Little Girl Abandoned by Father and Drug-Addict Mother Is Adopted by Christian Texas Family, Becomes Best Athlete in the World

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“The best ever.” “The perfect 10.” “The best gymnast in history.” “Unbeatable.” “Stunning.” “Breathtaking.” “A Legend in the making.”

These are some of the ways Simone Biles has been described by her competition, even before her Olympic debut. Biles, a 19-year-old gymnast for Team USA, is already the most decorated gold medalist in gymnastics world championship history. In Rio, she is on the fast track to becoming the best in the world, again, being an odds-on favorite to bring home as many as five gold medals . . .

[Simone] Biles and her siblings were born into a fatherless, drug-abusing home and eventually were placed in foster care. According to Texas Monthly:

Biles was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1997 to drug-addicted parents who struggled to care for their children. Biles and her three siblings were shuffled back and forth between their mother’s house and a foster home. (Biles’s father had abandoned her mother and was never present in his daughter’s life.) . . .

Her upbringing was chaotic. Biles bounced back and forth between state and foster care until she was six years old. In 2001, her grandparents, Ron and Nellie Biles, officially adopted Simone and her sister and moved them to Spring, Texas. (Read more from “Little Girl Abandoned by Father and Drug-Addict Mother Is Adopted by Christian Texas Family, Becomes Best Athlete in the World” HERE)

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CHART OF THE DAY: College Inflation Since 1978

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Courtesy of David Stockman, here’s another testament to government intervention:

It all goes back to two well-intentioned federal goals: first, that a college education should be within the reach of every American, and second, that if students borrow money from the federal government, they should repay it. Most of us would agree that both are noble goals. But the consequences of both have been stunning.

As a result of the first, the money began to flow; over the last 30 years, inflation-adjusted federal financial aid has quadrupled. Total student debt has now reached the $1 trillion mark, more than the credit card debt of every American combined. The federal deficit in the recently ended fiscal year totaled $1.3 trillion; the debt load carried by college grads now stands at more than two thirds of our nation’s massive budget shortfall.

The above paragraph was actually written five years ago. The actual numbers are far worse today.

College-versus-Medical-Care-or-New-Car

Look at the bright side: it’s only 1,272 percent inflation in the last 38 years.

Well done, Democrats! (For more from the author of “CHART of the DAY: College Inflation Since 1978” please click HERE)

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A Tale of Redemption: Recovering Alcoholic Priest Says ‘Hold onto Jesus’ in Video Released After His Death

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“Hold onto Jesus.”

Those were some of the last words that Fr. Ed Thompson, a priest and recovering alcoholic, said to a friend who documented his 92-year life story on video. It was a heartwarming tale of the Prodigal Son who came home, told just before his real home-going. Fr. Ed wasn’t the typical pious priest. He’d struggled with addiction for most of his adult life. But he knew one thing: Jesus Christ was the answer.

Fr. Ed was born eight minutes before his identical twin brother David. Before the boys were born, a doctor told their mother to abort them, because she would contract rheumatoid arthritis if she carried them to term. She refused. Fr. Ed said that when he and his brother were born, his mother took each of their tiny hands and made the sign of the cross over her newborn babies. He and his brother later looked back on that event as one that set their lives in motion.

A Testing and a Calling

Both boys entered the priesthood, David one year before Ed. Although he received his calling at age 11, he wasn’t “pious,” and continued to live a normal life — he dated girls, played sports and worked at Westinghouse. When he finally told his mother and father he wanted to be a Catholic priest, they discouraged him. His father accused him of trying to be like his brother. His mother said he needed to work to help support the family. Even the local priest agreed with his parents.

Later, though, he said, he realized they were testing him. “They wanted to make as sure as they could that I was doing it for the right reason,” he said.

After entering the seminary and then working as a Vocation Director for 12 years, in 1974 Fr. Ed was made a pastor in a Philadelphia church. “But I had a problem,” he said sadly. “It was a drinking problem. I was a real, live alcoholic.” He only lasted a year as a pastor there. “I was so sick and so ashamed that after a year I just left the parish.”

He went to Florida and got a job selling graves for a cemetery. Even though his mother urged his brother David to “bring him back,” David told her he would wait until Fr. Ed was ready. “Thanks be to God, my dear brother David never tried to call me, never tried to rescue me.” After about six months, he called his brother, who told him he’d immediately come to Florida.

“You know what he told me?” Fr. Ed said. “’Edward, you’re an alcoholic. And you’re a liar.’ Alcoholics when they’re drinking cannot tell the truth. They can’t survive telling the truth.” That’s when he joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and his brother arranged for him to stay in a rehabilitation house, where he lived for over a year. His job at the house was slopping the pigs. “So the Prodigal Son story was very much alive in my life,” Fr. Ed said wryly.

Fr. Ed was once again given the opportunity to practice as a priest when the bishop of Reno, Nevada, took him in. But once again he fell victim to his addiction. He celebrated the event by drinking scotch. It caught up with him about a year later, he said, and over his fifteen years as a priest in Nevada, Fr. Ed said he was sent to 3 six-month treatment centers for his alcoholism, after which he said the money ran out and the diocese told him, “We’re saying goodbye to you. You’ll have to make it on your own.”

At the Point of Desperation

Just at the point of desperation as he was kicked out of the parish and the treatment center, Fr. Ed had an experience that turned his life around. A woman was trying to reach him, and he decided to call the phone number even though he didn’t recognize the name.

It turned out to be someone he had helped 30 years prior. Jesus told her that he was in trouble and she was to help him, she said. He admitted he needed help and had nowhere to go and she invited him into her home in Florida, where he had four cats as roommates. “I was really afraid of cats,” he said. He worked for his room and board, cleaning up after the cats, cutting the grass and going to the grocery store. He was thankful for a place to stay.

Then ‘a miracle happened,’ Fr. Ed said.

He was given yet another opportunity to serve in a church, there in Florida. At first he was given only simple jobs like training altar servers or reading the Scriptures during worship. But then his bishop in Florida convinced the bishop of Reno to let him work as a priest once again.

“For the last 23 years, I’ve had the joy of being a parish priest here at St. Mary Magdalene parish,” he said. “It has been 23 years of the happiest times in my whole priesthood, my whole life. … I offer holy mass, hear confessions, teach the Scriptures, visit the sick, bury the dead. If I do those things, and do them well, I’ve had a wonderful priesthood.”

Fr. Ed’s last words on the video were intended to reach others, offer encouragement and hope and perhaps reveal the secret of what kept him going during the years he struggled.

“Whatever you do,” he said as he looked into the camera, “hold onto Jesus Christ … in the holy Communion. … He is there. He is our religion, He is our Church. … Hold onto Him. Believe in Him. Never let Him slip out of your life.” (For more from the author of “A Tale of Redemption: Recovering Alcoholic Priest Says ‘Hold onto Jesus’ in Video Released After His Death” please click HERE)

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Dobson: Electing Trump to the White House ‘Would Unleash Christian Activists’

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Christian activist Dr. James Dobson believes that a Donald Trump presidency “would unleash Christian activists to fight for their beliefs.”

Writing on the website WND, Dobson recounted a June meeting in which he met with Trump and other Christian leaders at Trump Tower in New York City.

At the meeting, he told Trump, “Our Supreme Court has struck down Bible reading in schools and even prohibited prayer to an unidentified God. Then, they banned the posting of the Ten Commandments on bulletin boards. From there, the limitation on religious liberties has become even more egregious,” he wrote.

“Most recently, President Obama and Hillary Clinton have been referring to ‘freedom of worship,’ rather than ‘freedom of religion.’ Do you understand their motive? They are suggesting that Americans are free to worship in their churches and synagogues, but not in the public square,” he told Trump.

He said that Trump responded by calling it an “outrage that Christians have been deprived of their rights to speak openly on behalf of the values and principles in which they believe.”

Dobson noted that Trump criticized the Johnson Amendment, a 1954 piece of tax code that bans political participation by churches, as well as other tax-exempt not-for-profit groups. The amendment was supported by then-Sen. Lyndon Johnson, D-Texas.

Dobson said Trump’s promise to overturn the amendment “would have a great impact on Washington because it would unleash Christian activists to fight for their beliefs.”

Trump has kept faith with the ministers with whom he met. The Republican platform includes a plank to abolish the amendment.

“We’re going to get rid of that horrible Johnson amendment and we’re going to let evangelicals, we’re going to let Christians and Jews and people of religion talk without being afraid to talk,” Trump said last month.

Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, has said that eliminating the amendment “is almost as important for Christians as the appointment of Supreme Court justices.”

Trump himself has said that ending the ban can be a catalytic moment for religion in America.

“I think maybe that will be my greatest contribution to Christianity — and other religions — is to allow you, when you talk religious liberty, to go and speak openly, and if you like somebody or want somebody to represent you, you should have the right to do it,” Trump told Dobson and the other clergy at their June meeting, saying religious leaders in America were “petrified” of running afoul of the ban.

“You talk about religious liberty and religious freedom, you don’t have any religious freedom if you think about it,” he said then. (For more from the author of “Dobson: Electing Trump to the White House ‘Would Unleash Christian Activists'” please click HERE)

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NFL Star: Margaret Sanger’s Plan to Exterminate Blacks Is Working — but Faith Is a Step Toward Healing

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Benjamin Watson, a NFL tight end now with the Baltimore Ravens, said in an interview with Turning Point that minorities are buying into the idea of abortion, “hook, line and sinker,” which is ironic, he said, because Planned Parenthood and founder Margaret Sanger’s plan “to exterminate blacks … [is] working.”

Watson discussed how minorities make up the majority of abortions, adding, “We sit here and talk about advancing the black agenda, whatever that means, we talk about our interests, and what’s important to us — like having political power and advancement and all those things — and then we are turning around and we are killing our children. And we are buying the lie that it’s our personal decision to make.”

Men should be a big part of raising their child, he said, because “as much as he has a role in making the baby in the first place, it needs to take both of them the whole way through. Any idea that a man doesn’t have a role in it is not true, and is simply more about politics and making a man’s life easier.”

Watson recalls how he gave advice in the locker room to a teammate who had just found out that his girlfriend was pregnant. “My whole speech to him was encouraging him about what an awesome opportunity it is to raise a child, to give the child a home, to love that child, and that God entrusted him with another life, and what a responsibility and the privilege that is. And then being real and saying, ‘Look, it’s not going to be easy. There are going to be some sacrifices that are going to come.’”

He admitted that it isn’t easy to be a good father and that he falls short all the time. But the man’s duty is to “be there for their child, and for the baby’s mother … we need to be the provider, be a priest, a protector for them, so that they get a little glimpse of the sacrificial love of the heavenly Father.”

“I tell them they’re never going to be a perfect dad because no one is,” Watson said. “But we have a perfect Father to model ourselves after … my job as a father is to be the best example of our heavenly Father as I earthly can.”

Watson’s new book, Under Our Skin, looks at race, bias and justice and “appeals to the power and possibility of faith as a step toward healing.” (For more from the author of “NFL Star: Margaret Sanger’s Plan to Exterminate Blacks Is Working — but Faith Is a Step Toward Healing” please click HERE)

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Franklin Graham Warns the Nation That a Price Will Be Paid for Celebrating Sin

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Once again the Rev. Franklin Graham issued a warning to the United States based on the word of God.

Graham’s warning comes in the wake of news that Vice President Joe Biden performed a same-sex marriage.

The marriage, between White House staff members Brian Mosteller and Joe Mahshie, took place Monday afternoon at the Naval Observatory in Washington.

On Wednesday, Graham posted a message on Facebook post that began, “Another first for America that we should not be proud of — the vice president of the United States presiding over a same-sex wedding.”

Graham continued, saying that America has gained the reputation for celebrating what God defines as sin. He also promised that “there will be a price to pay.”

He quotes the Bible, Isaiah 1:4: “Woe to the sinful nation, a people whose guilt is great, a brood of evildoers … given to corruption! They have forsaken the LORD; they have spurned the Holy One of Israel and turned their backs on him.”

“This is why I’m going to eight more state capitols this month to pray for our nation,” Graham said. He urged people to come to his prayer rallies or to pray for America wherever they are.

In order for the vice president to officiate at the wedding, it was necessary that he obtain a temporary license from the District of Columbia authorizing him to perform the ceremony.

Following the event, Biden posted the following on Twitter:

The vice president’s wife, Jill, responded to her husband’s tweet:

Biden has been a supporter of same-sex marriage since endorsing it in 2012.

This was; however, his first opportunity to perform a wedding. (For more from the author of “Franklin Graham Warns the Nation That a Price Will Be Paid for Celebrating Sin” please click HERE)

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What the Supreme Court’s Ruling Means for Transgender Bathrooms in Schools

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The U.S. Supreme Court signaled an interest in taking on the transgender bathroom debate on Wednesday, granting a Virginia school system temporary permission to keep its bathrooms separated by biological sex.

In a 5-3 vote, the justices issued a stay in the case involving a transgender student in Gloucester County who is suing his school board to gain access to the boys’ restrooms. The stay halts a lower court’s order that said the school board must allow the transgender teen, Gavin Grimm, into the bathroom that corresponds with the student’s gender identity.

Gavin, 17, was born female but now identifies as a male.

If the Gloucester County school board’s petition for the Supreme Court to hear the case is denied, the stay will terminate automatically, and Gavin will be allowed to use the boys’ bathroom. If the court decides to take the case, the stay will remain in effect until the justices reach a final decision.

The lawsuit alleges that by prohibiting Gavin from using the boys’ restrooms, the school board’s policy violates Title IX, the federal statute that bans discrimination on the basis of sex.

The U.S. District Court in Eastern Virginia initially rejected that argument, and sided with the school board’s claim that Title IX does not protect against discrimination based on gender identity. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit disagreed, and issued an injunction that required the school to allow transgender students to use restrooms in accordance to their gender identity.

Some in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movement downplayed Wednesday’s decision, calling it “just a temporary delay.”

“Across the country, courts and policymakers are recognizing that discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination,” Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said in a prepared statement. “We are confident that if and when this issue reaches the Supreme Court, the court will affirm that recognition.”

Conservatives, however, call the decision a significant step in their direction.

“It’s significant that the Supreme Court said we’re going to put a hold on that—we’re going to preserve the status quo as it’s always been in society, as it’s always been in schools,” Jeremy Tedesco, a lawyer at the Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, told The Daily Signal. “That boys use boys’ restrooms and girls use girls’ restrooms.”

The implications, Tedesco added, could reach far beyond Gavin and other students in Gloucester County.

In directing schools nationwide to open their showers, bathrooms, and locker rooms to students of the opposite biological sex, the Obama administration cited the Gloucester case.

The Department of Education wrote that its interpretation “is consistent with courts’ and other agencies’ interpretations of federal laws prohibiting sex discrimination,” and linked to the case.

A total of 24 states are now challenging the legality of the administration’s mandate, in addition to dozens of private legal battles playing out nationwide.

“The Department of Education—in all the litigation that’s going on across the country and in their major, chief mandate that they sent out nationally to all the schools saying that Title IX requires schools to allow students of one sex to enter locker rooms and bathrooms of students of the opposite sex—they’re all relying on the Gloucester decision from the 4th Circuit to say that’s required,” Tedesco said. “What the Supreme Court has done is thrown that decision into serious doubt.”

Tedesco, who is involved in several of these challenges, said the decision is “a really important outcome” for Alliance Defending Freedom’s case in Illinois.

In that case, 50 families in the Chicago area are suing the Department of Education and the Justice Department for threatening to take away federal funding if the school does not comply with the Obama administration’s interpretation of Title IX.

Lawyers for the Obama administration, Tedesco said, “have been citing the Gloucester decision over and over again for why they should win.”

Now, he said, “it’s going to be a lot more difficult for them to rely on that case, with the Supreme Court putting the entire decision on hold and calling it into question.”

Gloucester County, located about 140 miles south of Washington, D.C., and just north of Newport News, Virginia, has more than 5,000 students in its eight public schools.

The Gloucester County school board welcomed Wednesday’s decision, saying in a press release that it “continues to believe that its resolution of this complex matter fully considered the interests of all students and parents in the Gloucester County school system.”

Josh Block, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union representing Gavin, said he was disappointed by the decision because it will leave Gavin isolated from the rest of the student body.

In a blog post, Block wrote:

Gavin was preparing to begin his senior year with a fresh start. He would finally be able to use the restroom without being isolated. Even if the Supreme Court ultimately decides to let the lower court’s decision stand, Gavin will have had to spend most of his senior year forced to use a separate restroom from the rest of his classmates, simply because of who he is.

The high court’s four conservative-leaning justices all voted in favor of the stay. They were joined by Justice Stephen Breyer who wrote that he granted the stay “as a courtesy” in order to “preserve the status quo.”

Only four justices are needed for the Supreme Court to review a case, making it likely that the bathroom fight could be decided soon. (For more from the author of “What the Supreme Court’s Ruling Means for Transgender Bathrooms in Schools” please click HERE)

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Say What? After Trump Has Crying Infant Removed, Planned Parenthood Says Babies Are Welcomed at His Rallies

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Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States, chastised Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump for booting a wailing infant from a Virginia rally Tuesday. Trump, not one to suffer interruptions during his rallies, initially acknowledged the outburst with grace. “I love babies,” he said. “I hear that baby crying, I like it.”

“What a baby. What a beautiful baby, don’t worry,” he continued.

His patience was exhausted in short order.

“Actually, I was only kidding, you can get the baby out of here,” he said moments later. “I think she really believed me that I love having a baby crying while I’m speaking,” he added.

(Read more from “Say What? After Trump Has Crying Infant Removed, Planned Parenthood Says Babies Are Welcomed at His Rallies” HERE)

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Top Catholic Warns Politicians Who Back Abortion, Oppose Religious Liberty

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Catholics cannot support politicians who support abortion, the head of the international Knights of Columbus told members and almost 100 Catholic bishops today. The group, known as “the Knights,” is the largest Catholic men’s service organization in the world, with almost 2 million members who in 2014 gave $175 million and 73 million volunteer hours to charity.

“It is time to stop creating excuses for voting for pro-abortion politicians,” said Supreme Knight Carl Anderson at the Knights’ 134th annual convention, according to a copy of his address given to The Stream. Abortion, he said, is not “just another political issue.” It is “a legal regime that resulted in more than 40 million deaths.”

Anderson’s comments echoed his 2008 open letter to Catholic Sen. Joseph Biden,Sen. Obama’s choice for vice president. Like Hillary Clinton’s choice Tim Kaine, also Catholic, Biden said he was personally opposed to abortion but supported it as public policy. Anderson explained how Biden had misrepresented the Catholic teaching and finished his letter by telling him: “You have a choice: you can listen to your conscience and work to secure the rights of the unborn to share in the fruits of our hard-won liberty, or you can choose to turn your back on them.”

The Knights recently commissioned a poll by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion that found most Americans oppose public funding of abortion and support raising standards on abortion clinics. However, most Americans also support legalized abortion in the first trimester, which is when the pro-abortion research group Guttmacher reports 88 percent of abortions take place.

On Tuesday, he asked: “What political issue could possibly outweigh this human devastation?” Abortion, he said, “is the killing of the innocent on a massive scale. We need to end the political manipulation of Catholic voters by abortion advocates. It is time to end the entanglement of Catholic people with abortion killing. It is time to stop creating excuses for voting for pro-abortion politicians. We will never succeed in building a culture of life if we continue to vote for politicians who support a culture of death.”

A spokesperson for the Knights did not respond to The Stream’s questions about what advice the Anderson would give to Catholic voters this fall, especially related to the support for abortion by both major party nominees and the nominees for the Green Party and Libertarian Party. The Knights also did not respond to whether pro-abortion Catholic politicians should be permitted to receive Communion.

The Knights’ Charity

In addition to tackling abortion and the controversial issue of religious liberty, Anderson’s speech noted charitable activities funded by the Knights, such as tens of thousands of donated wheelchairs and more than 300,000 new coats for children the group has given out in recent years. He also highlighted the plight of Christians in the Middle East, who have been targeted by Islamic extremists. (Anderson speaks about this more in this Crux interview.)

“Christians and other religious minorities are facing extinction,” said Anderson. “Many receive no support from their governments or from the United Nations. They have had to rely on their fellow Christians, and they have been able to rely on the Knights of Columbus.” The Knights have raised more than $11 million for Christian refugees in the last two years, and was a major player in the U.S. State Department’s decision to declare that ISIS is committing genocide against Christians. (For more from the author of “Top Catholic Warns Politicians Who Back Abortion, Oppose Religious Liberty” please click HERE)

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An After School Satan Club Could Be Coming to Your Kid’s Elementary School

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It’s a hot summer night, and leaders of the Satanic Temple have gathered in the crimson-walled living room of a Victorian manse in this city renowned for its witch trials in the 17th century. They’re watching a sepia-toned video, in which children dance around a maypole, a spider crawls across a clown’s face and eerie, ambient chanting gives way to a backward, demonic voice-over. The group chuckles with approval.

They’re here plotting to bring their wisdom to the nation’s public elementary school children. They point out that Christian evangelical groups already have infiltrated the lives of America’s children through after-school religious programming in public schools, and they appear determined to give young students a choice: Jesus or Satan.

“It’s critical that children understand that there are multiple perspectives on all issues, and that they have a choice in how they think,” said Doug Mesner, the Satanic Temple’s co-founder.

On Monday, the group plans to introduce its After School Satan Club to public elementary schools, including one in Prince George’s County, petitioning school officials to allow them to open immediately as the academic year starts. Chapter heads from New York, Boston, Utah and Arizona were in Salem on July 10 talking strategy, with others from Minneapolis, Detroit, San Jose, New Orleans, Pittsburgh and Florida participating online. The promotional video, which feels like a mash-up of a horror movie trailer and a “Saturday Night Live” sketch, will serve to promote the new club along with its website — Afterschoolsatan.com. (Read more from “An After School Satan Club Could Be Coming to Your Kid’s Elementary School” HERE)

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