Last week Pope Benedict moved to welcome traditional Anglicans/Episcopalians into the Roman Catholic Church with their liturgies and episcopates largely intact. Whether the pontiff’s initiative is a genuine reflection of his concern for greater Christian unity or cynical ploy for ‘expanding market share’  when the ‘competition’ is in disarray, it does serve to put in glaring light the abyss, spiritual and temporal, that is the American Episcopal Church (ECUSA). Some would argue that calling New York based ECUSA a ‘church’ is stretching the definition of the word too much.

Indeed, today’s rapidly declining ECUSA is better known for liberal activism on behalf of any number of colorful causes like global poverty, climate change, hate speech legislation, and gay marriage rather than for sublime spirituality or substantive theology.  Leading ECUSA bishops openly question the most basic Christian precepts and creeds. The result has been a heaemmoraghe of members from an organization which, a mere generation ago, was considered the premier church of America counting amongst its congregants any number of Presidents, CEO, chancellors, cabinet members, and theologians. The marriage of the ECUSA with the equally theologically irrelevant ELCA Lutherans some years ago has done nothing to stanch the flow of orthodox Episcopalians and Lutherans to the more substantive branches of their own heritage (or to the various evangelical denominations).

The Pope’s gambit, as one East Coast journalist called it, should serve as another impetus in the continuing task of consolidating the several strands of non-ECUSA Anglicanism in North America which began this summer with the launch of the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA). Seeking ultimately to become a full fledged province of the global Anglican Communion, ACNA is ambitiously bringing together and diligently organizing disparate elements of disaffected ECUSA parishes, Anglo-Catholic and Anglo-Evangelical congregations, and small outposts of reformed Anglicans across Canada and the United States.  It is a gigantic task but a noble one with the ultimate aim of bringing under one umbrella the millions of Christians who devoutly hold to both Biblical precepts and their Anglican heritage as enshrined in the 39 Articles of Faith that have served as the anchor of Anglican Christianity since the sixteenth century.

 I have said this before and I will say it again: victims of crimes are victims of crimes, glaring reminders of a law enforcement system that failed them and utterly deserving of swift justice that a free society can and must provide them. The race, religion, gender, sexual habits, or disability of the victim should be of no concern to the justice system whose task remains the identification, prosecution, and conviction of the perpetrator(s).  We cheapen the horror of a crime and violate the principle of equal justice under the law when we decide that some victims of the same crime are less worthy than others.

By signing the so called ‘hate’ crimes legislation today, President Obama and his radical liberal allies have gone down that very path of creating two sets of victims: the preferred ones and the ordinary ones. On top of that, they have expanded the heavy hand of the federal government both into state jurisdiction and into free speech and free thought. Another proof that liberals are not really friends of, well, liberty.

Liberals and their middle class educated ‘moderate’ cohorts will rejoice today at the so-called Matthew Shepard Act. But no mistake about it, not too far in time from today the basis of that very law will be used to expand federal power to control the actions of groups and individuals with whom liberals sympathize; it will be perhaps a war time Republican president who will find it easy to expand his powers to consider anti-war speech to be a ‘hate’ crime. Moderates and liberals who cheer today will be shedding tears that day; tears that they will very richly deserve.

This despicable law is another effort to raise money from San Francisco donors, muzzle religious speech, and provide federal employment graduates of second class law schools and third class gender studies programs.

The fact that mental health has not been an issue in the otherwise volatile national healthcare debate is to be commended: mental health coverage is included in all the bills and proposals by default. We have come a long way from a mere generation ago when it was almost a taboo topic.

But I fear, we are fast trivializing the health of the mind by making it a fad and pop culture item. Every personal difficulty, communication problem, marital discord, or even mere sadness elicits the same hackneyed response of ‘have you considered counseling’. In the America of today, uniquely amongst industrial nations, the concept of ‘counseling’ is taken to be the psychological equivalent of the wonder drug aspirin. As for counselors, a cursory glance at the myriad of post-nominal letter combinations will tell you that anyone can call herself/himself a counselor.

Therapy Nation, the title of a book from the 1990s, rightly foreshadowed where we were headed with this fad of ‘talking it out and taking Prozac’ spreading from the elites to the masses.

At the risk of sounding nonchalantly unimpressed by fancy titles, let me suggest that being sad at the loss of a pet dog does not require seeking therapy. Nor does it require counseling, whatever that means in today’s water cooler side conversation, when a normal person is having a sad day or two because of an argument or the weather or stress. Newsflash to pop-psychologists: happiness and sadness are regular elements in the regular life of regular folks.

Mental health is a serious matter that manifests itself in manic depression, obsessive compulsiveness, schizophrenia, and several other substantive maladies.  We do no service to those suffering from such ailments by falsely elevating a sad day or a foul mood to the level of ‘mental illness’ needing therapeutic counseling. Please let us have our sad days and let qualified psychiatrists and certified psychologists handle the care of people with real mental health problems. Ignoring mental health problems in the past did us no good; trivializing them today does us no favors either.

 

Today the President met with his national security team about Pakistan, in the aftermath of last week’s passage into law of the Pakistan Aid Act, which commits millions to the Pakistani regime. A brainchild of Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, and Richard Lugar, the law gives the President-who spent time in his childhood and in his youth in Pakistan-broad authority to disburse American taxpayer money to Pakistan to help the country combat terrorism. While some conditions are attached, by and large, they are less severe than in the past, and still allow the President to ignore them citing ‘national interest’. So far, so good.

Except that Pakistan has had a poor history of using American money for noble purposes. Mostly such aid has been used, as successive CBO reports point out, to prop up the domestic priorities, including subsidies to politicians and drug lords, of the men in power. And while Pakistan and its Washington friends talk about using the aid to do important social uplift work, they fail to mention the stark truth about Pakistan’s abiding shame when it comes to doing humanitarian work: for thirty eight years, hundreds of thousands of Pakistan’s own citizens-now well into their third generation-have languished in squalid refugee camps in impoverished Bangladesh while Pakistan squandered billions of American aid dollars. How can America expect the Pakistani regime to do anything uplifting with our dollars when they have purposely and deliberately let their own citizens rot in camps for generations?

At the very least, conservatives should demand that Pakistan take back its own citizens rotting in foreign lands before embarking on other elaborate projects for social uplift.

She was a 13 year old child, Ms. Applebaum, who was drugged and then sodomized by your beloved Roman Polanski! I have never believed that Left liberals particularly cared for children, and this proves that belief’s veracity again. After all, when you call it a mere ‘choice’ to kill the most vulnerable of kids, why should I be surprised that you condone the rape of a teenager.

In this off-year, we still have three marquee statewide elections coming up. Two such races-the gubernatorial ones in VA and NJ-have been covered extensively by the traditional new outlets. The third one, arguably the only one with long-term impact on our social fabric, remains largely ignored except for the protagonists on the ground.

 I speak of the referendum Question One in Maine that seeks to restore the customary definition of marriage, which was changed earlier this year by politicians in the pockets of leftwing special interests. Special interests have not taken the gauntlet, thrown openly when regular Maine folks gathered 100,000 signatures to put the question to ballot, lightly or in good grace. Millions in money, tens of thousands in services, and hundreds in staff have been deployed from California, Washington DC, Boston, and New York to fight the old fashioned notions of the regular people of Maine. All the big name corporations, bar associations, East Coast special interest outfits, and the Maine political establishment are firmly arrayed in support of imposing the Hollywood definition of marriage on the rock ribbed good folks in the state. No amount of scare tactics or misleading PR is enough for these powerful Goliaths of the Establishment.

It matters. From a purely political perspective, keeping the definition of marriage intact in a deep blue state like Maine would be a powerful coda to the Proposition 8 victory in equally blue California.  Such a victory would firmly underline the truism that that Americans across the political and geographic spectrum deeply believe in the sanctity of marriage.

Beyond the immediate political angle, the momentum from a Question One victory will slow down the intense drive by the ruling elite to impose-via judicial means or otherwise-its own definition of m across the country. In other words, a victory in Maine will give a new breather of life to the concept of representative democracy.

 Far more important, however, is the issue of individual and parental rights. States where gay ‘marriage’ is legal, can and do require children as young as toddlers to learn about it. Parents do not have the right, contrary to the propaganda of the other side, to opt their kids out of classes that conflict with their values. Those objecting to strenuously about imparting their own values to their children can go to jail (Parker v. Hurley).  

 The electoral battle in Maine is one that impacts us and our liberties. Ordinary people like you and I are standing up there in defense of their right to live, work, and raise their families in accordance with their deeply held beliefs. The opposition is well organized, well funded, well equipped, and comprised of a grand list of Who’s Who in corporations, bar associations, journalists, and special interests.  On the other side, defending the sanctity of marriage and the right of people to live their conscience is a loose alliance of ordinary, everyday men and women from across Maine. They fight a battle at a place where America literally begins, a battle waged on behalf of all of our rights all across the country.

Lend these brave Mainers a hand, if you will. This is their website where you can read the story and rationale behind Question One, and donate a few dollars to the worthy cause of defending the very basis of any self-perpetuating civilized society.

 Too often it seems that Democratic presidents confuse form with substance when it comes to international relations and end up spurning our allies to curry favor with those who despise us, all in the name of ‘democracy’. Sounds less like a measured foreign policy approach made by professionals and more like the Model UN conferences I frequented in college where elaborately (but often bizarrely) dressed twenty something sorority loudmouths spent hours trying to impress upon the rest of us the theoretical glories of international engagement, global initiatives, and disarmament..blah, blah, blah.

The cost of Democratic foreign policymakers acting like over-idealistic college kids out of control in an out of town conference has often been disastrous. Harry Truman’s desire to see a friendly Soviet Union led the United States to condone the  post WW II the rape and pillage of Eastern and Central Europe that made Attila the Hun sound almost humane. Jimmy Carter stood silent as Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocracy pushed aside our ally the Shah of Iran n 1979; Carter further disgraced America when, buckling under the threats of the ayatollahs, he didn’t allow the dying Shah to be hospitalized in the United States. Bill Clinton, too afraid to challenge the appeasement mentality of the French and the British, allowed Serbs to visit genocide on Bosniaks and Croats in the 1990s while using the United States military to help the Serbs in disarming the victims. Not to be outdone, Barack Obama is putting tremendous pressure on the legitimate government of our ally Honduras to let the absconding fugitive Zelaya become president of that country again.

Time and again the Democratic foreign policy wonks have let down our allies and disgraced our values thus endangering our standing in the world and compromising our long term national interests.

Can we really blame a Turkey or Israel someday asking, ‘can I trust the United States to stand by me?’

For many people, the opposition to the President’s healthcare reform agenda is one of principle buttressed by history: when a government bureaucrat is given even a trifling bit of additional authority, he will make sure that in time his power grows. That such power is often at the behest of noble intentions and good motives does not negate the historical evidence that, ultimately, the power of government is but a necessary evil for free societies. Long after the necessity of some function of government is gone, there will still be the bureaucracy that administered that purpose, but this time making up regulations simply to justify its existence.

President Reagan was right, “the closest thing we have to immortality in our time is a government bureaucracy.” And please, none of that sappy nonsense about how civil servants are underpaid, overworked, selfless denizens of virtue: neither empirical evidence nor personal experience backs up that sentimental image of a noble servant of the masses.

The question that the President and his cronies have failed to answer is ‘how many new jobs will be created for bureaucrats and their toady lawyers when your healthcare reform becomes the law?’ Almost every new law that passes Congress these days, seems to have one overarching goal at its core: make more Americans dependent upon the government for their daily bread, either by employing them directly in the government or making some regulation that restricts their ability to go about their productive lives.

Is this how free republics slowly transform into oligarchies and then descend into tyrannies ruled by a cult of the anointed?

It is a church that predates the American Revolution, where John Wesleyonce preached, and has rightly been called the Mother Church of Georgia. Though all the turbulence in American political and social history since 1733 when the colonists established Christ Church of Savannah, the church has steadfastly upheld the abiding principles of the worldwide Anglican Communion: to proclaim and defend the Gospel.

In 2009, it may have finally run its course. Christ Church’s parent organization, the Episcopal Church of the United States (ECUSA), had had enough of the plucky nature of the Georgia congregation which has refused to bow to the unrestrained, rabid, political radicalism of the New York-based ECUSA bureaucracy. The ECUSA is marshalling its considerable financial and PR resources to wrest away the historic church from its congregation.

This is the time to stand up for Anglicans and Episcopalians who want to keep their denomination a Christian one. Here is a link where faithful of all strands can join the prayerful struggle to keep one of America’s oldest churches as a haven for preaching the Gospel. The symbolism of this struggle against the powerful forces of radical liberalism cannot be overemphasized.

http://www.christchurchsavannah.org/

Not every generation of Christians gets the opportunity that Martin Luther had when he spoke plain truth to the assembled powers of his day, ‘This is where I stand, I can do no other.’ Where do real Episcopalians and Anglicans stand today?

It is rather annoying to keep listening to politicians, specially (though not exclusively) of the liberal variety, who want every 18 year old go to college and make the rest of us foot the bill for the college experience. College is not an entitlement, it is not for everyone, and, frankly, it is not a requirement for being a respectable, wage earning, contributing member of society.

One of the bluntest economic facts is that we are in far more desperate need of auto mechanics, plumbers, landscapers, electricians, and welders than we are of college graduates in sociology, ethnic/gender studies, sports management, and psychology. I won’t even go into the overabundance (and inimical social effects) of law school alumi.

So unless, you are going to go to college for nursing, dental hygiene, engineering, medicine, or computer science, I do not see why taxpayers should be guaranteeing your loans, let alone giving you a grant. Maybe, I can even see the societal need for graduates in fields directly related to international affairs (not of the Mark Sanford kind though), criminal justice, and business administration.

Leaving aside the question of what kind of higher studies should be underwritten by the taxpayer, any astute observer of the consumer side of higher education knows all too well what kind of shallow thinking goes into the process much of the time. Affordable quality education at community colleges and public state universities is often the last choice for the gum-chewing, Blackberry-toting, clueless teenagers who have been conditioned to equate brand name with quality and necessity. The difference being that this time around they (and their parents) want the rest of us to pay for ‘shopping’ at the prestigious private colleges. While at college, most of this crowd will change majors a dozen times, drop a few classes every semester, skip half the classes, booze up every weekend, go beserk on spring breaks, expect to live in comfortable apartments furnished with digital cable, and drive the fanciest cars. That’s all perfectly alright and very cool. Just as long as they pay for this lovely ‘college’ experience themselves instead of asking me to foot the bill of such ‘higher’ education.

Unlike many doctrinaire conservatives, I do believe that we do have a problem with healthcare in the country. A free, compassionate society cannot forever leave large portions of its population either without healthcare or at frequent risks of losing it. Having a new ten thousand member intrusive bureaucracy with nosy civil servants, however, is not the solution to the problem, especially in a society that values liberty. Rather, measured solutions based on our fundamental social and economic values are the way to approach the issue.

Short term solutions will involve removing the state-line barriers to insurance purchase and allowing small businesses and non-profits to pool employees together to buy coverage. These are changes that can be done through legislation in a  matter of weeks and have starting effect in few months.

 For the medium term, we have got to look at tax rebates, but with a twist. For those Americans who cannot be covered  by Medicaid and cannot afford private coverage, tax rebate coupons can be sent out, such coupons being good only for the purchase of basic health insurance.

Looking at the longer term, simply put we will need more medical professionals out in the field. That means reining in the propensity of lawsuits. But more significantly it also means making those tough and unpopular social policy decisions that help kids do better in the sciences in school so that they get in and graduate from medical and nursing schools. Even then, for a country as widespread and diverse as ours, such domestic supply won’t be enough anytime soon: we will need to make the process of importing and deploying foreign healthcare professionals easier and more streamlined, notwithstanding the knee jerk xenophobia of the Lou Dobbses and Tom Tancredos.

Doing nothing will relegate Republicans even further into irrelevancy. Hence, such an inaction is simply not an option.

Whether nation’s highest civilian award was meant to be given to ‘agents of change’ is debatable, but given this administration’s key buzzword in last fall’s campaign, perhaps it is to be expected. In reviewing the (rather large) list of this year’s honorees for the Medal of Freedom, I was delighted to see Nobel Laureate Dr.Yunus who has shown the world that entrepreneurship, capitalism, and micro-business are the surest ways out of grinding poverty.

That delight was quickly dissipated upon finding former Irish President and erstwhile UN Human Rights boss Mary Robinson’s name on the list. An accomplished lawyer, scholar, and politician, Mrs. Robinson’s legacy is, unfortunately, tinged with anti-Semitism. During her tenure as the HR chief for the United Nations, she routinely used her pulpit to condemn Israel and draw moral equivalence between Israel and its terrorist enemies. I certainly don’t begrudge a human rights advocate speaking on behalf of  innocent civilians caught in the midst of a brutal conflict; in fact that is the job of a human rights leader and activist.  I find it deeply offensive, however, that the human rights forums of the United Nations were used as a platform to attack Israel and thus give comfort to the terrorists who wish to obliterate it from the face of the planet. That we should not have expected any different from a left-liberal ideologue like Mary Robinson is perhaps a truism. After all, even as President of Ireland, she had broken precedent by meeting with terrorist  IRA leader Gerry Adams. Nor should we be surprised that an administration with such a lukewarm attitude towards Israel has chosen Mrs. Robinson to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Even with its obvious ideological agenda and preferences, could the Obama administration not have found some left-liberal luminary without the baggage of anti-Semitic tendencies?

It is reassuring to see Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu at the helm in Israel, especially in the context of the new regime in Washington DC having a ‘peace at any cost’ approach. The recent Israeli warning to Iran, backed up by history, is a case in point. While Iranians have every sovereign right to develop newer energy sources, the idea of having nuclear weapons in the hands of openly militant clerics is unnerving. These clerics, again as history has shown, are rational, calculating folks who understand well the difference between lawyerly admonition and robust warnings. If lasting peace for all peoples in the Middle East is to come, it will not be with a nuclear armed Iran that has been appeased by State Department's pant suit wearing lawyers. Rather, such a permanent peace will include an Iran that is a free, democratic, and humane participant in global civilization. Bibi knows it; Hillary doesn’t.

It was once called the ‘American Establishment at prayer’ and counted everyone from George Washington to George H W Bush among its congregants. Today, thanks to thirty years of ‘modernization’, only a rump remains of the Episcopal Church (ECUSA). As someone whose affinity to that church is more than ordinary, it has pained me to see its growing descent into irrelevance and theological atrophy. In the last thirty years, the ECUSA has gone from a respectable symbol of a mainline via media between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, to becoming the ecclesiastical mouthpiece of the Democratic National Committee. Part of the blame for this descent must rightly be placed on those traditionalist Episcopalians who were too busy to care while dedicated groups of activist ‘progressives’ took over parish after parish, diocese after diocese, and committee after committee to impose an ironclad agenda that has little resemblance to Anglicanism anywhere else outside the dying parishes of Canada and the United States. For a ‘church’ that doesn’t believe in the basic tenets of the Nicene Creed, the Ten Commandments, the sanctity of life and marriage, or the Biblical qualification of bishops and priests is strange, to say the least. No wonder, the vast majority of Anglicans worldwide have little respect, though abundant abiding Christian love, for the Episcopal bureaucracy in New York that has made socialized medicine, homosexual ‘marriage’,  and taxpayer funded abortion on demand the centerpiece of its ecclesiastical calling.

The ECUSA is not a church anymore…it is simply another liberal interest group. The good news is that finally the different Bible based groups of Episcopalians have banded together to launch a true alternative to the decrepit ECUSA: last month different strains of America’s and Canada’s Anglicans, Anglo-Catholics, and traditional Episcopalians came together to prayerfully initiate the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) that seeks to become a full fledged province of the global Anglican communion. The journey is tough, the obstacles immense, and the resources meager since almost all of the material wealth of the ECUSA has been taken over the by New York based bureaucracy and its allies. The most powerful tools of the ACNA are the prayers of its congregants and the solid support of orthodox Anglicans from Nigeria to Uganda to Jerusalem to Sydney. It will be a long journey. A journey that Anglicans hope will stiffen the spines of those Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians and other mainline Protestants who hunger for the meaningful church of their forefathers.

But then, every generation of Christians has been called upon to bear its own Cross in the turbulence and scorn of its own times.

This is our time.