The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber put the state constitutional amendment that’s up for a vote Tuesday, in the perspective it should be with Christian voters. Rev. Barber, pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina said this a day before North Carolina voters go to the polls to vote on a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in the state:
“Our message is consistent: A vote on the same-sex marriage amendment has nothing to do with your personal and religious opinion on same-sex marriage but everything to do with whether or not you believe discrimination should be codified and legalized constitutionally. We should never seek to codify and vote discrimination, hate and division into the very heart and framework of our Constitution.”
Traditionally, black churches have been strong supporters of constitutional bans to block gay marriage. This is understandable as most African-American Christians are firmly fundamentalist when it comes to Biblical principles, but those same people are also very much for equal rights for all and this is the reasoning that Rev. Barber expressed. The good reverend went on to explain:
“The real insult to the Civil Rights Movement is that the same regressive, ultra-conservative Tea Party type folks suing to overturn the 1965 Voting Rights Act, re-segregating and robbing our public schools of valuable resources, blocking workers’ rights to organize, trying to force us all to get photo ID’s to exercise our right to vote and cut back on the time and opportunities to vote, and attempting to repeal the Racial Justice Act, now somehow think the sons and daughters of the Civil Rights Movement cannot see through their Trojan Horse trick.” read more…
Vice President Joe Biden recently made a comment on NBC’s Meet
the Press affirming his support for marriage equality. “I am absolutely
comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying
women and heterosexual men and women marrying one another are
entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties,”
Biden said. This new discussion forces one to look at the President, look
at his supporters, and ask the question: Why, again, do you support the
President?
One would think this issue would have been brought up during the repeal
of DADT but it wasn’t. To be fair, the Left put a lot on his plate but the
President has the unilateral power–without the help of the “obstructive”
Congress, as the Left puts it, to perform his sought after duties.
A former Neo-Nazi Jason Todd Ready, known as JT, allegedly murdered four people, including a female toddler before killing himself. JT Ready belonged to a group called the U.S. Border Guard. This group patrolled the border we have with Mexico, looking for illegal immigrants trying to cross the border.
Mr. Ready had some violent criminal offenses from his past but nothing that would indicate he could commit such heinous killings. But, it was well known that JT was a white-supremacist, being a member of the National Socialist and a proud member at that.
The very name “U.S. Border Guard” would imply it is part of the United States Government. The civilians who make up that group dress in camouflaged uniforms and carried weapons, which would make anyone who wasn’t familiar with the group, actually believe they were part of the U.S. Border Patrol.
It may be true that our federal government is not doing enough to secure the borders but I do know that since the Obama Administration has been in office, enforcement of immigration laws has been stepped up extensively. I think most Americans would agree that if anyone is going to patrol our borders, they should be law enforcement officers and not vigilantes. read more…
Conservatives don’t seem to understand that a lot of Americans don’t really care about being rich. In fact, some of us mature to the point of understanding that if we were given too much wealth, it might change us and make us into something we don’t want to be.
So instead, many Americans just decide that the best for us is to have our simple dreams; have enough money to secure our families a decent middle-class life; enough money to send all our kids to college; enough money to go on a vacation occasionally; enough money to afford good health insurance for our families; and a decent retirement nest egg so that we can live comfortably in our twilight years.
And, it’s okay with us simple folk that some want to be wealthy and that’s their dream and ambition. What isn’t okay is when some don’t only want to be wealthy and enjoy having everything they could have, but they want it all. When I say all, I mean every penny and every single dollar they can get their hands on. If that means leaving a majority of Americans struggling to pay their bills and millions living in poverty, there are some who just don’t seem to care. read more…
For most of the Americans who are old enough to well remember 9/11, which means most of us because it’s only been less than eleven years, we know the kind of pain, sadness and especially anger that we felt after those planes crashed into buildings and killed so many Americans. We also know the exhilaration we felt when we discovered that a Navy SEAL team took Osama bin Laden out.
Osama bin Laden’s death was one of those rare moments that we were all Americans and it didn’t matter if you were Republican or Democrat, rich or poor, black, white, Hispanic or even Muslim; we were all overjoyed that the man who had masterminded the attacks on 9/11 was dead, except maybe those who agreed with the machinations of an evil man.
First, I will make it clear that I am an opponent of the death penalty. The reason is because I believe that only God should be the only one to take a life. But, I also understand that through this world’s history, there have been evil men that represented such a great danger to so many lives that it called for a divine justice given by the hand of those it has so greatly harmed and most importantly to end the evil before it has a chance to strikes out again. read more…
George W. Bush was arrogant. He loved to brag and brag big – flying to an aircraft carrier to deliver a speech under a banner declaring “Mission Accomplished” a few months after the beginning of the war in Iraq, claiming victory for a war that would take several years to complete, and then by another president.
President Obama ordered and oversaw the attack on Osama bin Laden that ended in his death, even though some in his cabinet, including Vice President Biden advised against it. It was a huge success.
Here we are, one year later from the anniversary of that successful mission and Republicans are outraged that President Obama dared to brag about, or otherwise they’re saying without actually mouthing the words; who does he think he is; a Republican?
I have this habit every time a Republican slams Obama for one thing or the other, I say to myself; who does Obama think he is; a Republican? I of course, say this in the most sarcastic way. read more…
Pastor Sean Harris of Berean Baptist Church in Fayetteville, N.C. is no kind of shepherd at all. A pastor to me has always been someone to turn to for spiritual guidance; someone who has the ear of God and speaks for God. For a pastor to tell his congregation that if their young boys show any signs of effeminacy, they should just “punch” them. If I had been in that congregation at the time, I would have gotten up and headed out the door, but probably not before I turned on the man and told him what I thought about him as a supposedly man of God, right in front of his congregation. I’m also certain I would need to speak quickly before the ushers got to me to force me out the door.
Being a gay man and one who was raised in a denomination well-known for its hellfire and damnation rhetoric – Pentecostal – I well know the kind of damage that kind of talk can do to the psych of a young gay teen boy who is just discovering their sexuality and trying to hide it from their family and friends while they sought God to deliver them from those terrible feelings they’re having.
Here’s an excerpt from his sermon:
“So your little son starts to act a little girlish when he is four years old and instead of squashing that like a cockroach and saying, ‘Man up, son, get that dress off you and get outside and dig a ditch, because that is what boys do,’ you get out the camera and you start taking pictures of Johnny acting like a female and then you upload it to YouTube and everybody laughs about it and the next thing you know, this dude, this kid is acting out childhood fantasies that should have been squashed. read more…
I’m glad we have a president who has his eyes wide open and is intelligent enough to figure out what we need when it comes to security. If our nation was left in the hands of Republicans, they would have us fighting a war in every country they found to be a threat and many more of our young men and women in uniform would be paying the ultimate price with their lives. Along with that, our nation’s treasure would be depleted even more.
We’ve all heard Republicans criticize this president over everything, even foreign policy, always talking about how they would do it differently and how much safer we would be under their watch. The problem with that scenario is that they’ve never proven it to be true. Instead, they only seem to know how to start wars and hand out huge tax cuts for the wealthy on top of the wars they start. Then in the end game, they blame a Democratic president for all our troubles. That’s like the bad kid on the block does something bad like trash someone’s flower garden and then blames it on the good kid who helped plant the garden in the first place.
Obama is a man of action and a man of his word. He said he’d go after Osama bin Laden even if he had to cross over into Pakistan to do it. The Republican nominee, Mitt Romney criticized him for saying that and claimed that he wouldn’t cross over into Pakistan’s sovereign territory like that. His story is different now of course, as he claims he would have done the same thing President Obama did by sending in a special operation to take out Osama bin Laden into Pakistan, which is saying that Obama doesn’t deserve any credit for what any president would have done. read more…
Hypocrisy is running rampant in the GOP when Ayn Rand becomes their idle while they’re still trying to proclaim the Christian mantle. Ayn Rand’s vision for the world was about individualism and satisfying oneself over the needs of the many. Her philosophy was what you might say was the exact opposite of Jesus Christ’s philosophy which was about selflessness and compassion for the poor.
To me, the GOP and Ayn Rand belong together – their policies for the last several decades has been anything but Christian when it comes to their views about the poor and the social programs that provide a safety net for those in need. It’s as if suddenly they woke up to the fact of this is who they are; selfish and self-centered and caught up in this dance with the devil.
Case in point is Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan and his budget, Path to Prosperity. Ryan has made it no secret that he looks to Ayn Rand and her philosophy for inspiration – that is until recently. Four years ago he made this statement:
“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” Since then, Rep. Ryan has done an about-face, clearly because of pressure from religious leaders. Recently, the faculty at Georgetown University, the nation’s oldest Catholic university, wrote a letter to the U.S. senator who is Catholic, about his misrepresentation that his budget plan, which cuts social programs for the needy while lowering taxes even more for the wealthy, is based on Christian teachings. Jesuit Father Thomas J. Reese one of the authors of the letter said this concerning Ryan and his budget: read more…
Finally, some of those who represent Christ have stood up to the GOP and Paul Ryan’s budget plan.
A group called “Faith in Public Life” held a press conference to speak out against Republican’s budget plan that provides more tax cuts for millionaires while cutting social programs for the most vulnerable in our society; the poor. They released this statement:
“The sky is falling on poor people in this country. The sky is falling. This time it really is. In the past, when we’ve done deficit reduction — and we’ve done it before — we’ve done poverty reduction at the same time. You can do both together. And every previous attempt there has been a bipartisan agreement to a given, a principle, that poor and low-income people are not the ones to make hurt more when you’re making tough decisions. … They don’t bear the brunt of our fiscal irresponsibility because they didn’t cause it. We did not get into fiscal trouble because of poor people. … The poor didn’t cause this. Let’s not make them pay for it.
What we’re saying in the faith community, across the spectrum, is that a nation is judged — our Bible says — by how we treat the poorest and most vulnerable. Period. That’s what God says to us. That’s God’s instruction to us. To be faithful to God, we have to protect poor people.” read more…
