Posted on 11/27/2004 4:57:13 AM PST by johnny7
Liberal religious figures, concerned about broad moral issues such as world poverty as well as the perception that ''moral values" helped win the election for President Bush, are stepping up their organizational efforts to support left-leaning candidates and their causes to prepare for the 2006 midterms and the 2008 presidential election.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Great choice for the job! They all get a laugh about that time Teddy and Chris Dodd sandwiched the waitress in a bar room closet.
These people are laughable. They want to know why the death penalty isn't a "hot button moral issue" like abortion. It does not occur to them that the public might actually support imposition of the death penalty. This obtuseness is why they will continue to lose elections.
This article is priceless. How about the "why is abortion a moral issue and not the death penalty?" To the Democrats, an unborn baby is right on a par with people on death row and the Dems wonder why their message isn't being received well? This party had better get some better spokesmen and get a grasp on reality or they are going to be obsolete!
These 'dims' - most people of faith understand 'actions have consequences' and 'personal responsibility' - the basic idea of 'faith' is not to accept 'anything goes' as a rational moral philosophy (unless you are a member of a unitarian or feel-good faith model) - but that one is RESPONSIBLE for the consequences of their actions - HENCE - punishment is rational, deserved,and expected; salvation, for Christians, comes through faith and the direct intervention of the Redeemder; MURDER of innocents is wrong; legal execution - legally arrived at and applied is appropriate and necessarya if a society is to survive; self-defense and self-preservation are mandated by God; works of charity are a necessary, VOLUNTARY part of Christian living; income redistribution (i.e. involuntary extortion from the productive to the non-productive by government fiat is fundamentally wrong) and tolerance does not mean endorsement, special rights nor extraordinary privileges. I could go on - but just like gooey commercials for donations to a Children's Hospital by rabid pro-abortionists reeks of hypocrisy - putting lipstick on a pig won't make a 'hillary' into an Ann or Michelle or Laura or....you get the point!
And with Clinton as the enduring icon of the Democratic Party and Ted "Chappaquiddick" Kennedy leading the charge, there's a snowball's chance in hell of that happening.
The Dims are relying on the same formula which has put the mainline Protestant churches into a tailspin over the past 4 decades. They're pushing a social gospel which is a counterfeit and it will rally no one. These guys have absolutely no clue as to what's going on outside their little enclaves and it will continue to cost them big time.
But I for one am very happy when I read somthing like this. They're going to make things very easy for the good guys.
They are obsolete, and have been for 40 years. The real question is, can we make them total irrelevant? I think we can.
Exactly what does the "middle" in the "middle church" stand for?
''They say, 'Keep abortion safe, legal, and rare,' but they do nothing but try to keep it legal; they do nothing to make it rare," he said. ''The Democrats ought to say, 'Let's work on reducing abortion rates, adoption reform, helping low-income women.' We could work on that together, prolife and prochoice, and reduce the abortion rate in the process."
The Democrats will never do this because for them abortion has become a litmus test of political acceptability. What they do instead is change the subject--to the death penalty or to war or to poverty or to just about anything except piles and piles of butchered babies.
You know... guitar-playing during services, collections for communist insurgents, gay Bishops, government health-care...
Well said. I think you covered all the bases. The Rats detachment from reality is finally hitting them in a big way. It's funny to watch them huff and puff as their stranglehold slips away.
National Post | April 8, 2003
The Relativist Left and the War: The antiwar movement is a product of the Left's refusal to reason
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/887908/posts
There are MANY good links in this 2003 thread
"..Sojourners magazine ..."
Tikkun is another beloved magazine of the Religious Left:
Michael Lerner is its editor. http://www.tikkun.org/
"Tikkun philosophy is: An eccentric left-wing Jewish cult, mixing the Old Testament, medieval cabala mysticism and 1960’s style campus Marxism.
Tikkun teaches that we need a "New Covenant". Sound familiar? It should if you watched the Democratic National Convention in 1992. Bill Clinton’s acceptance speech was called the "New Covenant" speech.
That was the most famous speech in which Clinton misquoted the Bible saying; "As the Scripture says, ‘Our eyes have not yet seen, nor our ears heard, nor our minds imagined what we can build.’ We can do it!" ....
If you think this stuff sounds far out, the confessional prayer of Tikkun, known as "Al Cheyt" takes the cake. Al Cheyt begs forgiveness "for the sins of accepting the current distribution of wealth and power...for the sins of squandering hundreds of billions on unnecessary defense expenditures...for the sins of turning our backs on the oppression of gays and lesbians."
As far back as 1988, Clinton could be found writing letters to Tikkun magazine editor and chief seer Michael Lerner.
That year the bi-monthly publication printed a letter in which an inspired Bill Clinton wrote that Tikkun "had helped me clarify my own thinking."
Lerner was known around the University of Washington as the "Commie" prof. He openly advocated communism telling the Seattle Times in 1970, "I dig Marx." Lerner taught at both Washington and U. of Cal.-Berkeley where he was the head of the SDS.
In Seattle he led the infamous Seattle Liberation Front, a radical anti-war group ... In the 1970’s Lerner was indicted for his part in the violent bomb attack against the Seattle Federal Courthouse.
His 1973 book, The New Socialist Revolution states, "This book is an attempt to explain why the only changes that will make sense in America are those that will move the country to socialism...can the American Revolution occur without violence?"
According to the SNS wire story, Lerner’s goal now is to fuse left-wing politics with religiosity - a Jewish version of "liberation theology."
The Sterling News Service story sums Tikkun up as "a craze about the middle-aged crisis of meaning for a coterie of Yale Law School graduates and their confused friends.
Culturally adrift, they are trying to create a new designer religion for themselves out of the fetishes of modern life -a bit of ecology here, a bit of psycho-babble there - a cult without faith, without God, without transcendental purpose, doomed to failure." Lerner would disagree.
.... there can be no doubt that Tikkun is a perfect match for the relativism (i.e., the end justifies the means; change your mind to suit the outcome of any given situation) and socialism that the Clintons live and are bent on pushing on America.
Before it was deemed unwise to veil their communications by those at the White House, it was apparent that Lerner had captured the attention of Hillary Clinton so much that she has invited him to disciple her in Tikkun thought regularly. ...
She even constructed her most famous speech around a Lerner phrase and philosophy - the "Politics of Meaning" - in San Antonio, April 6, 1993.
This speech echoes Lerner’s teaching from the Tikkun magazine May/June 1993. It was shortly thereafter that Hillary invited Lerner to the White House to discuss "...how to take the politics of meaning into a policy direction."
Lest there be any doubt that Lerner still stands totally entrenched in Marxist philosophy, he wrote, speaking of his own ideas saying; "The politics of meaning is the Clinton's attempt to change the dominant discourse of this society from the language of selfishness to the language of caring, social responsibility and ecological sensitivity."
Translation: "selfishness" is the free-market system and "caring, social responsibility, sensitivity" beckon the idea of Utopian socialism controlled and defined by a Marxist government.
Human Events evaluates the "politics of meaning" to be simply 'a loony form of socialism.'" ~ Eric Barger
Good summary.
"You know... guitar-playing during services, collections for communist insurgents, gay Bishops, government health-care..."
Gee, I didn't know that guitar-playing in church was right in line with communism and the other stuff you listed.
I guess organ music is the only appropriate type of accompaniment according to God.
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