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What We See: This commercial isn’t for a car, but it’s about something you see in a lot of car ads these days: parallel parking without much driver input. We open on an unremarkable young woman talking to us from someplace in lower Manhattan. Over her shoulder we can see the Statue of Liberty, which—and it’s not by “accident”—looks a lot like the Liberty Mutual logo. The woman explains that although there are many things young people do well, parallel parking isn’t one of them. She then gives two options: “Either take the bus or get Liberty Mutual insurance,” because...

Staff and students in the University of Tennessee Office for Diversity and Inclusion want people to think beyond the "he/she" pronouns and are encouraging use of gender-neutral pronouns such as "xe," "xym" and "xyr." Their suggestion hasn't quite caught on -- and some state legislators aren't impressed. Not everyone in society identifies on a strict male-or-female basis, according to diversity office staff, so they are asking people to be aware some may identify themselves with a name and gender that's not strictly male or female. It is not UT's policy. "We should not assume someone's gender by their appearance, nor...

The Rev. E. W. Jackson spoke at the Family Research Council's Watchmen onthe Wall event on May 22, 2015 in Washington, D.C. (CNSNews.com/Penny Starr) (CNSNews.com) – The Rev. E.W. Jackson told attendees at the Family Research Council’s Watchmen on the Wall event in Washington, D.C., last week that Americans who believe biblical teachings about marriage and the sanctity of life are being persecuted. “It bothers me to think my own country is a strange land,” Jackson said Friday at the pastors’ retreat. “I never thought there would be a day when my nation would persecute the Bible-believing Christian for standing...

The Pulitzer Prize board is receiving criticism for giving an award to a South Carolina newspaper for a series on domestic abuse implying that Christianity and the Bible are the sources of the problem. The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC) won the 2015 public service prize for a seven-part series titled "Till death do us part.” But the paper blamed part of the problem of domestic abuse on "deep-rooted beliefs about the sanctity of marriage and the place of women in the home." Tim Graham with the Media Research Center believes there's a natural tendency in southern states for newspapers...

(Snip) They [Christian small business owners]are in this sense more like religious believers under compulsion in a society with an established church than like believers denied the freedom to exercise their religion. Liberals are in this respect right to say they’re not trying to kill religious liberty. They’re trying to take it back to something like the form it had in the Anglo-American world when the Anglo-American world had a formal state religion—except now the state religion is supposed to be progressive liberalism. Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/416421/church-left-yuval-levin

Dear Justice Kennedy, June is nigh, and with it will comes your ruling on the most contentious political issue of our time: marriage. I write because I am one of many children with gay parents who believe we should protect marriage. I believe you were right when, during the Proposition 8 deliberations, you said “the voice of those children [of same-sex parents] is important.” I’d like to explain why I think redefining marriage would actually serve to strip these children of their most fundamental rights. It’s very difficult to speak about this subject, because I love my mom. Most of...

As reported by NBC Chicago, "When a 13-year-old Chicago boy wrote a letter to Santa asking simply for 'safety' this Christmas, he didn’t expect to get a response from the president of the United States. Malik Bryant, who lives in a high-crime neighborhood on the South Side called Englewood, didn’t ask for your typical Christmas toys when he participated in a charitable Letters to Santa program in the city. “All I ask for is for safety. I just want to be safe,” his letter read, according to Direct Effect Charities' website." What is this but the fruit of secular humanism?

Troy Schmidt’s jaw dropped. A few minutes before, he had been preparing to start his seventh year as chaplain for the Olympia High School football team in Florida. But now, those plans had been changed – radically changed. “I received a call from the coach,” Schmidt told me. “He said Orange County Public Schools is no longer allowed to have chaplains as a part of the football program.” Schmidt, who is a campus pastor of the First Baptist Church of Windermere, Florida, listened as the football coach explained the district’s decision to cleanse Christianity from its ranks. “I could no...

Image credit: Jimmy Demello Artworks[/caption] The last time I was in Houston, I had to change the fuse in my paradox meter after meeting a self-described pro-choice Republican woman, who was also a lawyer.  I told her at least she was better than Wendy Davis, to which no response was offered.  I said it a second time, and with a puff of white smoke, the paradox-meter died. Dang, the fuse just blew again, reading Time’s August 4 issue, Religion section article “Atheist “Churches” Gain Popularity—Even in the Bible Belt” (behind a paywall).  Yup, the “Atheist Church” they wrote about...

<p>David Niose, an attorney for the American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center, said public schools should not permit an exercise that "teaches students that patriotism is tied to a belief in God."</p> <p>“Such a daily exercise portrays atheist and humanist children as second-class citizens, and certainly contributes to anti-atheist prejudices,” Niose said in a statement.</p>

...Over the past 50 years or so, these post-Protestants have gradually formed the core of a new and fascinating social class in America....And we can recognize their origins in mainline Protestantism when we discern some of the ways in which they see the world and themselves. They are, for the most part, politically liberal, preferring that government rather than private associations address social concerns. They remained puritanical and highly judgmental, at least about health. And like all puritans, they are willing to use law to compel behavior they think right. Nonetheless, they do not think of themselves as akin to...

“Today, America embraces people of all faiths and of no faith. We are Christians and Jews, Muslims and Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs, atheists and agnostics. Our religious diversity enriches our cultural fabric and reminds us that what binds us as one is not the tenets of our faiths, the colors of our skin, or the origins of our names. What makes us American is our adherence to shared ideals - freedom, equality, justice, and our right as a people to set our own course.”

Barack Obama, first lady Michelle Obama, and their two daughters did not go to church on either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, according to press pool reports. The Obamas are in Kailua, Hawaii for a 17-day Christmas vacation. Although the Obamas did not go to church for Christmas, President Obama did play golf

Like the Golden Calf the Children of Israel made while Moses was receiving the law at Sinai, Obama is making a new God for the masses to worship – big government, the Golden Calf state. "Praise Washington from whence all blessings flow. Praise it all peons here below." The president's policies are designed to maximize dependency – government as the source of all blessings. Under Obama, the food-stamp rolls increased by 33% (to 44.7 million – a record one in seven Americans). The number now receiving Social Security disability payments reached 11 million. (Costs increased from $56 billion in 2000...

If Signorile and other "LGBT" activists get their way, this would mean that churches, mosques, synagogues, religious schools, Bible bookstores, as well as any and every other business in America with 15 or more employees, would be forced, under penalty of law, to abandon the biblical and traditional-values viewpoint on human sexuality, and hire (and otherwise not offend) those who openly flaunt expressly sinful and demonstrably self-destructive sexual behaviors.

The European Parliament called on Thursday (24 October) for EU countries to better implement European environmental rules despite the initial costs involved. The vote put the EU legislature’s seal on a deal with the EU Council of Ministers on the program to lay out the EU’s approach to environmental action up to 2020, “Living well, within the limits of our planet”. The program, the seventh of its kind, will structure EU action on all environmental policy, from water management to climate change, and boost so-called “green growth”. …

Polish Nobel peace laureate Lech Wałęsa on Monday called for a new “secular Ten Commandments” to underpin universal values, addressing a summit of Nobel Peace Prize winners in Warsaw. “We need to agree on common values for all religions as soon as possible, a kind of secular Ten Commandments on which we will build the world of tomorrow,” he said in an opening speech kicking off the three-day summit. … Besides universal values, the international community needs to focus on the economy of tomorrow, he said. …

The world is aging so fast that most countries are not prepared to support their swelling numbers of elderly people, according to a global study being issued Tuesday by the United Nations and an elder rights group. The report ranks the social and economic well-being of elders in 91 countries, with Sweden coming out on top and Afghanistan at the bottom. It reflects what advocates for the old have been warning, with increasing urgency, for years: Nations are simply not working quickly enough to cope with a population graying faster than ever before. By the year 2050, for the first...

The U.S. Air Force said that a well-known drag queen group was invited to perform on base during a “Diversity Day” celebration because drag is a “symbol of gay pride and unity. But the performance sparked outrage among some airmen who called the drag show “totally offensive and inappropriate.” Jewels and the Brunchettes performed to a small crowd at the Los Angeles Air Force Base on Aug. 8, the military confirmed. Photographs provided to Fox News show an individual wearing a giant wig and sporting form-fitting dresses performing to a sparse crowd underneath the American flag. “Drag acts to this...

Switzerland announced a national competition this week that will search for a new national anthem to replace its current one, which government officials say has too many references to God and is too old-fashioned. "The real problem is above all the text," said Lukas Niederberger, who is part of the Swiss Society for Public Utility (SGG), the completion organizer in charge of looking for a new anthem. "Officially the anthem is a psalm, a prayer, but of course we have an open society, religiously neutral. We have atheists, no single god, so this anthem is a difficulty," he told BBC...