Heresy for Sale: The Downfall of Rep. Mark Siljander

There once was a Member of the House of Representatives. His name was Mark Siljander. He was known as a conservative from Michigan, and he served three terms, from 1981-1987. Pretty unremarkable.

Then came the terrorist attacks of 9/11. While most of us studied up on shari’a law and woke up to the dangers of the Islamist thousand year war on Western Civilization, Siljander tried to “bridge the Muslim-Christian divide.” He took trips to the Middle East, bringing Christian leaders with him to try to “bridge the divide”. He wrote a book which claimed (to much acclaim) that the Islamic Allah and the Christian God were one and the same. The former United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon wrote the foreword, and notable post-modern Christian heretic Brian McLaren joined in the praise and adoration of the book. So did Dr. Ergun Caner, who was dismissed earlier this month as the head of Liberty University’s seminary after an investigation into his own fraudulent past and claims. The book managed to put itself on the shelves of Christian bookstores around the country and right here in South Carolina.

Of course, in addition to being a brainless heresy, the whole thing was a fraud.

Siljander was indicted in federal court for money laundering, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice on behalf of the Islamic American Relief Agency, a group raided in 2004 by the FBI and referred to as “Al Qaeda in Missouri”. Their Executive Director was trying to teach shari’a in American public schools. As it turns out, Siljander had been paid $75000 under the table to represent IARA and try to improve their status with the Senate Finance Committee (who had listed them as a terrorist supporting organization.) According to the original indictment, Siljander allegedly laundered money for an Afghan warlord with ties to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Earlier this month, Siljander entered a plea deal to obstruction of justice and illegally representing IARA without filing as a lobbyist. He faces fifteen years in the federal pokey.

The website for the book is still up, and Edwin Meese, Rod Beckstrom, and Cal Thomas still have their names up there (Memo to their PR reps: you might want to get that pulled down…). The book stands as thoroughly discredited as its author, a paid shill for a terrorist faith who got his hand caught in the cookie jar.

Those who went with him to Sudan and other places around the world to promote ‘interfaith understanding’ should beware: they’ve been duped – big time. The doctrines he espoused were in direct conflict with Biblical teaching on the identity of Christ and His supremacy. Worse, they appear to have been bought and paid for by enemies of the faith and of the nation.

Next steps? Christian bookstores need to take this one off the shelves, including on college campuses. His can no longer be considered a respectable opinion with which orthodox evangelicals disagree; it’s paid hackery at its worst.

Congressmen everywhere – especially the newest class of former Congressman – should take note at the dangers of going for the quick lobbying buck after leaving office. It’s a road fraught with dangers that too often end in prison terms.

Finally, the rest of us need to keep our guard up. Creeping Shari’a has many sources, many friends in high places. Citizens continue to stay on guard for their liberty, and so we must. Our liberties need to remain protected against those who would sell us out to the Islamists for 30 pieces of silver.

Freedom of Worship, Sex Education, and the Loss of Parental Rights

This may not seem political, but it is.

There has been a left-wing consortium trying to rewrite traditional Constitutional values, and they are again stepping up their attacks of late.

Exhibit A: The Obama Administration has started to refer to “freedom of worship” rather than “freedom of religion” as the guaranteed First Amendment right. Michelle Boorstein first picked this up in February in Newsweek, but it has been noticed far more within the past week by both protestant and catholic writers.

Here’s the rub: by calling it “freedom of worship” instead of “freedom of religion”, Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are restricting the rights of believers by excluding many other things that are included in “religion” but not necessarily worship, especially the right to proselytize. “Freedom of Worship” specifically doesn’t include evangelism, which means that, more than any other religious group, Christians are the primary targets of this new policy. Taken in combination with President Obama’s “We’re not a Christian nation” speech, this is alarming, to say the least.

Money quote from Nina Shea of the Center for Religious Freedom:

"It excludes the right to raise your children in your faith; the right to have religious literature; the right to meet with co-religionists; the right to raise funds; the right to appoint or elect your religious leaders, and to carry out charitable activities, to evangelize, to have religious education or seminary training."

Exhibit B: The International Planned Parenthood Federation has a new booklet that has popped up at Girl Scout camps worldwide, known as Happy Healthy and Hot. It’s a guide for HIV positive youth who want to keep having sex. Unprotected sex. With partners who haven’t been told about the HIV status of the partner.

Don’t believe me? I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t… just check out page 3 on the booklet:

Sharing your HIV status is called disclosure. Your decision about whether to disclose may change with different people and situations. You have the right to decide if, when, and how to disclose your HIV status.

There are many reasons that people do not share their HIV status. They may not want people to know they are living with HIV because of stigma and discrimination within their community. They may worry that people will find out something else they have kept secret, like they are using injecting drugs, having sex outside of a marriage or having sex with people of the same gender. People in long-term relationships who find out they are living with HIV sometimes fear that their partner will react violently or end the relationship.

How is it even remotely appropriate to tell this to Girl Scout troops? Aren’t we just asking for a rise in the HIV/AIDS epidemic?

The answer, is yes. For political reasons. And that is simply unacceptable.

Amazingly, this is the group that, along with their partners in the Playboy empire control the sex education curriculum coming out of the South Carolina Dept. of Education. The group is known as “SIECUS”, representing the partnership of Playboy and Planned Parenthood to intentionally oversex our school kids. In Playboy’s case, this means more magazine sales. In Planned Parenthood’s case, it means more abortions in their baby-killing plants. For normal parents, it’s just a nightmare.

Exhibit C: To complicate that problem just one touch further, it appears that the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) is pushing this agenda as well. As reported by the World Congress of Families, a UNFPA official declared the breakdown of the traditional family to be a “triumph” of “human rights” against “patriarchy.” Well, now they're pushing “International Guidelines on Sexuality Education” which seeks to promote “sexual pleasure” among five year olds.

Folks, our “freedom of religion” does guarantee us the right to teach our children what we want to, not have the sexualization of our children dictated to us by the UN and their Planned Parenthood and Playboy allies through programs like SIECUS. SIECUS bragged last year that their “allies in the SC Department of Education” would help them abolish abstinence based education in South Carolina.

Well, we’re not going to let that happen. Time to fight back.

Mick Zais and Frank Holleman are the leading candidates for Superintendent of Education. Mick and Frank – will you pledge to stand up for abstinence-until-marriage education, as mandated by South Carolina state law, or will you kowtow to the liberal agenda to undermine our parents and put our children at risk for sexually transmitted diseases?

This is an issue too important; we will be staying on this story in the coming months.

Immigration Reform, South Carolina style

You would think the federal government would appreciate a little help on the immigration issue right now.

Budget cuts being what they are, and an out of control border causing havoc and mayhem to the local citizenry, you’d think the feds would tell Arizona “Thanks for the help! Let us know who we can pick up.”

And of course, you’d be spectacularly wrong. Under the Obama Regime, the federal government has no interest in fixing the immigration problem with anything other than blanket amnesty (which of course only worsens the problem in the long term, as we have already seen post-1987). To the Obama Regime, this isn’t a problem to be fixed, but a Rahm Emanuelesque crisis to be taken advantage of.

So you get the insane situation where rather than enforce its own laws and its own borders, the federal government instead puts up signs warning the locals to stay out of portions of their own country due to rampant lawlessness (above).

Let me point to Beaufort County, South Carolina as evidence that the Arizona approach should be preferred to the federal government approach. Beaufort County, fed up with the federal government’s non-intervention into immigration enforcement, decided to do its own ordinance to cut back on illegal aliens, including fines for businesses that employ illegals.

On the other end of the state, York County Sheriff Bruce Bryant has his deputies trained under section 287(g) to handle immigration cases on their own. Beaufort County is also doing this. This will result in a drop to the crime rate in both of those communities.

And yes, South Carolina’s own immigration reform act has finally come completely into fruition this month, though the Obama Regime’s likely move there is to shut down the e-Verify system that the state relies on for businesses to verify workers and the law to be enforced.

So, it seems to me that there are three things that South Carolina and her communities can do on this immigration issue to clamp down, and tell the feds “Yes, we can.”

First, in addition to the previously passed bill, South Carolina needs to pass the Arizona law. This will accomplish two things: it will put us in a position to protect ourselves, and it will give Arizona (and other states contemplating similar actions) some cover to do the same. The feds can pick on one state far more easily than they can pick on 30. Let’s get other states passing Arizona’s immigration law. I know it will be difficult, but the State also needs to pass enough funding for SLED to enforce the law. This will pay for itself in the long run with reduced costs to our Medicaid and social welfare spending.

Second, South Carolina counties should immediately begin discussing how to bring the Beaufort County immigration ordinance to their county. I have a copy, if you need one – look me up. I’ll be sending copies to the Lexington County Council to see if we can get this law passed here. If every county raised moneys similar to the Beaufort tally, you’d see far less clamoring for state dollars. Sooner or later, businesses are going to figure out that hiring illegals isn’t the money making operation they hoped it was, and you’ll start to see a drop in citizen unemployment rates as well.

Finally, every county Sheriff in South Carolina should follow Sheriff Bryant’s lead and get their deputies trained under ICE’s 287(g) program to handle these cases. The problem of criminal illegal aliens is a serious one, and 287(g) is a serious response while it lasts. (I have no faith that the Obama regime won’t pull the plug on this eventually.)

This would be a serious three-tiered approach to stopping the illegal immigration influx into South Carolina, and an effective way to address unemployment, crime, and the looming budget crisis in our state. I hope our leaders will listen.

Reprint: On Conservatism and Race

This didn't make the blog last year, but it should have, and so it will. This was originally posted as a Facebook note on July 14, 2009, in the wake of the disastrous election of Audra Shay as YRNF Chair. A year later, living as I do in Senator Jake Knotts district, it seems just as fresh today.
*****

OK, so I hate having to write this at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, but it is what it is. For a kid who grew up in a house with a Biblical worldview (and thus without so much as a hint of racism), this issue is nearly alien to me. Yet I am confronted with it, and find I need to write it out.

Within the past two months, we have witnessed a meltdown within the Republican Party on the issue of race. I have multiple friends and acquaintances who have made unfortunate Facebook comments that have found their way into the media. Always there was some underlying excuse – look at the political climate, or there was some other subcontext for the comments, whether the left’s hateful treatment of Sarah Palin, the Obama Administration’s policies on spending and taxes, those on the evolution side of the creation debate, or Walmart’s decision to unionize. Whatever excuses are made, the underlying racial nature of the comments made remains inexcusable.

Folks, if we are going to reclaim the mantle of leadership in this nation, there is no room for this sort of behavior. “Conservative” does not refer to bringing some sort of single-ethnicity rule, or the exclusion of those who look different from us; rather, it refers to “conserving” the intent of our Founding Fathers when they wrote:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

All are created equal – by Almighty God, and given rights that we today still work to secure. Governments should, Conservatives believe, exist to protect those rights and our citizen’s lives – and do little else. Liberty flourishes when government power is constrained. Economies flourish when governments tax little and spend little and Liberty is allowed to grow. Free peoples prosper; enslaved peoples do not.

And yet I read this morning about the “permanence of racism in the American experience.” I’ve seen racism come from both sides of the American ideological divide, from the left-wing attacks on Michelle Malkin's Asian ethnicity, to the anti-Semitism found on the fringes of the right and left, to the unhinged remarks of Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright, to what J.C. Watts condemned as the “race-baiting poverty pimps,” to what President Bush termed the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” to the Facebook comments so many of us have had to deal with in the last three months.

My friends, let this not remain. If we are to continue to build a civil society on the principles our Founders laid out – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, rights from God, to all, protected by government – we must stop the ethnic divisiveness and hatred that plagues so much of the rest of our world.

The Apostle Paul makes plain in his epistles that the Christ-follower must have no place for racism or ethnic hatred. Those who in the past have abused Scripture to excuse racism miss the plain words of his letters to Galatia or Ephesus: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female: you are all one in Christ Jesus… One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and in you all.” Not divisiveness, unity. If indeed “Christ is in us, the hope of glory,” we have no room for divisions on such trivial matters as the place of our birth or the tone of our skin.

I hope that we Republicans will remember this and learn from the mistakes of the first half of this year. We cannot capture the attentions of the public, nor convince the public that we are deserving of a return to national leadership, if we cannot also get past the racism of yesteryear that has rightly and strongly been rejected by the vast majority of the American public. Our message of limited government, liberty, and personal responsibility cannot be heard if it is drowned out by controversy over who should be allowed to enjoy those blessings of liberty.

I hope you will join me in this endeavor; I hope that you will take these words to heart and to work in your own community; I hope that you will share this with others.

And I hope that God will richly bless each and every one of you as you seek to follow His heart and do His will.

Putting the Band Back Together

So... it's been a long time.

I haven't written for the blog in... what, 16 months?

At some point, I'll write about the campaign here. Lessons learned, friendships made, folks I just can't trust any more... It was a 95% positive experience, and that's where I'll focus the most. In that time I wound up helping start the Tea Party movement (and then see it go through some serious adolescent growing pains). I'm certain to keep commenting on that as things move forward.

And, as y'all know, I'm pretty opinionated. I'm not about to stop telling you what I think (and let the discussions begin). I've been saving up some things that I'll be writing about over the summer, on all the usual topics that long time readers will remember.

Thanks for coming back. I look forward to moving the debate forward for the sake of conservatism everywhere.