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.

Random Thoughts on President-Elect Hopenchange

A few thoughts while I watch the Prez-Elect introduce his new National Security team...

It's funny (and somewhat encouraging) to me to see how quickly Obama has stuck the knife in the collective back of the Left in his headlong dive towards the middle. Iraq War? Hey, looks like the surge worked and we won - oh, and we're keeping Defense Secretary Gates. (Interesting, isn't it? that Democrats two Administrations running have chosen Republicans to run the Defense Department... Even Democrats know you can't trust Democrats to run the military.)

Hispanics in the cabinet? Probably, but not that pesky Bill Richardson as Secretary of State - we'll put Hillary in for that one. (That has to be the most stunning stab in the back of the lot - Richardson is the most qualified Democrat to be SecState; he backs Obama over Hillary; Obama thanks him by... overlooking him for Hillary? Wow...)

Overturning don't ask, don't tell? Too soon to talk about that... Freedom of Choice Act? Well, we're not sure there's a consensus... Undo the Bush tax cuts? Y'know, a recession might not be the best time to do that...

The exhilaration at electing Obama is already wearing off for the left - making this perhaps the first administration whose honeymoon is ending before the inauguration.

***

Of course, that's if there is an inauguration. This pesky birth certificate thing is getting more steam than it should - and now we hear the Supreme Court might hear it this week? A few days before the Electoral College meets? Granted, very little news reporting is going on with this story, so much of what's going around is by email, (or WorldNetDaily) and of questionable repute. Still - this is a story that just won't die - even after the reprinted copy of the birth certificate was released by the campaign. (And was immediately attacked as a fake by critics.)

Dan has already posted the link to the Kenyan ambassador's unbelievable blunder in telling a reporter that Obama's Kenyan birthplace is already a national attraction, and that Obama's paternal grandmother insists he was born in Kenya. (Notable - Obama's maternal grandmother insisted he was born in Hawaii.)

Personally, I still can't get past the Honolulu Advertiser announcing the birth the next day (August 4, 1961). Many questions still arise (why is the hospital still unknown, why seal the records, where's the original), and Obama should put this behind him by coming clean about this whole thing. In my own estimation though, the preponderance of the evidence suggests Obama was born in Hawaii, to an American citizen mother, when he says he was, and is therefore Constitutionally allowed to be President.

***

...which may be more than we can say for Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, as it turns out. Pete Williams (NBC analyst, and former State Department spokesman) notes Article One, Section Six from the US Constitution:

No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been increased during such time; and no Person holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Office.

Since the salary for cabinet secretaries has been increased while Clinton was a Senator, she would be constitutionally barred from serving. Question: do Senators decide not to confirm her over this, or does this one wind up in Court? I'm guessing the latter - the politically expedient thing to do is confirm her "in a spirit of bipartisanship" (blah blah, etc), and let's face it - the Senate isn't known for doing things that are anything other than politically expedient. Still - it will be interesting to see this one wind up before the Supremes.

Obama Reax - It's not the Racism, it's the intellectual dishonesty

I haven't had a whole lot of time to think about the Obama speech (still haven't, really), but I was struck by the unbelievability of the speech more than anything.

Apparently, I wasn't alone.

Victor Davis Hanson pointed out the relativistic nature of the speech, with a hidden rejection of absolutes that guts it of any moral authority.

The tragedy of Obama's speech and the mindless endorsement of it was the rejection of any constant moral standard—an absolute sense of wrong and right that transcends situational ethics, context, and individual particulars. And once one jettisons such absolutes, they won't be there when one wishes to seek refuge in them in a future hour of need.

When he failed to "disown" Rev. Wright, and then brought in parallels of things purportedly as bad, or offered excuses that Wright had done good things to balance the bad, or that there were certain mitigating circumstances that explain his hatred, then the universal wrong of Wright's racism and lying disappears and with it any ethical standard by which we have moral authority to condemn such vitriol.

Newt Gingrich went on Cavuto's FoxNews show to declare the speech "intellectually dishonest." Video at the link.

All things considered, though, it's these two YouTube efforts that best describe what went wrong with this speech. The first shows Obama flip flopping on what he knew and when he knew it. The second compares Obama's own words to those of his wife and his pastor. I think I see the beginnings of a 527 negative ad in that second clip.

First the flipflop:



Then the comparison:



No matter what, this will serve as ammunition for Hillary's campaign, who will surely continue to run the "Red Phone" ad as a contrast to Obama's inconsistency and unreadiness. If she fail to capitalize on this inconsistency, Senator McCain surely will.