Month: July 2012

Fr. John Whiteford Responds to Dr. David Dunn: The Hypocrisy of the Christian Left

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Source: Fr. John Whiteford’s News, Comments, & Reflections

In a Huffington Post article, David Dunn has pointed out what he sees as hypocrisy on the part of Christian conservatives:

It is the view that Christians should vote their values, and this means we should legislate moral evils into oblivion. Thus if we believe life begins at conception, we should vote against abortion! If we believe marriage is between one woman and one man, we should vote against gay marriage! And if we believe in caring for the sick and the poor, we should vote against “Obamacare!” …Wait a minute! Do you see the political hypocrisy? The Christian Right votes for candidates who are anti-abortion and anti-gay (at least on paper) because it believes we must pass laws to protect marriage and protect life (at least embryonic life), but it is unwilling to apply the same principle to “Obamacare.” Infants in the womb have a right to life, but apparently adults do not have a right to life-saving medical care.

There are several problems with the logic here. For one, you could simply flip this question and ask why the Christian Left thinks a baby has a right to free medicaid after it is born, but doesn’t think we should prevent that baby from having a doctor induce a partial delivery, stick a pair of scissors in the back of its neck, and then suck out its brains with a suction machine.

Another problem is a failure to recognize where the government’s powers can rightly be used, and where it cannot. Does anyone have a right to medical care? Everyone should certainly have a right to purchase it, but if you say that you have the right to medical care, you are saying you have a right to someone else’s labor. Last time I checked, that was slavery. I don’t have the right to go to a doctor, hold a gun to his head, and make him treat me or my family members.

On the other hand, does a baby have a right not to have a doctor insert scissors into the back of its head and suck its brains out? Yes. Regardless of what the Supreme Court may say, every human being has a right to life, liberty, and property that comes from God, not the government. The government cannot grant those rights, they can only respect and protect them, or allow them to be violated.

Now do the Scriptures say that we should give to the poor? Yes. The Scriptures do not say that we should lobby the government and force our fellow citizens to give to the poor. The Scriptures say that we should give to the poor.

The Scriptures certainly do not forbid a government from providing charity with tax money, but whether or not that is a good thing, and how that should best be handled is not a matter that the Church has a definite teaching on. Christians can disagree.

I have spent 20 years now, in my secular job, working in social services, which have included Medicaid, Food Stamps, TANF (formerly AFDC), and Child Support. I think some of these programs have some good aspects and should continue, but there is also a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse connected with these programs, and there are also problems with the way the government delivers them that encourage dysfunctional behavior.

Further, while all Christians agree that helping the poor is a Christian responsibility, it is not a self evident truth that the best way to accomplish that is more government welfare, or universal health coverage. I certainly would not suggest that those Christians who disagree with my take on that are not Christians because they don’t see it my way, but they should return the favor, since the Church has no clear teachings on how government should handle public charity. For more on my opinions on welfare, see: podcast.

However, when it comes to baby killing or gay marriage, these are questions that the Church does have a clear teaching on. If you think it is OK for the government to not only allow for babies to be murdered, but have no problem when the government wishes to make Christians pay to kill those babies, then you are not only a hypocrite, you have departed from the Christian Tradition.

Fr. Peter Gillquist — May His Memory be Eternal

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– I first met Fr. Peter when he stayed with my wife and myself during a speaking engagement he had in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He sure was a gracious guest and he also loved sports. He relaxed in our living room watching a football game as I recall. It was a great visit. I had converted to the Orthodox Church a few years earlier and watched with great interest the conversion of the former Campus Crusaders because it mirrored my own journey in ways. Seeing such a large group come in made it a bit easier actually.

Throughout the years we keep in touch here and there. He was a real people-person as we say, and it was authentic and genuine. The man knew Christ, loved Christ, and it always showed by his graciousness towards me, my family, and the other people I would see him interact with in different settings and occasions. That is what I remember about Fr. Peter the most, his gregarious and generous spirit. We have lost a good man.

For more information go to All Saints Orthodox Church.

Archpriest Peter Gillquist, longtime pastor of All Saints Orthodox Church in Bloomington, Indiana and prominent American convert to Orthodox Christianity, died on Sunday, July 1, 2012 after a long battle with metastatic melanoma cancer.

In the 1960s, when Fr. Peter was on staff with the Evangelical parachurch organization Campus Crusade for Christ, he and some friends began to search for the apostolic, historic Christian Church. Under their leadership, a large number of evangelical congregations united as the Evangelical Orthodox Church. Almost twenty years later, in 1987, the EOC was received into the Orthodox Church by the Antiochian Orthodox Church of North America. Fr. Peter recorded this story in his book, “Becoming Orthodox”.

In the 1960s Fr. Peter was a senior editor with Thomas Nelson Publishing. He later helped found Conciliar press, and was its chairman for many years. He served as project director for the Orthodox Study Bible project. Conciliar press published a number of his books, which in addition to “Becoming Orthodox” included “Let’s Quit Fighting over the Holy Spirit”, “The Physical Side of Being Spiritual”, “Love is Now”, and “Why We Haven’t Changed the World”.

Memory eternal!

Welcome to the Cult of Government

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Source: Real Clear Religion | By George Neumayr

Either say “long live the federal government” or die, Mexican government officials hectored Catholics in the early twentieth century, as depicted in the movie, For Greater Glory, an account of the Christian resistance to this persecution known as the “Cristeros war.”

Is Mexico’s past America’s future? After four years of in-your-face secularism from Barack Obama, it is not an idle question.

“Darn tooting,” Barack Obama said to militant feminists when they asked him, after the passage of the “Affordable Care Act,” if he was going to force Christians to pay for the contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacients of their employees.

Under his secularist mandates, of which his HHS contraceptive/abortifacient mandate is the most obvious example, Americans are in effect forced to say “long live the federal government” or face financial death. Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the essence of the “Affordable Care Act,” noncomplying religious organizations can expect to face fines of $2,000 per employee as soon as August 2013. These fines will cripple most Christian hospitals and schools and cause the closures of many religious charities.

Judeo-Christianity is so dangerous to the common good, according to Obama, that he feels free to persecute it through fiats and a cramped definition of “religion” which renders, as the United States Bishops have pointed out, even Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity nonreligious. As HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius decreed at the time of the HHS mandate’s announcement, only private sects that “primarily” employ and serve fellow members of their sects qualify as “religious” under the Obama administration’s definition of a religious organization.

How convenient. By this Orwellian definition of “religion,” Obama seeks to maintain the fiction that he is respecting “religious freedom” while driving the religious out of the public square.

Purging the traditionally religious from public life has long been the objective of the ACLU left, from which Barack Obama comes. He is, as his supporters put it in 2008, the one “we have been waiting for” — meaning that he is the final consummation of socialism and secularism.

According to Barack Obama, no higher power should exist in public life than godless government. Government, not God, is the sole measure of morality and law for him. Government, not God, is the determiner of the “good.” Never mind that the word good derives from the word God. Hence, Obama feels justified in shunting the religious into the shadows of society. While he has not pursued this aim violently, as Mexican President Plutarco Calles did in the 1920s, he has pursued it bureaucratically and legislatively.

Were Plutarco Calles alive today, he would no doubt approve of Obama’s attempts to define religion out of public life through statute, not to mention Obama’s use of public schools as instruments of secularist propaganda. Raised by an atheistic uncle who taught him to hate the Church and influenced by the growing secularism in Western Europe (where he traveled), Calles was a socialist and secularist who sought to monopolize all of public life by plucking children from parents and priests and indoctrinating them in statism. “We must enter and take possession of the mind of childhood, the mind of youth,” Calles liked to say.

In For Greater Glory, the child who is pressured to say “long live the federal government” instead says bravely, “Viva Cristo Rey!” Let us hope that the parents of America will teach their children to emulate this heroic example.

George Neumayr, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, is co-author (with Phyllis Schlafly) of the forthcoming book, No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom.

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