Shawn Akers

Right Wing Leftovers - 12/3/12

  • J.C. Watts says he is being “encouraged” by supporters to run for chairman of the RNC because it would supposedly help the party reach out to minority voters.  Just like it did when Michael Steele was chairman, right? 
  • Ken Hutcherson goes after Focus on the Family for going soft on the culture wars. 
  • Matt Barber is now calling laws prohibiting the use of "ex-gay" reparative therapy on minors "Jerry Sandusky Laws."
  • Gordon Klingenschmitt is suing Mikey Weinstein.
  • Prosecutors have reportedly offered a plea bargain to Floyd Corkins, the man accused of shooting an employee at the Family Research Council headquarter.
  • Gary Bauer says that it is not social issues that are costing the Republicans elections: "The fact is that Republicans have been pummeled in two straight presidential elections, and both those elections were decided on economic issues. In fact, every time in the last 20 years cutting Social Security and Medicare were major issues, the GOP has lost."
  • Finally, Liberty Counsel's Shawn Akers is worried about increasing blasphemy in America because "that there is going to come a time when God is going to get fed up with all of this, and Christians’ indifference to these incidents."

Liberty Counsel: Dan Savage is Encouraging Violence Against Christians Like the Nazis Did to the Jews

Earlier this month, Dan Savage set off a bit of controversy when he declared that "every dead gay kid is a victory for the Family Research Council," prompting FRC president Tony Perkins to hint that legal action might be taken against him.

Today, Matt Barber and Shawn Akers discussed Savage's comments on the "Faith and Freedom" radio program during which Barber suggested that Savage was intentionally "sending a signal to the next Floyd Corkins to go in and try again" while Akers asserted that he "didn't want to go off into hyperbole" right before he declared that Savage's remarks were just like "Hitler's programmatic desensitization of the German people toward the Jewish population": 

Akers: Since Gay Activism is a Religion, Regnerus Study is Treated Like Heresy

On Friday's "Faith and Freedom" radio program, Matt Barber and Shawn Akers discussed the announcment by the University of Texas at Austin "that no formal investigation is warranted into the allegations of scientific misconduct lodged against associate professor Mark Regnerus" over his study claiming to show that children children raised by gay or lesbian parents experience a much higher rate of social and emotional problems.

The study was widely condemned which, for Akers, is evidence that "the homosexual activist community" is really a religion. As Akers sees it, just as the Catholic Church once vehemently opposed scientific discoveries that revealed that the earth revolves around the sun, for gay activists today "the political correctness of their propaganda" will not allow them to accept anything that might contradict their agenda and so such things must be treated as heresy: 

Raymond Raines and the Undying Myth of Christian Persecution

A few weeks ago, we wrote a post about a new report from Liberty Institute and the Family Research Council entitled "The Survey on Religious Hostility in America" which claims to have chronicled "more than 600 cases detailing religious bigotry throughout America."

We noted that one of the cases prominently cited in the report was the story about a ten-year old boy named Raymond Raines who was supposedly yanked out of his chair in the school cafeteria and screamed at by a teacher simply for praying before eating his lunch.

It is one of the Religious Right's favorite tales of victimhood and, as we have noted several times before, it's nearly twenty years old and totally false

The St. Louis case concerned 10-year-old Raymond Raines who, his mother said, was given detention because he sought to pray over his lunch. When lawyers for the Rutherford Institute heard about the case, they filed a lawsuit against the principal and issued a press release denouncing the school system.

"I know it sounds bizarre, but we have substantial evidence to believe it happened," said Timothy Belz, the St. Louis lawyer working with the Rutherford Institute.

On NBC-TV's "Meet the Press," Gingrich described the situation as "a real case about a real child. Should it be possible for the government to punish you if you say grace over your lunch? That's what we used to think of Russian behavior when they were the Soviet Union."

But school officials said the incident never happened. Rather, they said, Raymond was disciplined for fighting in the cafeteria.

"I can tell you he was not reprimanded for praying," said Kenneth Brostron, the school's lawyer. "Do you think it makes sense that the teachers would look around the cafeteria and target the one student who was praying quietly at his seat?"

But that, of course, didn't stop Matt Barber and Shawn Akers from citing it on today's "Faith and Freedom" radio program, where Akers bizarrely linked it to the Declaration of Independence:

For good measure, Barber chimed in to declare that "the hostility against religion, Christianity in particular, has reached such heights that government officials are physically assaulting for praying over a meal in the schools.  That's not hyperbole; that's a specific example."

The claim is, of course, nothing but hyperbole.

Akers: Religious Education vs Indoctrination into the Spartan Mindset

On today's installment of Liberty Counsel's "Faith and Freedom" radio program, Shawn Akers was discussing a recent 4th Circuit Court decision upholding a South Carolina law that allows students to receive elective credits for taking off-campus religious education classes.

The case involved a lawsuit filed against a Spartanburg school district, which was interesting to Akers because it supposedly highlighted the difference between the worldview of the Founding Fathers and that held by the warriors of ancient Sparta: 

You see these two worldviews colliding. One is the worldview of the Founders that said that we are a moral and religious people, that our Constitution was created for a moral and religious people and is wholly inadequate for any other. And that not only is religious allowable but it's something that we have a responsibility to train in our children.

Versus another worldview and it's very close to that one we see in Sparta. Do you know what they did in Sparta? They took the children of people at a very early age, they took them away from people at a very early age. The ones that were deemed undesirable, especially young girls, baby girls, were just killed. The ones that were too weak to live were allowed to die. Only the toughest and the strongest were given over as property of the state and they were dictated to from the time they woke up to the time they went to bed to be completely indoctrinated with the Spartan mindset, to be completely indoctrinated with the religion of the state, the state of Sparta.

And we see these two religions, these two worldviews coming head to head. One is that of liberty of the Founders and the other says, no the state owns your children and we're going to train them accordingly.

Freud, Marx & Darwin: The Holy Trinity of Secular Humanism

We already know that the folks over at Liberty Counsel believe that secular humanism is a religion, so perhaps it shouldn't come as much of a surprise when, on today's installment of the "Faith and Freedom" radio program, Shawn Akers explained that the religion of secular humanism even has its own Trinity - Darwin, Marx, and Freud:

I'll tell you something that's really interesting, Ron. There was a poet by the name of William Butler Yeats wrote a poem called "The Second Coming" around the early 1900s and his idea was that every two thousand years, a new God arises. And it was kind of striking that, after two thousand years after Christ, about the time that Yeats wrote this poem, no new God was to be found, or at least we didn't think so.

But it was about that time Darwin came on the scene and told us that you really created yourself by dragging yourself out of the primordial ooze and evolving faster then all the other species. And Marx came along and told us really that religion is the opiate of the masses, that if you're going to be fed, you're going to feed yourself. And then Freud came along and said if you don't feel good about yourself, don't look to a god to heal you, you got to dig down deep in yourself through psychoanalysis and you're your own counselor.

What I find interesting about that, Ron, is that we took the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit - the father that told us where we came from, that I created you in the beginning, we took the Son that said I'll tell you that I'm going to feed you and heal you and tell you how to find your substance, and we took the counselor, the Holy Spirit, and we put Freud in his place and said you counsel yourself.

In other words, the new god that arose under Yeats' scheme was secular humanism. It was making man god.

This is a pretty interesting theory, aside from the fact that the works of Marx and Darwin had been published more then a half-century before Yeats' poem and both men had already been dead for nearly forty years.

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