Christianity Today has reprinted a 1995 interview with the late William F. Buckley, Jr., in which he dispenses some timeless advice for Christian activists. An excerpt:

YOU BELIEVE THAT THERE IS A PLACE FOR RELIGIOUS CONVICTION TO INFORM POLICIES. WHAT PRINCIPLES SHOULD GUIDE CHRISTIAN ACTIVISTS AS THEY TRY TO INFLUENCE LEGISLATION?

Thomas Aquinas once was asked, “If the public view was that a famine was imminent, would you be justified in charging injurious prices for your grain, knowing that a relief wagon of grain was coming?” Thomas said yes, you would, but it would be wrong. A Christian would not do that.

Certain things which the market authorizes simply in terms of law are unchristian and ought not to be done. The big issue today has to do with the fidelity of marriages. The tendency now to leave your wife because you have an infatuation with a younger woman of tenderer flesh is an enormous temptation. It’s carnal, and it’s also easy to justify with all the solipsistic reasoning that we hear today. That is about the gravest offense that a human being can commit, to throw away a wife.

Go read the whole thing.

Comments: 7 |

William F. Buckley, Jr., was my first conservative—and I didn’t like him much. With his arched eyebrow and flickering tongue, with his $50 words, I thought he was the perfect picture of a snob. I thought his brand of politics would never attract a national following.
As a young college student, I watched him on TV. I wasn’t buying his labored defenses of constitutionalism that he said justified some in resisting integration. I was strong for civil rights and he was against civil rights. Or at least that’s what I thought at the time.

When my hero Hubert Humphrey took to the Senate floor to defend the great Civil Rights Act of 1964, I laughed when he said if any part of that great charter ever led to racial quotas or set-asides, he would eat the page of the Congressional Record on which the bill was printed. I hope Hubert liked Tabasco sauce.

Buckley had warned us. And he warned us of many other things, too. Like Communism.
Perhaps it was because Buckley was such a great man of faith himself that he understood instinctively that Communism was, in the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, atheism with a knife to your children’s throats.

I laughed, too, when Buckley ran for Mayor of New York City in 1965. He ran against the liberal knight, John V. Lindsay. Buckley realized he never stood a chance, saying that if he won he’d demand a recount.

Later, when Lindsay switched parties and became a Democrat, his staffers asked me what the Mayor of New York could do for me in my own race for state Assembly. Knowing how my Long Island neighbors despised the limousine liberal Lindsay, I said: “Mayor Lindsay could denounce me by name.” The devil didn’t make me say that; William F. Buckley, Jr. did.

When Buckley debated Governor Ronald Reagan about giving away the Panama Canal, I invited my fellow Coast Guard officers to watch it on TV. As we gathered in the Officers Club, I assured them that Buckley “clean up the floor with Reagan.” At that time, I happened to agree with Buckley that the U.S. ought to give away the canal. I agreed with California Senator Hayakawa who said “we stole it fair and square.”

What we saw instead was Ronald Reagan at the height of his powers. I switched parties and positions on the spot. I became a Reagan man. And Bill Buckley—wrong as he was on the canal—became one of Reagan’s best boosters. My Coast Guard buddies never asked for my political advice again.

Perhaps my favorite Buckley quote is the one that summed up his political philosophy—and mine. It wasn’t just because he was a Yale man that he put down Harvard so memorably. He said: “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” He was, after all, a good democrat.

He would have agreed with Edmund Burke: “Individuals are foolish, but the species is wise.” William F. Buckley, Jr. understood that ideas have consequences. And he did his best to advance the ideas of faith, family and freedom. He did it with wit and energy. God rest ye, Merry Gentleman!

Comments: 1 |

Never a group to turn away a buck, Planned Parenthood will take money from wherever and whomever it can get it, be it the government, Hollywood movie stars, and corporations. That welcoming spirit apparently even extends to those who seek racial genocide:

Comments: 3 |

[Note: On Wednesday, February 27 at 11:00 a.m., FRC will be welcoming David Blankenhorn for a lecture on his book, The Future of Marriage (Encounter Books, 2007). The lecture will also be available via live webcast at www.frc.org.]

In 1995, David Blankenhorn made one of the most important contributions to the debates over family structure with his book Fatherless America. In it, he compiled the overwhelming social science evidence in support of the common-sense truth that children need fathers as well as mothers.

Now, after years as what he calls a “Morally Anguished Fence Sitter” on the issue of so-called same-sex “marriage,” Blankenhorn has finally followed his earlier findings to their logical conclusion by declaring that marriage should be defined as the union of one man and one woman. His new book, The Future of Marriage, lays out in a thorough, scholarly, yet accessible way exactly why marriage exists as a social institution, why the male-female union is intrinsic to it, and how redefining marriage to include same-sex couples would damage it.

Blankenhorn takes the reader on a fascinating tour across time and cultures, noting that “the origins of marriage appear to coincide with the origins of civilization.” Blankenhorn describes how in the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, older cultures which practiced temple prostitution and sex for its own sake came to be replaced by ones (like that of the Hebrews) that recognized marriage and the social importance of fatherhood.

In contrast to such patriarchal societies are ones like the Trobriand Islands in the Pacific, which emphasize a child’s descent through her mother’s line. Yet even here, marriage and fathers are considered crucial for the raising of children. These two illustrations—as well as quotes from numerous anthropologists—prove that marriage has some features that are virtually universal, and that bridging the male-female divide is one such feature.

Continue reading »

Comments: 7 |

Below is video of this week’s Witherspoon Fellowship lecture at FRC with John G. West of the Discovery Institute. The lecture is entitled “Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science.”

Comments: 3 |

The Vermont Marriage Advisory Council recently sponsored a forum at the University of Vermont, entitled, “Does Traditional Marriage Matter?” FRC Senior Fellow Dr. Pat Fagan, Director for Marriage and Religion, presented a host of data from the social sciences which deal directly with the institution of marriage and the implications of genderless marriage.

The VMAC’s website contains a video of Dr. Fagan’s presentation, The Right of the Child to the Marriage of His Parents.

|

The latest New York magazine has a fascinating article by Po Bronson on how and why kids lie:

Out of the 36 topics, the average teen was lying to his parents about twelve of them. The teens lied about what they spent their allowances on, and whether they’d started dating, and what clothes they put on away from the house. They lied about what movie they went to, and whom they went with. They lied about alcohol and drug use, and they lied about whether they were hanging out with friends their parents disapproved of. They lied about how they spent their afternoons while their parents were at work. They lied about whether chaperones were in attendance at a party or whether they rode in cars driven by drunken teens….

For two decades, parents have rated “honesty” as the trait they most wanted in their children. Other traits, such as confidence or good judgment, don’t even come close. On paper, the kids are getting this message. In surveys, 98 percent said that trust and honesty were essential in a personal relationship. Depending on their ages, 96 to 98 percent said lying is morally wrong.

So when do the 98 percent who think lying is wrong become the 98 percent who lie?

Bronson’s article contains a number of revealing tidbits, including:

1. Lying is related to intelligence. The smarter the kid, the better they are at lying.
2. On average, a 4-year-old will lie once every two hours, while a 6-year-old will lie about once every hour and a half.
3. Scholars have found that kids who live in threat of consistent punishment don’t lie less. Instead, they become better liars, at an earlier age—learning to get caught less often.
4. Children lie because they see their parents lie, and learn to imitate them. Adults inadvertently teach children that honesty only creates conflict, and dishonesty is an easy way to avoid conflict.
5. Permissive parents don’t actually learn more about their children’s lives.
6. Most rules-heavy parents don’t actually enforce them since its too much work.
7. Parents view arguing with their teenager as destructive to their relationship, while teens see it as strengthening their bond.

Read the whole article here.

Comments: 3 |

If you happen to be visiting New York City today, perchance to be celebrating Valentine’s Day, in the destination city of romance-seekers the world over, you might be greeted by “street teams” from the health department welcoming you with. . . “a colorful and sexy message” — Get Some.

Taxpayer-funded condoms, natch. Nice souvenir.

C’mon, New York. Are you really going to put up with this?!

|

If you’re in DC today, stop by FRC at noon to hear a lecture by John G. West. Dr. West, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and author of the provocative new book Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science (ISI Books), will speak today, Tuesday, February 12 at noon on Darwinian Fundamentalism and its dehumanizing effects on our politics and culture.

If you can’t make it, the event will also be webcast live. Follow this link to view the webcast at noon.

|

News report: On Tuesday, McCain’s delegates at the West Virginia convention swung over to support Huckabee at the last minute in a successful maneuver designed to deprive Romney of a victory.

This convention tactic is as old as conventions. Abraham Lincoln’s supporters employed it in Illinois in 1856. We can read about it in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s excellent “Team of Rivals.” She shows how Abraham Lincoln’s political allies did exactly the same thing in Illinois in 1856. They knew Lincoln could not get the Senate nomination, so they threw their support to Orville Browning to block a rival. Lincoln got the support of that Senator Browning in his 1858 race against Steven Douglas.

We need to remember that politics ain’t beanbag.

Comments: 3 |

While the Canadians have taken the legal route to claiming that a child can have three “parents,” British scientists are taking it a step further. Researchers at Newcastle University have now created an embryo (a.k.a. human being) that contains the DNA from three separate parents:

They experimented on 10 severely abnormal embryos left over from traditional fertility treatment.

Within hours of their creation, the nucleus, containing DNA from the mother and father, was removed from the embryo, and implanted into a donor egg whose DNA had been largely removed.

The only genetic information remaining from the donor egg was the tiny bit that controls production of mitochondria – around 16,000 of the 3billion component parts that make up the human genome.

The embryos then began to develop normally, but were destroyed within six days.

This all done, of course, in hopes of preventing diseases caused by genetic defects (fatal liver failure, muscular dystrophy, diabetes, etc.). However, the notion that this takes us one step closer to assembly-line human beings seems to be lost in the hard-charge toward technological advancement. Also lost is the fact that this search for a cure for disease in human beings involves killing human beings.

The cure is deadlier than the disease.

Comments: 7 |

There’s an odd feeling in the office today. So much is at stake. It’s overcast in Washington. Everything is anticipation. What will the voters do? I remember being here in 1984. We were pretty confident that President Reagan would be re-elected. He led in all the polls. Still, there was uneasiness.

I concluded then that in most countries, the people fear the capital city. In this country, the capital city has a healthy fear of the people. Keep it that way.

President Reagan, of course, respected the American people. And more, he loved them. They fully returned his affection. That day, they gave him their support. He carried forty-nine states.

Shortly afterward, I was asked to draft a letter for President Reagan to Congress. In my version, the President said “if we don’t teach phonics, I fear the rising generation will lack the essential tool of literacy.” I got that draft letter back within three hours. That line was circled in red. In the margin, someone in the President’s office wrote: “This president has concerns. He has no fears.” I was never so happy to be corrected in my life.

Comments: 4 |

FRC is honored to present a Witherspoon Lecture on Tuesday, February 12th at noon by Dr. John G. West. Dr. West will speak on Darwin Day in America? This lecture is co-sponsored with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) of Wilmington, Delaware. Dr. West’s new book is an in-depth analysis of the drive to replace Lincoln’s Birthday with an international secular holiday called Darwin Day. Dr. West is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute. He will critically examine the movement to indoctrinate students in Darwinian naturalism. Darwin Day in America shows how our politics and culture have been dehumanized in the name of science.

Please join us in our newly redesigned Media Center at 801 G St. NW for this stimulating lecture and discussion. Hardbound copies of Darwin Day in America will available for purchase at a discounted price. Dr. West has graciously agreed to sign copies of his book for attendees. To RSVP, please call 1.800.225.4008 or register online here. The lecture will also be webcast live at www.frc.org.

|

by Tom McClusky and David Christensen

In his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003, President George W. Bush announced the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). PEPFAR is the largest commitment ever by any nation for an international health initiative dedicated to a single disease — a five-year, $15 billion, and multifaceted approach to combating the disease around the world. The United States now leads the world in its level of support for the fight against HIV/AIDS.

Continue reading »

|