I caught about 5 minutes of a cable show about the 60s counterculture. In it, the actor Danny Glover informs us:

[Haight Ashbury of 1967] was about taking mescaline and [having sex]. It was about smoking weed and [having sex]. [I]t was almost like the revolution was now you can [have sex] every night whether it was having an orgy, whether it’s going to an encounter group. I remember going to the Grateful Dead’s ranch, where everyone would spend the whole weekend nude.

If that sounds like pure hedonism, it just shows how clueless you are. Glover continues:

But it’s hard to reduce it to that, because I don’t want to diminish any of my political commitment and what we were trying to do.

LOL! The documentary plays along with this pretentious conceit. These kids weren’t just there to get stoned and have sex. No sir, they had loftier goals. They were reevaluating societal mores and exploring their freedom.

Hopefully parents feed their kids heads with discernment to see through this wistful, juvenile nonsense. It’s amazing that anyone still sees the 1960s as meaningful, at least in a good way.

Are people going nuts? I have seen and heard of a number of marriages breaking up recently in strange ways. And now comes the odd story of South Carlina Governor Mark Sanford.

Trend researcher Gerald Celente says that when people lose everything, they tend to lose it. True, perhaps, but in all of the cases I’ve heard of, the economy was at best indirectly involved in these marital situations. (I’ve said it many times before, but I believe that the real disaster is yet to come with the economy).

Every time a moral downfalls occurs, we get the usual flood of mockers who are only too happy to pounce. “Ha, another Christian hypocrite!” To the mocker, it’s better to set the bar an inch off the ground and step over it than to set the bar six feet off the ground and fail in jumping over it.

This isn’t to excuse Mark Sanford. He may be an unrepentant fraud for all I know. Church history is replete with them. The Bible warns of those among us who were never of us.

While I don’t want to downplay it, hypocrisy is a fact of life with all believers to some extent, even if it does not lead to scandalous sin. I’ve experienced enough of myself to know that I’m at the head of the “pathetic loser” line. However, to mockers, you’re either perfect or a fake. That’s quite convenient for them. If no man can jump their bar, then they posit that no man has the right to speak God’s judgment against them.

However, man does have the right to do exactly that. God commands it. God commands pastors and elders (sinners all!) to proclaim His righteous judgment. You see, mockers, when R.C. Sproul and Tim Bayly and John MacArthur say that the unrepentant will be thrown into Hell, they’re just proclaiming what Jesus said. If it were only their opinion, it wouldn’t matter, but Jesus Christ, the King of Kings, has proclaimed it. Therefore it matters. Even if you shut up every messenger, the message remains. The eternal God remains. Judgment is coming. There’s no stopping it.

And know this, mockers: God doesn’t grade on a curve. I measure my relative successes against others (and overlook my failures) as well as any sinner, but one man’s scandal doesn’t make you look good to God by comparison. God isn’t comparing you to other people. He’s comparing you to a standard of perfect obedience. If you aren’t trusting in Christ– that is, if you don’t have the imputed, spotless perfection of Christ’s righteousness– then you are on the road to Hell. And you’ll deserve it. The mocking will soon be over.

Mockers, don’t use incidents like this to harden your hearts further. Turn now.

As an addendum to the last post, it’s telling that Barack Obama was shocked and outraged at George Tiller’s murder, but he’s not shocked and outraged at George Tiller’s long career of destroying infants.

The infamous Wichita abortionist George Tiller, who has long been one of the most loathsome child killers in the country, was apparently murdered by someone today. Bad things tend to happen to people who spend their lives doing bad things. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Tiller has long had the tacit approval of his “church,” Reformation Lutheran (what a misuse of the word reformation; deformation would be more like it). Tiller was an usher at the church. He was killed while handing out bulletins. Imagine having your bulletin handed to you by a guy who has profited by killing tens of thousands of infants by poking scissors into the back of their skull and sucking out their brains with a vacuum. “May I show you to your pew?” Now Tiller has been ushered into judgment.

Tiller’s murderer, if guilty, will go to trial and hopefully receive his just sentence of death. While I can’t mourn Tiller’s passing, I do pray that God uses this not to harden, but to bring repentance to his family. Pray that pro-abortion evildoers are not successful at using this incident to persecute lawful opponents of Tiller’s wickedness.

Is there a greater example of men’s darkness than how they glorify men like George Tiller? You’ll probably see plenty of it in the next few days.

Barack Obama implores us to find “common ground” on abortion. Lather, rinse, repeat. The liberal playbook never changes.

“Common ground” means that we all be nice and talk to each other while liberals and their abortionist friends get their way. The killings will continue and all will be as it ever was. Big loser: the hapless unborn.

The other day Obama was warning about a debt crisis as if he were a passerby instead of a powerful Senator who faithfully voted to expand federal spending at every turn, or as if was not he, but instead his evil twin who’s been insanely pushing the expansion of the national debt. Now he’s playing the nation’s pastor-in-chief.

The man’s lawbreaking shamelessness is just amazing.

There is a group on Facebook called “Cancel Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy.” The group has just under 200,000 members (!). Its arguments are absurd, but no more so than any other arguments for bailouts.

At best, public stimulus is inefficient. At worst (which is where government decision-making normally resides), it’s downright destructive. Not only does it remove private savings that would’ve been used to create or expand real enterprises, it’s used for handouts to groups that stifle innovation, that regulate, that create bureaucracies, etc. We’d be better off as a country if the government just printed up all the stimulus money and drove it off a cliff.

I was reminded of this great old article by the late, great economist Murray Rothbard. Rothbard posited that the the answer to an unpayable public debt is outright repudiation. He distinguished between public and private debt:

If I borrow money from a mortgage bank, I have made a contract to transfer my money to a creditor at a future date; in a deep sense, he is the true owner of the money at that point, and if I don’t pay I am robbing him of his just property. But when government borrows money, it does not pledge its own money; its own resources are not liable. Government commits not its own life, fortune, and sacred honor to repay the debt, but ours. This is a horse, and a transaction, of a very different color.

What about the savers, the elderly fixed-income holders, and the foreigners hold these IOUs? Rothbard’s words were stern:

The public debt transaction… will be paid back not out of the pockets or the hides of the politicians and bureaucrats, but out of the looted wallets and purses of the hapless taxpayers, the subjects of the state. The government gets the money by tax-coercion; and the public creditors, far from being innocents, know full well that their proceeds will come out of that selfsame coercion (my exmphasis).

I for one had never really thought of it that way. Why hold ANY government debt? First, there’s no way they’ll ever pay it all back, and so, for example, the kids out there with unpayable college debts will likely make off with cheap and probably worthless educations (the government is the “creditor” for most college loans, but it borrowed that money from someone else). Second, why should I loan the government the means to extend its own power? Third, and most important, isn’t it immoral to hold debt in hopes of receiving interest that is forcibly extracted from others? I’ve concluded that yes, it is immoral. (That said, there’s no real way to get around holding some government debt since every Federal Reserve note i.e. dollar in your pocket is debt courtesy of the government’s counterfeiting operation, and legal tender laws force us to hold these false weights and measures. We have to swim to some extent in the cesspool.)

To those who argued that no one would loan to the government again if they repudiate the debt, Rothbard responded with a thumbs-up:

Apart from the moral, or sanctity-of-contract argument against repudiation that we have already discussed, the standard economic argument is that such repudiation is disastrous, because who, in his right mind, would lend again to a repudiating government? But the effective counterargument has rarely been considered: why should more private capital be poured down government rat holes? It is precisely the drying up of future public credit that constitutes one of the main arguments for repudiation, for it means beneficially drying up a major channel for the wasteful destruction of the savings of the public. What we want is abundant savings and investment in private enterprises, and a lean, austere, low-budget, minimal government. The people and the economy can only wax fat and prosperous when their government is starved and puny.

Anyway, it’s a great article on a topic that will be increasingly prominent in coming years.

Years ago, I worked with a software developer from the Ukraine. We were talking about something related to Russian politicians, and he abruptly looked at me and said: “They’re all creem-een-als.” Those of you who’ve known Eastern European emigres or read their materials know that they possess a certain biting wit. But this guy wasn’t joking. He meant it. He’d seen it. At the time, I laughed it off as hopeless cynicism.

Now I think I finally understand. I’ve really come to see politicians as largely a criminal class. Here’s yet another example.

There’s really no difference between this congresswoman and a thug in an alley with a switchblade.

That title sounds appropriately pretentious.

Environmentalists, at least those interested in politics, are essentially authoritarians. They want to regulate how much water is in our toilets, what kind of light bulbs we use, how much we use our air conditioners, etc. The lash of the state’s whip is their friend. They take something we all agree about — good stewardship, which the market price system handles quite well — and seek power through it. The latest fad is the use of debt and inflation to “create alternative energy jobs.” They are spending our savings and the savings of our descendants because they know what is best for the planet. Sure they do.

Today is liberal Easter. Instead of a cross, there’s a bin where paper can be thrown and spring anew after loads of costly energy is spent recycling it. On this high holy day, we were reminded a million times again to “do our part.” A friend of mine said that he felt like littering today. I know the feeling.

Chesterton’s well-worn line is that when people don’t believe in God, they’ll believe in anything. As a corollary, when people deny the law of God, they create all sorts of rules and regulations to live by as they work their way to heaven (or whatever they call it).

David Wegener cleverly conveys a loathsome style of writing in his excellent summary of the deterioration of Christianity Today over the years:

Articles: There used to be serious articles on core doctrines of the faith: progressive revelation, inerrancy, the Trinity, original sin, justification, sanctification, the Day of Judgment, hell, etc., all of them written by learned pastors and theologians. Today, we’re taken on a journey as the free lance author recounts her confusion on some topic (like fashion or global warming or endangered species) and how she decided to investigate this topic and went to a conference put on by evangelicals on her topic. She tells us how her plane was delayed and she had trouble checking in to the conference hotel, and missed her first session, but how it was okay, cause she ran into the seminar leader in the restaurant and ate lunch with him and how he was nice and funny and normal even though a great man. Then she details all the difficulties in coming to any firm conclusions on this topic and tells us how nuance and humility are really important and necessary, but we can be sure of this, and then out comes some platitude worthy of a 7th grader in Sunday school.

Beyond the self-absorption and shallowness, there’s an aspect of this style of writing that I see also in the Episcopal church newsletter that still comes to our door (don’t ask). Every page of it is a denial of the faith, but it never really comes right out and says it. That’s not nuanced. Just coming out and saying what you think doesn’t befit an elitist. It’s too… doctrinaire. And so, amid the anecdotes about the foibles of life and descriptions of actions that unite us all, you just look for the clues like Muggeridge used to do in Pravda. To use a fictional example, when someone explains the sterling team effort involved in restoring a city garden, along with all the humorous (i.e. unfunny) things that happened along the way, you’ll be informed that Robert and his life partner Steve participated in the project. Or, amid the heart-rending departure of another congregation that can’t hack your denominational activism any longer, you’ll be gently told that some value unity above others. Or you’ll learn that some see nuance instead of “easy answers.”

It’s the equivalent of a pitcher nibbling around the plate all night. You know he’s trying to get you out, but he’s not going to come right out and challenge you. He’ll save his fastballs for the church courts.

Samuel Johnson once wondered, “How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Along those lines, I wonder: How is it we hear the loudest yelps for separation of church and state among those who speak of the state in messianic terms?

Tiller the Killer escapes again (from a misdemeanor charge!), but a day is coming when there will be no escape.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is yet another wasteful, counterproductive, unconstitutional bureaucracy of the federal government. Barack Obama recently appointed Kathleen Sebelius to head the HHS cabinet post. This is a woman who has enjoyed steak and lobster with the infamous late-term abortionist George Tiller.

But the president looks good on TV, has a nice family, and believes in hope and the children. So never mind.

We’ve seen the delight of blacks at Obama’s ascension, and it’s hard to not feel a tinge of happiness for them. They see this as something they could’ve hardly imagined at one time. Many perhaps now feel that they belong in this country, and that is a good thing. They’ve always belonged in my opinion. They’ve never been any better or worse than the rest of us knuckleheads (Gal. 3:28).

However, in their excitement blacks do not see that Barack Obama is an evil man. His views on abortion alone are sickening. Whether you think Iraq a just war (I do not), the total American soldiers dead over there are a day’s work at Planned Parenthood offices and other abortion mills. Add in civilian deaths and it’s maybe a month’s work.

Obama, if he proceeds on his current course, will fail miserably in “turning around the economy.” You can’t create prosperity through borrowing and spending at a national level any more than you create prosperity by borrowing and spending on a personal level. Savings and production are the very things Obama will continue to attack just as Bush did, only Obama will do it with more fervency. Although he and his supporters will complain that he received a bad deck from Bush if things should end up collapsing, Obama shares the same Keynesian roots as the rest of the Democratic establishment. He supports the same massive government that they and Bush do. He’s been part of the problem since he arrived in the Senate. He’ll just be the crook left holding the bag.

So, the question isn’t “Will Obama fail?” That’s pretty much a given. The question is “What will his failure look like?” I’m guessing (and of course that’s all it is) it could go in one of two ways:

1. The bloom will be off the rose within a year or two and an alienated people will wonder what on earth they were thinking. The Republicans, whose one big idea of economic merit — tax cuts — has been been successfully (if not properly) co-opted by Obama, may benefit. Or, at long last, perhaps a coalition will come to the front that will finally make drastic cuts in spending and destroy the Fed to allow for a sustainable economy.

2. Worsening conditions will lead to more crisis measures, with Obama’s popularity staying high (similar to FDR’s fascist regime of the 1930s) with the help of a complaisant news and pop culture media. If this happens, expect a dramatic lessening of economic freedoms. Expect this to extend into social spheres: we already know what liberals think about the church’s views on sodomy. Free speech will be attacked in many ways. Collapse or war may be the end of this big game of Don’t Break the Ice that the government is playing. The greater the house built on sand, the greater its fall. Nock put it well:

A dozen empires have already finished the course that ours began three centuries ago. The lion and the lizard keep the vestiges that attest their passage upon earth, vestiges of cities which in their day were as proud and powerful as ours – Tadmor, Persepolis, Luxor, Baalbek … The sites which now bear Narbonne and Marseilles have borne the habitat of four successive civilizations, each of them, as St. James says, even as a vapour which appeareth for a little time and then vanisheth away. The course of all these civilizations was the same. Conquest, confiscation, the erection of the State; then the sequences which we have traced in the course of our own civilization; then the shock of some irruption [internal collapse] which the social structure was too far weakened to resist, and from which it was left too disorganized to recover; and then the end. -Our Enemy, the State, ch. 6, p.144

Ah yes, the freeing breeze of coercion. Liberal tolerance always involves an iron fist.

It’s amazing that eHarmony, founded by a supposed evangelical, would agree to such a damning idea. Better to shut down than to connive.

For this is the will of God, your sanctification:that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God; that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you. For God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness. Therefore whoever disregards this, disregards not man but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you. -1 Thess 4:3-7

Sean Hannity’s straight-faced summary of Deepak Chopra’s new novel reminded me of Muggeridge’s hilarious comments on journalism’s view of Jesus as Newsmaker. Except here it’s Jesus as Rebel. It’s amazing that one could read the Gospels (not to mention Psalm 2 and Hebrews 1) and see Jesus as little more than James Dean. An Indian workmate, a lapsed Hindu, told me a few years ago how incredulous he was that anyone listened to guys like Deepak Chopra. My workmate’s theory was that people still saw Indians as exotic bearers of great mysteries.

Chopra is yet another in an endless line of false teachers mouthing the same old drivel that Jesus was a man who became divine, and you can be divine too if you buy my book. There’s even an appearance by my own favorite: the Sermon on the Mount as guide for liberal do-gooders. Instead of being terrified by the great sermon, liberals are inspired. They never mention the ending (“Depart from me…”), nor are they inspired by by parable endings like Luke 19:27: “But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.”

What’s with Deepak’s glasses, by the way? When you’re listening to a guy who’s wearing specs from the Bootsy Collins collection, maybe it’s time to find a new guru.

There’s an episode of Star Trek where people on a planet walk about like zombies. Then the clock strikes 6pm and the zombies… go nuts. This is what our nation seems to be doing right now. The government is responding to a crisis it created by just… going… insane.

So GM, you snowed yourself under with absurd labor contracts and bad management? Have some money. AIG, you need another 40 billion? Here you go. Today we learned that the Fed refuses to identify the receipients of two trillion in bank loans. That’s two thousand billion.

I never expect Democrats to have sense, but that almost no one in the Republican party (other than Ron Paul) gets WHY all this is happening, and I just have to think that this is mass delusion. Is God bringing America to heel as he brought Nebuchadnezzar to heel?

We’re headed toward major inflation. It’s already way understated, which is pretty obvious when you look at how much more even stuff like fast food costs when compared to how much purchasing power you have. I’d rather be holding gold than dollars now.

I suggest everyone go out and buy a wheelbarrow. You may eventually need it to cart around your worthless dollars. Also, this book may help as you consider how to react.

People are finally cutting back and beginning to save, but the government is making up for that by spending an unbelievable amount of money that it does not have. Any savings people gain by prudence is being destroyed by government counterfeiting (what you save will purchase less because the currency is being devalued). It’s a like a guy who has five maxed out credit cards, and he says to himself, “I need to stop charging stuff. It’s time to start working and saving.” And our government, bearing stimulus checks and artificially low interest rates, responds: “No, don’t be irresponsible, we’ll give you another credit card, just keep the party going. Keep spending.” It’s like a national impoverishment wish. The government is slowly and effectively destroying this nation’s wealth. The Keynesians will never get it: spending doesn’t create prosperity. Instead, it’s savings and production, both of which enable you to spend money you actually have, that create prosperity.

And now we have Obama and all his brilliant ideas to look forward to: card check, more “stimulus,” more spending, fully nationalized health care… just what we don’t need. Change apparently means “more of the same on steroids.” (And more abortions). George W. Hoover seems to be making way for Barack Delano Roosevelt. Despite what the history books tell you, that’s not a good thing.

My pastor — perhaps the most thoughtful person I’ve ever encountered– believes, I think rightly, that the utterly irresponsible policies this government continues to pursue will have repercussions for the next 30 years. He believes that we may be entering a period where the church will not be a collection of free agents, but a community who will– out of economic necessity– have to really rely on each other. And that this may well used by God to empower the church’s internal unity and its witness to the world.

Katie Couric asked Sarah Palin the following questions recently:

Couric: If a 15-year-old is raped by her father, do you believe it should be illegal for her to get an abortion, and why?

Couric: But ideally, you think it should be illegal for a girl who was raped or the victim of incest to get an abortion?

Couric: Some people [read: people like Katie Couric] have credited the morning-after pill for decreasing the number of abortions. How do you feel about the morning-after pill? … And so you don’t believe in the morning-after pill? [horrors!] … I’m sorry, I just want to ask you again. Do you not support or do you condone or condemn the morning-after pill?

The answers to these aren’t tough, but we all know that the point is to the offend the sensibilities of the moderates who’ll swing the election. One wonders if Katie Couric will ask her preferred candidates similarly tendentious questions. Here are a few suggestions off the top of my head:

Mr. Biden, some people think that all forms of abortion are vicious killings. Let me explain a few of the procedures and I’d like you to tell us in each case why you think it’s both good and right to support them and even take money from the people who perform them. Let’s start with the most common procedure (and I have a few pictures here)…

Pro-lifers argue that the child is alive, and with ultrasound that’s pretty much beyond a reasonable doubt even to the ignorant that we’re dealing with a baby. How can you allow someone to destroy a child? Doesn’t that innocent child have rights?

If the government doesn’t exist to protect life and liberty, what’s the point of it?

No, extremism only runs one way. You say you support a woman’s right to murder her offspring? Nothing extreme about that. No biggie. You get a 100% rating from NARAL– straight A’s? That’s not extreme or unbalanced. You’re a family man and you look good on TV. You speak at events like this held by the nation’s largest abortion mill operator, and you speak approvingly of new clinics? Hm, well, it seems like you’re more than a reluctant supporter, but hey, it’s all in moderation and extremists don’t wear nice suits anyway. Oh, you take money directly from abortionists? Well, nothing to see here either. Move along.

Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrenti Beria remain notorious. Yezhov was a crazed, alcoholic, bisexual dwarf who enthusiastically oversaw Stalin’s Great Terror. Beria, his successor, was a sadistic killer and rapist. Neither, particularly Beria, was averse to getting blood on his shirt.

Preceding these depraved Stalinist hangmen was the lesser-known Vyacheslav Menzhinsky. Menzhinsky was an intellectual of sorts. Like Himmler, he let his thugs do their thing in the cellars and kept his own collar clean. Menzhinsky would recline upon a divan, legs wrapped in a blanket, and interrogate his victims in a kindly fashion. And yet, the historian Donald Rayfield noted that the “excruciatingly polite” and efficient Menzhinsky was responsible for more murders than Yezhov and Beria.

That’s an imperfect segue to this: the ongoing focus on partial birth abortions has always seemed to me a case of playing at the edges, a case of accusing Beria and excusing Menzhinsky. First, there are thousands of late-term partial birth abortions, hundreds of thousands of first-trimester abortions. Second, for the doctor who “performs” the dirty deed, maybe the other types of abortion seem more clinical and less bloodthirsty than partial birth abortion. If we focus on results, though, how are these other forms less brutal for the child? To put it another way, if an executioner gave me a choice between (a) a partial birth abortion where he’d jam scissors into the back of my neck and suck my brains out, (b) a saline abortion where he’d scald me to death, or (c) his most common method, where he’d use a suction tube with a sharp cutting edge to dismember me… Well, I think I’d ask if an option (d) was available.

Beyond people playing Frankenstein and murdering the innocent and helpless, isn’t it the case that all of these methods are barbaric and vicious? No one should get kudos because they oppose one limited and little-used variety.

Tim Bayly’s latest writeup on Barack Obama’s appeal to “moderate” evangelicals reminded me of a few choice Sobran quotes from 1996:

Liberalism wants us to “set aside our differences,” as if our differences don’t really matter as much as the things on which we can all agree with liberalism itself. You can almost define a liberal as one who demands that others reach his conclusions from their premises. -1/4/96 column

[O]n issues as contentious as abortion, there is no “middle.” When you try to find one there, you only make both sides distrust you, because both sides agree on one thing: that there are principles at stake. Faced with clashing principles, [Bob] Dole chooses neither. …When Mr. Dole compromises, he gains nothing for his side, if he can be said to have a side. He merely gets the Democrats to settle for three-quarters of a loaf, in exchange for giving him part of the credit. -7/23/96 column

I don’t know if Obama’s schtick is cynical demagoguery (see Clinton, Bill) or simple inanity. “Common ground,” in his parlance, is just another word for pro-life surrender. Oh, you’re free to carp on the sidelines, but don’t even think about running out on the field with your helmet on. The game’s over. The Supreme Court told us that years ago when they ushered us out of the Dark Ages.

The life issue is pretty much binary: dead baby or live baby. How are you going to find common ground or compromise on abortion? Saw kids in half, maybe? That’s no worse than what’s being done now. Or maybe allow half of those intended for the slaughter to live and half to die? As morally odious as that sounds — it’s like an old Star Trek morality play! — it would represent the kind of “three-quarters of a loaf” success the pro-life movement hasn’t achieved in my lifetime. I’m not pushing it as feasible or moral, but just noting that even such a repugnant idea as this would actually represent an improvement on the current situation.

It’s not the type of compromise the Left would ever entertain anyway. No, the machinery of death will continue to run. On that there will be no compromise. Amid the soaring rhetoric about healing, the abortion mills will faithfully grind, day after day. NARAL and Planned Parenthood will continue to cut their checks to politicians like Obama to keep their blood money safe. Parents will continue to murder their offspring with the indispensable help of this support infrastructure.

Good-faith compromisers on the pro-life side will just have to settle for getting the credit for seeking “common ground.”

One rarely hears the word “harlot” today. We still hear the word “whore,” but mostly in a non-Biblical sense (“attention whore”). The implications of fornication and adultery are mostly gone. The decline from “sodomite” (Biblical term implying judgment) to “homosexual” (clinical term) to “gay” (phony euphemism) is now mirrored by the decline from whore/harlot (judgment) to today’s “prostitute” (clinical cf. the TNIV) to tomorrow’s euphemistic heir apparent: sex worker.

Sex worker. What a term! Norm MacDonald, whose vulgarity clouded clever satire, nailed the new morality back in 1997 (and yes, all but the punch line really happened):

In San Francisco last week, a birthday party for one of the area’s leading political figures, attended by the city’s Mayor, Sheriff, and members of the board of supervisors, culminated with a performance in which a dominatrix used a razor blade to carve a satanic star into the back of her male partner, then urinated on him, before finally sodomizing the man with a liquor bottle. After learning of the incident from press reports, San Franciscans expressed shock and outrage that the liquor bottle was not recycled.

Environmentalism is one thing, but the precincts of liberalism that glory in their irreverence and acceptance of degradation are way too precious to deal with anything implying condemnation. This gets the Tolerant crowd downright offended, angry, even violent. That’s not what they mean by free speech, pal. It turns out that the world has its own Puritan (impuritan?) streak.

“Sex worker” seems so bland, so inoffensive, so legal. And of course, the whole point is to muddy the waters and soften the blow. Consider:

How the faithful city has become a whore sex worker. -Isa. 1:21

“You have played the harlot sex worker with many lovers; and would you return to me?,” declares the Lord. -Jer 3:1

Not quite the same, eh?

Even we Christians cringe when hearing “harlot” and “whore” used in their Biblical sense. They aren’t meant for polite company any longer. But isn’t that another mark of our worldliness?

Stories like this continue to surface stating that young evangelicals are peeling away from conservatism. It’s hard to tell how big of a movement this will be until the election (our liberal media has long indulged in wishful thinking in such matters), but it bears watching.

The reason given by these young evangelicals is that they aren’t “single issue” voters. They’re pro-life, but they also believe in “social justice.” What is social justice? Well, it’s pop-culture speak for the use of taxpayer money to “fight” poverty and AIDS, to “protect” the environment, etc. In other words, it’s the same old, tired liberalism. (To digress, I’m convinced that popular culture inculcates this propaganda more effectively than the usual suspects in the mainstream news media. It’s the subtle, liberal premise on MTV, VH-1, afternoon talk shows, movies, and Comedy Central that, with endless repetition over a period of years, work its magic on minds already untethered by discernment. This, along with churches no longer preaching the whole counsel of God and discipling the sheep, is what has led to the rapid acceptance of sodomy over the last 20 years. The shift in even the last 10 years has been incredible. What a damning lack of love we show by acting as if this is cultural advancement.)

I’m not a single-issue voter, either. I won’t vote for someone who is pro-abortion, but the role of government and the rule of law is also critically important. There’s a reason why a government that historically saw its main goal as providing for the common defense now regulates (via the EPA) the gallons-per-flush for your toilet. That particular power wasn’t enumerated in the constitution, but it didn’t come from nowhere either. It was an accretion on prior interventions in the market. Similarly, government funding of Planned Parenthood didn’t come out of the blue either. It was another layer of plaque buildup on top of prior unconstitutional prerogatives assumed by our government. If we get to the point in this country reached by a few European countries where it’s a “hate crime” to speak the whole counsel of God in matters of sexuality, you can be sure that that won’t come from nowhere either. It will follow other “plausible” and “sensible” government meddling in related matters.

Henry Hazlitt, whose Economics in One Lesson should be read by all, noted:

This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.

That about says it all for liberalism. My late father defined a liberal as “someone who likes to spend someone else’s money.” Well, another definition might be: “Someone who always — always — overlooks secondary consequences.” (In Ohio now, we have a group pushing a ballot issue to force businesses with more than 25 employees to provide seven mandatory sick days. Now isn’t that a fine prescription for making Ohio, already one of the worst business climates in the country, more competitive, especially in this era of expanding inflation and high gas prices? Pity our small business owners.)

Here’s what I say to young, wavering evangelicals:

• Barack Obama is another in a long line of empty-suit, vote-buying demagogues peddling phony hope for power. (McCain is a vote-buying demagogue too, but that’s a matter for another time.)
• If you think abortion a negotiable issue — should a mother be allowed to kill her offspring? — then examine your heart. You’re out of line with what the church has always believed.
• Liberal social justice is a violation of the eighth commandment. Sure, you spend a few trillion and you’re going to manage to help someone. But who’s really benefiting from it? Politicians, lawyers, and special interests, that’s who. And who’s paying the price? Taxpayers, the poor people who live around bums, drunks, and crackheads, and the bums, drunks, and crackheads themselves. African missionaries like David Wegener and my pastor can tell you the effects of foreign aid in Africa. A better answer is the exact opposite of what the social justice movement offers, namely property rights, the replacement of public “safety nets” that enable bad behavior with private charity, the return of vagrancy laws, discouragement of sodomy instead of handing out rubbers (Planned-Parenthood style), and, most of all, the gospel of Christ. The abortion movement is flat-out evil; liberal social justice is flat-out stupid and counterproductive (and that’s a charitable take).
• Liberal social justice (and that includes the environmental movement) is an enemy of freedom. Value your freedom to live and worship. The government already takes half of our income on average, and there is some truth in the idea that every dollar spent by government is a dollar of our freedom. That’s one reason why, for example, many families don’t feel they can afford to have mom at home, because politicians in Washington — especially the ones who prattle on about “working families” — think they know how to spend our money better than we can. This arrogant attitude is well demonstrated by a U.S. senator in favor of a 1990s tax hike who said something to the effect of “well, if we don’t do it, people will just go out and buy more VCRs and TVs.”
• The Christianized version of liberal social justice offered by the Rick Warrens isn’t a new reformation of Christianity; it’s the same candy-coated spirituality offered by the social gospel movements of the 19th and 20th centuries that decimated the mainline churches.

I’ve never thought much of Habitat for Humanity. It always had that vague taint of the (now-trendy!) social gospel and political leftism espoused by regressives like Tony Campolo. Now Habitat is revealing itself by logrolling with Planned Parenthood.

Someone at National Review (back when it was much better) once posited a rule that any organization that is not explicitly conservative will drift leftward over time. I don’t know if Habitat really had to drift too far. I do know this: Not one dollar of our money will be sent to organizations like Habitat or Susan G. Komen.

McCoy: We were speculating. Is God really out there?
Kirk: Maybe he’s not out there, Bones. Maybe he’s right here. [points to his heart]
-from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

Every few years, a book comes out that captures the world’s attention using the same basic New Age stew (and a big marketing budget). The latest deceiver is Eckhart Tolle. He’s being touted by Oprah Winfrey, who herself has a long track record of pushing falsehood. The book names may change, the endorsers may change as the decades go by (John Denver, Shirley MacLaine, Marianne Williamson), but the beliefs are pretty much the same vapid samplings of pantheism, paganism, gnosticism, and self-help.

Paul and John in particular warn against those pushing false knowledge of hidden things (e.g. the book of Colossians). The early church father Irenaeus meticulously chronicled the “absurd ideas” of gnostics like Valentinus. Compared to the complexities of the old heretics, the pop-culture smorgasbord tends to serve heretical appetizers (a little bit o’ this and a little bit o’ that) and junk food.

Given that, why would anyone waste time reading Oprah Winfrey’s latest guru instead of mining the Scripture? Well, for one, these false teachers tell itching ears (2 Tim 4:3) what they want to hear. They impart supposedly “secret” knowledge that turns out to be the same old lies: You are a good person with great potential, so look within and become a god (compare with Jeremiah 17:9…”The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked”). And of course, they tell us not to worry about King Jesus. Jesus, to these false teachers, is a “demigod” or “spirit guide,” but not the only begotten Son of God who rules the nations (Psalm 2). He’s tame.

Also, these books prey on the ignorance of our Christian neighbors. This is the kind of stuff — along with all the other self-help, quasi-religious therapy of television talk shows — that forms people’s spiritual beliefs. Peter Brown, in his biography of Augustine, noted the time Augustine spent correcting and guarding his flock in letters marked by “an inspired fussiness, and by a heroic lack of measure when it came to the care of endangered souls… [They] catch the barely suppressed sigh of a tired old age, characterized by constant quiet acts of self-sacrifice as Augustine lent his pen, again and again, to the defence of his Church, at the expense of intellectual projects that engaged him more deeply.” (pgs 466 and 492, 2000 edition)

Well, I saw Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. I hardly agree with its premise that academic freedom is the solution to persecution of those who believe in Intelligent Design. A better solution would be to tear down the evolutionist’s fort by abolishing state-funded education. Public schools — particularly universities — are largely sheltered from market forces and allow for the creation of intellectual fiefdoms. In other words, we’re free to disagree with Darwinists as long as we keep funding them. How about making these people get real jobs that aren’t based on government coercion? As a Christian, I would add that academic freedom means only so much if our wills are in bondage to sin.

Those caveats aside, one only need look at the absurdly negative reviews of Expelled to see that it’s touched a nerve (cf. universally positive reviews of this documentary). It’s the same nerve jangled when sodomy and abortion are discussed, a nerve inflamed by hatred for God and his church (aka. those inferior ‘religious nuts’).

It is well-made. It makes good points. You’ll have to see Expelled to hear some utterly absurd Darwinist theories about how life began. Also, David Berlinski– the guy had me laughing.

More signs of the drift in evangelical youth. Where did people get the idea that there is virtue in living sinfully — indeed, flaunting it like Anna Karenina — as long as you’re honest about it? Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue. Authenticity must be the tribute that vice pays to vice.