CNS Gives A Platform to Anti-Gay Kenyans Topic: CNSNews.com
A July 7 CNSNews.com article by Patrick Goodenough pounds home the anti-gay message in realation to President Obama's upcoming visit to Africa. Goodenough quotes no fewer than seven Kenyan political and religious officials denouncing homosexuality and attacking Obama for even considering discussing the issue of gay rights in Kenya.
Despite the fact that CNS' mission statement claims that it "endeavors to fairly present all legitimate sides of a story" Goodenough made no apparent effort to contact any Kenyan official who would not engage in gay-bashing.
Goodenough is apparently so concerned with giving Kenyan gay-bashers a voice that he can't be bothered to tell us what the laws on homosexuality in Kenya are. He obliquoely refers to the situation by noting that "Homosexuality is frowned on in many African countries" and that "same-sex sexual acts are illegal in 76 countries around the world, 36 of them in Africa." But curiously, Goodenough never explains the situation in Kenya.
Homosexuality is illegal in Kenya, punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Tthe Kenya National Commission on Human Rights states that gays "are discriminated, stigmatised and subjected to violence because of their sexual orientation." Additionally, gays "often face arbitrary arrest, are often detained at the police stations, subjected to torture and unnecessary harassment by the police who extort money from them and are only released after bribing their way out."
Goodenough and CNS, it seems, are totally down with all of that Kenyan anti-gay hate.
CNS Publishes Birther Lawyer Again Topic: CNSNews.com
Last month, CNSNews.com demonstrated the creeping WND-ism that is taking over the Media Research Center by publishing an anti-gay marriage column by Herbert Titus, a WorldNetDaily favorite who's perhaps best known for claiming that Barack Obama can't be president because he did not have two parents who were American citizens and that his "loyalties" purportedly lie with his Kenyan-born father.
Well, apparently CNS can't get enough of Titus' legally suspect opinions, so he's back in a July 6 column declaring that the Supreme court's ruling on same-sex marriage is "illegitimate and unlawful" and "Worthy only to be disobeyed." Titus concludes his article by he will "will continue to release articles" on how Americans can breakt the law -- a strange position for a so-called legal expert to take.
Well, Titus' view on Obama's eligibility and the definition of "natural born citizen" can be found nowhere in U.S. jurisprudence, which makes anything he has to say on any legal issue rather suspect. We also don't see Titus running around enforcing his extremely narrow definition of "natural born citizen" on Ted Cruz the way he was on Obama, so that makes him a hypocrite as well.
Those flaws, apparently, make him the perfect person to write op-eds for CNS, apparently.
WND Can't Stop Stringing The Birthers Along Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily isn't done stringing its faithful birthers along, it appears.
Following Aaron Klein's interview with Joe Arpaio -- in which Klein failed to ask Arpaio any meaningful birther-related questions -- Art Moore interviews cold case posse chief Mike Zullo for a July 9 article. Under the pretense of explaining away Zullo's claim of forthcoming "universe-shattering" evidence he made in late 2013, Moore uncritically lets Zullo declare that "there is no credible evidence of where Obama was born" and doesn't bother to challenge Zullo's claims that the unnamed thing that's keeping his purported investigation "under lock and key"could "prevent me from ever disclosing what this is."
As his fellow WNDer Klein did, Moore fails to ask Zullo about important revelations that have surfced that discredit his investigation:
The documentation that what Arpaio, posse leader Mike Zullo and other birthers have claimed as evidence that the online version of Obama's birth certificate released by the White House is a manufactured fraud -- the various layers in the PDF document -- are easily reproduced by using a common Xerox scanner to scan in the document.
Arpaio's admission in the documentary "The Joe Show" that the only reason he latched onto the birther movement was to generate donations to his own re-election campaigns.
The statement by former posse member Reilly that Hawaii's verification of Obama's birth certificate constitutes sufficient proof that Obama is a "natural born citizen" -- and puts the lie to any claim by Arpaio that the investigation is fair and designed to clear Obama.
Moore also curiously fails to make any mention in his article of another fellow WNDer, Jerome Corsi, even though Corsi not only was (and may still be) a member of the cold case posse, it was his presentation to the Surprise Tea Party that, as Moorepoints out in his article, spurred Arpaio to set up the cold case posse in the first place.
Corsi's books on the issue aren't even promoted in Moore's article -- just a category list of "the resources you need to understand the critical constitutional issue ignored by Washington and establishment media — the essential qualifications for the person responsible for the nation’s security." And, yes, WND is still trying to desperately unload copies of Corsi's "Where's the Birth Certificate?" for 99 cents.
It's almost as if Corsi and WND now ashamed of their role in forwarding the birth certificate issue or something.
Nevertheless, Moore tries to demonstrate his own birther bona fides:
Some scholars point to the Naturalization Act of 1790, passed shortly after the Constitution was issued, as a guide. It defines a natural-born citizen as the offspring of two U.S. citizens, regardless of the place of birth. While the law was repealed by the Naturalization Act of 1795, which removed the term “natural born,” some argue the 1790 law, passed only three years after the Constitution was signed, represents the intent of the Framers.
Regardless of his place of birth, Obama would fail the 1790 Naturalization Act test, because his father was a Kenyan visiting the U.S. as a student.
Of course, given that the Naturalization Act of 1790 was repealed in 1795, it does not have the force of law. Moore avoids mentioning another inconvenient fact WND doesn't want to talk about: WND's favorite presidential candidate, Ted Cruz, would also fail Moore's test.
We've written Moore to ask for an explanation of his omissions. We'll let you know if he responds.
More Bad And Misleading Reporting, Courtesy of CNS Topic: CNSNews.com
We know CNSNews.com is not the place to go for fair and balanced reporting, especially under managing editor Michael W. Chapman. We've found even more examples of misleading reporting.
It was clear from the start that a July 1 CNS article by Lauretta Brown would not be a fair take on high school health clinics that offer contraception, what with the headline blaring, "Seattle 6th Graders Can’t Get a Coke at School, But Can Get an IUD." In the third paragraph of her article, Brown makes this declaration about long-acting reversible contraception such as IUDs:
LARCs are associated with serious side effects, such as uterine perforation and infection. IUDs, specifically, can also act as abortifacients by preventing the implantation of a fertilized egg.
Brown is falsely potraying IUDs as being unsafe by highlighting only the "serious side effects." In fact, a 2013 study found that less than 1 percent of users developed complications or serious side effects, and even the fact sheet Brown uses to fearmonger about IUDs admits that "Serious complications from use of an IUD are rare."
Brown's claim that IUDs are an abortifacient because it can "prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg" is a false reading of medical science. The medical definition of an abortion is removal of an implanted egg from the uterus; therefore, if it's not implanted, it's not an abortion.
Further, 50 percent of a woman's fertilized eggs never naturally implant into the uterus, so it seems that under Brown's definition, nature (or God, if you will) is the biggest abortionist of all.
Oh, and Brown never establishes in her article that any sixth-grader in Seattle has ever asked for an IUD -- only that it's theoretically possible -- so that further shoots down her biased attack.
Barbara Hollingsworth serves up her own chunk of bad reporting in a July 7 article:
Obamacare is exhibiting early signs of a “death spiral” as hundreds of insurance plans listed on the federally-run exchanges in 37 states and the District of Columbia request double-digit premium increases for 2016, says David Hogberg, a health care analyst and senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR).
A “death spiral” – which is the insurance pool equivalent of a bankruptcy - occurs when rising premiums force younger, healthier people to drop their insurance coverage due to the increased cost. But their exodus leaves the remaining “risk pool” older, sicker and more expensive to insure than before, necessitating further rate hikes.
Thirteen percent of the people who signed up for Obamacare in 2015 have already been dropped from coverage because many of them failed to pay their share of the subsidized premiums, The New York Times reported.
And that's before the premiums on many policies are due to skyrocket next year.
Hollingsworth fails to mention, as she usually does, that the NCPPR is a right-wing organization that has long attacked Obamacare, so its analysis can't exactly be trusted. At no point does Hollingsworth make an effort to seek anyone to counter NCPPR's "death spiral" fearmongering, making her article completely unbalanced.
Because of that, readers will never know that anti-Obamacare forces like the NCPPR have been howling about a "death spiral" for years, only to be consistently proven wrong.
Further, large rate increase requests mean nothing, let alone a "death spiral." As Mother Jones' Kevin Drum notes, insurance companies always request large rate increases, and they will in the end be more reasonable. Further, Drum notes, more people are likely to continue paying their subsidized premiums in the future because the penalty for not having insurance will increase this year.
But Hollingsworth doesn't bother to tell you that either. That's the standard of reporting CNS has these days.
NEW ARTICLE: Silence Equals Assent Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily has so far refused to respond to our documentation of how its racially charged rhetoric may have influenced Charleston shooter Dylann Roof. Is that an admission that we're right? Read more >>
At CNS, 'Honky' Is Unprintable Topic: CNSNews.com
In a July 1 CNS blog post, Melanie Hunter highlights a "Nightly Show" clip in which "actor Joe Morton, who plays Rowan Pope or Papa Pope on ABC’s 'Scandal,' used a racial slur to describe Confederate flag supporters during an impromptu in character monologue."
That slur? It's apparently so offensive to Hunter and CNS that she can't even bear to type out the word.
In her transcription of Morton's monologue, she notes that he (in character) referred to white supportersd of the Confederate flag as "h---- m----- f-----." We'll grant Hunter the "m----- f-----" -- CNS does claim to be a family publication, after all -- but what's that other word that she apparently thinks rises to the level of the N-word in unprintability?
Honky.
The MRC-doctored clip of Morton rather clumsily drops the audio on the offending phrase, but the clip at Comedy Central confirms that Morton did indeed say "honky."
Sure, "honky" is a racial slur, but is it really so offensive to white people -- or anyone, really -- that it must be relegated to H-word status? Who even says the word these days in a manner other than invoking 1960s black radicalism or channeling George Jefferson? We're not aware of anyone who puts the word on that kind of footing -- including CNS itself.
CNS published the word in its full glory in a July 2014 column by Matt Barber in an anti-liberal rant over the Hobby Lobby decision:
Addressing the high court's Hobby Lobby decision last Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., fumed, "We have so much to do this month, but the one thing we're going to do during this work period - sooner rather than later - is to ensure that women's lives are not determined by virtue of five white men."
To which Justice Clarence Thomas replied, "Say what, honky?"
So, in CNS' eyes, is "honky" a word only white people can use, like some complain that the N-word can only be used by blacks?
And as Wikipedia notes, "honky-tonk" can be considered a derivative of the "honky" insult. So does that mean at CNS, honky-tonks are now known as "h---- -tonks"? Or "caucasian-tonks"?
And conservatives complain about alleged liberal political correctness.
Gay Marriage Derangement Syndrome, Mychal Massie Edition Topic: WorldNetDaily
Anyone one who believes homosexuals do not have an end game that has yet to be accomplished “have eyes and see not,” and “have ears and hear not.” Homosexuals are not after equality; they, not unlike Muslims, are after conquest – and just like all terrorists, they have carefully conceived a plan they’ve been carrying out by any means available. But unlike Muslim terrorists, they are not patient, and that may well be their downfall – but I get ahead of myself.
The recent Supreme Court ruling dictated that regardless of one’s faith or personal convictions, we must now accept homosexuality. But therein is the bastardization of the truth. The homosexual agenda is not about just forcing America to embrace homosexuality. It is much more insidious than that – and your federal government not only knows this, but they are complicit in this Erebusic agenda.
[...]
The evidence and research show that the lesbians and transgenders are the useful idiots pursuant to the true homosexual agenda. I further believe that their use of the civil rights struggles of blacks was nothing more than an ends to a means.
My contention is that the true homosexual goal is a nation of male sodomites. If I am right, it is one of the greatest insipid and draconian acts of treachery perpetrated against a civilized society since the beginning of time.
Satan never comes to the table without an end game beyond that which is clearly visible. From my reading of the homosexual manifesto and “Redeeming of the Rainbow,” I have reached the conclusion that the homosexual agenda is 100 percent about homosexual men. It is not about lesbians and the transgendered as such, and it most certainly has nothing to do with concern for blacks.
It is much more sinister than that. I believe the homosexual agenda’s secretive end game is a country of homosexuals – not lesbians and not the transgendered. They are not unlike the mythical “purebred” vampires of celluloid fame, who look down upon all who are not singularly homosexual.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Read their manifesto, the book and the articles I referenced above in totality and see for yourself.
WND Dances to Arpaio's Birther Tune Again Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily and Sheriff Joe Arpaio have long been in cahoots when it comes to promoting birther conspiracy theories. After all, it was a birther lecture by WND's Jerome Corsi to a tea party group in Arizona that was designed to manipuate Arpaio into launching a "cold case posse" to examine Barack Obama's birth certificate -- a posse that included Corsi as one of its members, thus guaranteeing it could never be fair or comprehensive.
While both WND's birtherism and the posse's activities have dropped considerably after Obama's re-election -- which WND's birther obsession was intended to prevent -- It's never stopped completely, WND has never admitted its birther conspiracies have been completely discredited, and the posse's incompetence has been demonstrated by former posse member Brian Reilly.
WND has no problem playing up the birther conspiracy when it feels like doing so, and a radio interview with Arpaio by WND re[porter (and birther) Aaron Klein provided the perfect opportunity, as a July 5 WND article documents:
In a radio interview broadcast Sunday, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio affirmed he is “pretty well convinced” President Obama’s birth certificate, as released by the White House in 2011, is a “fraudulent, fake document.”
“I’ve been in law enforcement 55 years,” stated Arpaio. “I think I know a fraudulent, fake document. I’m not a computer expert. I rely on my people. But I’m pretty well convinced it’s a fake document.”
The famous sheriff was being interviewed for “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” broadcast on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and Philadelphia’s NewsTalk 990 AM.
The clip Kelin and Arpaio accompanying the article is a short one, so we can assume that Klein couldn't be bothered to ask Arpaio about the following:
The documentation that what Arpaio, posse leader Mike Zullo and other birthers have claimed as evidence that the online version of Obama's birth certificate released by the White House is a manufactured fraud -- the various layers in the PDF document -- are easily reproduced by using a common Xerox scanner to scan in the document.
Arpaio's admission in the documentary "The Joe Show" that the only reason he latched onto the birther movement was to generate donations to his own re-election campaigns.
The statement by former posse member Reilly that Hawaii's verification of Obama's birth certificate constitutes sufficient proof that Obama is a "natural born citizen" -- and puts the lie to any claim by Arpaio that the investigation is fair and designed to clear Obama.
But Klein, being the birther that he is, is sticking to WND's policy of not admitting the birthers were ever wrong, even as the evidence continues to pile up. And he no doubt helped Arpaio convince a few more suckers to donate to Arpaio's campaign.
CNS Managing Editor's Obsession With (Most Of) Franklin Graham's Words Continues Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman's obsession with reprinting the anti-gay, anti-Muslim and anti-Obama tirades of Franklin Graham hasn't abated.
We've previously documented how in the first three months of 2015, 25 of the 69 articles Chapman wrote were Franklin Graham regurgitations. The sycophancy continues: In the three months from April 12 to June 30, of the 62 articles Chapman published, 21 were transcriptions of Graham's rantings -- a full one-thrid of Chapman's written output. In addition, threemorearticles by Chapman repeated the rants of Franklin's sister, Anne Graham Lotz.
That means of the 131 articles Chapman has written in 2015, 46 of them, or 35 percent, were dedicated to uncritically repeating Franklin Graham's words.
For all of Chapman's dedicated Graham sycophancy, there are words of his he won't repeat -- the ones where Graham isn't denigrating people he despises. We've already noted that Chapman didn't think Graham's denunciation of the Muhammad cartoon contest where two would-be gunmen were killed as an uncalled-for mocking of Muslims was worth repeating.
In a June 22 Facebook post, Graham said it is time to "set aside" the Confederate battle flag in an effort to boost American unity:
My great-great-grandfathers fought for the South under the Confederate flag during the civil war--both were wounded at Gettysburg and lost limbs. Growing up, many people in the South flew the Confederate flag; but I believe that it’s time for this flag to be set aside as a part of our history. We are all Americans, and we need unity today more than ever. Through faith in Christ we can have love and reconciliation with one another—regardless of race. Jesus Christ can change the human heart and take away the prejudice, racism, and hatred that lies within.
While Chapman has devotedfourCNSposts to Graham's words since June 22, none of them are his words on the Confederate battle flag.
Apparently, if Graham isn't attacking gays, Muslims or the president, Chapman doesn't want to hear about it -- and, more importantly, doesn't want to tell his readers about it. Is that responsible behavior for the managing editor of something that claims to be a news organization?
WND Still Doesn't Want To Talk About Dylann Roof's Manifesto Topic: WorldNetDaily
If WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah was an honest journalist, he'd be reflecting on how the views promulgated by his website have apparently influenced more than one mass murderer -- first Anders Breivik, now Dylann Roof -- and his website would be accurately reporting on its contents.
But he's not, so he isn't. And WND keeps trying to make sure discussion of Roof involves anything other than the closeness of the racial views in Roof's manifesto to WND's editorial agenda.
The latest attempt to change the subject comes in a July 3 WND article by Leo Hohmann in which he falsely suggests that liberal professor Juan Cole is somehow anti-Semitic for pointing out that the Islamophobia promoted by WND faves like Pamela Geller and Daniel Pipes is reflected in Roof's manifesto. Hohmann plays up a reference by Cole to Geller and Pipes as "right-wing Jews." But Hohmann takes the phrase out of context; in the blog post Hohmann is attacking, Cole points out that it's ironic that Geller and Pipes are Jewish because Roof "went on heartily to hate Jews, as well. Many American Jews, he held, are pro-African-American, and so he abhorred them, as well."
Hohmann makes no mention of the details of Roof's manifesto in which he reflects WND's concerns about black-on-white violence and the Trayvon Martin Case. Instead, he contacts Geller and Pipes for predictably outraged quotes that anyone would link them to Roof.
If Leo Hohmann were an honest journalist, he'd get into the details of Roof's manifesto. But he isn't, and Farah isn't paying him to be one. So unless one or both of them mans up and faces the truth (or at least do better than Jack Cashill), our take on WND and Roof will remain the accurate -- and damning -- one.
They say silence equals assent. Should we take WND's silence as assenting that its editorial agenda contributed to Roof's mindset?
It's a new month, and you know what that means: Time for Ali Meyer and the rest of the CNSNews.com crew to cherry-pick statistics to make the latest unemployment numbers look as bad as possible and ignore positive news. And they do what they're paid to do:
None of these stories mentioned that 223,000 jobs were created. The first story is the only one to note that the unemployment rate dropped to 5.3 percent, but not until the sixth paragraph.
How The MRC Defends Trump's Smears of Mexicans Topic: Media Research Center
From the beginning, the Media Research Center has worked to downplay Donald Trump's smears of Mexican immigrants.
In a June 18 NewsBusters post, Ken Oliver-Mendez spun hard by insisting that Trump's characterization of Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists "was not unqualifiedly negative, as he also immediately added 'and some, I assume, are good people.'" Oliver-Mendez then touted how "On the campaign trail after his announcement speech, Trump actually upgraded his assessment somewhat."
Oliver-Mendez grumbled that on Spanish-language networks, "Trump’s opening campaign statement effectively morphed from a condemnation of the perceived prevalence of undesirable elements among unauthorized immigrants entering the country to an offensive statement against immigrants in general, particularly Mexican immigrants." Of course, when you are falsely branding Mexican immigrants as mostly criminals and rapists as Trump did, that's an entirely reasonable reaction.
Also spinning hard is Kevin Gibbons, who uses a June 25 NewsBusters post to keep up the complaint that people were elevating Trump's offensive remarks and ignoring the "positive statements" about Mexico he made:
Trump actually made several positive statements about Mexico and Mexicans, but they have gone largely unheard in the media due to the force of the other, unpleasant remarks he also made.
“Druggies, drug dealers, rapists and killers are coming across the southern border,” Trump tweeted the other day. Even though the object of Trump’s attention knows it’s true, she apparently doesn’t want anyone else to point it out.
Trump’s campaign announcement speech actually applauded Mexico with “They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically.” Everything was going well on the first date, until he took a personal shot at her family member. Trump later added “Mexico is killing the United States economically because their leaders and negotiators are FAR smarter than ours.”
In response, Univision in particular has fueled a well-known negative stereotype of a Mexican’s reaction to a personal insult. Instead of “appreciating” that Mexico outperforms the U.S., all of the focus and attention are on the name-calling.
Gibbons goes on to declare that Univision's dumping of the Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant was "rash" and "akin to ESPN cancelling their NBA contract because of racist comments made by former Clippers owner Donald Sterling." Well, no; it's more akin to ESPN cancelling their NBA contract because the NBA commissioner made racist comments.
On June 27, Jeffrey Lord laughably asserted that Trump's smears were "accurate," adding: "Trump is surging in the polls on the very basis of his blunt criticisms of the Obama administration’s conduct of foreign affairs and the GOP Establishment’s woeful performance on issues - dealings with Mexico over the southern border and on trade but two of those issues."
Thge MRC also gave a platform to Jorge Bonilla to defend Trump in a June 28 post. Bonilla proclaimed that Trump "laced blunt truths with Trumpian hyperbolic bombast, adding: "Opinion on Trump aside, reasonable people can agree (or disagree) that perhaps not every undocumented immigrant will be a valedictorian or a hard-working incarnation of the American Dream with an immaculate criminal record, or that our seriously deficient immigration model is in dire need of actual reform."
But does Bonilla agree with Trump that most are criminals and rapists? Apparently so.
By this time, however, it was time for a distraction, which the MRC found in a Univision executive's posting a picture to his Instagram page comparing Trump to Chalreston shooter Dylann Roof. The MRC happily promoted Fox News criticism of it, and Tim Graham whined that the media was ignoring the "scabrous" image in its coverage of the Trump-Univision conflict.
Of course, Graham ignores his employer's promotion of a similarly scabrous image comparing President Obama to Satan in which which the MRC blogger giggled, "Spoiler alert: Barack Obama is the one on the right."
MRC chief Brent Bozell dutifully pounded the Trump-roof image, but he failed to mention the anti-Mexican smears by Trump that provoked the image (and, needless to say, his own organization's promotion of an image that's just as "unacceptable" as he claims the Trump-Roof image is).
It's what you'd expect from an organization that finds holding a conservative accountable for his words to be more offensive than insulting an entire race of people.
MRC Mad That Historic Court Ruling Is Accurately Described As Historic Topic: Media Research Center
Curtis Houck complains in a June 25 MRC NewsBusters item:
Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in favor of President Obama in the ObamaCare subsidy case, the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC were out in full force during their Thursday evening newscasts to cheer the “historic ruling” and labeled Chief Justice John Roberts as a “conservative” after having “saved” ObamaCare “from a devastating blow.”
Houck doesn't explain how describing a historic ruling as historic, or a conservative justice as conservative, constitutes the liberal bias he implies is happening here.
Houck is the latestMRCworker to fulfill the Stephen Colbert principle that reality has a well-known liberal bias.
Gay Marriage Derangement Syndrome, WorldNetDaily Edition Topic: WorldNetDaily
One has to ask what caused Roberts, as he has done before, to trash his own professed conservative principles, that we are a nation of laws and not men and that no branch of government can be permitted to subvert the Constitution?
Perhaps the answer to this and a number of the chief justice’s other aberrant rulings and statements can be explained by the coercive intelligence practices of the NSA and CIA. These criminally minded agencies, as disclosed by Edward Snowden, have “harvested” the confidential secrets of even Supreme Court justices. According to another whistleblower, Chief Justice Roberts was at the top of the list.
So the big question is this: Did the NSA and/or the CIA, working in concert with their Supreme Leader Obama, blackmail Roberts into submission? Even the potential for this to happen, given the unconstitutional surveillance of the spy agencies on nearly all Americans, underscores why the nation is again on the verge of revolution. If evil despots have compromised even our Supreme Court, the ultimate protector and “decider” of our rights, then what choice is left to us?
There will be consequences for this decision. Don’t expect everyone to put aside their most deeply held religious convictions and live happily ever after. Don’t expect the cultural anarchists who put this movement in place just a decade ago to stop here. This is the beginning of their revolution, not the endgame.
As a Christian, I also believe we will be hearing from the author of marriage soon.
I don’t know what form that message will come, but it is certain to be heard sooner rather than later.
America’s elite leadership have taken the side of the enemies of God, and He will take notice.
It could come in the form of an economic crash. It could come in more civil and racial strife along the lines of what has been building in recent years. It could come in the form of an attack on our country from foreign power or terrorist group.
I suspect it will something big. I take no comfort in passing along this warning. It’s just the pattern that God uses to bring His people to repentance for their own good.
Read the Bible. It’s unmistakable.
And while you’re reading the Bible, be sure to see what it says about marriage.
The horrific nature of this illegitimate decision cannot be overstated. It makes a mockery of the institution of marriage, something of which God alone has the authority to design and define. It represents a level of judicial activism unmatched since Dred Scott, Buck v. Bell or Roe v. Wade.
Man-woman marriage, as He designed it, is the metaphor God uses for the relationship between Christ and His Church. In addition to mocking marriage, this decision mocks God.
Which is by spiritual design.
Satan is laughing himself silly right now. His demonic minions, both above and below, are popping the bubbly and clinking the champagne flutes.
Soon, public school textbooks throughout the country will be re-written and re-illustrated to conform to today’s ruling. It matters not that these revisions will contradict the beliefs and convictions of their parents. It will soon become the law of the land.
Many more vulnerable kids will grow up in homes with same-sex parents, obviously lacking either masculine or feminine role models. They are the real victims of the Court’s ruling.
Adults will suffer, too. I believe a barrage of court cases has already been planned against those who hold to politically incorrect views of marriage. Many of us will be dragged into court to be prosecuted or subjected to civil judgments. Some will lose their jobs, while others forfeit their businesses. Some will be persecuted and ridiculed and fined. Some may go to prison as the years unfold. Since same-sex marriage has now been determined to be a universal human right by the highest court in the land, it will trump religious liberty, churches, seminaries, Christian schools, businesses and a host of individual liberties. I also fear that judgment will befall this once great nation.
Further, the United States now must recognize the validity and legality of what is called “gay marriage” – but which really is a bastardization of the word “marriage” – both in definition and in practice.
Toss the dictionaries – the 1,000-year-plus understanding of marriage as the union of a man and a woman – the foundation of a family, which provides stability for the birth and raising of children.
The definition has been changed on the whim of five people on the high court influenced by massive and incessant pressure by the homosexual movement.
Now, two men or two women can “marry” – can have children as long as someone donates sperm or an egg or, in some cases, carries the child to term. Who’s mommy? Who’s daddy? Who knows?
God is giving America over to her lusts and pride because, like ancient Israel, she has turned away her heart from Him, though He was like a faithful husband to them both.
America is, indeed, getting justice, but not the way Obama and the moral anarchists think of it. They are getting their just deserts, as are the rest of us who have not been the salt and light needed to hold back judgment.
Judgment isn’t just coming. It is here. This is it. It could get worse, but the Supreme Court ruling on marriage was, in fact, itself a form of divine judgment on America.
Let me risk prosecution for “hate thoughts” by raising what the Bible says about homosexuality, the behavior that opened this spiritual Pandora’s box.
Congress should formally recognize the dignity of opposite-sex married couples and resolve to protect that dignity in our laws. A joint resolution should recite the many reasons why the special union of husband and wife has been honored for “millennia,” as Justice Kennedy admitted.
Only the union of husband and wife was recognized in the foundational texts of Western civilization, including the book of Genesis as well as the classical writers of ancient Greece and Rome. The union of husband and wife was singled out for special recognition in the words of Jesus, as recorded in the gospels of the New Testament.
Only the union of husband and wife is honored in our cultural heritage – depicted in thousands of works of art and chronicled in thousands of works of literature – which have inspired and ennobled people over millennia. Only the union of husband and wife can provide the biological connection that attaches a child to its parents and, through them, to other members of the human family.
The union of husband and wife is the only means of tracing history over generations. Royal dynasties, such as the family that has ruled Great Britain since 1066 – the same family that chartered the North American colonies beginning in 1607 – would have been impossible without it.
Only the union of husband and wife can provide a stable home as a self-supporting economic unit suitable for rearing and educating children. That is why Karl Marx, in his Communist Manifesto of 1848, called for “abolition of the family” as a necessary step toward a revolutionary communist utopia.
Recently, we have seen judicial activism on steroids at the Supreme Court. That is especially true in their hubris-laden decision to set aside “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” and say that same-sex marriage is now the law of the land in all 50 states. Period.
We-a-slim-majority-of-the-Court have spoken. And there it is. To me the big issue boils down to authority. By what authority did a majority do this?
As Chief Justice Roberts himself said, you can celebrate this decision if you want to, but the bottom line is it had nothing to do with the Constitution.
MRC Writer Thinks Musicians Get Paid By The Hour Topic: Media Research Center
For someone whose job it is to write about business, the Media Research Center's Joseph Rossell doesn't know much about it. Take this opening paragraph from Rossell's June 26 MRC Business & Media Institute item:
Left-wing Apple is huge and popular with the technorati. It became the world’s first company worth $700 billion, and was once rich enough to buy the entire island of Cyprus. But Apple said it can only afford to pay musicians pennies an hour for streaming their music, approximately 27 times less than Chinese factory workers earned making the Apple Watch.
Wow -- so much wrong in one paragraph. We'll skip the fact that Rossell offers no evidence to claim Apple is "left-wing," and we'll take a educated guess that a not-insignificant number of Rossell's MRC employees use Apple products, which undermines his sneering at the company's supposed politics. Instead, we'll move right to his complete ignorance of how musicians are paid for their music.
Rossell's claim that Apple's new music streaming service pays "per hour" is utterly wrong. No streaming service does that. He later concedes that streaming services pay on the basis of how many times a song is streamed, but he clings to the per-hour claim to push his apples-to-rutabagas comparison with the salaries of Chinese workers, insisting that "it was far stingier with musicians than some Apple suppliers were with their Chinese employees."
But musicians do not work for Apple on a salaried or even a contract basis the way a factory worker does for his or her employer, and Apple paying a royalty to musicians for streaming their music is not even remotely the same as someone being paid to work several hours a day at an Apple supplier.
Rossell doesn't seem to understand that, unlike that Apple supplier worker, musicians have multiple streams of revenue. Rossell portrayed musician Pharrell Williams as kind of poor because of the paltry streaming revenues he receives. But as Forbes details, he will make $32 million this year; he makes money from not only his music sales and touring but also from his clothing line and appearances on the TV show "The Voice."
If Rossell is so concerned about the revenue of musicians, he might want to focus his ire on radio stations, which pay nothing to musicians for the songs they play. But then, the National Association of Broadcasters, the lobbying group for radio stations, opposes paying royalties, and the contributions of its PAC appear to skew Republican.
But that would require knowing something about how business works, which, again, Rossell doesn't.