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On this date in 1934, Chinese Communists beheaded John and Betty Stam in the Anhui province town of Miaoshu. The Stams had settled as China Inland Mission proselytizers in the town of Jingde (at their time generally rendered as “Tsingteh”). Betty Stam (nee Scott) had grown up in China, the daughter of a Presbyterian missionary. John was a New Jersey native who had graduated Moody Bible Institute in 1932. They had a three-month-old daughter named Helen Priscilla. On December 6, 1934, Communist rebels in China’s long-running civil war entered Jingde and seized the foreign family. According to a tribute page...

As North Carolina lawmakers debated a proposal to prevent charter schools from discriminating against applicants based on sexual orientation, one representative suggested Tuesday that adult sexual attraction to children is a sexual orientation like homosexuality. The amendment was tabled by Republicans, preventing a vote on it. But during the debate, Republican Rep. Paul Stam, R-Wake, said pedophilia, masochism and other illegal sexual practices are sexual orientations like homosexuality and he questioned the role adults who are sexually attracted to children might have in schools. Several lawmakers called those comments offensive. After the House session, Twitter lit up with criticism of...

2 Chronicles 20:15 And he said, Hearken ye, all Judah, and ye inhabitants of Jerusalem, and thou king Jehoshaphat, Thus saith the LORD unto you, Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great multitude; for the battle is not yours, but God's. In December 17776, Thomas Paine wrote in THE CRISIS, "These are the times that try men's souls: the summer soldier and sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyrrany, like hell, is not easily conquered;...