Free Republic

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley. If you’re looking at the same-sex “marriage” debate and thinking it won’t affect you, allow me to bring the truth home to you—before your own children bring it home themselves. Imagine finding out that your kindergartner’s teacher read the story Heather Has Two Mommies or Daddy’s New Roommate before nap time. Having two daddies or two mommies is just the same as having one of each, she explains. Or perhaps you’ll learn over the dinner table that a special speaker visited your middle-schooler’s health class. The speaker instructed your...

Same-Sex 'Marriage' Goes to School - Out of the Closet and Into the Classroom Mark Earley. If you're looking at the same-sex "marriage" debate and thinking it won't affect you, allow me to bring the truth home to you—before your own children bring it home themselves. Imagine finding out that your kindergartner's teacher read the story Heather Has Two Mommies or Daddy's New Roommate before nap time. Having two daddies or two mommies is just the same as having one of each, she explains. Or perhaps you'll learn over the dinner table that a special speaker visited your middle-schooler's health...

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley. As America moves closer to embracing same-sex “marriage,” one can almost picture people in the wedding industry rubbing their hands in delight. After all, if we legalize gay “marriage,” we’ll have more weddings than ever, right? Wrong. We will end up having fewer marriages, not more. Just ask the citizens of Holland, where marriage is going the way of typewriters and buggy whips. In the Weekly Standard, Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, points out that in recent decades—a time when parental cohabitation was sweeping across...

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley. Chuck Colson told me recently that his church, First Baptist in Naples, Florida, at the urging of Pastor Hayes Wicker got sixteen hundred communications off to the Congress—e-mails, letters, and most importantly, phone calls—urging action on a Federal Marriage Amendment. What a great example. I hope all other churches across the country are doing the same thing. But the response that came back from many of the congressmen and senators was disconcerting. They said they were opposed to gay “marriage,” but wanted to leave it to the states. They...

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley. In a TV debate a distinguished looking pastor argued in favor of the Federal Marriage Amendment. He quoted Scripture and was eloquent, talking about God’s plan for society. His adversary, a young man with one of the gay-rights groups, looked at him at the end of his discourse and said, “But pastor, we’re not asking for a church marriage; we’re asking for civil marriage.” The pastor had no response, and as a result, in the minds of many listeners, the gay argument won the day. To effectively present the...

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley. On several “ BreakPoints,” Chuck Colson has addressed the threat posed by the growing radical Islamic movement among America’s prison population. Unfortunately, since the last time he spoke about it, the situation in our prisons has only become worse. The U.S. Department of Justice has just released a report about the selection of Muslim religious service providers by the Bureau of Prisons. According to this report, the Bureau has been far too lax in screening Muslim chaplains, contractors, and volunteers who work in our prisons. While these workers have...

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley . The more we read and learn about the mistreatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the worse it gets. New revelations about the conduct of American soldiers shock and surprise us. But one person who wasn’t surprised by what he learned is Dr. Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University. He has seen it all before. In 1971, Zimbardo and his colleagues conducted an experiment in the basement of Stanford’s psychology building. After creating a simulated prison, they randomly assigned twenty-four Stanford students to be either guards...

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley. One day in 1981, when Jeannette Watson was visiting her doctor for a pregnancy checkup, she told him about her congenital hip displaysia. The doctor informed her, “In a few years there is going to be a genetic test to determine early in a pregnancy if the fetus carries that defective gene.” Jeannette, who considered herself pro-choice, responded, “I would never kill my baby because he had hip displaysia.” Jeannette’s husband, Alexander Sanger, disagrees. He tells this personal story in his new book, Beyond Choice: Reproductive Freedom in the...

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley. Yesterday I talked about the need for consistent worldview training to help teens choose abstinence. But that’s not all teens need. As a father of six children, I can tell you that what we often forget to talk about when discussing teen sexual behavior is the enormous influence of adult sexual behavior. While some so-called “safer-sex” advocates have a disturbing tendency to think of teen sex as normal and even healthy, the majority of adults still know it’s a bad idea. But it doesn’t seem to occur to most...

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley. A little story in the WASHINGTON POST sums up what's really going in San Francisco. Reporter Evelyn Nieves had just described how San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom had decided to violate state law simply because he didn't like it: He ordered city and county officials to issue marriage licenses to homosexuals who wanted to "marry." As a result, thousands of homosexuals have defied the law, taking part in so-called "weddings." Until days ago, the state attorney general of California -- whose job it is to enforce state law --...

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley. This past weekend, after the affirmation the president gave to the Federal Marriage Amendment in the State of the Union, President Bush stated his unequivocal support, not only for the Federal Marriage Amendment, but also for the amendment process and for the version known as the Musgrave Amendment. He did it in response to a question by Senator John Cornyn (R-Tex.). The amendment reads as follows: “Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution...

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley. Somehow it isn’t surprising how on the morning after the Super Bowl, there was outrage in the air—and it wasn’t just coming from Carolina fans. The MTV-produced halftime show, not to mention the commercials, left even some of the worldliest football fans sputtering. Our own Chuck Colson talked with a non-Christian friend who is usually blasé about what goes on in our culture, but who was furious over the exposure of Janet Jackson’s breast during the halftime concert—if you can call it that—and about finding out way too much...

(Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley.) Are you in the mood for a Christmas movie? How about one where a department-store Santa swears incessantly at little kids, gets falling-down drunk, robs stores, and has a few graphic sex scenes? Believe it or not, that movie, called BAD SANTA, opened a few weeks ago. I haven't had the privilege of seeing this little gem, but the reviews were full of details about its rampant vulgarity. BAD SANTA didn't do too well at the box office, but, boy, did the critics love it. To take just a...

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley. Back in October of this year, a bus-load of Prison Fellowship staff and volunteers went to the Fluvanna Women's Correctional Center in Virginia to help prisoners sign up their children for Angel Tree Christmas. A few of us volunteered to go into the segregation unit to meet with women who could not leave their cells. One of the inmate-moms I met was Alicia. As I knelt on the concrete floor and spoke to her through the food slot in her solid steel door -- the only way we could...

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley. Last week, the Senate held its longest debate in nearly a decade. The subject wasn’t health care, war, or even education. It was something even more vital to the health of our democracy: the constitutional balance of power between the executive and the legislative branches. The issue was the refusal of Senate Democrats to allow a vote on four of the president’s nominees to the Federal Courts of Appeals: Charles Pickering, Priscilla Owens, Bill Pryor, and Janice Rogers Brown. Republican Senators tried to make the point—and did—that judicial nominations...

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley. "In America today," wrote Chuck Colson, "we have very nearly reached the completion of a long process I can only describe as the systematic usurpation of political power by the American judiciary . . . " That statement was no more true than yesterday when the rule of judges manifested itself again: The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, by a 4-3 margin, ruled that the state's refusal to recognize so-called "marriages" between same-sex couples is unconstitutional and a violation of civil rights. The court gave the Massachusetts legislature 180...

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley. Like many teenage girls, Tiffany wanted books for Christmas. But there were three problems. Number one, her dad was in prison. Number two, her family was struggling financially. And number three, Tiffany had been blind since birth. The first two problems were taken care of when Tiffany's dad signed her up to receive Christmas gifts through Prison Fellowship's Angel Tree ministry. But that still left the third problem. Tiffany could read Braille, but as her mother warned Angel Tree volunteer John Miller, Braille books are "expensive and hard to...

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley. This past spring, the war in Iraq sparked a renewed passion for activism among youth on both sides of the debate. But as the WALL STREET JOURNAL put it, "this is not your father's protest generation." The protesters of the sixties and early seventies shared a common countercultural vision: a new society with socialist values, sexual liberation, and the end of conventional ideals like monogamy and the nuclear family. Today in our permissive culture, however, there is not much left to run counter to. "The counterculture of thirty years...

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley. A youth pastor in a northern Virginia church was teaching his congregation of high school and college students what it means to be a Christian. "Christianity," he told them, "is not about what you cannot do -- a set of forbidden behaviors -- but about what you can do. The two greatest commandments Jesus gave were about doing something," he emphasized. "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And love your neighbor as yourself." He was teaching about being the Body of Christ:...

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley. In their book HOW NOW SHALL WE LIVE? Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey tell the story of a father and his teenage daughter on vacation at Disney World. The man knows his daughter is having some problems, but when he tries to question her about them, he's shocked by what he hears. After hearing her Christian beliefs challenged by her teachers and friends, she's on the verge of giving up her faith. She's come to believe that the only real answers come from science, and that faith is only...