Tuesday, June 30, 2015
From: Gary L. Bauer
The Fight For Faith
A lot of foolish things have been said since the Supreme Court redefined marriage. But none are more foolish than the suggestion that the marriage fight is over and that conservatives and Christians who were “on the wrong side of history” can now move on to other issues.
For example, former Florida Congressman Joe Scarborough, a co-host on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” has said that the marriage issue is off the 2016 agenda. No, it’s not.
Here’s why: The same political and social forces that are spending us into huge debts, attacking the successful, gutting our military and retreating around the world are aggressively attempting to rip America out of the rich soil of Judeo-Christian civilization.
As I noted yesterday, demands are already being made for the legalization of polygamy. Calls for censorship are growing.
Other battlefronts emerged even before last week’s decision. The most obvious being whether anybody of orthodox faith has the right in this country, a country built on religious liberty, to say, “No, I am a doctor and I will not perform abortions.” (Pro-life Americans need to understand that what happened last week regarding marriage was a major defeat for them too.)
Just consider Memories Pizza, the mom and pop pizza shop in Indiana that recently became national news. As of now the owners can go to church and hear a sermon that says God defined marriage as a between a man and a woman. But it is increasingly likely that the church they attend will lose its tax-exempt status.
A column this week at Time.com argues that “. . . the logic of gay-marriage rights could lead to a reexamination of conservative churches’ tax exemptions.”
Justice Alito raised the danger of religious institutions losing their tax exempt status during the Supreme Court’s oral arguments. The Obama Administration’s lawyer said in response, “I don’t deny that, Justice Alito. It is going to be an issue.”
Being decent people, the owners of Memories Pizza serve anyone who comes into their restaurant to buy a pizza. But, as they sadly discovered when they answered a hypothetical question, the left would force them to serve the customer who comes in and says, “Hi, I’m John, and I’m marrying Mark. We want 50 pizzas to serve at our reception.”
The media and corporate America are already defining people who politely say, “No, we don’t want to participate in same-sex marriages,” as equivalent to the racists who would serve only whites at their lunch counters. Too many politicians, and even some pastors, are unable to craft the intellectual response to that absurdity.
Don’t miss the irony here: In order to establish a right (same-sex marriage) that is nowhere in the Constitution, many of our elites are prepared to surrender a right (religious liberty) that clearly is in our Constitution.
Iran Deadline Missed
Today was the deadline for Iran and five major world powers to reach an agreement on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. No deal was reached, and the existing interim deal has been extended to July 7th.
I hope they miss the next deadline too. It is obvious that any deal President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry agree to will be a bad deal, 1,000% percent worse than no deal at all.
You may recall that a major roadblock in the negotiations has been guaranteeing access for international inspectors to Iran’s military sites — a non-negotiable necessity when it comes to verifying Iran’s compliance with the deal. The ayatollah has repeatedly said he would not allow it. The Iranian parliament passed a law against it.
News broke yesterday that this impasse has been resolved. A senior U.S. official said, “The entry point isn’t we must be able to get into every military site, because the United States of America wouldn’t allow anybody to get into every military site, so that’s not appropriate.”
Allow me to translate: Obama just caved again.
As my friend Bill Kristol put it, the left has replaced the moral equivalence between the Soviet Union and the United States with moral equivalence between the U.S. and Iran. Kristol wrote:
“Think about that. The American official argues that Iran — a rogue regime that sponsors terror and that has lied about its nuclear program, and that is under sanctions precisely because it has proved time and again it can’t be trusted — should be held to the same standards as the U.S. Amazing.”
Yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned, “I am not impressed by the potholes in the nuclear talks. . . . This agreement is going from a bad agreement to a worse agreement, and is becoming worse by the day.”
So while the left blows up our culture internally, it is also greasing the skids for a nuclear-armed Iran that will dominate the Middle East, threaten our interests and Israel, and make war more likely.
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