mohamed's Moon, though Mark would be more satirical. I remember when Mark recommended Robert Ferrigno's Prayers for the Assassin, a book that imagined a future North America with a large chunk of the former United States under Islamic rule. So I ran out and bought the book and enjoyed it. I hope you do the same. I think Keith is an even better writer than Ferrigno. And remember it was Mark's book review of Ferrigno's dystopic novel that got analyzed before the censors of various human rights commissions.

Mohamed's Moon is a thoughtful, respectful treatment of Islam. At the same time it does not bow to political correctness or wrap itself in denial about some of the more extremist elements.

Keith's previous novel Angel in the Alley was a dystopia about a future society one might imagine if human rights commissions were allowed to mushroom in influence to the point that the Bible is forbidden. It, too, was a great read, with all the entertainment you'd expect from a well-written popular novel, but grounded in truth and contemporary realities.

If you're looking for a good book to read at the cottage this summer, or to give to someone who needs to have their consciousness raised while being entertained, think of Mohamed's Moon or any of Keith's other novels.

Help me get the word out. There are some terrific Canadian novelists who write from a Christian point of view. You'll never hear about them in the Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star, so it's up to us to spread the news.

More about a powerful, life-changing Jesus

More than ten years ago, a group of us who took an Alpha Course together decided we wanted to continue to meet for Christian fellowship. Some of us had heard of John Wimber, the founder of the Vineyard movement, and how he was reading the New Testament and reading about the healings and miracles and wondering why those things did not happen anymore in today's churches.

So, he decided to start laying hands on the sick and praying for people. He famously said, "You would not believe how many people did not get healed."

But after months of praying for people, suddenly, to his great surprise, many people did start getting healed.

Thus our little group decided we would start practicing praying for each other and some of us started also going to visit the sick who, with their permission, would let us pray for them.

You would not believe how many people did not get healed.

But in our little prayer group, each one of us took turns in the "hot seat" where we would talk about our prayer needs, and the rest of us would pray. Instead of praying for Bertha down the street who had cancer or Agnes in the next town who was getting divorced, we were in effect confessing our cutting edge present moment spiritual struggles and the freedom we felt and the sense of joy and spiritual bouyancy afterwards was amazing.

And the hospital visits. I hate hospitals. I could never be a nurse or a doctor, as much as I admire those professions. But I had a friend whose wife suddenly became ill with cancer. One day when I was driving to Toronto, I thought of my friend's wife who was in hospital in Carleton Place. I felt like God was nudging me to go visit her. But you know how it is. You have the momentum going of a long drive and you don't want to stop. I said to myself, "I don't know where the hospital is."

Boom! A blue hospital sign suddenly popped into view. "Okay, if I can find the hospital easily, I will go."

Boom. Another blue hospital sign.

So I pulled into the parking lot of the hospital and sat in my car with my knees shaking, literally, feeling a tremendous sense of inadequacy and but also a sense that God was asking me to do this.

I went up to Linda's room and asked her if she'd mind if I practiced praying for her. Well, Linda didn't get healed, but once I got started in my feeble, fleshly attempt at obedience, God's grace began to flow and she and I were both left with a profound sense of peace and joy.

I started going once a week to Carleton Place--a half hour drive from where I live---to pray for Linda. Sometimes her husband would be there. Sometimes I'd bring along someone from my prayer group. Sometimes we would end up praying for the elderly roommate who was watching wistfully. And everyone would leave with profound joy and a powerful sense of Christ's presence.

Funny though, it was always an effort to go. I never wanted to do it. There was always a resistance from the flesh and frankly, a hundred other things I would rather be doing than go to visit someone in the hospital.

One time I went to visit another friend who I journeyed with through her cancer treatments on a day where she had chemo administered via syringe through a hole that had been cut in her skull.
She became scary ill. I was able to rush out and get a doctor. Once she was stabilized, she began to vomit or need to be helped to the bathroom, as she was now quite frail. As I say, I would hate being a nurse. But that day, holding one of those blue kidney shaped basins to my friend's lips, I had such a peaceful sense of knowing that God had created me to be there at that particular time and place, that I was in His will. There was another time when I went to visit someone's mother who had a stroke. The woman had a lot of visitors, as I could see from the boots outside her door, but next door, a woman was crying out "OH God, help me. God, please help me."

So I went in to ask if she would like me to pray for her. She kept on saying, "Oh God help me," in great angst. I told her God had sent me. I know that sounds arrogant, but because I had been practicing, I had seen how we Christians really are Christ's hands, and feet and voice here on earth.

I discovered she was Roman Catholic. Interestingly, I had just attended a day-long Quiet Day at my Anglican Catholic Church where there had been three talks on the Rosary. I had obtained a little booklet on how to do the Rosary and meditate on the various mysteries. And I had just bought my first set of beads. So I asked her if she would like me to do the Rosary with her.

As we did the Our Fathers and Hail Mary's together, the frail old woman, who had oxygen tubes in her nose and no sign of any family or friends in her hospital room, practically levitated off the bed in the fervency of her prayers. For those moments, anyway, Veronica had peace. And that wintry afternoon, I knew I was where God wanted me to be.

During those times of "practicing" praying for the sick, I felt such joy and such a sense of being in God's will. Alas, I have grown busy with other things and all that has gone by the wayside, and as I said, it was always a big effort to make myself go.

Well, God is good. At church on Sunday, a friend told me she had been experiencing a nightly headache that was interfering with her sleep and leaving her feeling tired and fuzzy-headed.

We were in the little ladies' bathroom, so I put my hand on her head where the headache was located and said a quick prayer and forgot about it.

Then last night I received this email:

Hi Debby- no headache last night, no fuzzies today! I raised the head of my bed with a pillow and slept right through! PTL!!

Isn't God good! We do have a powerful, life-changing Jesus. No, not everyone is going to get healed. But if in our illnesses we can identify with Christ's redemptive suffering, that is a spiritual healing in itself and a great grace.

Julie Lyons' book sounds like something I must read

Rod Dreher interviews her about her experience as a white middle class person who has attended a black Pentecostal church in Dallas.

She says (my bolds):

For years, Pentecostals were identified with a lack of formal education, low socio-economic status, loosey-goosey doctrine, a lot of whooping and hollering and out-of-control tongue-speaking. Now that Pentecostalism is basically sweeping the world--it is the mainstream of evangelical Christianity, by sheer numbers--Protestants as well as Catholics have been forced to re-examine the stereotype. Pentecostalism has appealed to the terribly oppressed and the poor because they can tap into a Jesus who is powerful enough to totally change their lives--and he doesn't play favorites. He can pull someone out of poverty. He can give dignity to the despised. The power of the Holy Spirit exceeds the evil forces that are accepted as a fact of life in much of the developing world, and Pentecostals believe we're engaged in a cosmic struggle between good and evil, which corresponds to the realities of people living in Africa, Central and South America, and the persecuted church.

I have seen a fair amount of what we call "fakin' and shakin'" in Pentecostal circles--as well as emotionalism, and an emphasis on spectacular spiritual "gifts" at the expense of godly character and sound doctrine. The things for which we're criticized are more prevalent than I'd like to admit. But I'll take a powerful, life-changing Jesus any day over the tepid, sad savior I was introduced to as a child in the Reformed and mainline churches my family attended.

I know the powerful and life-changing Jesus. Thanks be to God! But I prefer to worship in a traditional liturgical setting.

LifeSiteNews lists groups denouncing Tiller murder

LifeSiteNews.com has a list of pro-life groups that have condemned the Tiller murder:

June 1, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In the wake of the murder of late-term abortionist George Tiller, pro-life groups from across North America and the UK have condemned the killing as “heinous,” “deplorable,” “cowardly,” “senseless,” and “unconscionable.”

Abortionist Tiller was renowned for performing late-term abortions in Kansas, many of them post-viability. Tiller only recently found himself in court facing 19 counts of performing illegal late-term abortions, but was found “not guilty” by a jury last month. He had also survived a previous murder attempt in 1993.

Scott Roeder, a man with no affiliations with the mainstream pro-life movement, has been taken into custody and is expected to be charged with allegedly murdering Tiller.

LifeSiteNews.com has obtained statements from some 20 pro-life groups, all unanimously condemning the murder. The statements stress that while Tiller was involved in perpetrating a great evil, all life is sacred, including the lives of abortionists. They also stress that the pro-life movement wishes to change abortion laws by legal means and not by violence. (To read all the statements, click here)

“Pro-lifers do not answer violence with violence,” said Stephen Borden, a Pastor in a pro-life African-American coalition, in response to the news of the Tiller slaying.

Dr. Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and a colleague of Borden, said that she “wanted to share with [Tiller] the harm [she] experienced from abortion.” She continued, saying that she had a deep desire for Tiller to “join me in repentance.”

“I am deeply sorry that his life was taken before that could happen,” King said.

Dr. James Dobson from Focus on the Family issued a statement saying that members of the organization “categorically condemn the act of vigilantism and violence.” Dobson said that America was built on the rule of law, and despite the verdict in Tiller’s case “he was acquitted by the court and declared ‘not guilty’ in the eyes of the law. That is our system, and we honor it.”

Jim Hughes, National President of Campaign Life Coalition in Canada and Vice President of International Right to Life said that not only is the murder of abortionists “seriously damaging to the pro-life cause, it is also deeply contrary to everything that is meant by the phrase pro-life.”

There's lots more.

The chorus is truly deafening but it will be to no avail

The nutbar who murdered the abortion doctor in the United States has been captured. But here is a big teaching moment for everyone. Note how just about every pro-life group and well-known pro-life individual has come out of the gate denouncing this act of murder in a way that many of us wish moderate Muslims would do when there are terrorist attacks or honor killings. But a lot of good it's gonna do us. Here comes the Fairness Doctrine 2.0 and the most draconian rules to restrict pro-life freedom of speech. Already some are trying to blame Conservative radio and Fox News hosts for the killing.

As Russ comments (my bolds):

Looks like they caught the shooter, by the way. I've seen people wishing that the killer was a disgruntled husband, or a relative of one of Tiller's patients; I don't think so. Gateway Pundit quotes one of his commenters:

Despite peoples' wishes, I think we're going to find out that Tiller's murderer was indeed associated, albeit on the fringes, with some sort of pro-life organization.

That association will indeed be used to tar the entirety of the pro-life movement, in precisely the same way that the entirety of Islam wasn't after 9/11, or the Left in general wasn't after a Weather Underground bombing.

Don't kid yourselves. The odds of Tiller having been murdered for any reason other than his "medical" practice are vanishingly small.

Actually, yeah, that's me he's quoting.

There will be a backlash against the Pro-Life movement. It's coming. Never mind that the murder has been universally condemned — the forces of the Left, with the willing assistance of the most abortion-friendly (and gun-hating) administration in our history, will use this crime as a pretext to do their utmost to silence their opponents and, as a bonus, will likely try to leverage this incident to disarm Americans.

Now, I have a very hard time shedding a tear over the fate of a man who committed what I consider to be infanticide for a living, and I know I'm not alone. But let me be perfectly clear: murder, every murder, is wrong.

I am always dismayed when someone takes into his own hands the powers that are reserved to the State and to God: administration of justice, and judging a man's soul. The latter is particularly to be regretted; there is always a chance for anyone to reform their ways, to repent of their evil past. Though the odds may have been slim, the murderer robbed Tiller of that opportunity to change.

The irony, of course, is that the murderer will get the justice he deserves... but in the right way, through the legal system. Meanwhile, he has done incalculable damage to the cause he purports to support.

Newsbusters writes:

As NewsBusters readers are well aware, taking a tragedy and turning it into an opportunity to slander conservatives is hardly a new concept. And the left has not hesitated in celebrating the murder of George Tiller, yes celebrated, by pretending that it is actually the right which is basking in the all-around tragic story.

This couldn't be a bigger gift to the Obama administration. If the Sotomayor nomination was a way to get his economic bungling and foreign affairs fumbling off the front pages, this takes the pesky racial quotas business off the front pages and makes Conservatives the hateful scapegoats.

Gateway Pundit has great updates on the story, including new information on the previous criminal record of the anarchist who has been charged with the Tiller murder.