Fighting the Right

Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness talked to James Dobson today on Family Talk about the expansion of the roles of women service members and the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, which they warned will have horrific ramifications. Donnelly, who has warned that allowing women in combat roles and gays to serve openly will lead to the military’s downfall, told Dobson that the culture of the military is in grave jeopardy due to the “process of diversifying and imposing LGBT agendas,” maintaining that “the civil rights movement is being co-opted by the advocates of diversity, by advocates of the LGBT equality group.”

The new concept of inclusion is a radical departure from the military’s honorable tradition of recognizing individual merit. In fact the armed forces were way ahead of the civilian world in recognizing individual merit regardless of race, regardless of gender even, but the way we’re going now, the civil rights movement is being co-opted by the advocates of diversity, by advocates of the LGBT equality group. There are a lot of influences under the current president who unfortunately are in the driver seat in the Pentagon and they are making some serious problems here. Can it change? Yes, the military is resilient, but right now people have got to become aware, first of all, of what’s happening and secondly, figure out a way to do something about it.

I think every major conservative cause there is has taken a beating in the last several years, whether it’s health care, whether it’s the economy, our banking system, all kinds of things have been seriously harmed in the last three years. So are we going to give up on all of that? No, I certainly hope not, not as Americans. But the military is different because it’s the only military we have. If you cause problems in education, you can always homeschool; you can go to a different school system, if you don’t like your state you can move to another state; but if something is wrong with the culture of the military—Reagan had an easy job with it, all he had to do was rebuild the ships and the planes and the hardware—but rebuilding the culture of the military after we go through this process of diversifying and imposing LGBT agendas and lowering standards to accommodate it all, this is going to be more difficult.

Earlier this year, a Ugandan gay rights group sued notorious anti-gay activist Scott Lively in US court for allegedly violating international law over his role in Uganda's proposed "Kill The Gays" bill.

Shortly thereafter, the notorious anti-gay activists at Liberty Counsel stepped up to represent  Lively  and on today's installment of "Faith and Freedom," Matt Barber and Harry Mihet explained that they were doing so because Lively is really a courageous hero who ought to be commended for the kingdom's work that he has been doing but who has become instead the victim of violence from gay activists:

Today on Jay Sekulow Live, Rep. Jeff Landry (R-LA) discussed with the American Center for Law and Justice’s Chief Counsel an amicus brief that the ACLJ is putting together on behalf of the congressman in the lawsuit against the Obama administration’s mandate for health insurance plans to include contraception coverage. Landry maintained that the Obama administration is showing its “hypocrisy” by mandating that religiously-affiliated hospitals and universities cover contraception in their health insurance plans while also “granting special status or waivers to Muslims as they go through TSA screenings.”

The congressman’s allegation that the Obama administration is giving Muslim passengers “special rights as they go through the TSA screening” doesn’t seem to have any basis in reality, as the TSA on its website gives no mention of religious exemptions and TSA administrator John Pistole testified that anyone who wants to avoid a pat down based on religious reasons is “not going to get on an airplane.”

Sekulow: How big of a deal, how big of an issue is this both in the body politics [sic] and among your constituents?

Landry: Down here in south Louisiana this is huge, this is very important to my constituency. I think the biggest problems that a lot of Americans are having out there is the hypocrisy of this administration. Remember, this is an administration who has no problem granting special status or waivers to Muslims as they go through TSA screenings. Look, as they believe that there is a need to grant them special rights as they go through the TSA screening based upon their religion, that’s fine, I’m ok with that. But then don’t turn around and attack Christians when they stand up and say ‘listen, we believe that the policies you’re putting in place violate our religious freedoms as well.

Landry warned that if the contraception mandate, which he called a “dangerous” exercise of power, is upheld then there will be “no limit to what the federal government can do”:

This strikes at the very foundation of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience, if we allow the federal government to violate this principle there is no limit to what the federal government can do thereafter.

…

To me this is one of the biggest cases brought forth in the country in a long, long time. I got to tell you, my hat’s off to the Catholic bishops around America, they have gotten to the point where they understand that this exercise that is going on with the federal government is a dangerous one. If they allow this to happen, if we allow this to happen as Americans, as Catholics, as Christians, there is no limit to where the government goes from here. You know, Jay, to me that is the biggest danger, that should be the biggest concern, I mean where does it stop after this?

Recently, Tony Perkins and Harry Jackson sat down for a half-hour interview with CBN's David Brody to discuss President Obama's support for marriage equality and what it will mean for the 2012 election.

Brody has posted the entire interview on his blog, in which Perkins compared the issue of gay marriage to the issue of abortion, declaring that Americans will never accept the legitimacy of gay marriage, regardless of what the courts rule, because "same-sex marriage violates reason and natural law" and warning that any Supreme Court ruling upholding the legality of gay marriage will "create great unrest in this society": 

For his part, Jackson saw the President's statement as an opportunity to create a new "Black-Brown coalition" among African Americans and Hispanics rooted in opposition to the Democratic Party's growing support for gay rights and fueled by resentment against gay activists who are trying to push minorities to the back of the line. 

Jackson said comparisons between the push for gay rights and the struggle for civil rights are nonsense because systematic discrimination and violence against the gay community "never happened" and warned that if African Americans and Hispanics don't escape the "Democratic Party plantation," then "America's best days are over": 

On Friday's installment of "Prophetic Perspective on Current Events," Rick Joyner warned that "we are close to having race riots in America" and that the racial tensions created by the Trayvon Martin shooting are giving "the enemy" an opportunity to unleash massive death and destruction in this country.

Explaining that racism "empowers the spirit of death," Joyner pointed to Nazism and Japanese atrocities during World War II as proof of what can happen and warned that, if it takes hold in America, "there will be a whole lot more death and a whole lot more destruction than the last time": 

Southern Baptist Convention’s chief “ethicist” Richard Land signed off from his weekly radio broadcast on Saturday without mentioning why he was leaving the show. He simply stated that his program is ending “due to a variety of circumstances” and asked people to pray for a “spiritual reformation” in America. Land lost his show due to his racially-insensitive tirade about the Trayvon Martin shooting, which he vowed to never apologize for until he eventually did, and for plagiarizing commentaries on his show, including part of his remarks about the Martin.

While the SBC trustees reviewing Land’s radio show said that plagiarism was one of the “practices that occur in the radio industry,” even Religious Right talk show host Steve Deace said in an interview with The Tennessean that plagiarism is not common practice on radio shows, contradicting the trustees’ claims:

Trustees claim that Land was following practices that are common in the talk radio industry.

But Steve Deace, a syndicated Christian radio host from Des Moines, Iowa, said that’s not the case.

He said that radio hosts sometimes hear other people’s turns of phrases and repeat them when talking about issues. But they don’t read word for word from other people’s work.

If a host does that, then listeners will eventually catch them at it.

“They are going to know if you are lifting stuff from people,” he said.

Blogger Aaron Weaver, who first caught instances of Land’s plagiarism, pointed out that Land not only didn’t cite the authors of the articles but was actually “adding extra comments and using different adjectives” to pass commentaries off as his own. Indeed, when he initially defended his racially-charged rant regarding the Trayvon Martin shooting, Land never mentioned in his non-apology that he was reading from a Kuhner column.

Weaver and Robert Parham of the Baptist Center for Ethics think the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which Land leads, should have been tougher on Land, especially considering the fact that Land teaches at a university where students who commit plagiarism can be expelled:

Weaver, a graduate student at Baylor University who blogs at thebigdaddyweave.com, said that trustees were wrong when they said the plagiarism was a result of “carelessness and poor judgment.”

“He wasn’t being careless,” he said. “This was intentional.”

…

Robert Parham of the Nashville-based Baptist Center for Ethics said that Land’s radio show should have been canceled years ago. He said that the show was more about politics than about religion or ethics.

Allowing Land to keep his job, despite the plagiarism, sends the wrong message, said Parham.

Along with being the head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Land also teaches regularly at Baptist seminaries.

“Allowing Land to continue as an SBC official — without even an unpaid leave of absence — will create a banquet of distasteful consequences for the Southern Baptists when it comes to how seminaries deal with students who plagiarize papers and how churches deal with pastors who plagiarize sermons.”

On Bryan Fischer's radio program yesterday, Fischer and Cal Beisner discussed how environmentalism was becoming the established religion in America. 

How exactly is environmentalism a religion, you ask? Well, as Beisner explained, it has its own doctrines, its own holy day (Earth Day,) its own food taboos, sacrifice rituals (recycling,) paradoxical beliefs, sacred structures (recycling bins,) and it proselytizes.  And, as Fischer added, just like with the early church, heretics (i.e. global warming deniers like Fischer and Beisner) are punished and excommunicated:

Kamal Saleem spoke to Janet Parshall yesterday where the phony “ex-terrorist” alleged that radical Muslims are going to “penetrate” every sphere of American society and that there are even United States generals who are secretly trying to “destroy” the country from within:

Saleem: From military, infrastructure to the church and synagogues, also to the banking and the education system, and also to pharmaceutical and medical, every level that there is that they were going to go ahead and penetrate and so far they were able to penetrate every level. Unfortunately, this government has not stopped them from advancing forward, but helped them advance forward to overcome many things. Now there are many generals who swore to destroy the United States of America are generals in the United States.

Seeing that Saleem works frequently with former General and anti-Muslim activist Jerry Boykin, it would be nice of Saleem to offer Boykin and the public at large the names of generals who “swore to destroy the United States.”

Later, Saleem talked to Parshall about his life story. Saleem has implausibly claimed to have worked for the Muslim Brotherhood in Lebanon, the Syrian government, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Libyan government (even dined with Gaddafi!), Saudi Arabia and terrorists in Tora Bora.

He told Parshall that before going to Tora Bora he worked in Europe in the “culture jihad,” and after training terrorists there he came to America to diminish the conservative Bible Belt’s political and cultural clout!

Saleem also claimed 450,000 illegal immigrants came to America in 2010 to wait for Obama to “legalize terrorism,” even though the border control said the year had exceptionally low rates of crossings.

He insisted that if state legislatures don’t pass laws banning Sharia law then the United Nations through Resolution 16/18, which reaffirms “freedom of religion or belief and freedom of expression” and opposes religious discrimination, will force the church to “go underground.” Then after the church isn’t allowed to write their own sermons or canonize priests, Saleem claims, “our country will become Islamist by default because only Islam can fight back” against the United Nations, or something:

Saleem: This is what’s happening in America right now, the invasion of the United States of America is happening through the borders where in 2010 over 450,000 illegals crossed through Mexican borders and these guys are waiting for amnesty to be citizens as soon as our President changes the immigration law and are granted amnesty, legalizing terrorism will be just the first cut in the United States of America.

Parshall: Wow. So now we’ve got you in the European continent and eventually you make your way to the United States, correct?

Saleem: That’s correct. My last battle was in Tora Bora and from Tora Bora I came to the United States of America and we were in the northern sector, the American people are weaker over there and they are not as the Bible Belt area, they are not as strong. So our stronghold was in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, all that region over there, and from there I was sent specifically to the Bible Belt because they asked us to take on this because in order to bring the American culture down we have to overthrow their weight of voting, of power, of everything so we have to penetrate the area and bring about the light of Islam so we can change that culture and change the future of the United States from that area.

Parshall: Wow.

…

Saleem: If this [anti-Sharia law] bill does not pass and Americans do not support it then UN Resolution 16/18 will take place and that is the hate crime bill which is the American people, simply, the church cannot talk about their belief anymore, the church will have to go underground and they will have to submit their sermon and what so have you, and we are fighting on both area to disable the Islamists from taking over. That’s why the Catholic Church is fighting so hard because how they canonize their priests and what so have you, this will disable them from doing all this, and now our country will become Islamist by default because only Islam can fight back.

Parshall: Wow.