Thank you for your great responses. I do tend to go ballistic when we’re talking about folks who trash the U. S. these days. Illegal aliens are a huge concern of mine, and some of them come here, wave the Mexican flag, and flip off U. S. Citizens who object.
That’s why I bristle so easily when I see our own citizens that do something that shows disrespect for the nation. Look, our nation isn’t perfect. It just hasn’t been surpassed by any other nation to this point. I think we would do well to support the best nation to come along, with regard to personal rights.
You raised some good points, and advocated for them. I think those points are reasoned. I share some of the same concerns. I do however thing it’s reasonable to defend the case I made, and I’d rather have someone like me defend it, than someone who doesn’t like Christianity at all.
Desmond Doss was a special guy. Not carrying any weapon at all, he crept up withing 30 yards of machine gun nests, on a number of occasions. Wow.
Hey, thanks for the back and forth. I appreciate it.
BTW: I also appreciate your mention of historic accounts that may have impacted Mennonite policy, and their absolute position on pacifism, something I wasn’t quite sure about when I mentioned those issues. Take care.
D1
Not a problem, DoughtyOne. Soft words are almost always my first response (and usually my continuing response) to people who I can tell agree with me on the basics but disagree on specifics. I usually reserve my anger for liberals who know what they’re doing to destroy the country, not for conservatives who may disagree with me on how to save it.
I’ve spent most of my adult life in the news media. I’ve often been the only political conservative in the newsroom, and almost always have been the only evangelical. I’m used to having to defend everything I say, to think beforehand about what holes somebody can shoot in what I want to say, and to think through the logical conclusions of what might initially appear to be a good idea.
Part of that is because liberals in government are often really, really good at agreeing with a conservative idea, having a hand in crafting bipartisan legislation to accomplish it, and then using the resulting laws in ways that were never intended.
That’s why I raised my concerns. Liberals have already gotten a precedent established with Bob Jones University that a sincerely held religious belief which contradicts public policy can disqualify a private Christian college from tax exempt status and from most forms of federal financial aid available to students at other private colleges. (I happen to be married to a Korean, so I obviously disagree with Bob Jones University’s traditional position, since changed, on barring interracial dating, but I realize many Southerners sincerely believed for a long time that interracial marriages were forbidden by several biblical passages.)
So far, that precedent has been almost entirely limited to Bob Jones University because virtually no other college agreed with them on that narrow issue, and they themselves have finally changed their position. See here: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2000/marchweb-only/53.0.html
However, expanding that precedent that the government can penalize colleges for sincerely held religious convictions could become disasterous to Christian higher education, and I don’t want to see anything done to make it harder for Christian colleges to operate in accord with their beliefs — even if those beliefs are dead wrong.