Is Disability the New Welfare?

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Photo Credit: National Review

The government in Britain recently did something interesting.

It asked everyone receiving an “incapacity benefit” — through a disability program slowly being phased out under new reforms — to submit to a medical test to confirm they were too disabled to work. A third of recipients (878,000 people) didn’t even bother and dropped out of the program rather than be examined. Of those tested, more than half (55 percent) were found fit for work, and a quarter were found fit for some work.

But that’s Britain, where there’s a long tradition of gaming the dole. Americans would never think of taking advantage of the taxpayers or misleading the government. Well, except for the couple of dozen people who have pleaded guilty to scamming the Long Island Rail Road’s federal disability system in a $1 billion fraud scheme. A billion bucks would pay for a lot of White House tours.

Though hardly isolated, the LIRR scandal is an obvious black-and-white case of criminality. The real problem resides in a grayer area.

In 1960, when vastly more Americans were involved in physical labor of some kind, 0.65 percent of workforce participants between the ages of 18 and 64 were receiving Social Security disability-insurance payments. Fifty years later, in a much healthier America, that number has grown nearly nine-fold to 5.6 percent. In 1960, 134 Americans were working for every officially recognized disabled worker. Five decades later that ratio fell to roughly 16 to 1.

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School Voucher Ruling Supports Religious Freedom

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Photo Credit: Urban Cure

As the nation has focused on the Supreme Court hearings on the constitutionality of same sex marriage, news from the state of Indiana could prove far more important regarding the nations future.

The Indiana Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled unanimously, 5-0, that the states school voucher program — signed into law in 2011 and the most expansive school voucher program in the nation — does not violate the states constitution.

Those who challenged the law argued that the voucher program is unconstitutional because it allows public funds to be used for religious education. Not so, said the court. The voucher goes to the families, not the schools. It is the parents who decide how to spend it.

Why do I draw connection between the U.S. Supreme Courts review of same-sex marriage and this voucher decision in Indiana? And why do I suggest that the Indiana decision may be more important to the nations future than whatever the Supreme Court decides on same-sex marriage?

Same-sex marriage sits before the Supreme Court today because of the dramatic change in public opinion over recent years regarding the legitimacy and morality of same-sex marriage and homosexual relations. General public opinion is far more accepting today of both than it has been in the past.

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News We Never Hear: Guns Save Lives

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Photo Credit: National Review

We all know that guns can cost lives because the media repeat this message endlessly, as if we could not figure it out for ourselves. But even someone who reads newspapers regularly and watches numerous television newscasts may never learn that guns also save lives — much less see any hard facts comparing how many lives are lost and how many are saved.

But that trade-off is the real issue — not the Second Amendment or the National Rifle Association, which so many in the media obsess about. If guns cost more lives than they save, we can always repeal the Second Amendment. But if guns save more lives than they cost, we need to know that, instead of spending time demonizing the National Rifle Association.

The defensive use of guns is usually either not discussed at all in the media or else is depicted as if it means bullets flying in all directions, like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. But most defensive uses of guns do not involve actually pulling the trigger.

If someone comes at you with a knife and you point a gun at him, he is very unlikely to keep coming and far more likely to head in the other direction, perhaps in some haste, if he has a brain in his head. Only if he is an idiot are you likely to have to pull the trigger — and if an idiot with a knife is coming after you, you had better have a trigger to pull.

Surveys of American gun owners have found that 4 to 6 percent reported using a gun in self-defense within the previous five years. That is not a very high percentage but, in a country with 300 million people, that works out to hundreds of thousands of defensive uses of guns per year.

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Newt Gingrich: Obama Deserves Credit

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Photo Credit: Breitbart

By Donovan Slack. Newt Gingrich, the former speaker who famously wanted to create a moon colony, is now backing President Obama’s plan to spend $100 million mapping the human brain.

“President Obama is taking a very important step toward the most dramatic breakthroughs in human health. Brain research is vital for Autism, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, Parkinson’s, traumatic brain injury, mental health, and a host of other concerns,” Gingrich said in a statement. Read more from this story HERE.

Obama proposes $100M for brain mapping project

By Associated Press. President Barack Obama on Tuesday asked Congress to spend $100 million next year on a new project to map the human brain in hopes of eventually finding cures for disorders like Alzheimer’s, epilepsy and traumatic injuries.

Obama said the so-called BRAIN Initiative could create jobs and eventually lead to answers to ailments including Parkinson’s and autism and help reverse the effect of a stroke. The president told scientists gathered in the White House’s East Room that the research has the potential to improve the lives of billions of people worldwide.

“As humans we can identify galaxies light-years away,” Obama said. “We can study particles smaller than an atom, but we still haven’t unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears.”

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Krauthammer: Gay Marriage Cases May Presage ‘Assault On Religion’

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

On this weekend’s broadcast of “Inside Washington,” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer said the two gay marriage cases currently before the Supreme Court could lead to an all-out assault on religion in the United States…

“It gets really sticky,” Krauthammer said. “If the court were to decide that to deny same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, then you got Georgetown University – a Jesuit university [that offers] married student housing. It’s a Catholic University. So [when] it says it’s only going to allow heterosexuals, it will get sued. This will become an assault on religion. And the religions, which I think are sincere in their beliefs, are going to be under assault and under attack.”

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The Death of the Family: Delusion and Parochialism About Marriage

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Gay marriage? It came up at dinner Down Under this time last year, and the prominent Aussie politician on my right said matter-of-factly, “It’s not about expanding marriage, it’s about destroying marriage.”

That would be the most obvious explanation as to why the same societal groups who assured us in the Seventies that marriage was either (a) a “meaningless piece of paper” or (b) institutionalized rape are now insisting it’s a universal human right. They’ve figured out what, say, terrorist-turned-educator Bill Ayers did — that, when it comes to destroying core civilizational institutions, trying to blow them up is less effective than hollowing them out from within.

On the other hand, there are those who argue it’s a victory for the powerful undertow of bourgeois values over the surface ripples of sexual transgressiveness: Gays will now be as drearily suburban as the rest of us. A couple of years back, I saw a picture in the paper of two chubby old queens tying the knot at City Hall in Vancouver, and the thought occurred that Western liberalism had finally succeeded in boring all the fun out of homosexuality.

Which of these alternative scenarios — the demolition of marriage or the taming of the gay — will come to pass? Most likely, both. In the upper echelons of society, our elites practice what they don’t preach. Scrupulously nonjudgmental about everything except traditional Christian morality, they nevertheless lead lives in which, as Charles Murray documents in his book Coming Apart, marriage is still expected to be a lifelong commitment. It is easy to see moneyed gay newlyweds moving into such enclaves, and making a go of it. As the Most Reverend Justin Welby, the new Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, said just before his enthronement the other day, “You see gay relationships that are just stunning in the quality of the relationship.” “Stunning”: What a fabulous endorsement! But, amongst the type of gay couple that gets to dine with the Archbishop of Canterbury, he’s probably right.

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Mark Steyn: Ted Olson ‘Lazy,’ Interracial Marriage Laws Irrelevant to Same-Sex Debate

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

On Hugh Hewitt’s Thursday night radio program, National Review columnist Mark Steyn said former Solicitor General Ted Olson is fundamentally wrong to cite the landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia case — which invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage — as evidence that gay marriage should be legal, because that case fundamentally understood marriage as the union of a man and a woman…

Steyn, author of “After America: Get Ready for Armageddon,” said that unlike laws prohibiting same-sex marriage, restrictions on interracial marriage ran flatly contrary to that generations-old, traditional conception of marriage.

“Ted Olson said, well, you know, once upon a time, we banned interracial marriage, so this is exactly the same as Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 case that struck down interracial marriage,” Steyn said. ”Justice [Anthony] Kennedy said, … ’What are you on about?’ … Interracial marriage is basically an invention of 19th-century America that was at odds with existing common law marriage, as it had been for hundreds of years.”

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Christianity Is Under Attack, But the Bible Series Proves its Great Popularity Persists

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Photo Credit: IrishCentral

Roma Downey and her husband Mark Burnett are setting records with their extraordinary Bible mini series. The series takes stories from the bible, beginning with the book of Genesis and it will end in the book of Revelation finale Easter Sunday.

The series outperforms all other television shows on Sunday nights, reaching close to 80 million viewers with its first three installments alone. As interest grows worldwide, it is expected the audience will expand exponentially.

“Roma and I continue to be grateful for the overwhelming global enthusiasm for The Bible series,” says executive producer Mark Burnett. Ireland native, Roma Downey says “The audience reaction says so much about what people are looking for these days, we are just thrilled that we were able to bring these stories to life.”

In April, the series will be released on Blu-ray and DVD which should sweep the world…It will be an extraordinary commercial success…But even more extraordinary, are the resounding testimonies for Christianity, whose religious institutions and faith have been under fire around the world.

For the past several years, anti Christianity has intensified as the Arab Spring was ushered into the Middle East and North Africa, ancient homelands to Christians. Alarming stories of persecutions fill the newswires as Christians are harassed and either driven out of their ancient homelands, or transcended into second class citizens.

It has also been fashionable to attack and ridicule Christianity in the entertainment industry under the guise of being cutting edge, as comedians and entertainers mock Christianity. Although it is painfully obvious these same artists lack the courage to browbeat Islam, a religion that will actually fire back at them.

Higher education got caught with its pants down last week, when a college professor at Florida Atlantic University, assigned his students to write the name of Jesus on a piece of paper, then put it on the ground and stomp on it. See Fox News story.

Institutions of Christianity have gone astray over the millennium and that invites the criticism. Man lead institutions can always go astray into evil and mischief and Christianity has suffered many a black eye for those sins in the past.

But Jesus Christ is easily the most important figure that has ever appeared in the history of mankind. However he is regarded, his teachings have influenced the course of human history more than any other human who has ever lived. From his Beatitudes, to his Sermon on the Mount, his teachings have left mankind a blueprint to live by, unparalleled by any other and that’s what is resonating with the public as the Bible Series comes to a conclusion this Easter.

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Ed Farnan is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.

Chief Justice Roberts’ Lesbian Cousin: He’ll Rule In Favor Of Same-Sex Marriage

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Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts’ cousin, a lesbian seeking to get married in California who will have reserved seating for relatives at two upcoming cases, wrote that she believes her cousin will rule in favor of same-sex marriage in an op-ed posted on the National Council for Lesbian Rights.

A spokesperson for the court did not respond to questions about a potential conflict for Roberts.

“I know that my cousin is a good man,” Jean Podrasky, 48, of San Francisco wrote. “I feel confident that John is wise enough to see that society is becoming more accepting of the humanity of same-sex couples and the simple truth that we deserve to be treated with dignity, respect, and equality under the law.

“I believe he understands that ruling in favor of equality will not be out of step with where the majority of Americans now sit. I am hoping that the other justices (at least most of them) will share this view, because I am certain that I am not the only relative that will be directly affected by their rulings,” she added.

In her op-ed, Podrasky cited Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) as a policymaker who was persuaded on the matter because of a family member who was gay.

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Civil Rights Activist: ‘No Comparison’ Between Civil Rights, Gay Rights Movement

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Photo Credit: Penny Starr

Civil rights activist Rev. William Owens, who is founder and president of the Coalition of African-American Pastors, said Tuesday there is no comparison between the civil rights movement and the gay community’s fight for same-sex marriage.

“I marched and many other thousands of people marched in this same location years ago on the claim that we were being discriminated against, and today the other community is trying to say that they are suffering the same thing that we suffered, but I tell you they are not,” said Owens, who gathered on the National Mall with other traditional marriage supporters in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act.

The Supreme Court met Tuesday to consider Proposition 8, California’s ban on same-sex marriage. However, the Associated Press reported that the high court could dismiss the case with no ruling at all.

Owens said that as a black man, he cannot change the color of his skin.

“Every morning I wake up, I look in the mirror, and I see a black man, and there is absolutely nothing I can do to change the color of my skin,” he said.

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