Good Morning!
Why do so many secularists fear people of faith?
Daniel Handler, who writes under the pen name, Lemony Snicket, once wrote:
“There are two kinds of fears; rational and irrational – or, in simple terms, fears that make sense and fears that don’t.”
We begin with a look at an irrational fear of the left:
- Why are People Afraid of Coach Kennedy?
Focus on the Family president Jim Daly writes:
After nearly seven years of being sidelined for his faith, Coach Joe Kennedy finally had his day at the Supreme Court on Monday.
Formerly of Bremerton High School in Washington, Kennedy refused a school district order to stop praying on the 50-yard-line of the team’s field after games.
In his eight years at the school, Kennedy mentored hundreds of football players – young men who considered him a good man to emulate. For the coach, his role on the sidelines wasn’t just a job – but a calling from God. He felt the Lord had placed him there for more reasons than football. To this day, his players (now grown men) routinely laud him and express their appreciation for the influence he had on their lives.
That a man like Joe Kennedy was fired is a glaring illustration of what’s wrong with our nation’s priorities. Schools are supposed to be shaping and speaking into young lives – not harassing good men and women committed to that very mission.
I feel a special kinship to Joe Kennedy, because he reminds me of a man just like him who shaped my own life in a profound way.
I first met my high school football coach, Paul Moro, as an orphaned sophomore who had experienced many tragedies in my short life: my dad walking out on the family when I was 5; Mom dying of cancer four years later; and my traumatic stint in the foster care system.
As you can imagine, I wasn’t doing too well. I desperately needed a mentor to help me transition from boyhood to manhood.
And that’s what Coach Moro did for me. He was a tough, no-nonsense type of guy who pushed me to excellence – but he also showed me great compassion and got involved in the details of my life.
Let’s be reasonable. We cannot simply ignore the assertion in our Declaration of Independence that God has given us inalienable rights – like the freedoms of speech and religion – and that it is the duty of government to “secure” those rights.
I’m hopeful and optimistic that a majority on the Supreme Court will rule in Coach Kennedy’s favor. That’s the way I’m praying – and I hope you will pray for that outcome, too. A majority of the High Court today seemed to be sympathetic to Coach Kennedy’s religious freedom.
As a former teenage boy who was once helped by a man in the mold of Kennedy, I know how important men like him are. As a dad, I prayed for my sons to have coaches and teachers like him – people who live out the principles of honor, hard work, conviction and compassion. These are things we can all agree are right and good. It’s not something to fear. In fact, our culture would benefit in many ways from more Christ followers like Joe Kennedy.
RELATED:
Coach Kennedy Defends Free Speech, Religion at Supreme Court Oral Arguments
From The Daily Citizen:
Can a public high school fire a coach for taking a knee and praying quietly at the fifty-yard line after a football game? The answer to that question was explored by the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court on April 25 during oral arguments in the case of Coach Joe Kennedy, who was fired in 2015 from his coaching position at Bremerton High School in Bremerton, Washington.
Supreme Court arguments can appear obtuse to the layman, peppered as they are with legal “hypotheticals” – i.e., where the questioner tweaks the facts of the case slightly – which at first glance don’t seem to have anything to do with the actual facts of the case. But as the justices explored the arguments from lawyers for the parties, using questions dominated by such hypotheticals, the scheduled one-hour oral argument stretched an additional 50 minutes.
Coach Kennedy was represented by the veteran Supreme Court advocate, Paul Clement, and the school district was ably represented by attorney Richard Katskee.
Clement began his argument on behalf of Kennedy with a brief summary of the case:
“When Coach Kennedy took a knee at midfield after games to say a brief prayer of thanks, his expression was entirely his own,” Clement told the justices. “That private religious expression was doubly protected by the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses.
- It’s Official: Elon Musk Buys Twitter in Potentially Massive Victory for Free Speech
From The Daily Citizen:
Elon Musk holds many different and interesting titles. CEO and Product Architect of Tesla. Founder and Chief Engineer of SpaceX. Founder of The Boring Company. Co-founder of Neuralink. Wealthiest man in the world ($264 billion to be exact).
And now, he can add president and owner of Twitter to his resume.
Early on Monday afternoon, Twitter’s Board of Directors accepted Musk’s $44 billion all cash offer to buy the company.
In his offer made public by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Musk had offered to buy all of the outstanding common stock of Twitter for $54.20 per share, which is a 38% premium over what Twitter’s share price was on April 1, 2022.
- Federal Court Orders First ‘Gender-Affirming’ Surgery for Transgender Prisoner
From Townhall:
For the first time, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has been ordered to secure “gender-affirming” surgery for a transgender prisoner. The prisoner has previously had their request for the operation denied by the BOP.
NBC News reported Thursday that a federal District Court judge ordered the Bureau to conduct a “nationwide search for a qualified surgeon to perform the surgery for the inmate, Cristina Nichole Iglesias,” who is a male transitioning to live as a woman.
Iglesias’ legal representative, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), provided a statement to NBC regarding the judge’s order this week.
“I am hopeful that I will finally get the care I need to live my life fully as the woman I am,” Iglesias’ statement provided by the ACLU read. “BOP has denied me gender-affirming surgery for years — and keeps raising new excuses and putting new obstacles in my way. I am grateful that the court recognized the urgency of my case and ordered BOP to act.”
4. Why the “LGBT Person” and “LGBT Community” Don’t Really Exist
From The Daily Citizen:
No Person is LGBTQ. No. One.
“As an LGBTQ person, I demand…”
We hear moral assertions like this regularly in public today and we are supposed to take the person’s self-proclaimed credentials seriously and utterly respectfully. The claim is fundamentally absolutist, meant to silence any debate or disagreement.
But the truth is that no person is “LGBT,” “LGBTQ,” “LGBTQIA+” or any of the other endlessly expanding alphabet soups that no one can keep up with. The reason is that if you take any of the individual letters themselves with any seriousness − which we are required to do under the current ideological regime − the collection of letters describing any actual person is a logical impossibility. Just think about it. If each letter means anything, they necessarily exclude the others.
Honest activists admit as much.
John Corvino, a philosophy professor and respected voice in the pro-homosexual community, wrote in the pages of The New York Times some years ago,
I’m amused whenever I hear someone say “as an L.G.B.T. person….” Nobody is an L.G.B.T. person. You can have two, maybe three letters maximum at any moment…” and that is pushing it.
Saying one is an “LGBT person” is an absurdity because each letter is mutually exclusive. To claim to be one is to necessarily state that you are clearly not any (or most of) the others. That is how language works.
- NYT Magazine’s 1619 Project paved the way for mainstream media to pursue CRT and race-based reporting: Experts
From Fox News:
The New York Times Magazine’s publication of the 1619 Project in August 2019 has helped spark a bevy of think pieces on critical race theory and paved the way for a surge in race-based reporting, multiple experts and analysts agreed.
The project, penned in part by lead writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, purports that 1619, the year the first enslaved Africans were brought to what would later become the United States, should be considered the true founding year of the country. Critics and historians who were consulted on the project have since hit the report as being full of historical inaccuracies, such as suggesting the Revolutionary War was fought in part to preserve slavery.
No matter what side of the debate Americans found themselves on, many noted the uptick in race-based studies and news reports.
The Washington Post published a database in January on the number of congressmen who once owned slaves. The authors declared their research provides a “greater understanding” of how slaveholding “influenced early America.”
6. Utah College Still Plans to Offer Pornography Studies Class Despite National Social Media Backlash
From CBN:
A private college in Utah said it won’t cancel its plans to offer an elective class on pornography for its upcoming May term even though the backlash on social media has been severely critical of the school.
The course description of FILM-3000 Porn from Westminster College’s online catalog explained that porn was “more popular than Sunday night football.”
Westminster, a private, nonprofit, accredited and liberal arts college located in Salt Lake City, found itself in the crosshairs of national social media attention after conservative commentator Candace Owens tweeted about the course last week.
“I thought this was a joke — it isn’t. This is a pornography class that you can enroll in at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. The class description reads that porn is as American as apple pie and students will watch pornographic films together and discuss sex as an art form,” she tweeted to her 3 million Twitter followers.
7. Half of parents still financially support their adult children, study shows
From CNBC:
From buying food to paying for their cell phone plan or covering health and auto insurance, half of parents with a child over 18 provide them with at least some financial support, according to a report by Savings.com.
These parents are shelling out roughly $1,000 a month, on average, on such expenses, the report found.
Young adults just starting out have faced significant financial hurdles over the last few years, including an uneven job market, hefty student loan bills from school and soaring housing costs.
In 2020, the share of those living with their parents (often referred to as “boomerang kids”) temporarily spiked to a historic high.
And yet, 62% of adult children living at home don’t contribute to household expenses at all, Savings.com found.
Now, inflation poses new challenges for achieving financial independence.
- Ignore the Environmental “Prophets” of Gloom and Doom
From The Daily Citizen:
According to socio-biologist Edward Wilson, the world has just 27 years and 251 days left of food.
“The limit to how many people Earth can feed is set at 10 billion at the absolute maximum,” he says. “The constraints of the biosphere are fixed, there’s no wiggle room here.”
Catastrophic predictions have become the norm for environmental radicals over the years, working overtime to instill fear in an effort to persuade both politicians and the public to go along with their ill-conceived policies.
They’re always wrong.
Some will remember the name Dr. Paul Ehrlich. He’s the biologist who famously predicted in the 1960s there would be a devastating food shortage in the United States in the 1970s, resulting in hundreds of millions of deaths. He also stated the American population would decline to 22.6 million by 1999.
At the root of all of these wildly foolish and outlandish predictions is a raging secularism. In this worldview, man has replaced God and ecology has replaced theology. Its proponents believe they can somehow control both the wind and the waves and all the weather in between. It’s almost laughable if not for their destructive and costly policies that negatively impact real people’s lives.
This fatalistic fanaticism ignores God’s sovereignty and even His mysterious ways. Absent from Edward Wilson’s cry that we’re running out of food is the fact that agriculture and food development and procurement are constantly evolving. How things are today will not be how they will be next year – let alone the next ten. Consider that world hunger has decreased dramatically in the last half century despite all the apocalyptic predictions to the contrary.
As Christians, we are called to live responsibly – and hopefully. In the end, though, our ultimate security isn’t found in food but in faith in Jesus Christ. That is all. And that is enough.
- World’s oldest person, Kane Tanaka, dies at age 119
From NBC News:
The woman who held the record for the oldest living person has died at the age of 119, according to Guinness World Records.
Kane Tanaka of Japan died last Tuesday, Guinness World Records reported Monday.
On April 13, Tanaka’s family tweeted that she had recently been “hospitalized and discharged repeatedly.”
“I was able to come this far with the support of many people. I hope you will continue to have fun, [and be] cheerful and energetic,” she had said, according to a tweet from her family.
Tanaka was confirmed as the oldest living person on March 9, 2019.
10. An Economics Lesson From a Science Teacher
From the Wall Street Journal:
The best economics lesson I ever learned came from a science teacher. Mr. Seaver was a barrel-chested guy with a foghorn voice. My junior-high locker was directly across from his classroom. One morning, he appeared in the hallway toting a stepladder. From a leather bag he pulled a stencil set, pencils, a few rags and a small pot of black paint. Balancing his tools as he climbed the ladder, he traced out an inscription on the wall: “Life is not determined by what you want. Life is determined by the choices you make.”
The message was at odds with Mr. Seaver’s blusterous style, but I was transfixed. No one before had asked me to consider this notion. I’d been under the juvenile impression the world would always be my oyster.
A kid emerged from the gathering crowd. “Hey, Mr. Seaver,” he said, “what are you doing all that up there for?”
Mr. Seaver paused as he wiped down his paintbrushes. “I’m giving you guys the best advice you’re ever gonna get, that’s what I’m doing,” he said. “And I’m writing it on the wall so you see it every day. Maybe then you won’t forget it.”
You, like me, may want to live in a world without trade-offs, but life isn’t determined by what we want. Life is determined by the choices we make.
