Religious Freedom in the Workplace: Statement on Amicus Brief Filed at US Supreme Court

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Photo Credit: RZIMAs responsible citizens who love Jesus Christ and love our country, we want to express our deep conviction on matters of our faith and expression. No one ought to be compelled to so amputate their belief that it is meaningless except in private.

The faithful Christian cannot separate his life into sacred and secular, worship and work. A Christian does not cease to worship the Lord when he or she goes to work or opens a family business. Romans 11:36 says, “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen.” As Christians we are called to do all things to the glory of God, including – perhaps especially – our work. This amicus brief – which includes my signature – was filed at the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Protestant theologians in support of the appeals by Hobby Lobby Stores and Conestoga Wood Specialties, and demonstrates how the holistic nature of the Christian faith extends to a believer’s vocation.

Sadly, over the years, the Christian faith has been targeted by a rabid secularization and evicted from any or all public expression. The encroachment upon our civil liberties is frightening and we ought to take a stand. The cases of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga highlight the extreme dilemma that results when Christians are forced to choose between violating the government’s regulations and violating his or her sincerely held religious beliefs in the workplace. These beliefs are planted in our conscience.

Read more from this story HERE.

Prolific Historian: The Irony of Obama Feigning Peace Could Cause War (+audio)

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Photo Credit: APTo one prominent historian and world observer, President Obama’s policies are raising the stakes for war, as well as extinguishing opportunities for our youth as the country gets more Europeanized.

When President Obama abdicates American world leadership, knowingly or not, he raises the likelihood that in the next two years, belligerents around the globe may take more risks because America is no longer likely to respond. What kind of risks are there for the country?

Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution says these risks could include, “I will cross the 38th parallel. I’m going to readjust this settlement in Cypress. I’m going to bully Japan, or Taiwan is ripe for invasion, or maybe we can take another Soviet republic back into Russia, or South America, there’s areas for aggrandizement.”

Confusing America’s former allies and adversaries, President Obama’s rejection of American exceptionalism has consequences not readily realized. Hanson says in this new 26 minute video interview with The Daily Caller filmed on June 10, “The irony is that Obama wants to be the global peacemaker, but by projecting this image of ambivalence, he’s going to be the global war-maker, if he’s not careful.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Thousands Go Without Water as Detroit Cuts Service for Nonpayment

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Photo Credit: Jessica J. Trevino / APIt has been six weeks since the city turned off Nicole Hill’s water.

Dirty dishes are piled in the sink of her crowded kitchen, where the yellow-and-green linoleum floor is soiled and sticky. A small garbage can is filled with water from a neighbor, while a bigger one sits outside in the yard, where she hopes it will collect some rain. She’s developed an intricate recycling system of washing the dishes, cleaning the floor and flushing the toilet with the same water.

“It’s frightening, because you think this is something that only happens somewhere like Africa,” said Hill, a single mother who is studying homeland security at a local college. “But now I know what they’re going through — when I get somewhere there’s a water faucet, I drink until my stomach hurts.”

Hill is one of thousands of residents in Detroit who have had their water and sewer services turned off as part of a crackdown on customers who are behind on their bills. In April, the city set a target of cutting service to 3,000 customers a week who were more than $150 behind on their bills. In May, the water department sent out 46,000 warnings and cut off service to 4,531. The city says that cutting off water is the only way to get people to pay their bills as Detroit tries to emerge from bankruptcy — the utility is currently owed $90 million from customers, and nearly half the city’s 300,000 or so accounts are past due.

But cutting off water to people already living in poverty came under criticism last week from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, whose experts said that Detroit was violating international standards by cutting off access to water. “When there is genuine inability to pay, human rights simply forbids disconnections,” Catarina de Albuquerque, the office’s expert on the human right to water and sanitation, said in the communique.

Read more from this story HERE.

Is Joe Miller Really a Christian?

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As I travel across the State of Alaska, people often ask me, “Joe, are you a Christian?” Most people know my conservative principles but they don’t know my heart. So, I want to take the occasion on this Sunday to share a little bit of my story with you that I have shared in small group settings . . .

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My car slammed into a tree, crossed a four lane road, and ended up in the middle of the railroad tracks. By all accounts, I should have been dead.

With a massive headache, over 30 years ago as a teenager, I woke up on a hard cot in a cold jail cell, desperately hoping I was dreaming. I thought I could occasionally dance with the devil and not pay for it, but my luck had run out.

I grew up with five sisters and one brother. Although we were poor, I was raised in a loving Christian home. Our father was the pastor of an independent church and we had a stay-at-home mom, focused on raising her family.

In grade school, I had a very visible deformity on my lip from an accident when I was six and was often teased by other children. The continuous ridicule, rejection, and bullying made me feel insecure. Because my parents couldn’t afford health insurance or surgery to take care of my lip, I mowed lawns and did other work to pay for the surgery myself. However, I still felt like I had to compete in order to have self value, and I ended up making some poor choices.

My parents had no idea that I started partying in high school. And then came disaster. The morning that I woke up on the hard cot in the cold jail cell with a massive headache, lonely, and afraid, I could only do one thing: cry out to God. I was flat on my face, broken. I prayed, “Lord, I desperately need you. I cannot live without your presence.” I confessed my sins and gave myself wholly to Jesus Christ. And He revolutionized my life.

From that day on, I have never been the same. The Lord turned the bad into good (Romans 8:28) and I graduated from my high school class of more than 200 as valedictorian. He has blessed me with many other accomplishments. You can read more of what God has done in my life by clicking HERE.

Most importantly, he blessed me with an incredible wife and eight wonderful children and, as of last December, a beautiful grandson!

Am I perfect? Of course not! Have I made mistakes? Absolutely. The most important lesson I learned was after making a mistake, which we all do, is to confess and move on.

As the Apostle Paul said, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.” (1 Tim. 1:15; 1 John 4:8). In other words, Paul was saying “I am not better than you.”

Not only has Christ’s sacrifice on the cross proved sufficient for me, he also helps me every day to deal with unjust attacks and is even helping me to love the people who speak and write them.

So if anyone asks you, “Is Joe Miller really a Christian?” The answer is unequivocally “Yes.” God changed my life! “If you openly declare that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9).

I humbly ask you to pray for me. I am pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, fiscally conservative, and unashamed of my faith in Jesus Christ. I will not waiver in these core beliefs.

If you want to hear my personal testimony, you can watch it on YouTube by clicking HERE.

God’s people must rise up and stand for truth and righteousness in the halls of government, and in the marketplace. Together we can make a difference in our nation . . . we must!

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This article may be freely published, reproduced, and shared.

Texas Ranchers Under Attack

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Photo Credit: Ryan LovelaceTexas Ranchers Under Attack, Overrun by Illegal Immigrants

Ronnie Osburn was preparing to talk to National Review Online Thursday about lawlessness in his border community when his home was broken into.

Osburn, a rancher who lives just south of a Border Patrol checkpoint in Brooks County, Texas, says he stepped away for about 45 minutes, and when he returned somebody had trashed his house. The trespassers shattered his gun case, leaving a trail of blood throughout the house, but dropped the guns near the kitchen before scattering out the back door. They had searched through the house, opened drawers, and even left a heap of uncooked bacon in a frying pan on the stove.

Ranchers in South Texas say they are seeing a greater criminal element among illegal immigrants trespassing through their property. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers responded to the situation. Although no arrests have been made, a Brooks County sheriff’s deputy tells National Review Online the break-in involved “undocumented crossers.” At one point a Border Patrol agent said he thought the trespassers had been spotted about a half-mile north of the ranch, headed in the same direction as the Border Patrol checkpoint near Falfurrias.

Border Patrol agents carrying AR-15s and 12-gauge pumps searched the property with Osburn, who also had an AR-15, looking for any sign of the trespassers. After scanning his backyard, Osburn discovered three shoes left behind, and Border Patrol agents said they expected the burglars were less than a mile away.

“Welcome to South Texas,” Osburn tells me while extending his hand.

Read more from this story HERE.

What’s Next, Police With Tanks?

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Photo Credit: National Review Barney Fife Meets Delta Force

By Charles C. W. Cooke.

Nestled awkwardly among the usual guff, the outrage website Salon this week took a welcome flyer and accorded space to something genuinely alarming. “A SWAT team,” the headline screamed, “blew a hole in my 2-year-old son.” For once, this wasn’t hyperbole.

The piece’s author, Alecia Phonesavanh, described what it felt like to be on the business end of an attack that was launched in error by police who believed a drug dealer to be living and operating in her house. They “threw a flashbang grenade inside,” she reported. It “landed in my son’s crib.” Now, her son is “covered in burns” and has “a hole in his chest that exposes his ribs.” So badly injured was he by the raid that he was “placed into a medically induced coma.” “They searched for drugs,” Phonesavanh confirmed, but they “never found any.” Nor, for that matter, did they find the person they were looking for. He doesn’t live there. “All of this,” she asks, “to find a small amount of drugs?”

Historians looking back at this period in America’s development will consider it to be profoundly odd that at the exact moment when violent crime hit a 50-year low, the nation’s police departments began to gear up as if the country were expecting invasion — and, on occasion, to behave as if one were underway. The ACLU reported recently that SWAT teams in the United States conduct around 45,000 raids each year, only 7 percent of which have anything whatsoever to do with the hostage situations with which those teams were assembled to contend. Paramilitary operations, the ACLU concluded, are “happening in about 124 homes every day — or more likely every night” — and four in five of those are performed in order that authorities might “search homes, usually for drugs.” Such raids routinely involve “armored personnel carriers,” “military equipment like battering rams,” and “flashbang grenades.”

Were the military being used in such a manner, we would be rightly outraged. Why not here? Certainly this is not a legal matter. The principle of posse comitatus draws a valuable distinction between the national armed forces and parochial law enforcement, and one that all free people should greatly cherish. Still, it seems plain that the potential threat posed by a domestic standing army is not entirely blunted just because its units are controlled locally. To add the prefix “para” to a problem is not to make it go away, nor do legal distinctions change the nature of power. Over the past two decades, the federal government has happily sent weapons of war to local law enforcement, with nary a squeak from anyone involved with either political party. Are we comfortable with this?

Read more from this story HERE.

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Phtoo Credit: Jessica Rinaldi / ReutersWhat’s Next, Police With Tanks?

By James Poulos.

In the classic television series The A-Team, the eponymous heroes spend much of their time evading or thwarting the show’s stock adversaries, the ineffective Military Police. In a show notable for its lack of blood and gore, the MPs are waylaid by many a car crash, explosion, and unluckily placed boat pier.

How quaint that all seems today, when the creeping militarization of American law enforcement has at last begun to shock the conscience. Although many of us endure perennial mourning and outrage over the “senseless” acts of school shooters, most of us have more or less ignored the routine, all-too-logical bloodshed and injustice perpetrated by out of control SWAT teams, police forces equipped like armies, and cities and towns clamoring for materiel designed for military occupation, not public safety.

Talking heads and professional activists never tire of asking how many children must die before Washington imposes yet another round of constraints on the Second Amendment. But which leading voices wonder how many children must bleed in their own homes before Americans take action to constrain our officials from adopting a war footing in our neighborhoods?

At Salon, Alecia Phonesavanh recounts the latest gut-wrenching iteration of the pattern. “I heard my baby wailing and asked one of the officers to let me hold him,” she writes. “He screamed at me to sit down and shut up and blocked my view, so I couldn’t see my son. I could see a singed crib. And I could see a pool of blood. The officers yelled at me to calm down and told me my son was fine, that he’d just lost a tooth. It was only hours later when they finally let us drive to the hospital that we found out Bou Bou was in the intensive burn unit and that he’d been placed into a medically induced coma.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Egos And Infighting: The GOP’s Biggest Opponent In November

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Photo Credit: TownHall Stars are aligning for a big Republican victory this November – solidifying and expanding the GOP’s majority in the House and perhaps gaining one in the Senate. This is a best-case scenario, and any majority in the Senate would be a slim one. But the importance of removing Harry Reid as majority leader cannot be overstated. That’s why Democrats will pull every dirty trick in their deep bag to hold the Senate, and sadly many Republicans will help them in that quest.

President Obama will have two years left to wreak havoc on the country after the next election, but he can only throw stones into the river of time, not permanently change its flow. The ripples from his stones will have consequences, but they will be nothing compared to the lasting damage he can do with more Supreme Court appointments. Obamacare, oppressive EPA regulations, executive orders, all of it can be changed or repealed, but not with a more activist progressive Supreme Court.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 81 and suffering from pancreatic cancer. So far, she’s resisted progressives’ calls for her to retire so the president can replace her with a younger reliable vote, but no one knows if that will continue. Justice Anthony Kennedy is the key swing vote on the court right now. He’s 77 and in seemingly good health. But he’s also an unreliable vote for the Constitution. If they, or any of the other justices could be replaced by a younger, unchecked Obama appointee, the chances they’d bastardize the court’s rulings to permanently enshrine unconstitutional unilateral presidential actions rises exponentially.

Harry Reid spared SCOTUS nominees when he changed the Senate filibuster rules, but he could close that loop quickly. The Supreme Court is key and it’s their goal. Pack it with progressives, particularly young ones with decades to serve, and it’s game over.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Scandal of Fiddled Global Warming Data

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Photo Credit: Telegraph When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data.

Read more from this story HERE.

What Is (and Isn’t) at Stake for Obamacare in the Hobby Lobby Case

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Photo Credit: Larry Downing-Pool / Getty ImagesThe Supreme Court won’t strike down Obamacare’s contraception mandate, but a ruling for the law’s challengers could still render the policy toothless for millions of women.

The justices are set to rule any day now in a challenge to the birth-control mandate, and any decision against the policy would have ripple effects far beyond the two companies that filed this lawsuit. Just how far, however, depends on how broadly the Court rules—and it has plenty of options.

No matter what happens, the Court won’t strike down the entire mandate. The two companies that brought their challenge to the Supreme Court—Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties—haven’t asked the justices to ax the entire policy.

The most sweeping option is a broad First Amendment proclamation that all corporations have a fundamental right to exercise religion, in this case by refusing to cover birth control in their employees’ health care plans. This outcome would be almost a sequel to the Citizens United case on campaign finance laws and free speech. It would probably open the door for any company to challenge a slew of state or federal regulations, and would allow any corporation to avoid the contraception mandate—potentially affecting millions of women.

Read more from this story HERE.

Bring Obama your Huddled, Illegal Youths; He Invited Them

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Photo Credit: Eric GayBy Charles Hurt.

“Death trains” rumbling through Mexico teeming with children, headed for the U.S. border. Teenage girls raped. Unspeakable violence at the hands of ruthless coyotes, carrying out President Obama’s stunningly reckless new foreign policy.

Of course, Mr. Obama did not issue a formal edict inviting each of the tens of thousands of children pouring over the border from Mexico. He didn’t have to. His executive action legalizing underage illegals in the U.S. was all the invitation they needed. And come they did.

At this hot pace, we will have more than a quarter-million orphaned children on the border by the end of next year — each and every one the sole responsibility of Mr. Obama.

Actions have consequences, Mr. President. And executive actions have executive consequences. You are personally responsible for the harrowing condition of every one of these children. You are personally responsible for ripping apart every single one of these families.

Mr. Obama and congressional Democrats have pursued amnesty for illegals hoping for millions of indentured voters — poor new Americans they believe will feel obligated to vote for Democrats for decades to come. Yes, a sick political gambit.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: TownHall GOP Rep: Child Immigration Crisis ‘Has Been in the Making for Years’

By Leah Barkoukis.

Since October, 52,000 unaccompanied children have made the perilous journey to the United States, some suffering psychological or physical abuse in the hands of smugglers, others having been sold into the sex trade. DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said at today’s House Committee on Homeland Security hearing that Border Patrol is encountering roughly 350 people crossing into the U.S. per day—an unprecedented influx that patrol stations cannot handle and a problem which shows no signs of abating.

“This is a crisis that has been in the making for years,” Committee Chairman Michael McCaul said during his opening statement. “The Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. government as a whole, has been slow to act, turning a blind eye to the warning signs.”

While there was consensus among committee members that the safety of children comes first in addressing the issue, when it came to identifying the root causes of the problem, Democrats and Republicans were divided.

Republicans, including Chairman McCaul, mostly laid out three factors that have contributed to the problem: Obama’s executive actions like the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, lax enforcement policies, and Congress’ talk of comprehensive immigration reform.

“It is beyond dispute that such a narrative shapes behavior and encourages people to come to our country illegally,” McCaul said. “In fact, newspapers in El Salvador and Honduras seem to be encouraging youth to head to the United States based on these policies. And recent internal DHS surveys of these children reveal that more than 70% believe they are going to stay in the country.”

Read more from this story HERE.