Kyle Mantyla's blog

• Adam Peck @ Think Progress: Newt Gingrich Blames ‘Anti Religious’ Secular Government For Newtown Shooting.
• Anjali Sareen @ Mediaite: Piers Morgan Eviscerates Pro-Gun Advocate: ‘You’re An Unbelievably Stupid Man, Aren’t You?’
• Dave Weigel: The Stupidest Thing Anyone Has Written About Sandy Hook.
• Ben Dimiero, Matt Gertz, & Rob Savillo @ Media Matters: Bill O'Reilly Covers The "War On Christmas" More Than Actual Wars, Again.
• Jeremy Hooper @ GLAAD Blog: Focus on the Family's Stanton goes after little girl, her fathers.
• Jeffrey Toobin @ The New Yorker: Postscript: Robert Bork, 1927-2012.

• Conservative judicial icon Robert Bork died today at the age of 85.
• Mat Staver says Bork would have made an excellent Supreme Court Justice who would have overturned Roe v Wade, if only Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy had not been "so mean" to him.
• Buster Wilson really does not seem to appreciate our efforts to help him spread his message.
• We can only hope that, at some point, VA Rep. Bob Marshall's district will grow tired of being a laughingstock and stop electing him.
• Finally, Ted Baehr and Tom Snyder explain why the Sandy Hook tragedy happened: "By removing God, the Bible, God's Law, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit from society, including the mass media and the schools, we are raising generations of people with no faith in God or Jesus and, hence, no moral conscience, and no self-control. If so many people have no faith, no moral conscience and no self-control, then it’s no wonder our society is suffering from all these mass murders by evil lone gunmen."

One of the most remarkable things about the Religious Right today is the amazingly widespread belief that any criticism or disagreement with their agenda is somehow a violation of their First Amendment rights. 

The Religious Right seems to truly believe that the First Amendment protects their rights to say anything they wish while simultaneously rendering them immune from criticism or opposition, as if the very same First Amendment that protects their free speech rights does not protect the free speech rights of those who disagree with them.

Case in point:  the day after the election, the American Humanist Association sent a letter to all the newly elected members of Congress, encouraging them not to join the Congressional Prayer Caucus. But to Rep. Randy Forbes, founder of the Prayer Caucus, this is nothing more than an attempt to "censor people" and prevent them from talking about their faith, as he explained on "Wallbuilders Live" today:

None of us, and no member of our caucus believes, that we want government to dictate what the church should do and we don't want the church dictating what the government should do.

But these extremist groups try to switch that around and they try to carry it to another dimension where they don't want anybody in government to have the right to even speak about their faith, or prayer, or God, or religion.  And they don't want anyone in the church to be able to speak about government.

What they want to do is censor people from their faith and from their First Amendment rights.

Members of Congress have the right to join the Prayer Caucus if they want, just as others have a right to ask them not to do so.  That is how the First Amendment works. 

Disagreement is not censorship and the Constitution does not protect you from criticism.

On last night's episode of "The Glenn Beck Program," guest host Tim Ballard brought on David Barton to give his "expert" perspective on how the Founding Fathers would have responded to the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Barton insisted that the Founders called the Second Amendment "the biblical right of self defense" and crafted it to ensure that citizens could protect themselves again any and all threats, including the government, with equal firepower. 

In Barton's view, whatever weapons the government possesses must also be available to the population at large because the citizens might one day need to resist the government, so this principle of "equal power ... has got to control the gun control debate":

On today's episode of "WallBuilders Live," Rick Green and David Barton interviewed the ALCJ's David French about a piece he wrote following the election entitled "Progressive Evangelicals’ Epic Fail."  The discussion prompted Barton to declare that there really should be no such thing as the Religious Right or the Religious Left, as all Christians should just be "biblical" in their voting ... and since things like health care reform and climate change are not mentioned in the Bible, they shouldn't be things that Christians consider when casting their ballots:

Where does the Bible line up on education? Alright, that's where I am.

Where does the Bible line up on taxation?  Okay, that's where I am.

Where does the Bible line up on social programs? Alright, that's where I am.

And from that standpoint there has been, over the last twelve years particularly, especially every presidential election there's been a lining-up of the Religious Left and the Religious Right.

Religious Left runs in, as they have the last few years, and says 'Christians, you can't be concerned about stuff like life and marriage, you gotta be concerned about climate change, you have to be concerned about health care' and they go through all these things.  And I am concerned about that, if I can find it in the Bible. And that's really what it has to boil down to.

Sometimes we let our cultural positions or our political positions trump our biblical positions.  And that's what the Religious Left has done, saying 'yeah, yeah, yeah, we know the Bible is about life and marriage and those other things, but we're really concerned about global warming and about saving the planet and et cetera and so we want you to be concerned about that too.'

Alright, show me that in the Bible and I will be concerned about it.

Bryan Fischer essentially dedicated his entire radio program yesterday to defending the claims he made last Friday that God refused to prevent the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut because he is a "gentleman" who doesn't go where he is not wanted.

Since Fischer absolutely means everything he says, there was no need for him to attempt to apologize for or clarify his original comments in any way, so instead he simply reiterated and expanded upon them, explaining that the shooting was evidence that the reservoir of "moral capital" that this nation had built up by publicly honoring and recognizing God from its founding until 1962 has now been utterly depleted, thus weakening the shield of God's protection and allowing Satan to get through:

• Zack Beauchamp @ Think Progress: Huckabee Blames ‘Tax-Funded Abortion Pills’ For Newtown Massacre.
• Chris Rodda: No, Mr. Huckabee, It’s Not Because God Has Been Removed From Schools.
• Meenal Vamburkar @ Mediaite: Scarborough Questions ‘Long-Held’ Beliefs After Newtown: ‘Ideologies Of My Past Career’ No Longer ‘Relevant.’
• Jeremy Hooper: Teachers should have prayed more, packed more arsenal? The unhelpful weekend of AFA's in-house liability.
• Andy Kroll @ Mother Jones: NRA Darling Sen. Joe Manchin: "Everything Has to Be on the Table" in Gun-Control Debate.
• Andrew Kaczynski @ BuzzFeed: How The NRA Twitter Handles A Mass Shooting: Silence.

• AFA's Buster Wilson says "it is NOT the time to politicize" the shooting in Connecticut before going on to argue that school officials ought to be able to carry concealed weapons on school grounds ... apparently utterly unaware that he is politicizing the discussion.
• Apparently, making the case that marriage equality is a civil rights issue is "utterly cynical and possibly racist."
• Did God kill British Labour Party MP Malcolm Wicks because he prevented Todd Bentley from entering the country?  Todd Bentley thinks so.
• John Stemberger says he has no problem with gays, except "what we aggressively oppose, is this notion of trying to transform society. And ‘gay’ as in-your-face, loud and proud, forcing everyone to buy into your assumptions about life and human sexuality. And if you don’t, we’re going to shout you down and call you a bigot."
• Matt Barber yet again demonstrates that he is a genuinely awful person, tweeting that President Obama is an "absolute slime ball" following his remarks at the Sandy Hook memorial service.
• Finally, Bryan Fischer explains that God gave us prayer and guns in order to protect kids and there is not much he can do if we decide not to use them as the Bible instructs:

Patrick Colbeck, the Michigan state senator who, along with state Rep. Mike Shirkey, was the driving force behind Michigan's anti-union "right to work" legislation, appeared on "WallBuilders Live" today where he, and David Barton, attributed the legislation's passage to "divine providence":

I had a great colleague in the state House, state Representative Mike Shirkey has been phenomenal, he's a phenomenal Christian. 

We've also got what I call kind of a patchwork quilt that if any one of those patches would have came out of the quilt, this never would have happened.  We had folks at the grassroots level, we had union members that were for us, we had business leaders that were for us, we had folks that had been in the political environment for quite some time, we lobbyists helping us.  There were people all over the place and, reflecting upon everything that happened, if any one of those pieces - simple little pieces - would have disappeared and we wouldn't have had them, then it never would have passed.

So this is, we believe, knit together with some divine providence and when we pursued it, we pursued it with biblical principles.  We had what we called the Philippians 4:8 Strategy that said focus on what's noble, true, excellent, and praiseworthy.  Don't go off an do the usual political whack-a-mole when you find somebody who's not a hundred percent agreement with you; you go off and systematically work through them, make the values proposition for them and give them a reason to vote it and not against it.

American Family Association president Tim Wildmon offered up his thoughts on last week's tragic school shooting in Connecticut by saying that Satan literally took possession of shooter Adam Lanza and carried out the attack ... but "that doesn't exonerate the person of their responsibility" for what happened because Lanza knew what he was doing: