Persecuting Jesus

This column was co-authored by Bob Morrison

The nineteenth century French painting, Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer–today hangs in the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. It has not lost its capacity to shock. In the Roman Circus, the small flock of Christians is huddled in the sand, kneeling around their aged pastor. We see weeping little children, whole families gathered. In the stands are tens of thousands of people, none of whose faces are visible, but they are colorfully dressed, awaiting a special entertainment. The scene is eerily lighted by flaming crosses. Looking more closely, however, we see those crosses bear Christians, covered in pitch and set aflame. Their suffering, at least, will be brief. Out of the depths beneath the Circus stride lions a single tiger. The lead lion advances menacingly toward the Believers.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, the painter, may have wanted Christians of his time to remember the sacrifices necessary to build the magnificent civilization he and his contemporaries then enjoyed. The sky in this painting is dark and threatening. It symbolizes an age in classic antiquity that was both technologically advanced—look at architecture!—and spiritually stunted.

For France in 1883, it was the Belle Epoque. That was when Paris was being rebuilt as the beautiful City of Light we know today. In that year, steamships traveled the world’s oceans and Europeans sought to bring the benefits of railroads, schools, medical clinics, and the Gospel to many lands around the world.

All of that “imperialism” is today viewed with unalloyed horror by the intelligentsia of the West. The cultured despisers of religion think that persuading Indians to give up suttee—the practice of burning living widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres is cultural imperialism. Teaching native peoples in Africa not to kill newborn twins and chase their mothers into the bush to be devoured by lions is seen as imposing an alien values system on others.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that so little attention is being paid to Christian persecution in the Third World today. Our modern world—so technologically innovative—is morally and spiritually closer to that Roman Circus than we might like to admit. World Magazine, an Evangelical publication, is almost the only national news outlet that takes Christian persecution seriously. In the current issue, journalist Jamie Dean has provided a broad view of Christian persecution in the Mideast. It leads us to ask: Why should Christians anywhere view the “Arab Spring” with approval? Why should American Christians, in particular, join with the Obama administration in hailing every step they think they see toward greater democracy? Democracy requires more than people voting. In Egypt, there has been a sharp increase in the murder of Coptic Christians.

This administration entered office pledging to deal more openly with Iranian mullahs. These are the same men who jailed Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, 32, for the “crime” of sharing his faith with others. Reporter Dean makes clear that the recent release of Pastor Nadarkhani may have had more to do with the mullahs trying to avoid more stringent Western economic sanctions than with any lessening of their cruelties toward Christians.

Christians are familiar with the Bible passage in the Book of Acts where Jesus speaks to Saul. “Why do you persecute me,” Jesus asks. Saul is on his way to Damascus. How very appropriate this passage is to our own day. For it is in Damascus that Christians are being newly endangered. And when that is the case, it is not just Jesus’s followers are being persecuted, it is Jesus Himself. We have His word on that.

As we approach this Sunday’s International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church, it is good to remember that we are citizens, too. We should pray for our brethren suffering all over the bloody crescent. And we should recall that when Saul became Paul he did not give up his Roman citizenship. He used that citizenship to advance God’s purposes on earth. As Christian citizens of this great republic, we can certainly cry out against persecution at home and abroad. And we can make our voices heard. John F. Kennedy said it well: “Here on earth, God’s work must truly be our own.”

Ken Blackwell

Ken Blackwell, a contributing editor at Townhall.com, is a senior fellow at the Family Research Council and the American Civil Rights Union and is on the board of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. He is the co-author of the new  bestseller The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency, on sale in bookstores everywhere..

http://townhall.com/columnists/kenblackwell/2012/11/02/persecuting_jesus/page/full/

President Obama’s Covert Zeal for Abortion

Abraham Lincoln faced a similar problem in 1854 when he spoke of the“covert zeal” of President Franklin Pierce and Sen. Steven A. Douglas for the spread of slavery. These leading Democrats never said they were in favor of slavery. They simply viewed the right of whites to choose slavery for blacks as a “sacred principle of self government.”Lincoln abhorred this subterfuge.

President Obama doesn’t talk about abortion much. He famously tried to avoid the question in 2008 when Pastor Rick Warren asked him what rights, if any, unborn children have. “The answer to that question is above my pay grade,” he said then. With his strong election victory,Barack Obama was promoted to the office where the buck stops, where such questions demand an answer. His answer has been clear: None. The unborn have no rights at any time, in any context.

President Obama has been the most pro-abortion president in history. That was a distinction not easily won, especially after eight years of Bill and Hillary Clinton. They famously said abortion should be “safe,legal and rare.” That seemed to be a middle path. But the only place they made abortion rare was in Antarctica. President Clinton sent out the Red Cable to all U.S. Embassies ordering them to press their host countries to make abortion on demand legal and paid for by the state.

Yet, Hillary told Newsweek abortion is “wrong.”(October 31, 1994 issue). She only said it once in her entire career. Still,she said it.

Barack Obama has never said that. From his first public office, he has been an advocate for abortion on demand. He led the fight in the Illinois State Senate to deny protection for newborn children who survive abortion attempts. These children are U.S. citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. And just as too many states denied “equal protection of the laws” to black Americans under a century of unjust Jim Crow laws, Barack Obama denied protection of Illinois laws to newborns in the Land of Lincoln because they had been targeted for abortion. It is tragically ironic that a disproportionate number of these late term botched abortions are performed on minority women.

As president, Bill Clinton twice vetoed the ban on Partial-Birth Abortions. Elena Kagan strongly urged him to veto the law. President Obama elevated Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court. This outspoken advocate of Partial-Birth Abortion, not surprisingly, voted to approve Obamacare–the greatest expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade. We can have little doubt as to how Kagan will rule if the lawsuits filed by dozens of Catholic dioceses make it to the Supreme Court. She is unlikely to surprise and shock any liberal abortion advocates as Chief Justice John Roberts shocked and appalled millions of pro-lifers with his last minute shift of position. For pro-lifers, the shocks and the surprises only come one way with the Supreme Court. Liberal pro-abortion advocates never find one of their own jumping the traces. They vote in lockstep to uphold the Culture of Death.

Like the Clintons, President Obama opposed the ban on Partial-Birth Abortions. Nurse Brenda Pratt Shafer described what she saw in a Partial-Birth Abortion. It requires re-reading now: “I stood at the doctor’s side and watched him perform a partial-birth abortion on a woman who was six months pregnant.  The baby’s heartbeat was clearly visible on the ultrasound screen.  The doctor delivered the baby’s body and arms, everything but his little head.  The baby’s body was moving.  His little fingers were clasping together.  He was kicking his feet.  The doctor took a pair of scissors and inserted them into the back of the baby’s head, and the baby’s arms jerked out in a flinch, a startle reaction, like a baby does when he thinks that he might fall.  Then the doctor opened the sci he stuck the high-powered suction tube into the hole and sucked the baby’s brains out.  Now the baby was completely limp.  I never went back to the clinic.  But I am still haunted by the face of that little boy.  It was the most perfect, angelic face I have ever seen.”

Just reading about such a horror led pro-choice liberal columnist Richard Cohen to oppose it.

…the fact remains that the anti-abortion people are on to something. Late-term abortions may be necessary, but you cannot read about them without feeling diminished as a human being. Something awful has happened, and simply as a matter of principle we ought to be opposed. We ought to say, in short, that this procedure cannot be used–that late-term abortions cannot be permitted at all–unless we absolutely have no choice. ["Reason to Shudder," Washington Post, July 4, 2000].

Cohen said then that people who don’t shudder at this nightmare make him shudder. President Obama does not shudder. Nor does Justice Elena Kagan. They have a cool and detached view. To them, the fetus has no rights, ever. And “the right to choose” can mean the right to a dead child.

From his first day in office until now, President Obama has quietly but vigorously pushed the abortion agenda. He records promotional videos for Planned Parenthood. This group kills 340,000 of the more than1,200,000 unborn children killed each year by abortion. Under Obamacare, they will be able to kill millions more.

My Family Research Council colleague, Jeanne Monahan is the Director of FRC’s Center for Human Dignity. She has documented the unrelenting push for more abortion here and throughout the world under the Obama administration. Her carefully researched report can be downloaded here.

Another famous pro-choice journalist, Joe Klein, concedes in TIME magazine that ultrasound has changed our understanding of the unborn. It is impossible to deny, he writes, that “that thing in the womb,” he writes, “is a human life.”  From the earliest stages. Joe Klein is haunted. Richard Cohen shudders. We must decide if we shall proceed down the road toward a Culture of Death. That decision is not above our pay grade.

Ken Blackwell

Ken Blackwell, a contributing editor at Townhall.com, is a senior fellow at the Family Research Council and the American Civil Rights Union and is on the board of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. He is the co-author of the new  bestseller The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency, on sale in bookstores everywhere..

http://townhall.com/columnists/kenblackwell/2012/07/21/president_obamas_covert_zeal_for_abortion/page/full/

Chris Rock’s Tweet Beyond the Pale

Editor’s Note: This column was co-authored by Bob Morrison.

Comedian Chris Rock has stoked the flames of controversy with this Fourth of July tweet. The  Hollywood comic wrote: “Happy white peoples independence day the slaves weren’t free but I’m sure they enjoyed fireworks.” Rock’s tweet sparked plenty of day-after fireworks. What he wrote went beyond the pale, responded many online, hurt and enraged at Rock’s bitter humor.

Chris Rock’s tweet was beyond the pale. It was doubtless his effort to capitalize on the 160th anniversary of that great Fifth of July speech delivered by black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Douglass addressed a huge audience in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852 on the theme: “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

Douglass’  eloquent appeal was filled with “Rocky” barbs. Like this one: “I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary!” Within the pale was not a phrase lost on his mostly pale listeners. They may have laughed at the double entendre, but not for long.

Frederick turned his withering scorn on the very idea of a celebration of liberty in the midst of so much bondage and misery. “The blessings in which you this day rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. To drag a man in fetters…to join you in joyous anthems [is] inhuman mockery…This Fourth of July is yours, not mine…You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

It was one of the most powerful speeches ever delivered in America. And Frederick Douglass used the Fourth of July to educate and illuminate the controversy over slavery in America. So, yes, Chris Rock, you were right to use the Fourth of July and a bitter humor to prick our consciences on Independence Day. We do not want the deeper meaning of this important day to grow as stale as left-over potato salad. We need this day to remind us of our nation’s commitment to an ideal of life and liberty. The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.

Abraham Lincoln spoke to America in the 1850s, too. He, too, jarred our consciences. Lincoln had to deal with Supreme Court rulings adverse to liberty and antithetical to the nation’s founding ideals. Lincoln spoke to mostly pale audiences when he described the plight of the black man.

All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him; ambition follows, and philosophy follows, and the Theology of the day is fast joining the cry. They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.

Today, we search for those keys to escape the coils of Obamacare.

Lincoln knew better than to excoriate whites as whites, but instead sought to arouse them to their duty by reminding them of the high ideals that motivated the Founders.

In their [the Founders'] enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on and degraded and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of men, then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when, in the distant future, some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, not but white men, or none but Anglo-Saxon white men were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began, so that truth and justice and mercy and all the humane and Christian Virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man hereafter would dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the Temple of Liberty was being built.

We are now told by the Supreme Court of our day that millions have come to “rely” on abortion and therefore we must accept it. But did not millions then “rely” on slavery? Today, 71% of pregnancies in Harlem end in abortion. For those who view the fate of unborn children as “above their pay grade,” that 71% pre-natal death rate is not enough.

Today, Obamacare threatens to trample liberty underfoot in its drive to force acceptance of abortion on Catholic and non-Catholic institutions that try to defend innocent human lives.

What was wrong in slavery is what is wrong in abortion: It denies to members of our human family their rightful place at the national celebration of the Glorious Fourth. It says we will celebrate as your lives ebb away. It says we know what TIME’s Joe Klein writes is true: “That thing in the womb is human.” But we will look away. As we contemplate the nation’s birthday, we should ask ourselves: Doesn’t everyone deserve a birth day?

Lincoln said it well: If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. We agree. And if abortion is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. So tweet, Chris Rock, and don’t let us forget the tragedy that was American bondage. And join us, we appeal to you, join us in opposition to abortion.

Ken Blackwell

Ken Blackwell, a contributing editor at Townhall.com, is a senior fellow at the Family Research Council and the American Civil Rights Union and is on the board of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. He is the co-author of the new  bestseller The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency, on sale in bookstores everywhere..

http://townhall.com/columnists/kenblackwell/2012/07/06/chris_rocks_tweet_beyond_the_pale/page/full/

A True Hero In War On Religious Freedom

They call it a war — mainly, to dismiss it. As in: There go the Democrats again, fanning the flames of the culture wars, dividing Americans to win an election. But it’s actually something very different that’s going on.

Under the guise of tolerance and magnanimity, President Obama has been embracing a certain kind of radicalism that undermines the very institutions we’ve come to rely upon.

But where there are wars, there are prophets. There are brave ones who see threats on the horizon, lay groundwork, who make it possible for others to fight, who act as models by standing up for their beliefs in practical yet heartfelt ways. When it comes to the battle for religious liberty, Kevin Hasson is a true leader of men. Seamus, as almost everyone knows him, left a lucrative legal job to found the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty in 1994.

Anyone who has been going to Becket’s annual dinner knows something has dramatically changed. Every year, attendees hear about kids like Zachary Hood, who was a first-grader in a Medford, N.J., public school who wanted to read a story about Jacob and Esau from “The Beginner’s Bible.” God never came up in the book, but the school’s administration determined it was verboten in the classroom because it “might influence others students” and was “the equivalent of praying.”

Hasson’s proudest moment might be Becket’s representation of a Lutheran church school in a recent case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Hosanna-Tabor simply wanted the right to hire and fire its own ministers without government intervention. The court decided unanimously in the school’s favor, winning the votes of justices appointed by a president who seems bent at chipping away the remnants of religious freedom.

Having stepped down as president of Becket on account of Parkinson’s just prior to the landmark case, Hasson reflects: “I’m proud to say that happened without me. It’s a lot like watching my kids play soccer.”

When it’s not about us — when it’s about a greater good and the highest of callings, we can truly make an impact, and build a legacy of selfless leadership that inspires something similar in others.

Giving thanks for Seamus, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York called religious liberty “our first and most precious freedom,” noting, “without it, all others are in jeopardy.” Hasson has made an investment in it with his life, reminding us that there are causes worthy of such devoted sacrifice.

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Philadelphia, a past Becket honoree, recently told me: “Life is short. We’ll be forgotten by everyone but God. Our home is heaven, and the politics of this world won’t matter there. Charity, justice, courage, mercy — these are the virtues, or their absence, that will shape our eternity. These are the things that really matter.”

That may explain why Seamus and his wife, Mary, always look so happy — and still manage to take the time to offer that wee bit of wisdom that can change a life now and again.

As Seamus put it: “I’ve had the great privilege of investing my life in religious freedom.” For “if anyone in America doesn’t have religious liberty, no one in America has religious liberty.” You don’t have to be a believer to believe that. When our first freedom is gone, atheists have as much to worry about as the evangelical.

Seamus’ is a legacy to emulate –  it reminds us that there are men and women alive today who those who would curtail religious freedoms are not going to sideline — in or out of court.

Kathryn Lopez

Kathryn Jean Lopez, editor of National Review Online, writes a weekly column of conservative political and social commentary for Newspaper Enterprise Association.

http://townhall.com/columnists/kathrynlopez/2012/05/14/a_true_hero_in_war_on_religious_freedom/page/full/

The War on Men

I am woman, and I’m offended.

I am offended that, once again, parties in positions of power have decided to pretend that all women are cut from the same political cloth. I am offended, and alarmed, that religion is seen increasingly by many of those same parties not as a vibrant good in our democracy, but as a mere sideshow for nostalgic people or citizens in need of a crutch.

I am offended that the Catholic Church has been attacked as being anti-woman — the same church in which strong women like Sister Elizabeth Ann Seton built a world-class education system for the poor in a less-than-welcoming environment. I am offended that my government would penalize religious women like Seton in the future, telling them they cannot be who they are called to be; telling them their consciences must be dictated by the state.

And I am deeply offended about what is being said about men. A few good men have stuck their necks out lately in defense of religious freedom in America, and they deserve to be thanked and defended as they counter a dedicated campaign of dishonesty, hysterics and even raw bigotry.

Reasonable women cannot remain silent as the secretary of state pretends that the U.S. under a President Santorum or Romney would be an oppressive state for women. Or as a New York Times columnist echoes her, insisting that good men protecting conscience rights are “cavemen,” and that Republican men are trying to “wrestle American women back into chastity belts” in an “insane bout of mass misogyny.” Or as Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, calls the U.S. Catholic bishops “violently anti-woman.”

This is miserable, insulting, desperate stuff. It’s just not right. Women of reason cannot let it stand, and we’re not.

Standing alongside men like Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York and Bishop William Lori of Connecticut are a cavalry of women, a new sisterhood that challenges the feminist establishment that has always appeared preoccupied with abortion. There are vocal women leading the opposition to the mandate, but they’re often ignored by the left because we don’t pass their ideological test. We include Sen. Kelly Ayotte, U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, former ambassador and Harvard professor Mary Ann Glendon, and radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham, along with doctors, lawyers, religious sisters and fresh young faces at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and elsewhere.

When you start to realize this, when you hear these women on social media and C-SPAN, you begin to realize that the “women’s health” talk is really just a cynical political ploy to divide Americans in an election year.

Hillary Clinton warns that her political opponents “want to control how [women] act,” and “even want to control the decisions we make about our own health and bodies.” That’s, of course, not what Rick Santorum — to take one of the most prominent targets of the left’s scorn — wants to do. He might talk about the downsides of contraception in a far-reaching web interview, he might even do it when prompted on center stage, but he’s not going to issue mandates to enforce his views. Ironically, it’s only this White House that is demonstrating the heavy-handed mandating of mores, colliding with the freedom of conscience of Americans who might choose to live differently.

As the president accuses others of using religion as a bludgeon, he ought to reflect on the division he’s created. And those who oppose the mandate ought to be as relentless as those waving a “war on women” banner in defense of it. The White House is counting on us to be demure, as they and their allies scare single women into voting Democrat in the November elections. Don’t be. We’re in a fight for a foundational principle, a first freedom, and the stakes are too high to give in to the cynical ploy that we’re engaging in a “war on women.”

This is a not a war on women, and it shouldn’t become a war on men, either. This isn’t a battle of the sexes, it’s a fight for freedom as we’ve known it — for the conscience rights we’ve known before this administration changed them with the stroke of a bureaucratic pen. And if we have a fighting chance to preserve the liberty we’ve enjoyed here as a beacon for those who suffer under real oppression, we had better get out of the cave that mandate supporters hoped we’d hide in and be clear and confident in what were preserving, together, for women AND men — no matter what their faith.

Tags:                 A Culture of Life            ,                                    contraception            ,                                    War on Women

Kathryn Lopez

Kathryn Jean Lopez, editor of National Review Online, writes a weekly column of conservative political and social commentary for Newspaper Enterprise Association. TOWNHALL DAILY: Sign up today and receive Townhall.com daily lineup delivered each morning to your inbox.

http://townhall.com/columnists/kathrynlopez/2012/03/18/the_war_on_men/page/full/