Quick Takes: Some outrages, some triumphs, including links to read over the weekend!

1) Abby Johnson (former Planned Parenthood director, now pro-life activist) posted this on her facebook a few days back, and it left me as stunned as she was:

This is ABSURD!! I just received this response from the American Cancer Society when I messaged them about their donations to Planned Parenthood. 

"The grants given to Planned Parenthood had the potential to do much good as Planned Parenthood delivers more children than any other medical practice in the U.S." 

WHAT??? Planned Parenthood "delivers" children??? REALLY??
Please let the American Cancer Society know the truth. Planned Parenthood delivers NO babies...they are only in the business of killing them.

I just can't believe that any Americans actually think that Planned Parenthood delivers babies, much less that a respected organization like the American Cancer Society would believe it! How can this be? This is the kind of ignorance we are up against.

2) But wait! There is even more insanity. I received an email on Tuesday from CatholicVote.org. Here's an excerpt:

Moments ago the ACLU decided to jump into our lawsuit challenging the HHS mandate on behalf of a private Catholic business owner in St. Louis. Not surprisingly, they are defending Secretary Sebelius and her attack on religious freedom…

The ACLU is arguing that any business owner that opposes the HHS mandate is no different than a racist shop owner that refused to serve African Americans in the past! 

You read that correctly. If you refuse to provide unlimited birth control, sterilizations, and abortion drugs -- for free -- you are a modern day segregationist! 

In their brief filed with the court, the ACLU argues that providing free birth control and abortion drugs are necessary to allow women to fully participate in society. They conveniently don't mention that these drugs and medicines are already widely available at virtually every drugstore in America. But that's not enough. We must be forced to pay for them too!

Now, this shouldn't surprise me, as I've written previously about the ACLU's anti-Christian agenda, but it's still hard to take.

3) However! There is good news, and it comes in the form of JoAnna's post in response to the ACLU's news that women can't fully participate in society unless they are neutered and/or made to be like men. I think the title speaks for itself (some of us are getting a little ticked off), and the body of the post will make strong women everywhere cheer:

Screw You, ACLU 

Now, that's what it means to hear women roar!


4) Two blog posts from Marc Barnes at Bad Catholic caught my attention recently. The first, called In Defense of Things, has some thoughts in response to a New Age group offering an "ever-evolving" religion:

What then, is an ever-evolving religion? An ever-evolving religion, taken at its word, is a series of beliefs forever changing into other beliefs. Now I may be wrong here, but I’ll nevertheless stake my claim: A belief forever changing negates itself. One cannot hold an ever-changing conviction that something is true, or else it is by definition not conviction. It is a non-Thing.

As a fan of things, I recommend the rest, here.

But one of the bests posts I've read in a long time is this one:

A Sword for Theists

Why do I love it? Because it's an excellent treatment of the "Beauty" part of this "Truth, Goodness and Beauty" thing I'm always touting. I tend to put emphasis on the True and the Good, but I am not so eloquent when it comes to a discussion of the Beautiful. Marc Barnes blew it out of the water. An excerpt:

And so we arrive at an oddity. Man is a creature who — considered materially – receives everything — all experience, knowledge, wisdom, understanding, poetry and metaphor – from the natural world. Yet he gazes on a crafted piece of marble and experiences a thing which has utterly no place within the natural world. He experiences infinity. 

He experiences infinity as such an integral and obvious fact that he can turn to another human and say: “This marble is priceless” and that human will understand and agree — the marble has a quality that no number, no amount of money or transaction of goods could reach. It’s so obvious and innate that a blogger can sit here and run his mouth about the very same infinity, and his readers will understand him, despite having no natural frame of reference.  

Oh, please. Do yourself a favor and go read the rest, here.

5) Okay, I know I've given you a lot of links to read. I apologize. But there is another, and it's important. This man's voice deserves to be heard. We hear so much from those who would have us wave the white flag of surrender (via force and bullying) regarding the good of true marriage, but voices like the very courageous Robert Oscar Lopez:

Growing Up With Two Moms: The Untold Children's View

Many have dismissed my story with four simple words: “But you are conservative.” Yes, I am. How did I get that way? I moved to the right wing because I lived in precisely the kind of anti-normative, marginalized, and oppressed identity environment that the left celebrates: I am a bisexual Latino intellectual, raised by a lesbian, who experienced poverty in the Bronx as a young adult. I’m perceptive enough to notice that liberal social policies don’t actually help people in those conditions.

Lopez not only tells his own sad story, but he addresses the left's outrage (and campaign of career ruination) that came upon researcher Mark Regnerus for his recent study which shows less than favorable outcomes for children raised in gay households.


6) Okay, I have run across statements that have made me scratch my head, but this one has me baffled. On a recent facebook exchange, a liberal woman and I were debating the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses. I made the case that in the Founders' minds, "churches were to be protected from the state, not the other way around."

Her response:

lol. I agree, that was the idea...who knew we'd be where we are today where the state needs protecting from the churches! ;)

Okay, can anyone help me out? The state has the power to fine, tax, ruin, arrest, imprison, and even execute. It has the armed forces, the police forces, the IRS and the FBI, the HHS and Department of Homeland Security, plus a number of other agencies that can persecute, oppress and destroy churches and their ministries, believers and their businesses. The state can force compliance of any mandate on whim, and it can print as much money as it needs to keep it all going.

Churches have…. Preachers? Priests? Nuns? Sacraments? Bibles and catechisms? Soup kitchens, homeless shelters, hospitals, schools and universities? Online petitions? Blog posts and email alerts? Or maybe the scariest weapon of all (outside of Christ Himself!)… voters?

But seriously, folks, "the state needs protecting from the churches"??? Can someone help me make sense of that statement? I know she's not the only American to hold this view.


7) Let's find homes for some orphans!!! Two beautiful new faces to show you today, and then some fun news at the end.

First, take a look at sweet Yana, who is just one year old, and who has Down Syndrome with no medical complications! I want to eat her up!!

Click photo for more information on Baby Girl!!

And, oh my, look at Konner, an adorable three-year-old with spina bifida (who has had surgical corrections). Wouldn't he make someone a wonderful son? Look at that smile!

Click my photo for more information!

Both Yana and Konner are available to single moms, by the way! Please share their photos, and help us find their families!


Two more exciting things on the orphan front:

1) Oliver, my sweet, precious Oliver, has a $2,000 matching grant offered by an incredible family (mom, dad and baby boy) who have dwarfism, like Oliver does. They will match every single dollar donated to Oliver's adoption fund through August 19! Please check out their blog to learn more, here. Remember, a family is more likely to step up and adopt if they feel they have some financial ability to see it through, and Oliver needs out of that orphanage badly. It's not a good situation he's in….

2) Soooooooo excited about the Auction to Save Yulia and Elaine that has been running on facebook this week! Our own Meg has hosted it, and if you are lucky, you can own my childhood glass kitty set, or buy some of the cutest sealed and hand-painted Halloween gourds/ghosts you've ever seen. Over 80 quality items, most going for a steal, and it all ends on Sunday! Get going!!

This is Booy'all; one of a kind! More listed, all different

Children's mass kit!

A football rosary that you can custom make in the colors of your team, a 100% pashmina cashmere scarf going for half its value right now, and custom made (and shipped) Star Wars or Lego cookies, among many other fun items and treasures!

I'd put up all the pictures, but my typing hands are tired.



Thanks to Jen, for hosting!!

Christians: The ACLU is not your friend

When I read this beyond-the-pale story yesterday*, which (yet again) exposes the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for the anti-Christian organization that it is, I remembered a conversation I had a while back with an atheist reader of the Bubble, MaiZeke.

MaiZeke made the following claim:

The ACLU fights for the rights of Christians, Muslims, and the non-religious to practice their religious beliefs (or lack of religious beliefs in the case of the non-religious).

I took issue with the statement, and MaiZeke responded with links to a few cases or letters of Christians being defended by the ACLU.

I subsequently contacted family friend Alan Sears, who happens to be the head of the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF). The ADF and its attorneys boldly take on the ACLU every day, and are intimately familiar with the organization's history, philosophy and tactics. In addition to running ADF, Alan literally co-wrote the book on the ACLU's attacks on our nation's Judeo-Christian roots, The ACLU vs. America:

I told Alan of my exchange with MaiZeke and sent him her link. He promptly responded with the following:

The ACLU has a long history of providing token defense to Christians in carefully selected cases in order to advance its radical agenda. ACLU founder Roger Baldwin laid out this strategy in 1934 when he said, “If I aid the reactionaries {i.e. Christians and conservatives} to get free speech now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight against censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties.”

The bottom line: The ACLU generally only defends Christians when it serves their greater agenda, and often the cases they take on are “easy” ones that will not set any lasting legal precedent that will benefit Christians. However, there are numerous examples where the ACLU has been on the forefront of silencing, or attempting to silence, Christians.

In 2006, Jeremy Gunn, the ACLU’s “Director of Religion and Belief,” said that military chaplains who share their faith with soldiers, “should find another career.”

In 2003, the ACLU of Iowa tried to intimidate the small Iowa town of Tipton, to stop its yearly tradition of a nativity scene on a courthouse lawn. In the letter, the ACLU “kindly” agreed to assist the city on how it could “choose a constitutionally appropriate way to celebrate the Solstice Season.”

The ACLU has waged a systematic “war on the cross”, demanding that cross memorials to fallen military veterans -- such as Mt. Soledad in San Diego and the Mojave Desert Cross -- be taken down.

The ACLU has time and time again filed lawsuits against Christians who are simply trying to live out their faith:

In New Jersey, the ACLU is backing same-sex couples in a civil rights complaint against the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association of the United Methodist Church -- in order to force the ministry to open up its worship pavilion for same-sex “civil union” ceremonies in direct opposition to the association’s stated beliefs. 

In Kentucky, the ACLU took on a Baptist adoption ministry that works with the commonwealth to place children in loving two-parent homes, and backed a former ministry employee who had "come out” as a lesbian. The Baptist ministry's offense? Requiring its employees to adhere to Baptist beliefs regarding human sexuality. In its lawsuit, which has been unsuccessful thus far, the ACLU has tried to force the adoption ministry to either compromise its core beliefs or lose the funding it has received from the government to assist with adoptions.

It was the ACLU, in a friend-of-the-court Supreme Court brief filed in Everson v. Board of Education (1947) that came up with the distortion that the words “separation of church and state” appear in the U.S. Constitution. (They don’t.) Associate Justice Hugo Black picked up that phrase in the minority opinion, and the ACLU was off and running ever since, to use what the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6^th Circuit has called a “non-Constitutional construct” to engage in a war of fear, intimidation, and disinformation meant to bully public officials into silencing any religious expression in the public square – and in particular Christian religious expression. As a result, the ACLU participated in case after case at the United States Supreme Court that eventually outlawed school prayer, moments of silence, and eventually non-sectarian prayers by ministers and rabbis before public high school graduation ceremonies.

When school officials in Louisiana allowed a prayer before an awards banquet, the then-head of the ACLU of Louisiana compared praying Christians to Islamic terrorists, and demanded they be put in jail so they could be “removed from society.”

With regard to peaceful pro-life advocates at abortion clinics, the ACLU has not only attempted to strip them of the constitutionally-protected right to free speech, but some ACLU members have advocated using RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) laws – which were intended to financially cripple organized crime by tripling court awards – to bankrupt those who simply want exercise their freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

The ACLU’s assaults on Christianity in the public square go on and on, and are too countless to post in a forum such as this. One thing does become clear: The ACLU is the number one religious censor in America today.

One need only go back to the news article linked in my first line to have firm evidence of that.

The ACLU is a friend of Christians? You know what they say: "With friends like these, who needs enemies?"

Christians, don't be fooled.

*Unfortunate resolution to the story, here.

___