Hillary partnered with radical Alinsky group

 

Saul Alinsky

The exact nature and extent of Hillary Clinton’s relationship with radical community organizer Saul Alinsky has long been the subject of speculation and intrigue.

The interest has been largely fueled by Clinton’s suppressed and later released 92-page senior thesis for Wellesley College offering an extensive, largely positive critique of Alinsky and his work.

Now WND has found that long after Alinsky’s death in June 1972, a group Clinton co-chaired maintained a working relationship with Alinsky’s main community organizing outfit, the Industrial Areas Foundation, or IAF.

The partnership extended into the 1990s and yielded influence over the education policy of the Bill Clinton presidency, it can now be disclosed.

Founded by Alinsky in 1940 and run by him until his death, the IAF is a national community organizing network established to implement Alinsky’s expansive organizing agenda. After Alinsky’s death, the IAF was taken over by his longtime associate and designated successor, Ed Chambers, who became the group’s executive director.

Dick Morris, a former top political adviser to Bill Clinton both as governor of Arkansas and as president, noted to WND that education reform “is the key issue Hillary Clinton used to propel herself independently to the forefront of Arkansas politics during Bill’s governorship.”

“The revelation of how closely linked her efforts were back in the 80s – and have been since – to an Alinsky radical front group is deeply disturbing and expands our understanding of Hillary’s fundamental radicalism and commitment to the new left of Saul Alinsky,” Morris said.

David Horowitz, whose parents were members of the Communist Party and who himself became a leader in the new left movement of the 1960s and 1970s before rejecting it, said the revelation is significant though not surprising.

“When radicals set out to fundamentally transform a society, the first institution they attack is the educational system which under their influence becomes a system of indoctrination in radical ideas,” he told WND.

IAF partnership

The thread of Clinton’s ties to the IAF runs through the National Center on Education and the Economy, or NCEE, a group that helped Bill Clinton reform the U.S. education system.

In 1988, Clinton joined the board of the NCEE, which specializes in education reform. Until at least 1992, Clinton served as co-chairman of the NCEE’s Implementation Commission, the group tasked with implementing the NCEE’s education agenda.

To forge that agenda, the NCEE worked with several listed “partners,” most notably Alinsky’s IAF.

In 1989, the NCEE formed its Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, which carried out an extensive analysis and survey of the U.S. education system, interviewing more than 2,000 people and hundreds of government and private agencies.

The NCEE’s commission in June 1990 released an extensive policy paper with specific recommendations on how to reform the national education system, with Hillary Clinton, then a partner in the Rose Law Firm, serving as co-chairman of the group tasked with carrying out the recommendations.

In 1992, the NCEE created an expansive proposal to the New American Schools Development Corporation, a nonprofit that teamed up with government agencies to reform U.S. schools.

Titled “Schools – and Systems – for the 21st Century,” the NCEE’s proposal listed the IAF as a partner.

“The Industrial Areas Foundation, perhaps the most experienced agency in the United States in the arena of community organizing, will help us think through the parent engagement and organizing issues,” it said.

Clinton implemented Alinsky education agenda?

As co-chairman of the NCEE’s commission to implement its agenda, which was formed with IAF input, Hillary Clinton co-authored an extensive article for the U.S. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

The 1992 article was also authored by longtime Clinton adviser Ira Magaziner, who served on the NCEE’s board and currently works for the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

In their piece, Clinton and Magaziner highlighted the NCEE’s recommendations for how to reform America’s school system.

Many of the recommendations mirror some of the IAF’s longtime goals for education policy.

Alinsky’s IAF, for example, stated in a concept paper that “the entire community must be meaningfully involved in the public education system and held accountable for its results.”

As documented by Discover The Networks, one IAF paper on education calls for teachers and childcare workers to play a larger role in the upbringing of minors.

Stated the IAF: “Schools must be prepared to teach parents how to play a supportive role. In some cases this might mean making provision for parenting education. … Increasingly, schools will find it important to employ social workers who can coordinate necessary services and to intervene on behalf of a child in need. … Schools will need to help working families make provision for after-school childcare, and day care for pre-schoolers.”

To that end, Clinton and Magaziner touted their NCEE’s recommendation for a coalition of schools, the federal government and “local leadership to organize and oversee the new training-to-work transition programs and training systems.”

Clinton and Magaziner call for the establishment of a working group of “federal, state and national government leaders, with business, labor and education leaders” to begin discussions on the implementation of their recommendations.

The pair further advocated that states take responsibility for ensuring students meet proposed new education standards.

The IAF called for employers and taxpayers to help pay for new education standards.

Clinton and Magaziner proposed “all employers will invest at least 1 percent of their payroll for the education and training of their workers.”

Bill Clinton’s education reform

The NCEE yielded enormous influence during the Bill Clinton presidency.

The group was founded and is still run by longtime Clinton friend Marc Tucker. When Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, he brought in Tucker to help oversee restructuring of the state’s educational system.

The NCEE website documents the central role the group played in reforming the education system under Bill Clinton’s two White House terms.

From 1992 to 2000, the website relates, “almost the entire agenda advanced in” the commission’s report, as co-chaired by Hillary Clinton, “was enacted into legislation by the Congress and signed into law by the President (Clinton), including the School-to-Work Act, the National Skill Standards Board, and the Workforce Investment Act.”

Continues the history section of the NCEE’s website: “At the Rose Garden ceremony at which President Clinton signed his signature education legislation, the President departed from his prepared remarks to single out the contribution made by NCEE to the national education reform agenda.”

“Subsequently, many states also enacted policies designed to support the recommendations made in the America’s Choice report,” the website stated.

Clinton and Alinsky

Clinton’s 1969 Wellesley College senior thesis was titled “There Is Only the Fight … : An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.” The thesis received attention when it was released after the Bill Clinton presidency. According to reports, in early 1993, the White House requested that Wellesley keep the thesis confidential and not release any copies.

Clinton was said to have met with Alinsky several times in 1968, when she was writing her thesis. In her most recent memoir, Clinton wrote that she rejected a job offer from Alinsky to instead attend law school.

The Clinton-Alinsky relationship received more media attention last September, when the Washington Free Beacon uncovered direct correspondence between Clinton and Alinsky from the archives of Alinsky’s IAF.

The correspondence dates to the summer of 1971, when the 23-year-old Clinton was living in Berkeley, California, and interning at the law firm Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein.

In a July 8, 1971, letter to Alinsky marked “personal,” Clinton wrote: “Dear Saul, When is that new book [Rules for Radicals] coming out — or has it come and I somehow missed the fulfillment of Revelation?

“I have just had my one-thousandth conversation about Reveille [for Radicals] and need some new material to throw at people,” she wrote, referring to a 1948 Alinsky treatise on community organizing.

Clinton went on to tell Alinsky that she had “survived law school, slightly bruised, with my belief in and zest for organizing intact.”

“The more I’ve seen of places like Yale Law School and the people who haunt them, the more convinced I am that we have the serious business and joy of much work ahead — if the commitment to a free and open society is ever going to mean more than eloquence and frustration,” wrote Clinton.

The Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman notes the letter documents Clinton and Alinsky had kept in touch since she entered Yale and that Alinsky even offered Clinton advice on campus activism.

“If I never thanked you for the encouraging words of last spring in the midst of the Yale-Cambodia madness, I do so now,” wrote Clinton.

Clinton wrote that she missed their regular conversations and asked if Alinsky would be able to meet her the next time he was in California.

“I am living in Berkeley and working in Oakland for the summer and would love to see you,” Clinton wrote. “Let me know if there is any chance of our getting together.”

The Free Beacon reported that Clinton’s letter “reached Alinsky’s office while he was on an extended trip to Southeast Asia, where he was helping train community organizers in the Philippines.”

Alinsky’s secretary, Georgia Harper, sent Clinton the following response, which noted the radical’s fondness of her.

“Since I know [Alinsky’s] feelings about you I took the liberty of opening your letter because I didn’t want something urgent to wait for two weeks,” Harper wrote to Clinton in a July 13, 1971 letter. “And I’m glad I did.”

Harper informed Clinton: “Mr. Alinsky will be in San Francisco, staying at the Hilton Inn at the airport on Monday and Tuesday, July 26 and 27. I know he would like to have you call him so that if there is a chance in his schedule maybe you can get together.”

It was not clear whether Alinsky and Clinton met at that time.

With additional research by Brenda J. Elliott.

Hillary partnered with radical Alinsky group
Aaron Klein
Fri, 01 May 2015 00:45:49 GMT

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Feds slam prof's ‘kill severely disabled babies’ remarks

 

Peter Singer

The National Council on Disability, an independent federal agency, has slammed Princeton University ethics professor Peter Singer for arguing in a radio interview that it is “reasonable” for government or private insurance companies to deny treatment to severely disabled babies.

Singer contended the health-care system under President Obama’s Affordable Care Act should be more overt about rationing and that the country should acknowledge the necessity of “intentionally ending the lives of severely disabled infants.”

Throughout the interview, Singer repeatedly referred to a disabled infant as “it.”

Singer was speaking on the “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” broadcast April 19 on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and Philadelphia’s NewsTalk 990 AM.

In a lengthy rebuttal to Singer, the National Council on Disability, or NCD, distributed a statement contesting Singer on the facts and contending his views could foster discrimination against the disabled.

Is the U.S. on a “slippery slope” toward voluntary euthanasia? “Terri’s Story: The Court-Ordered Death of an American Woman” will take you inside the gripping saga.

“Professor, do your homework,” the NCD said.

“Discrimination because of disability is not likely to be reduced by Singer’s positions, or the logical policy positions that would emerge from them,” stated the NCD. “Discrimination is not solely a philosophical concept it remains a regular occurrence for individuals with disabilities.”

Singer essentially argues the right to life is based on a being’s capacity for intelligence and to hold life preferences, which in turn is directly related to a capacity to feel and comprehend pain and pleasure.

The NCD “categorically reject[ed] any calculus that assumes to ascribe a measurable, immutable quality of life to another human being – disabled or not.”

“There are simply too many variables to consider in making ‘quality of life’ assumptions.”

The agency said one of “the hallmarks of societal attitudes toward disabilities has been a tendency of people without disabilities, including media savvy philosophers, to overestimate the negative aspects and underestimate the positive features of the lives of those who have disabilities.”

“In contrast to Singer’s ivory tower speculations, the United States Supreme Court has acknowledged that ‘society’s accumulated myths and fears about disability are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.”

The NCD notes that increasingly, negative predictions of quality of life “have little to do with the actual life experiences of people with disabilities.”

“People with disabilities commonly report more satisfaction with their lives than others might expect,” stated the agency. “Though it might surprise Singer and those with limited imaginations, even people with disabilities who encounter obstacles, prejudice, and discrimination, derive satisfaction and pleasure from their lives.”

Kill disabled infants under Obamacare

In the interview, Klein asked whether Singer believes health-care rationing under Obamacare will become more prevalent.

Singer replied that rationing is already happening, explaining doctors and hospitals routinely make decisions based on costs.

“It’s different in the U.S. system, in a way, because it doesn’t do this overtly; maybe it doesn’t do it as much. And the result is it spends about twice as much on health care as some other countries for very little extra benefit in terms of the outcome.”

Klein quoted from a section of Singer’s 1993 treatise “Practical Ethics,” titled “Taking Life: Humans.”

In the section, Singer argued for the morality of “non-voluntary euthanasia” for human beings not capable of understanding the choice between life and death, including “severely disabled infants, and people who through accident, illness, or old age have permanently lost the capacity to understand the issue involved.”

For Singer, the wrongness of killing a human being is not based on the fact that the individual is alive and human. Instead, Singer argued it is “characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness that make a difference.”

Asked whether he envisions denying treatment to disabled infants to become more common in the U.S. under the new health-care law, Singer replied: “It does happen. Not necessarily because of costs.”

He continued:

If an infant is born with a massive hemorrhage in the brain that means it will be so severely disabled that if the infant lives it will never even be able to recognize its mother, it won’t be able to interact with any other human being, it will just lie there in the bed and you could feed it but that’s all that will happen, doctors will turn off the respirator that is keeping that infant alive.

I don’t know whether they are influenced by reducing costs. Probably they are just influenced by the fact that this will be a terrible burden for the parents to look after, and there will be no quality of life for the child.

So we are already taking steps that quite knowingly and intentionally are ending the lives of severely disabled infants.

And I think we ought to be more open in recognizing that this happens.

Klein followed up by asking whether the killing of severely disabled infants should be institutionalized to reduce health-care costs.

Asked Klein: “I know that it happens and it happens certainly if the family gives consent. But do you think in the future in order to ensure a more fair rationing of health-care and health-care costs, that it should actually be instituted more? The killing of severely disabled babies?”

Singer replied that such a plan would be “quite reasonable” if it saved money that can be used for better purposes. He contended that most people would say they don’t want their premiums to be higher “so that infants who can experience zero quality of life can have expensive treatments.”

Singer’s full response:

I think if you had a health-care system in which governments were trying to say, “Look, there are some things that don’t provide enough benefits given the costs of those treatments. And if we didn’t do them we would be able to do a lot more good for other people who have better prospects,” then yes.

I think it would be reasonable for governments to say, “This treatment is not going to be provided on the national health service if it’s a country with a national health service. Or in the United States on Medicare or Medicaid.”

And I think it will be reasonable for insurance companies also to say, “You know, we won’t insure you for this or we won’t insure you for this unless you are prepared to pay an extra premium, or perhaps they have a fund with lower premiums for people who don’t want to insure against that.”

Because I think most people, when they think about that, would say that’s quite reasonable. You know, I don’t want my health insurance premiums to be higher so that infants who can experience zero quality of life can have expensive treatments.

Feds slam prof's ‘kill severely disabled babies’ remarks
-NO AUTHOR-
Fri, 01 May 2015 00:57:27 GMT

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ISIS using Baltimore riots to recruit 'dissatisfied' blacks

 

TEL AVIV – ISIS is taking advantage of racial tensions in the U.S. by attempting to recruit dissatisfied Muslims among the American black population.

This according to Abu Saqer, leader of Jihadiya Salafiya, an Islamist militant group in the Gaza Strip. Jihadiya Salafiya represents al-Qaida in Gaza and has made statements in support of ISIS.

Saqer, speaking to WND from Gaza, would not provide further details other than to confirm ISIS is taking advantage of what he described as the “growing movement within the black community toward Islam and the racist policies of the U.S. government.”

Saqer said he was not aware of whether ISIS actually recruited any dissatisfied black Muslims within the U.S. or whether any such cells have been established.

He said Arabic Internet forums supportive of ISIS were “encouraged” by what he claimed was a pro-ISIS T-shirt worn by Ferguson protesters that became popular on social media.

The free WND special report “ISIS Rising,” by Middle East expert and former Department of Defense analyst Michael Maloof, will answer your questions about the jihadist army threatening the West.

It appears, however, that ISIS supporters may have misunderstood the intent of the message written on that grammatically incorrect shirt, which reads: “I rather get stopped by ISIS terrorist than Ferguson PD.”

The shirt clearly was not meant as a sign of support ISIS.

It’s not the first report of ISIS viewing the racial protests in America as possible fertile recruiting grounds. The protests in recent days have spread to Baltimore, where some protesters have turned violent.

The London Daily Mail reported last November that ISIS jihadists pledged on Twitter to send militants to fight police in Ferguson if protesters there commit to Islam.

The same article quoted London-born jihadist Junaid Hussain, who now goes by the name Abu Hussain al-Britani, tweeting a photograph of a handwritten letter urging the Ferguson protesters to “reject corrupt man-made laws like democracy” and declare their allegiance to ISIS’ leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who is believed to have been severely injured in a recent airstrike.

In the past few days, two U.S. agencies have warned of possible ISIS plots on U.S. soil.

While the FBI investigates a possible ISIS terror attack on the basis of intercepted chatter and intelligence information, the TSA is warning ISIS is planning an attack on U.S. soil.

As WND reported, little is known about the threat other than its imminence, which has prompted the TSA to deploy its new Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response teams, or VIPR, to various undisclosed locations. The VIPR teams deploy at airports, train stations and other busy transportation hubs.

One law enforcement source said parts of California were of special concern.

What do YOU think? Why are race relations so dicey? Sound off in today’s WND poll!

Related stories:

“Baltimore Mayor apologizes to rioters for using T-word”

Jobless, fatherless prone to ‘lawless actions’”

“Pat Buchanan: Baltimore needs ‘decisive force’”

Psychologist: Baltimore rioters have ‘Battered Community Syndrome’”

Media hail woman who smacked, berated Baltimore thug”

Where’s Obama? Throwing cops under bus again

Video shock: Black rioters drag white man from store

Baltimore streets fill with National Guard troops

ISIS using Baltimore riots to recruit 'dissatisfied' blacks
Aaron Klein
Wed, 29 Apr 2015 00:23:00 GMT

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Prayer service returning to U.S. Capitol

 

Do you think the nation’s capital could use a little help these days?

Well, prayer is returning to the U.S. Capitol, which was the scene of many worship services during the early generations of the United States.

And you can be part of the historic “Washington: A Man of Prayer” service Wednesday evening by signing up now with WND to view it online.

The service is an effort by Rev. Dan Cummins to return prayer to the Capitol building, where generations of Washingtonians worshiped God under an open-doors policy.

“Washington: A Man of Prayer” commemorates the events of April 30, 1789, when, after being sworn in at Federal Hall, President Washington, accompanied by Congress, proceeded to St. Paul’s Chapel where they “offered dedicatory prayers to God in divine services on America’s behalf.”

Honorary hosts for this year’s event, starting at 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time and lasting for 90 minutes, will be Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla, and Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va.

It is scheduled to be broadcast by Daystar Television Network and livestreamed on the Web on WND.

The event will be held in the U.S. Capitol’s historic Statuary Hall.

The 2015 event, to be attended by Congress members and national Christian leaders, commemorates the 226th inaugural anniversary of President George Washington.

Cummins, a longtime pastor, first obtained permission from House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, to use the hall in May 2012, the first time a private citizen had been allowed to hold a prayer service there in more than 120 years.

Click here to host in your church or home the WND.com Internet streaming of “Washington — A Man of Prayer 2015″ from Statuary Hall in the nation’s Capitol.

Rabbi Jonathan Cahn, author of the New York Times bestseller “The Harbinger” and the inspiration behind the “Isaiah 9:10 Judgment” movie, is scheduled to offer prayers.

Scheduled to attend are Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., Bill Flores, R-Texas, Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., Steve Pearce, R-N.M., Jeff Miller, R-Fla., Randy Weber, R-Texas, and Dennis Ross, R-Fla.

See a video about the event:

Historically, as many as 2,000 people were in attendance for worship services in the Capitol after President Thomas Jefferson approved the events.

Services were held in the chamber where the House of Representatives met from 1807 to 1857, now called Statuary Hall.

Cummins, recalling Washington’s first inauguration, said “the world saw more than just the inauguration of the president of a new nation; it witnessed a watershed moment in history when the ideals penned in ink on parchment at Philadelphia’s Continental Congress would preserve what sword and patriots’ blood had inscribed on the field of battle.”

Cummins is founding pastor of Bridlewood Church in Bullard, Texas, and the director of church relations for Renewing American Leadership in Washington, D.C.

Pastor Sergio De La More, founder of Cornerstone Church of San Diego, who spoke at the prayer event in 2013, said it’s important to understand America’s foundation.

“I am certain the framework of our country, built not on economic status, race, or political standing, but rather on the foundation of faith and prayer, still stands as a monument of strength for all people everywhere. We, as a multi-ethnic nation have a rare and historical opportunity to unify ourselves as one church and rally to represent one culture-kingdom culture.”

Kenda Bartlett, executive director of Concerned Women for America in Washington, said, “Over 32 years ago Mrs. Beverly LaHaye, wife of Dr. Tim LaHaye, and a small group of Christian women gathered around a kitchen table to answer God’s calling to start a women’s public policy organization dedicated to putting faith and prayer back into the public square.

“Today that organization is Concerned Women for America (CWA), the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization with over 500,000 members. So we know first-hand the huge impact a small gathering of believers can make when God is at the center of their work. Likewise, CWA was honored be among the small group of Christian leaders and organizations to gather in Statuary Hall for the first annual ‘Washington: A Man of Prayer’ event observing George Washington’s inauguration address, which boldly called ‘We the People’ to a time of prayer.”

Sign up now for access to the livestreaming for your home or church.

And here is Rabbi Jonathan Cahn speaking at a previous event:

Read Man of Prayer organizer Dan Cummins’ latest column, “Founders’ 4 landmarks: 3 destroyed, 1 to go”

Prayer service returning to U.S. Capitol
-NO AUTHOR-
Wed, 29 Apr 2015 00:47:58 GMT

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Florist targeted for 'personal ruin' fights back

 

Baronelle Stutzman

The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Justices Ruth Ginsburg and Elena Kagan argued at the Supreme Court hearing on same-sex “marriage” that mandating that status across the nation would do no harm to traditional marriages of heterosexual couples.

But they apparently didn’t address the injury it is doing to those of faith whose religious beliefs forbid them to support what the Bible describes succinctly as sin.

Barronelle Stutzman could fill them in.

A notice of appeal has been filed in Washington state in the case against the florist who declined to provide flowers for a same-sex “wedding” on religious grounds and since then has been targeted by the state attorney general for “personal and professional ruin.”

The notice was filed to the Washington state Supreme Court by officials with the Alliance Defending Freedom on behalf of Stutzman and her shop, Arlene’s Flowers.

The initial filing consisted just of the notice of appeal, not the fully briefed arguments.

But ADF attorney Kristen Waggoner said, “The message that the attorney general and the ACLU have sent to the people of Washington in these two lawsuits [against Stutzman] is quite clear: surrender your religious liberty and freedom of speech, or face personal and professional ruin.”

She continued, “The trial court’s ruling affects all Americans who wish to remain free to live and work according to their faith without fear of punishment by the government. For that reason and others, we are requesting that the Washington Supreme Court grant direct review of Barronelle’s case.”

Hear Stutzman and Waggoner tell Fox News about the case:

Sign a petition has been created in support of ordinances that allow Christian business owners to live by their faith.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday on the question of same-sex “marriage.” At the heart of the issue is whether the court will create the right to same-sex “marriage” and infringe on the Constitution’s protections for speech and religious freedoms, or whether those First Amendment protections will trump the lifestyle choices of a minority.

In practice, homosexual activism is in the bully pulpit right now, with a long list of cases assembled by WND where courts or commissions have penalized Christians for doing no more than living by their faith.

For example, the owners of a Christian farm in upstate New York recently were fined $10,000 and assessed $1,500 in damages for not allowing a lesbian duo to use their land and home for a wedding.

In Colorado, Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips is fighting to overturn state penalties against him – and his staff – for refusing to endorse a homosexual “wedding.”

There, a state human rights commissioner, Diann Rice, likened Christians to slave owners and Nazis, stating, “I would also like to reiterate what we said in the hearing or the last meeting. Freedom of religion and religion has been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the Holocaust, whether it be – I mean, we – we can list hundreds of situations where freedom of religion has been used to justify discrimination. And to me it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use to – to use their religion to hurt others.”

See the “Big List of Christian Coercion.

Just in the last week, Gresham, Oregon, bakery owners Aaron and Melissa Klein, who were forced to close their storefront, Sweet Cakes by Melissa, in 2013 shortly after a lesbian couple filed a civil rights complaint against them for refusing to provide a same-sex “wedding” cake, were told they were being fined $135,000.

Then in a surprise just days ago, a court ruled that a Kentucky T-shirt printer has the right to refuse to make pro-”gay” T-shirts because of the message. The homosexuality of the intended purchasers had nothing to do with it, the court said, and the Constitution protects the speech and religious freedom rights of the printer.

WND reported just weeks ago that Stutzman was told she was being fined $1,001 by the state for her decision to abide by her religious beliefs. She still faces a lawsuit from the customer.

A judge specifically ruled that her assets, including her business, personal possessions, bank accounts and home, could be subject to seizure to satisfy judgments against her.

Stutzman, 70, has run a flower shop for 40 years, but refused to make flower arrangements for the wedding of a longtime customer and found herself on the receiving end of two lawsuits – one from the Washington state attorney general’s office and another from the two men planning a same-sex wedding ceremony. They are not only suing her business; they’re also going after her personal assets, according to her attorney.

A GoFundMe account did raise in excess of $123,000 for her, but Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys representing Stutzman warned that the precedent – not the dollar figure – is the problem.

Waggoner said the award to Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson boils down to a government threat to Christians: “Surrender your religious liberty and free speech rights, or face personal and professional ruin.”

Stutzman was sued even though the man who filed the complaint was referred to several other willing florists and even was offered free flowers.

One of the homosexual customers, Robert Ingersoll, told the Tri-City Herald that Stutzman’s decision thoroughly shocked the couple.

The ruling from Alex Ekstrom, a judge at the trial court level, is the one being appealed. He had ordered the “defendants and their officers, agents, servants, employees, and attorneys, and those persons in active concert or participation with them … are permanently enjoined and restrained from violating the Washington Law Against Discrimination.”

Stutzman said she has, for her entire 40-year career, employed and served people who identify themselves as “gay.”

The case triggered what Waggoner called “volumes after volumes” of hate mail to Stutzman.

“I’ve read a lot of hate mail over the years, but what I’ve read in this case just is stunning,” she said. “It makes you sick to your stomach.”

Related stories:

“Scalia: ‘Why no ancient Greek gay marriages?’”

America ‘the divided’ revealed in Marriage arguments

“Hear Supreme Court questions about ‘gay marriage’”

Related columns:

Land of the free? Not with same-sex marriage” by Jerry Newcombe

“Judge Bork — a prophet on marriage” by Star Parker

“Founders’ 4 landmarks: 3 destroyed, 1 to go” by Dan Cummins

“‘The cross-gender premise’: Empathy is not science” by John W. DeVilbiss, Ph.D.

Florist targeted for 'personal ruin' fights back
Bob Unruh
Wed, 29 Apr 2015 01:38:34 GMT

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Hillary, bribes and burritos

 

Hillary, bribes and burritos
-NO AUTHOR-
Sun, 26 Apr 2015 15:27:54 GMT

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Baltimore siege over police-custody death

 

WASHINGTON – Baltimore was under siege Saturday following a march by thousands on City Hall to protest the death of Freddie Gray, 25, who died from injuries while in police custody.

Some protesters broke off from the main march, breaking police lines and trashing businesses, cars, throwing cans, bottles and trash at cops, baseball fans trying to get to the Camden Yards game between the Orioles and the Red Sox, restaurants and storefronts.

At least three people were taken into custody and there were at least two injuries.

A group of some 100 protesters broke out a window of a department store with a chair they looted from a nearby restaurant, according to eyewitnesses. No police responded. The same group was seen breaking windows of bars and restaurants, including a Subway sandwich shop near Camden Yards, tossing chairs and tables through the glass.

At least two bystanders – a man and woman – were observed bleeding from the head. Some people were struck by beer cans, bottles and trash cans.

Baltimore police called for backup from reserve and off-duty officers.

One protester was seen breaking out a window of a police cruiser, grabbing a police cap inside and wearing it while standing on top of the cruiser with several other protesters. Scores of officers rushed into the area, stopped and formed a line, three officers deep. The protesters scattered but returned a few minutes later and began yelling “What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!”

Earlier in the day, a crowd demonstrated while chanting “all night all day we will fight for Freddie Gray” and waving signs that read “racism is a disease, revolution is the cure.”

Marchers paused for a moment of silence in front of Shock Trauma hospital, where Gray died a week ago from a traumatic spine injury he suffered while in police custody.

Gray was arrested April 12 after he made eye contact with officers and ran away, police said. Officers held him down, handcuffed him and loaded him into a police van. While inside, he became irate and leg cuffs were put on him, police have said. Gray was not buckled with a seat belt, a violation of the police department’s policy. The case is still under investigation by the department. Six officers involved have been suspended with pay during the probe.

Baltimore siege over police-custody death
-NO AUTHOR-
Sun, 26 Apr 2015 01:57:37 GMT

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Schlafly warns America 'may be at a breaking point already'

 

Only eight short years from now, immigrants will make up a record-high 14.8 percent of the total U.S. population, and longtime conservative leader Phyllis Schlafly views the rising tide of newcomers as a purposeful attack on the country.

By the nation’s own president.

“It’s deliberate,” Schlafly told WND in an interview. “It’s not any accident. It’s because Obama and his friends are letting all these people in who don’t want to be Americans, who don’t want to speak English.”

The Census Bureau projected last month that the U.S. immigrant population, legal and illegal, will total a record 51 million in 2023. At that point, one in seven U.S. residents will be an immigrant. By 2060, nearly one in five U.S. residents will be an immigrant, and the total U.S. population will be 417 million – 108 million more than in 2010.

Conservative activist Richard Viguerie, author of “Takeover: The 100-Year War For The Soul of the GOP and How Conservatives Can Finally Win It,” noted that most of today’s immigrants come from nations more politically and culturally liberal than the United States. Therefore, he expects the growing immigrant population to make the entire country more liberal.

“It’s going to pull America to the left, for sure,” Viguerie told WND in an interview. “America will become closer to the European model of state control of our country.”

Of course, if America moves to the left, it will naturally gravitate toward the Democratic Party, the party of big government. Schlafly, author of “Who Killed the American Family?” worries about the future of the GOP.

“I think one of the reasons Obama and his friends are so eager to open the gates to more and more immigrants is they think it’s going to defeat the conservative movement and the Republican Party,” Schlafly said. “Of course, they all come from countries that are not used to the idea of limited government. They’re used to countries where the government makes all the decisions, and they don’t know anything different.

“They don’t understand what Americans mean when we talk about limited government, so I think one of their motives clearly is death to the conservative movement and the Republican Party.”

Get the details of how to fight this change in America, in “Takeover: The 100-Year War For The Soul of the GOP and How Conservatives Can Finally Win It.”

Viguerie agreed if all the new immigrants vote, it would spell the death of the Republican Party. But he also worries about another way the party might be destroyed.

“The Republican Party, if it were to nominate a pro-amnesty candidate, would self-destruct and not be able to politically survive having a political candidate that is pro-amnesty,” Viguerie said. “It would just drive a stake in the hearts of the grassroots Republican voters, and there would be almost no chance the Republican nominee could win the election.”

Regarding the field of likely 2016 GOP presidential contenders, Viguerie believes Jeb Bush is completely on the wrong side of the immigration issue. He said Marco Rubio and Scott Walker are suspect on the issue, even though Walker recently talked about the need to reform legal immigration.

“But a Bobby Jindal, a Ted Cruz are solidly anti-amnesty,” Viguerie said. “They’re in sync with the majority of the Republican voters and the majority of Americans.”

Schlafly agreed that Cruz is a good anti-illegal immigration candidate, and she praised Walker for his comments on legal immigration. Nevertheless, she believes any Republican who wants to limit immigration is swimming upstream.

“The powers-that-be, the propagandists, big media, and the big donors in the Republican Party are all pushing this massive immigration,” she said. “And of course that’s the view of big business – they want the cheap labor.”

The Census Bureau projects that the U.S. immigrant population will grow nearly four times faster than the native population. It will reach 15.8 percent by 2030 and 18.8 percent by 2060, at which time there will be 78 million immigrants in the country. By contrast, there were only 20 million immigrants in the U.S. in 1990, accounting for 7.9 percent of the population.

Schlafly and Viguerie say the GOP could decline under a flood of new immigrants, but so could the country.

“We may be at a breaking point already, I don’t know,” Schlafly said. However, she noted that she remains a Reagan optimist and doesn’t believe America will totally collapse.

Viguerie thinks the breaking point might not be that distant.

“We may be closer to that than we suspect, because Obama is on a fast track to change the voting demographics of this country by importing tens of millions of Democrat voters from South America, and so we could reach a tipping point within a few years,” he said.

“We’ve got a large percentage of people here who are not Americans, they don’t want to be Americans, they’re not assimilating, they want to keep their culture, they want to keep their language, they don’t know our history.”

Viguerie specifically referenced radical Muslims as one group that should not be let into the country.

“We need a different vetting system,” Viguerie declared. “We need to vet these people. We need to keep out radical Muslims. If you’re a radical Muslim, you should not be coming to this country, and we don’t have a proper vetting system for people who are interested in our destruction.”

Ultimately, Viguerie believes it will take strong leadership to stem the tide of immigration and preserve a uniquely American culture. However, the veteran fundraiser is not entirely optimistic.

“We don’t have the leadership in the Congress, we don’t have the leadership certainly in the executive branch, and we don’t have it in the Republican Party,” he said.

Viguerie said it will be up to voters to demand that their leaders solve the immigration crisis. He hopes some of the newer tea party-affiliated congressmen will provide real leadership on the immigration issue.

“Right now, most of the people who are thought to be leaders on the Republican side are intimidated by mainstream media and hesitant to step out, but it’s time to say we need to call a halt to mass immigration into this country here,” he said.

Schlafly, for her part, feels the American people are already on her side when it comes to immigration control. Indeed, a Gallup poll taken last June found a plurality of Americans, 41 percent, thought current immigration levels should be decreased. Only 22 percent thought they should be increased.

“I think the public opinion polls are showing that the majority of Americans agree with the views that I’ve been expressing,” Schlafly contended. “However, major media doesn’t put it out that way.”

She said ordinary people just need to keep talking about how immigration is harming them, and eventually politicians and the media will no longer be able to ignore them.

Viguerie said immigration should be slowed down.

“Let us catch our breath here and figure out, because the world is changing in front of our eyes,” Viguerie said. “Much of the world is moving toward a virulently anti-American, anti-Western values belief system. And we need to take a look at who’s coming into this country, and what are their views and values.”

Schlafly warns America 'may be at a breaking point already'
-NO AUTHOR-
Sun, 26 Apr 2015 03:08:34 GMT

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Holocaust 'an era of history ... that's coming back'

 

On Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2015, there are warnings that 70 years after the horrors inflicted on Jews and others came to an end, the world really hasn’t learned its lesson – and the atrocities may be coming back.

“The one thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history,” Mark Biltz, pastor of El Shaddai Ministries in Bonney Lake, Washington, told WND. “We are condemned to repeat history if we do not learn from it.”

Jan Markell, who co-wrote “Trapped in Hitler’s Hell” with Holocaust survivor Anita Dittman, is concerned that members of today’s younger generations don’t know or care enough about the Holocaust.

“I am concerned that particularly younger people – they don’t have an interest in history and they don’t have an interest in this era of history,” Markell said. “I think in their mind, it’s too long ago, and so they’re forgetting something, an era of history… that’s coming back.”

Anti-Semitism is on the rise, with increasing reports in the U.S. and in Europe, and Israel’s neighbors are threatening annihilation against the small Middle East democracy.

Markell said it’s reminiscent of Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s.

“My concern is that this is a generation that is being forgotten about – World War II,” Markell said. “It’s perceived as ancient history; it’s not, and we need to learn from it so that it doesn’t happen again, because it is happening again, and younger people – people of all ages need to be aware that it’s happening again.”

In America, a recent Anti-Defamation League report revealed there were 21 percent more anti-Jewish incidents in the U.S. in 2014 than in 2013. This included 36 assaults, 363 incidents of vandalism, and 513 incidents of threats and harassment.

Get the story of the Holocaust from an eyewitness, in “Trapped in Hitler’s Hell,” by Holocaust survivor Anita Dittman.

American Jews have faced even more attacks in 2015. In late March, two Jewish teenagers in Brooklyn were struck by paintballs as they walked home from synagogue with their grandfather. Police investigated the incident as a hate crime. This came only a week after another Jewish man reported that someone shot him with a paintball gun in the same section of Brooklyn.

In early April, on the Tuesday morning of Passover week, members of the Shaare Torah Congregation in Gaithersburg, Maryland, arrived at their synagogue to find it covered in offensive graffiti, including swastikas and hurtful words and phrases.

Only a day earlier, the Boulder Jewish Community Center in Boulder, Colorado, had to be evacuated after someone sent officials an envelope filled with white powder and a note reading “your [sic] have enemies.”

Biltz, the author of “Blood Moons: Decoding the Imminent Heavenly Signs,” blames the hostility on a climate of hate perpetuated by the media.

“One of the reasons anti-Semitism is so virulent today is because of libelous accusations that are made today through the media,” Biltz said. “The Jews are falsely accused for all the ills in the world today. Even when there are wars between Muslims, the Sunni vs. the Shias, the Jews are blamed.

“Most of the vocal people have never been to Israel or talked to Israeli Arabs. People tend to believe the big lie rather than taking time to really listen to the other side.”

American anti-Semitism, however, probably is overshadowed by that in Europe.

In a 2012 survey of around 6,000 Jews in eight European countries, about 75 percent said anti-Semitism had increased in their respective countries over the past five years.

The vitriol has continued beyond 2012. The Community Security Trust, a charity that protects British Jews, reported 1,168 anti-Semitic incidents in Britain in 2014, more than twice as many as in 2013 and the highest yearly total ever recorded by the CST. The 314 anti-Semitic incidents reported in July 2014 represented the highest monthly total ever.

But of course, the attacks didn’t stop when 2014 was over. Just last month, a drunken mob of about 20 people entered a London synagogue shouting, “Kill the Jews!” They attacked the worshipers and smashed windows.

Biltz said modern anti-Jewish violence is just a continuation of the long, hard slog that God’s chosen people have been traveling for all of their history.

“God separated the Jewish people from the nations,” Biltz explained. “They were to be different in how they dressed, how they ate, how they related to God and to one another. Many times the Jewish people wished God had chosen someone else because of the consequences of God’s choosing them. Society is jealous of how they are so few in number and yet so blessed. I can’t think of a people group who have been hated more and taken on more genocidal attempts than the Jewish people, yet they tend to thrive and be successful, winning even the greatest percentage of Nobel prizes.”

France has seen a huge jump in anti-Semitism as well. The CRIF, the French affiliate of the World Jewish Congress, reported 851 anti-Semitic incidents in 2014, more than double the 423 recorded the previous year. The group claimed anti-Jewish acts represented 51 percent of all racist acts in France that year, even though Jews represent only one percent of France’s population.

Perhaps the most notorious anti-Semitic attack in France so far in 2015 was the attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris, which came on the heels of the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo headquarters.

In light of all the violence, many French Jews fear for their safety. A record 7,000 Jews moved from France to Israel in 2014, twice as many as the previous year.

Danish Jews fear for their safety, too, in light of recent attacks on Jews in Denmark. Just last week, vandals smashed a window and scrawled anti-Semitic words at Copenhagen’s lone kosher deli.

In Belgium, things have gotten to the point where an insurance company refused to renew a policy for a Jewish kindergarten in Brussels. The company claimed the risk of attack on the kindergarten was too high.

Earlier this month, vandals splattered red paint on several portraits in an open-air Holocaust exhibit in Budapest, Hungary. Only a day earlier, in the same city, vandals had spray-painted a swastika on a synagogue.

Sometimes anti-Semitic attackers don’t just go for property or random Jews, but for Jewish leaders. In March, Eli Tauber, who established a foundation to promote Jewish culture in Bosnia and Herzegovina, was attacked outside a Sarajevo café by a man wielding a weighted chain.

Biltz says there are two keys to combating anti-Semitism: education and relationship building.

“From the education standpoint, the church needs to understand the errors of replacement theology, thinking that they have replaced the nation of Israel in God’s eternal plans,” Biltz said. “From a secular standpoint, people need to realize what they hear in the media is totally biased. Hatred is a strong emotion that sometimes even education can’t overcome, which is why relationships have to also be built. Going to Israel and meeting the Jewish people will transform your life.”

WND previously has reported not only on the anti-Semitism in the United States, but also the move that direction around the world.

Holocaust 'an era of history ... that's coming back'
-NO AUTHOR-
Wed, 15 Apr 2015 00:33:03 GMT

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Showdown with feds over right to gold in ground

 

In a developing story some are comparing to the Bundy Ranch standoff in Nevada, Bureau of Land Management officials and miners west of Grants Pass, Oregon, are in an impasse over who has the rights to the minerals in the ground around Galice Creek.

According to the Shasta Lantern, the Sugar Pine mining claim has existed as a rightful claim since 1876 and is one of the oldest claims in the country. On March 18, the BLM issued two stop orders on the mining district, citing authority under BLM Surface Management 3809 regulations.

“Reportedly late this week, BLM officials accompanied by deputies of Josephine County Sheriff Dave Daniel issued a Cease and Desist order to the mine and its owners,” writes Red Smith of the Shasta Lantern. “The order has given the miners until April 25th to remove all equipment, buildings and supplies from the mine. It has been reported local BLM officials have threatened to burn the buildings down if they are not removed by the date.”

Miners from the Galice Mining District, which encompasses the Sugar Pine Mine, say they have been arguing with the BLM since roughly 2012.

“The Galice Mining District is a private consortium of claims, owners and miners that has continuously operated since the early 1870s,” writes Smith. “This means the mining district actually predates the BLM by decades.”

The mining district has produced in excess of 10 million ounces of gold since its inception, and geologists estimate only 10 percent of the gold in the ground has been removed.

The miners expressed the intent to fight in court what they believe to be an illegal order, as the current cease and desist order was served on the Sugar Pine Mine even though the issue is scheduled to be heard in court later in the year. They have retained an attorney and requested the assistance of the Oath Keepers of Josephine County, who are currently staging a camp near the mine, terming the event the Sugar Pine Mine Security Operation.

Oath Keepers reports, “While serving a BLM Stop Order upon the Sugar Pine Mine, BLM Contract Deputy Jason Stanton, when told by the parties involved that they were ‘constitutional people,’ Deputy Stanton replied, ‘I have issues with the Constitution.’”

Oath Keepers has two sworn affidavits from two witnesses to the exchange. Oath Keepers say their mission is to ensure the Fourth Amendment constitutional right to due process is not being violated by the BLM.

“Under the 1955 Surface Resources Act, claims of this age have exclusive surface rights unless the Department of Interior utilizes a mechanism outlined in that Act to sever those surface rights,” wrote Smith. “According to a statement by the Galice Mining District, demands made to BLM to produce evidence of their surface authority in accordance to the 1955 Act have thus far garnered only ‘because we say so’ answers and numerous stonewalling tactics. According to the Galice Mining District, the BLM is in active violation, on multiple counts, of federal Freedom of Information Act statutes. Documents secured appear to have been ‘heavily parsed,’ raising suspicion that BLM is either actively suppressing the release of documents or has been actively destroying documents which they are obligated under Federal Law to maintain and provide on request.”

“It’s kind of an odd situation,” Jim Wittington of the Medford, Oregon, BLM, said in an interview with WND. “As far as we’re concerned, we had an inspection of the area in January after we realized there were some operations going on there. In March, we issued a notice of noncompliance, primarily because operations that were taking place at the site were not at the level of documentation – the documentation that we had allowed.

“So they have a mining claim, they were doing the kind of activity that probably demands a notice or a plan of operations. And so by virtue of sending them the notice of noncompliance, that gives them a couple of options.

“One, they can work to get into compliance and get a plan of operations in place, or they can appeal our decision that they are not in compliance. Based on what the issues were, they have two routes that they can go, depending on which issue it is. They can either appeal to the state director of the Bureau of Land Management here in Oregon and Washington, or they can appeal to the Interior Board of Appeals. In informal discussion with their lawyer, it sounds like they’re going to appeal, but they have a few days before they have to let us know.”

The Galice Mining District says although it hopes to resolve the issue legally and properly through the courts, it will “fully disobey” an order it views as “illegal and invalid.”

Law enforcement authorities have responded and are currently on the scene.

Showdown with feds over right to gold in ground
-NO AUTHOR-
Wed, 15 Apr 2015 00:22:59 GMT

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At stake in marriage case: All sexual boundaries

 

The U.S. Supreme Court soon will hear arguments in a case in which the justices, two of whom already have publicly endorsed same-sex marriage by performing ceremonies, will have an opportunity to eliminate “all sexual boundaries” and formally establish that “children are sexual from birth.”

But the high court should not take that step, contends a friend-of-the-court brief filed in the marriage case that is to be heard April 28 in Washington. It comes from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled states have the right to define marriage for themselves.

The decision conflicts with the rulings of federal judges who have imposed same-sex marriage on state populations who largely have voted against it.

“This court cannot – and should not – erase millennia of human history and dismantle the granite cornerstone of society in favor of an experimental construct that is barely a decade old,” said the brief, filed by lawyers with Liberty Counsel.

“This case presents the court with the opportunity to affirm and preserve the unique, comprehensive union of a man and a woman, the foundational social institution upon which society was built and the future of the nation depends,” it said.

WND has compiled a “Big List of Christian Coercion” with dozens of cases in which Christians have been fined, threatened or penalized for recognizing the biblical definition of marriage. A petition has been created in support of ordinances that allow Christian business owners to live by their faith.

“Changing millennia of history must always be approached with trepidation. In this case, the change must be rejected outright not only because it is seeking to redefine something which cannot be redefined, but also because the proposed change is grounded in fraudulent ‘research’ based on skewed demographics and the sexual abuse of hundreds of infants and children,” the brief states.

“The ‘research’ upon which petitioners based their artificial construct of same-sex ‘marriage’ is contained in Alfred Kinsey’s books on male and female sexuality, which legitimized homosexual conduct and ushered in a societal transformation that has now affected three generations and every aspect of America life.”

The brief was filed on behalf of Judith Reisman, perhaps the world’s leading expert on Kinsey and the child torture that produced his reports on sexuality. She is author of “Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences,” “Sexual Sabotage” and “The Kinsey Corruption.”

The brief explains that homosexuality was condemned in America until after Kinsey’s publications on sexuality, which included data purporting to show a 5-month-old infant was capable of three orgasms in a few hours.

However, at the time of the publication of Kinsey’s reports, few asked how he acquired the information. Reisman’s work over the years has revealed that an “orgasm” for a child, according to Kinsey, was “body tensions, twitching, rigidity, extreme tensions with violent convulsions, hysterical laughing, collapse, fainting, excruciating pain and screaming.”

Get the definitive works on Kinsey, in “Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences,” “Sexual Sabotage” and “The Kinsey Corruption.”

And the “data” he used for his studies came from, among others, “1,400 convicted sex offenders, 329 other prisoners, 450 homosexuals and 300 from the underworld.”

That is the background to the reports in which Kinsey presented his ideas of “a sexual utopia” that reflected his own desires and “private aberrant lifestyle.”

“Kinsey was secretly a bi-homosexual adulterer whose numerous male sex partners included his co-authors and interviewees. He was addicted to pornography and masturbation and was observed engaging in self-mutilation which apparently contributed to his contracting ‘orchitis,’ a sexually transmitted disease, and his untimely death in 1956,” the brief states.

Reisman, a Ph.D., has spoken, lectured and testified worldwide on the fallacies in Kinsey’s work.

Reisman is a consultant, the scientific adviser for the California Protective Parents Association and former president of the Institute for Media Education. She has been a consultant to four U.S. Department of Justice administrations, the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Her scholarly findings have had international legislative and scientific import in the United States, Israel, South Africa, Canada and Australia.

The brief notes that, based on Kinsey’s influence, the Supreme Court decriminalized same-sex sodomy in Lawrence v. Texas.

Judith Reisman

“Now this court is being asked to again use aberrant research created by aberrant researchers based on the sexual abuse of hundreds of children to make fundamental changes to American law – this time to demolish natural marriage,” the brief explains.

“The request to ‘define’ or ‘redefine’ marriage reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the institution, a misunderstanding that is exacerbated by societal changes spawned by Kinsey’s fraudulent research,” the brief explains.

After all, a court opinion in Alabama noted that marriage is “pre-political,” meaning it was created by God in the Bible and not “by law.”

Liberty Counsel’s brief explains that in 1942, the Supreme Court said marriage is “fundamental to the very existence and survival of the race.”

“Older than the Constitution and the laws of any nation, marriage is not a creation of any government, but it is an obvious relationship between one man and one woman. Marriage is a natural bond that society or religion can only ‘solemnize,’” said Mat Staver, chairman of Liberty Counsel.

Among Kinsey’s claims, the brief explains: Ninety-five percent of American men were engaging in sexual conduct that was illegal under existing laws. And 50 percent of farmers had sex with animals.

“For the past 67 years, purportedly objective scholars, lawyers and judges have undertaken fundamental societal transformation by embracing statistically and scientifically fraudulent “data” derived from serial child rapists, sex offenders, prisoners, prostitutes, pedophiles and pederasts misrepresented as average Americans,” the brief explains. “Now these same change agents, still covering up the fraudulent nature of the Kinsey ‘data,’ want this court to utilize it to
demolish the cornerstone of society, natural marriage.

“This court should not countenance such a destructive move.”

The brief warns that this coming ruling could join the ranks of Dred Scott, which legitimized African-Americans as slaves, and Buck v. Bell, which “validated” the forced sterilization of people, as dark days for the American judiciary.

“The consequences … would exceed the disastrous consequences of Dred Scott and will be as irreversible as the court-sanctioned sterilization of ‘imbeciles’ in Buck.”

WND previously reported many of the top names in Christian ministry – including the National Religious Broadcasters, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the Chuck Colson Center, Albert Mohler and Charles Stanley – were asking the U.S. Supreme Court to protect marriage as God defined it.

In a brief filed in the Obergefell v. Hodges case, the leaders ask the high court to affirm the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that residents of Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee can define marriage for themselves.

The brief was filed by the Liberty Institute on behalf of the National Religious Broadcasters, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Samaritan’s Purse, In Touch Ministries, Pathway to Victory, The Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview, Dallas Theological Seminary, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Daniel L. Akin, Mark L. Bailey, Francis J. Beckwith, Robert A.J. Gagnon, Robert Jeffress, Byron R. Johnson, Eric Metaxas, Albert Mohler Jr., Charles F. Stanley, John Stonestreet and Owen Strachan.

“In reaching its decision, this court should reaffirm that the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment protects religious dissenters who disagree with state-recognized same-sex marriage and to reaffirm the importance of free debate and free inquiry in this democratic republic,” the brief states.

Liberty Institute President Kelly Shackelford said religious liberty and free speech “are our first American freedoms.”

“We hope the Supreme Court will use this opportunity to affirm the Sixth Circuit and reaffirm the constitutional rights of all Americans to speak and act according to their beliefs,” he said.

When the Alabama Supreme Court prevented a federal judge from imposing same-sex marriage last month, it argued the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the right of states to decide the issue when it overturned the federal Defense of Marriage Act in the Windsor case.

In its order, the Alabama court wrote: “An open question exists as to whether Windsor’s ‘equal dignity’ notion works in the same direction toward state laws concerning marriage as it did toward DOMA. The Windsor court stated that ‘the history of DOMA’s enactment and its own text demonstrate that interference with the equal dignity of same-sex marriages, a dignity conferred by the states in the exercise of their sovereign power, was more than an incidental effect of the federal statute.”

The Alabama court noted that in Windsor, New York’s law allowed same-sex couples to obtain marriage licenses.

“Thus, the ‘dignity’ was conferred by the state’s own choice, a choice that was ‘without doubt a proper exercise of its sovereign authority within our federal system, all in the way that the Framers of the Constitution intended.’”

The Alabama court thus asked: Why, if New York could make that choice, would Alabama be deprived of exactly the same choice?

“The problem with DOMA was that it interfered with New York’s ‘sovereign’ choice,” the Alabama court said. “Alabama ‘used its historic and essential authority to define the marital relations’ and made a different ‘sovereign’ choice than New York. If New York was free to make that choice, it would seem inconsistent to say that Alabama is not free to make its own choice, especially given that ‘the recognition of civil marriages is central to state domestic relations law applicable to its residents and citizens.’”

California Supreme Court Justice Marvin Baxter warned of the fallout from approving same-sex marriage in 2008.

Baxter said the court’s decision to overturn a “deep-rooted” standard for marriage opened a Pandora’s box.

“Who can say that, in 10, 15 or 20 years, an activist court might not rely on the majority’s analysis to conclude, on the basis of a perceived evolution in community values, that the laws prohibiting polygamous and incestuous marriages were no longer constitutionally justified?”

At stake in marriage case: All sexual boundaries
Bob Unruh
Tue, 14 Apr 2015 00:09:56 GMT

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Obama breaks vow to recognize Armenian genocide

 

President Obama

President Obama has broken another campaign promise by refusing to recognize the Armenian Genocide carried out by the Ottoman Turks in 1915.

Experts say it’s just the latest example of the president bowing to  pressure from Islamic nations.

Lawmakers from both parties have called on Obama to fulfill his campaign pledge by attending a memorial in the Armenian capital of Yerevan April 24. The president has not responded.

While campaigning for president in 2008, Obama stated that “as president I will recognize the Armenian Genocide.”

Furthermore, he claimed: “America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian Genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides. I intend to be that president.”

But since taking office, Obama has consistently refused to use the word “genocide” to describe the attempted extermination of the Armenians.

David Kupelian’s powerful retelling of his grandmother’s personal account of the Armenian genocide anchors Whistleblower magazine’s April issue, “Persecution Rising,” which shows how today’s treatment of Christians worldwide is disturbingly reminiscent of the brutal persecution of the early followers of Jesus.

Bestselling author and human rights activist Joel Richardson, author of ”The Islamic Antichrist: The Shocking Truth about the Real Nature of the Beast” and director of the explosive documentary “End Times Eyewitness: Israel, Islam, and the Unfolding Signs of the Messiah’s Return,” said the controversy amounts to cowardice in the face of growing Turkish militarism.

In an interview with WND, Richardson said the “refusal to openly acknowledge the well-established historical fact of the Armenian Genocide carried out by the Turks is a profound dereliction of our duty as humans, and a great dishonor to the millions of lives lost.”

Pope Francis infuriated Turkey Sunday by terming the slaughter 100 years ago of up to 1.5 million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire “the first genocide of the 20th century.”

The outraged Turkish government of Racep Tayyip Erdoğan immediately recalled its ambassador and accused the pontiff of fueling “hatred.”

The comments by Francis were delivered during a Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica commemorating what Armenians call “Metz Yegherr,” or the “Great Evil.”

The pope interpreted the “massacre” of the Armenian people in Christian terms, proclaiming “many innocent people died as confessors and martyrs for the name of Christ.”

Francis also paid tribute to the “Christian identity” of Armenia and observed the country  was the “first among nations in the course of the centuries to embrace the Gospel of Christ.”

The Mass, which also celebrated the recognition of Armenian Saint Gregory of Narek as a “doctor of the church,” was widely attended by Armenian church leaders as well as Armenian President Serge Sarkisian.

Sarkisian hailed the pope’s comments and told the Associated Press, “The words of the leader of a church with 1 billion followers cannot but have a strong impact.”

Swift response

The Turkish government reacted swiftly by recalling its ambassador to the Holy See. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu condemned the pope’s statements as “out of touch with both historical facts and legal basis” and “unacceptable.” He also charged the pope with fueling “hatred and animosity” through “unfounded allegations.”

But WND Managing Editor David Kupelian, who lost many family members in the Armenian Genocide, says the pope is “obviously correct in insisting that the systematic, purposeful extermination of over a million Christian Armenians by the Turks during the last century was a ‘genocide.’”

“Unlike post-WWII Germany, which fully acknowledged and took responsibility for Hitler’s Holocaust, the government of Turkey to this day, after 100 years, still denies any genocide ever took place,” Kupelian observed. “This despite thousands of eyewitness accounts, despite the over 24,000 documents compiled from the U.S. National Archives of State Department records from 1910 to 1929 detailing the extermination of the Armenians, and despite the New York Times’ over 194 articles from 1913 through 1922 outlining the hideous manner in which Armenians died in Turkey.”

He also pointed out the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916, Henry Morgenthau, tried desperately to stop the slaughter.

Morgenthau stated in his published memoirs: “I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this.”

Pastor Carl Gallups, author of the theological bestseller “Final Warning: Understanding the Trumpet Days of Revelation,” said the pope’s comments were hardly shocking considering Francis’s own history.

When he was cardinal in his homeland of Argentina, then Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio declared the deaths of the Armenians slaughtered by the Ottoman Empire in 1915 as the “gravest crime of Ottoman Turkey,” Gallups noted.

And Argentina is the home of a significant number of Armenians whose ancestors fled the Ottoman Empire just after World War I.

Gallups also noted Pope John Paul II made the same declaration in 2001 and Pope Francis has made similar statements before.

“Pope Francis stands squarely on the side of the historical facts in this case. The Armenian genocide is considered by historical scholars to be the first genocide of the 20th Century. It has been dubbed the second most studied case of mass extermination after the Holocaust.”

The Ottoman Empire’s extermination of “a 100-year-old Christian community in the region” is clearly genocide, Gallups said, “regardless of the Muslim dominated and politically correct narrative of the current Turkish leadership.”

‘Dangerous’ Turkey

Richardson also praised the pope’s courage in the face of what he called the increasingly dangerous Turkish leadership.

“While I am no fan of this particular pope, the world should be grateful that he has had the courage to make clear statements where President Obama and so many others have caved to fear and pressure from the increasingly bullying tactics of the Turkish government,” Richardson said.

“Turkey is increasingly becoming one of the most overt dictatorships in the earth. Very little of the world has awakened to the threat of the radical nationalism in Turkey led by President Erdoğan.”

Richardson said the West “must remember that the concept of confession and admission of guilt is largely a foreign concept within Islam.”

“Islamic practice has no such thing as the public confession of guilt,” he said. “In the West, even liberals who have no real appreciation for the Judeo-Christian foundations of Western culture recognize the importance of acknowledging guilt in the process of moving forward in order to avoid repeating the great sins of the past. But where there is no admission of guilt, we are most often doomed to repeat the sins of the past.”

He said the fact that Erdogan “is so profoundly angered by the simple acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide is a profoundly dangerous and portentous statement concerning what he is capable of carrying out in the future.”

“This is a man who is not afraid of throwing childlike temper tantrums in public and on the world stage. And when children throw temper tantrums, it is important that the adults of the world do not cave in to the manipulative pressure,” Richardson said.

“Now is the moment for the world to stand firm against the manipulative bullying tactics of the Turkish president. In the days ahead, we will see which nations in the world leaders are responsible adults, and who are the enablers.”

Obama breaks vow to recognize Armenian genocide
-NO AUTHOR-
Tue, 14 Apr 2015 01:22:57 GMT

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Iran nuke deal parallels Bill Clinton's failed N. Korea strategy

 

WASHINGTON – Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, goes the time-honored saying.

That wisdom does not bode well for President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

In 1994, President Clinton said the framework of a deal reached with North Korea would lead to the end of that country’s nuclear program.

12 years later, North Korea exploded a nuclear device in an underground test.

On April 2, 2015, President Obama said his framework of a deal reached with Iran meant the country would never develop a nuclear weapon.

Less than a week later, Obama admitted that, under his deal, virtually nothing could stop Iran from getting the bomb after 12 years.

Nevertheless, both presidents expressed great optimism and confidence in their respective deals.

Former CIA Director James Woolsey

In fact, their words were so similar, it was “remarkable” according to someone who should know: James Woolsey was Clinton’s CIA director in 1994, when the U.S. struck the framework deal with North Korea.

Woolsey’s participation in Clinton’s deal only consisted of providing his national security council with the intelligence community’s assessment of North Korea’s capabilities.

“But that’s it. We had no part in policy making,” Woolsey told WND, confirming that he was not asked to assess the likelihood North Korea would abide by the deal.

WND showed Woolsey a series of quotes from presidents Clinton and Obama regarding their respective nuclear deals, and asked if the similarities seemed striking?

“It’s uncanny,” was his succinct summation.

“The verbiage is virtually identical,” said the former top spy, adding, “Your quotations sets are really quite remarkable.”

He also wryly observed, “The Obama administration folks could have saved some ink and paper by just taking the Clinton administration statements and blotting out ‘North Korea’ and inserting ‘Iran.’”

Here is a side-by-side comparison of what Clinton and Obama (in the Rose Garden and to the New York Times) said about their respective deals:

Clinton: This agreement will help to achieve a longstanding and vital American objective: an end to the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean Peninsula.
Obama: …Iran will never be permitted to develop a nuclear weapon.

Clinton: It does not rely on trust.
Obama: So this deal is not based on trust, it’s based on unprecedented verification.

Clinton: Compliance will be certified by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Obama: …what we’re going to be doing is setting up a mechanism whereby, yes, I.A.E.A. (International Atomic Energy Agency) inspectors can go anyplace.

Clinton: Under the agreement, North Korea has agreed to freeze its existing nuclear program and to accept international inspection of all existing facilities.
Obama: …a deal to stop the progress of Iran’s nuclear program and roll it back in key areas.

Clinton: This agreement represents the first step on the road to a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.
Obama: This framework would cut off every pathway that Iran could take to develop a nuclear weapon.

Clinton: …we have completed an agreement that will make the United States, the Korean Peninsula, and the world safer.
Obama: …if this framework leads to a final, comprehensive deal, it will make our country, our allies, and our world safer.

Clinton: The United States and North Korea have also agreed to ease trade restrictions and to move toward establishing liaison offices in each other’s capitals.
Obama: In return for Iran’s actions, the international community has agreed to provide Iran with relief from certain sanctions — our own sanctions, and international sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council.

Clinton: These offices will ease North Korea’s isolation.
Obama: …if Iran complies with its international obligations, then it can fully rejoin the community of nations…

Clinton: This agreement is good for the United States, good for our allies, and good for the safety of the entire world.
Obama: And it is a good deal, a deal that meets our core objectives … we are more likely to be safe, more likely to be secure, in a better position to protect our allies.

Clinton: It’s a crucial step toward drawing North Korea into the global community.
Obama: …there was an appetite among the Iranian people for a rejoining with the international community.

Clinton: And the United States has an unshakable commitment to protect our ally and our fellow democracy South Korea.
Obama: …a very clear message to the Iranians and to the entire region that if anybody messes with Israel, America will be there.

Clinton: We will continue to work closely with our allies and with the Congress as our relationship with North Korea develops.
Obama: But I say that hoping that we can conclude this diplomatic arrangement — and that it ushers a new era in U.S.-Iranian relations — and, just as importantly, over time, a new era in Iranian relations with its neighbors.

Given how the North Korea deal failed, WND asked Woolsey, did he think that portended badly for the Obama deal?

“Absolutely. I think Obama is not only making the same mistakes, but the same mistakes using the same words.”

So, if a deal with Iran would be unlikely to be any more successful than the deal with North Korea, did Woolsey see any option other than a military solution to keep Iran from getting the bomb?

“Not that I can think of,” was the chillingly concise response.

Would this administration attack Iran if it got the bomb?

“I’d be very surprised. They’d probably ask for an international conference.”

What are the worst of the Clinton mistakes that Obama is repeating?

• “Believing that the inspection system from the I.E.A.E. is actually going to shut down the program, in the one case, North Korea, and in the other, Iran.”

• “Basically, believing that easing the trade restrictions, in the Clinton case, and the sanctions, in the Obama case, is going to produce the behavior you want.”

• “Believing that easing up on the isolation of North Korea and Iran is going to create a spirit of community among the nations.”

The nation’s former top spy noted how both presidents vowed to protect U.S. allies, South Korea and Israel.

However, “In both cases, I think the allies would be well-advised to be extremely cautious and to make sure they’re going to be able to protect themselves. It’s not just that the (statements) are parallel; North Korea and Iran are best buddies and they work together.”

He described how that cooperation makes the danger even greater because it puts Iran on the path to acquiring the means to destroy the United States in a way that would be virtually undetectable and relatively easy to accomplish.

Woolsey said one of the reasons the North Koreans have both nuclear capability and long-range missiles is because of the cooperative efforts of their scientists and technical people with their counterparts in Iran. They visit one another’s test sites and attend one another’s launches.

“So, contrary to the predictions of the Clinton administration, North Korea has nukes as well as long-range missiles.”

“That means,” he explained, “they could launch into orbit a small nuclear weapon and detonate it over the United States and create an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that would take out our electric grid.”

“You don’t need to have a lot of nuclear weapons, or large ones, to do that. You need one small one. And you don’t have to have accuracy because you are not shooting at anything on the ground. You’re just detonating somewhere above the middle of the country.”

Those observations led to a shocking conclusion: The very survival of America is at risk.

“Iran will, I think, within a very few years, be able to, essentially, do the same thing: knock out the infrastructure of the United States with a single nuclear blast above the center of the country.”

Knocking out that infrastructure would spell the end of America.

Woolsey wrote in the Wall Street Journal in August of a study by a congressional commission in 2008 that concluded such an EMP attack would kill up to 90 percent of the U.S. population within a year, due to starvation, disease and societal breakdown.

Iran may soon have the means, but, perhaps even more ominously, it also appears to have the motive to inflict such a disaster.

Most analysts believe North Korea obtained nuclear weapons to ensure the survival of the economically dysfunctional, totalitarian state. Nuclear weapons became a way to defend the regime.

Iran has openly and repeatedly stated it has a very different objective: Death to America.

Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,  called for “death to America” just one day after Obama called upon Iran to accept a deal and just three weeks before he announced an agreement had been struck.

Many analysts believe deterrence, the threat of annihilation if a nuclear attack were launched, will not work against Iran because of its leaders’ religious convictions that destroying America is a holy duty more important than it’s nation’s own survival.

However, Woolsey painted an all-too-plausible scenario in which Iran would not even have to risk its survival to destroy America.

He began by describing how North Korea already has the ability to do that now.

Woolsey first referred to an article written in the Wall Street Journal in 2006 by former Defense Secretary William Perry (who served under Clinton from 1994-to-1997) and current Defense Secretary Ashton Carter that said, even back then, the risk of North Korea launching an effective attack was so great that the only secure defense was to put submarines off the coast and shoot down anything that might be launched from North Korea.

“Now, that was not some crazed person from the radical right, that was Bill Perry and Ash Carter. And they thought, almost a decade ago, that was the only way to keep the North Koreans from being able to launch a nuclear weapon.”

Furthermore, the key problem in defending against an EMP attack, as Woolsey described it, is that the launch of a nuclear warhead into orbit could easily be disguised as the launch of an ordinary satellite into orbit.

Consequently, “Anybody who talks about mutual assured destruction or deterrence with respect to EMP doesn’t know that he’s talking about.”

“That’s because en EMP launch would require just putting a single satellite into a low earth orbit. There are lots of satellites in low earth orbit. People launch them for all sorts of reasons. Surveillance, weather, etcetera …”

“If you launch a single satellite into low earth orbit, and you are the North Koreans or the Iranians, all you have to do is sit there with your finger on the trigger and wait until it passes somewhere above the center of the U.S. and detonate it,” emphasized Woolsey. “It doesn’t have to be accurate at all.”

And that single, small, unsophisticated warhead could throw America back into a virtual dark age, for those few who would survive.

“If the electricity infrastructure goes, we’re not back in the pre-internet 1980′s, we are back in the pre-electricity 1880′s. And very few of us have enough hand water pumps and plow horses to live in the 19th century.”

One would never know a satellite had a nuclear payload, and once it was launched, it would be too late to stop it.

“It’s up there with all the other satellites and you don’t know which is which. You can’t shoot down everybody’s satellites. Once you lose track of it after its launched it could be largely anonymous. And if its anonymous, deterrence doesn’t work.”

And even if the U.S. were to know one had been launched, Woolsey said, the North Koreans or Iranians would simply lie.

Iran has already launched four satellites into orbit, first in 2009 and most recently in February.

Woolsey absolutely shocked a panel of MSNBC journalists recently when he described the danger posed by both Iran and an EMP attack.

The former CIA chief characterized Iran’s danger to the world as, “Sort of like Germany’s in 1934 or 1935.” He said they were doing everything they could to spread their empire, controlling the capitals of four neighboring states.

“They are working hard, I think, on a nuclear weapon. And I think if we have a deal with them of the sort that’s been described, they’ll have one within a year, or so.”

Woolsey told the reporters he has spoken with several senior members of the executive branch about the threat posed by an EMP attack, “And you get a deer in the headlights look, they really don’t want to be bothered.”

WND asked Woolsey if the administration is in denial?

“They appear to not to want to listen. It’s an inconvenient truth, to borrow from Al Gore on global warming. It’s something they really don’t want to have to deal with because it disrupts the narrative.”

What narrative?

“They start with a narrative that is ‘We’ve won the war on terror and we are going to constrain rogue states such as North Korea and Iran by international sanctions, agreements and inspections.’ And that’s their story and they’re sticking to it.”

He said it also violates their narrative for them to admit that “we are very much in danger from North Korea now and will be from Iran very soon. I don’t know whether it will be months or years, but, if years, just a few.”

“And, at that point, they would be able to destroy the U.S. infrastructure with one nuclear weapon.”

Israeli Air Force jets

Did he think, in their zeal for a deal, the administration was blindly putting politics above the security of the U.S. and exposing it to a clear and present danger?

“I don’t know whether it’s inattention or whether they have some argument that this is not, in fact, a danger. If there is such an argument, they have not made it.”

What should Israel do?

“Keep its powder dry. It may be the only hope anybody has to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon. The United States is not going to do it successfully in this administration. If the Iranians get far enough along, then, basically, it may well be that Israel is the world’s only hope.”

The nation’s former top spy said it looked doubtful that the U.S was committed to keeping the Mideast “as a largely nuclear-free area,” because, “once Iran gets even really close to a nuke, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey are not going to be far behind.”

For those reasons, Middle East analyst and deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick, now sees war as inevitable. Did he agree?

“Caroline has been right an awful lot of the time, and I’m tempted to be very sympathetic to that. My only real answer is from some of the last lines of Carl Sandburg’s poem, “The People, Yes.”

It is an optimistic lament of a work in which the poet predicts, “The learning and blundering people will live on.”

Woolsey quoted Sandburg, “Man is a long time coming. Man will yet win. Brother may yet line up with brother: This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.”

The seasoned spy wistfully concluded by observing, “So, I hope Sandburg is right and Caroline is wrong but I’m afraid she’s got an awful lot going for her in making that prediction.”

Follow Garth Kant @DCgarth

Iran nuke deal parallels Bill Clinton's failed N. Korea strategy
Garth Kant
Mon, 13 Apr 2015 23:46:14 GMT

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