Good Morning!
It was Augustine who observed:
“Peace in society depends upon peace in the family.”
We begin with news of a conversation between Focus on the Family’s Tim Goeglein and former Vice President Mike Pence, discussing his devotion to his faith, his family and religious freedom:
- Vice President Mike Pence Talks Faith and Freedom in America with Focus on the Family
From The Daily Citizen:
Former Vice President Mike Pence recently joined Focus on the Family for a wide-ranging and insightful interview on the Focus on the Family’s Daily Broadcast.
The former vice president sat down to discuss his Christian faith, his passion for the pro-life cause, and his convictions on the importance of religious freedom with Tim Goeglein, Focus’ Vice President of External and Government Affairs.
Goeglein began by asking the vice president how, as a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, a former state governor, and then as vice president, his faith has changed or grown.
“For us, our family, our relationship with Christ is everything,” Pence said. “It’s where everything begins. It’s where our best days begin. And as our life has changed, and our family has changed, that hasn’t changed.”
- The Boiling Over of America
Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal:
Progressive politicians have been around long enough running cities that some distinguishing characteristics can be noted. One is they don’t listen to anybody. To stop them you have to fire them. They’re not like normal politicians who have some give, who tack this way and that. Progressive politicians have no doubt, no self-correcting mechanism.
Another characteristic: They are more loyal to theory than to people. If the people don’t like the theories the progressives impose, that’s too bad; the theory is pre-eminent.
So I do think America is on a campaign to remove them, one by one. And this is good.
The lesson of this political moment: Don’t be radical, don’t be extreme. Our country is a tea kettle on high flame, at full boil. Wherever possible let the steam out, be part of a steady steam release before the kettle blows.
The court should release the Dobbs decision—stop letting madmen think they can stop or affect it through violence. As for the clerks, yes, it’s generally, perhaps unjustly, assumed a clerk leaked it and hard to doubt it was a clerk for a liberal justice, with the motive of alarming, agitating and urging opponents to rise up.
Mission accomplished. Now the clerk should come forward, confess, and leave his or her fellow clerks professionally unharmed. If you were moral, you would want to protect the innocent. And let some steam out there, too.
3. The ‘Seals and Crofts’ Pro-Life Song Abortion Activists Didn’t Want the World to Hear
From The Daily Citizen:
Once upon a time, Seals and Crofts became a household name in music with a string of popular hits – “Summer Breeze,” “Diamond Girl,” and “Get Closer.” But Mr. Seals’ obit took special note of a controversial chapter either long forgotten or deliberately ignored.
Back in 1974, right in the middle of the band’s rapid rise, Jim Seals and his musical partner, Dash Crofts, released a controversial album that its label, Warner Brothers, urged them not to.
Moved and saddened by the Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe a year earlier, Lana Bogan, wife of the band’s recording engineer, Joseph Bogan, wrote a poem. It was titled, “Unborn Child” and here are the lyrics:
Oh little baby, you’ll never cry, nor will you hear a sweet lullabye.
Oh unborn child, if you only knew just what your momma was plannin’ to do.
You’re still a-clingin’ to the tree of life, but soon you’ll be cut off before you get ripe.
Oh unborn child, beginning to grow inside your momma, but you’ll never know.
Oh tiny bud, that grows in the womb, only to be crushed before you can bloom.
Mama stop! Turn around, go back, think it over.
Now stop, turn around, go back, think it over.
Stop, turn around, go back think it over.
The band put the poem to music, releasing it as part of their sixth album.
It seems Warner Brothers’ warnings were prescient. The album’s release met fierce resistance. Their concerts were picketed by pro-abortion activists and many radio stations refused to even play the song. Both men acknowledged the move damaged their career.
RELATED:
Calling Pro-Life Friends to SeeLife This Summer
From The Daily Citizen:
Focus on the Family is committed to coming alongside pregnant women and encouraging them to consider making a decision for life. We are unashamedly pro-life.
This summer, Focus on the Family will host a livestream event, SeeLife 2022, to rally with other pro-life friends, pray and become equipped to live out our pro-life values. This is the summer to SeeLife!
The livestream event will be held on June 14, 2022, at 7 p.m. MT and will be accessible to viewers online. Speakers will include many pro-life leaders, including Ben Shapiro, Candance Owens, President of Focus on the Family Jim Daly, President of the March for Life Jeanne Mancini, contemporary Christian musician, singer, and songwriter Phil Wickham, and Christian author and speaker Jesse Minassian.
While the radical left is inciting violence and calling for a “summer of rage,” the pro-life movement is seizing this pro-life moment to respond with love, compassion and a call to SeeLife.
Don’t miss your opportunity to hear from champions in the pro-life movement and prepare for a post-Roe America. Register now and save the date for SeeLife 2022.
RELATED:
The Contradictions of Abortion Polling
From the Wall Street Journal:
The conventional wisdom on abortion polling is that the Supreme Court is walking into a gale-force political wind if it overturns Roe v. Wade. Gallup reported last week that 55% of Americans identify as pro-choice, up six points since 2021 and near a record high. The Journal’s poll last week says 68% of people hope the Supreme Court doesn’t completely overturn Roe.
Movement in such topline figures is meaningful, but it obscures as much as it reveals. What do people mean when they identify as pro-choice? In the Gallup survey, 67% of Americans say abortion should be “generally legal” in the first three months of pregnancy. But it falls precipitously to 36% in the second trimester and 20% in the final trimester.
The real contradiction in the polling is Roe, which has become a totem that doesn’t reflect the underlying policy views. Fifty-five percent of Americans tell Gallup that abortion should be generally illegal in the second trimester. Yet a majority say the Supreme Court should keep Roe. That circle can’t be squared, and it probably reflects that many Americans don’t realize what Roe really allows.
Public opinion on abortion policy remains diverse and for the most part more moderate. How the politics shakes out depends on how the debate and policies go in the states. If the Supreme Court overturns Roe, some states will ban abortion and some will allow it with few limits.
Others might settle at 15 or 18 weeks, roughly where democratic laws in Europe have come out. The polling suggests that’s what many Americans favor. But whatever people tell pollsters about Roe as precedent, they can’t get the policy they seem to want until Roe goes and the political debate opens up.
- What Rights do Religious Employees Have in the Workplace?
From The Daily Citizen:
What do you say and do when your employer makes it clear that you must celebrate “pride month” in some manner the company has planned, upon pain of some implied or explicit adverse career consequence if you refuse? What are your religious freedom rights in the workplace?
A timely and short “question-and-answer” resource from the attorneys with First Liberty Institute is now available that answers some of the common questions Christians have as they navigate the sometimes tricky issues that arise in today’s workplaces.
The “Religious Liberty At Work Q&A” first gives an overview of the federal employment law known as Title VII that prohibits employers of 15 or more employees from violating the religious rights of their workers. Title VII also requires employers to grant what is called a “reasonable accommodation” to employees who ask for things like time off to attend religious observances, unless the accommodation would create an “undue hardship” for the employer.
Then the Q&A document asks and answers some of the most pressing questions affecting Christians in the workplace today.
5. The Changeable ‘Scandals’ of Evangelicalism
Professor D.G. Hart of Hillsdale College writes in the Wall Street Journal:
Twenty years ago the strangeness of white evangelicals was beginning to lift, thanks to the work of scholars like Mr. Noll. In 2000 the Atlantic ran a cover story with the headline “The Opening of the Evangelical Mind.” Written by the Boston College political scientist Alan Wolfe, the piece highlighted the efforts of evangelical historians who were using first-rate scholarship to revitalize their movement. In Mr. Wolfe’s judgment, evangelical scholars had “enlivened and enriched the humanities, political and social theory, and even empirical social science.” Their success was “uneven,” but Mr. Wolfe believed no one could write off evangelicalism as a “backward reaction against modernity.”
After 2016, however, a dark age threatens the renaissance. Instead of trying to place white, GOP-voting evangelicals within the larger frameworks of American religious, political and intellectual history, younger historians blame them for bigotry. The outrages of misogyny, racism and nationalism replace the older sins of interpreting international relations through the Bible.
The newer explanation of the evangelical scandal uses arguments similar to those faulted by Mr. Noll in his 1994 book. If beliefs about Christ’s return once undermined serious scholarship about social and economic issues, evangelicals’ problem now is that they fail to exhibit sentimental attachment to Jesus. Ms. Du Mez concludes her book, for instance, with an appeal to the kind of masculinity Jesus exhibited. He promoted “gentleness and self-control, commitment to peace, and a divestment of power as expressions of authentic Christian manhood.”
Ms. Du Mez conveniently ignores difficult sayings of Jesus—that his true disciples need to “hate” their families (Luke 14:26), that Jerusalem will be destroyed (Matthew 24), or that his authority extends throughout the universe (Matthew 28:18). If the problem with evangelical thinking at the time of Mr. Noll’s book was using the Bible simplistically, Ms. Du Mez shows this weakness extends to scholars critical of evangelicals.
The scandal identified by Mr. Noll remains. The main difference is that evangelical scholars used to try to correct it. Today they prosper from it.
- My Faith Votes Launches New Initiative to Engage Christian Voters for Midterm Elections
From The Daily Citizen:
A nonprofit organization that exists to encourage Christians to get out and vote is launching a new campaign ahead of this year’s upcoming midterm elections.
My Faith Votes is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that exists to “motivate, equip and activate Christians in America to vote in every election, transforming our communities and influencing our nation with biblical truth.”
The organization encourages Christians to “pray, think and vote” to protect the organization’s four core pillars: religious freedom, the sanctity of life, strong families and marriages, and compassion and support for those in need.
Currently, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee serves as the organization’s Honorary National Chairman.
- Holly Clouse, who went missing as a baby, found over 40 years after her parents were murdered in Texas
From CBS News:
A baby who has been missing since her parents were found murdered in a wooded area in Houston in 1981 has been found, Texas authorities have announced. Holly Clouse, now 42, is alive and well, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office said in a statement Wednesday.
Clouse was about a year old when her parents’ bodies were found in January 1981, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. They weren’t identified until 2021, when a forensic genetic genealogy firm said they were Harold Dean Clouse Jr. and Tina Gail Linn Clouse, originally of Florida, according to Paxton’s office.
Their deaths are still under investigation, Paxton’s office said. Their families had last heard from the couple in October 1980, Texas First Assistant Attorney General Brent Webster said during a press conference Thursday.
“While we rejoice today that Holly has been found and families that were looking for her for decades rejoice, we still are looking for suspects in this case,” Webster said.
8. ‘I Put My Faith in God’: New Lakers Coach Praises God Before Saying Anything Else at First Press Conference
From CBN:
Darvin Ham, the new head coach for the Los Angeles Lakers, believes God is the “master of all plans,” and he openly shared his Christian faith Monday during his first press conference.
After general manager Rob Pelinka excitedly introduced Ham, 48, the newly-minted coach made first things first and immediately thanked the Lord before saying anything else.
“First of all, I want to thank God. Coming from where I come from, I was raised in a household with strong, spiritual faith, belief in God and His Son Jesus Christ, so I want to start with that,” Ham said.
- NASA joins the hunt for UFOs
From the Washington Post:
NASA is joining the hunt for UFOs, a top space agency official said Thursday, forming a team that would examine “observations of events that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena.”
The space agency would bring a scientific perspective to efforts already underway by the Pentagon and intelligence agencies to make sense of dozens of such sightings, Thomas Zurbuchen, the head of NASA’s science mission directorate, said during a speech before the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. He said it was “high-risk, high-impact” research that the space agency should not shy away from, even if it is a controversial field of study.
The announcement comes just weeks after a rare and historic hearing before Congress on sightings of what the Defense Department calls Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, more commonly known as UFOs, and a report issued last year by the director of national intelligence that catalogued more than 140 flying objects that officials were not able to identify.
10.Twin Valedictorians in Massachusetts Graduate from Same School with 4.0 GPAs
From Fox News:
Twin sisters Alina and Anastasia Antropova started off in the world together — and now they have another achievement attached to their names. They’re both community college graduates with valedictorian honors.
The 19-year-old twin sisters graduated from Holyoke Community College, a two-year public institution in Holyoke, Massachusetts, on Saturday, June 4.
Both sisters maintained a perfect 4.0 GPA throughout their enrollment while juggling a startling amount of extracurricular activities, scholarship applications and competitions.
