According to the respected anti-persecution ministry Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), an Iranian Christian pastor has been sentenced to death in Iran for, to put it simply, being a Christian.

CSW says that “the death sentence handed down in 2010 for the crime of apostasy, to evangelical house pastor Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani, has reportedly been upheld by the third chamber of the Supreme Court in the Shia holy city of Qom. Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani of the Church of Iran denomination was arrested in his home city of Rasht on 13 October 2009 while attempting to register his church. His arrest is believed to have been due to his questioning of the Muslim monopoly on the religious instruction of children in Iran.”

According to the Voice of Martyrs, “With (Pastor Nadarkhani’s) sentence now upheld and confirmed, it is possible that the authorities will ask him to recant his faith and execute him without advance notice if he refuses — a typical pattern of action taken by authorities in such cases.”

This death sentence has been issued despite Iran being a signatory of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, whose Article 18 states:

“Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching.”

Sadly, persecution of Christians in Iran is extensive:

“A major spike in the harassment and arrest of Iranian Christians in recent months is revealing just how nervous the Islamic republic is about the prodigious success of house churches, say Iranian Christian leaders. At least 202 Christians in 24 cities faced ‘arbitrary’ arrest between June 2010 and January 2011, according to Elam Ministries. Elam, run by Iranian expatriates, counted 80 arrests over 2008 and 2009 combined.”

You can express your concern for Pastor Nadarkhani and ask for his release by calling the Iranian Interest Section at the Embassy of Pakistan in Washington, DC at (202) 965-4990.  You can also contact the Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran at the United Nations: Email – iran@un.int; Phone – (212) 687-2020.

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Dear Friends,

Welcome to a special Fourth of July edition of the Social Conservative Review.

As our nation prepares to celebrate Independence Day, our gratitude for our country and the brave men and women who defend it is great. There is no nation like American, one founded upon the belief that our rights are gifts of God, not bestowals of the state.

Continue reading »

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: June 24, 2011

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Family Research Council (FRC) President Tony Perkins reacted to the vote by the New York State Senate, releasing the following statement:

“Enormous political coercion has resulted in a profound failure of moral courage in the New York Senate. A clear majority of the people of New York oppose counterfeit ‘marriage,’ but Gov. Cuomo and anti-family lawmakers have shown that their allegiance is to a small but vocal minority seeking to redefine marriage and family.

“The so-called religious protections that were tacked on to the bill will ultimately do nothing to protect the religious rights of New York citizens. As we go forward there is little doubt that the “incentives,” some taxpayer funded, used to sway votes, especially Republican ones, will be exposed.

“While it was the Democrats who were pushing this agenda, it is the Republicans in the NY Senate who ultimately allowed this to happen, especially Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos. Sadly, the families of New York are not represented well by either of the state’s major parties on this issue. This battle however, is not without its heroes. State Senator Ruben Diaz, Rev. Duane Motley, Jason McGuire and the National Organization for Marriage worked tirelessly for the families of New York in this battle, and they should be praised for their work – it is not all for naught.

“The New York state legislature’s denial of its citizens a chance to vote on the issue of marriage shows it is long overdue that the U.S. Congress begin taking these threats to marriage seriously. They should move to allow the people of the U.S. the right to vote on an issue they clearly understand, as evidenced each time the issue of marriage is put to a direct vote of the people,” concluded Perkins.

-30-

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Adult stem cell researchers James Sherley and Theresa Deisher have filed their brief asking federal court to grant their pending motion for summary judgment and finally ban federal funding of illegal, unnecessary, and unethical “research in which” human embryos are “knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death” in violation of federal law.

Both sides in the lawsuit agreed to supplemental briefs after a U.S. Appeals Court panel overturned the preliminary injunction in the case.

Brief filed by attorneys for the plaintiffs, adult stem cell researchers James Sherley and Theresa Deisher.

Dr. Sherley has also filed a supporting declaration demonstrating that the NIH Guidelines are creating a virtual certainty that more human embryos.

Brief filed by attorneys for the defendants, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, NIH Director Francis Collins, HHS and NIH.

Nature describes the federal lawsuit over US government funding for human embryonic stem cell research as the “landmark lawsuit challenging the legality of government support for the controversial research.”

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A new survey produced by Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life provides insight into the perspectives of 2,200 Evangelical Christian leaders around the world.  Although the headlines the survey is receiving have to do with the rather gloomy cultural outlook of North American and European Evangelicals (in contrast to those in the Global South, who say Evangelical influence is growing), buried within it are two findings that should make those who are hoping for a wedding of theological and cultural erosion within Evangelicalism distinctly uncomfortable.

First, the survey finds that 96 percent of those surveyed believe “abortion is usually or always wrong.”  While I wish it were 100 percent, nonetheless it is clear that international Evangelical leaders of all kinds believe abortion is the taking of a life of a person, a tiny image-bearer of God.  Of course, this is consistent with the facts of science and reason, but it shows, too, that Evangelical leaders remain committed to the biblical teaching that God wove us in our mothers’ wombs (Psalm 139).

Second, the survey notes that 84 percent of Evangelical leaders believe that “society should discourage homosexuality.”  Again, 100 percent would be better, but the fact remains that despite decades of aggressive homosexual activism, the large majority of Evangelical leaders understand that homosexuality is a moral wrong and is socially destructive.

Of further note is that a startling 71 percent – and remember, these are Evangelical leaders from nations as diverse as South Africa and Canada – believe “the influence of secularism” is a profound threat to Evangelical Christian faith, followed by 67 percent who cite “consumerism.”  Militant Islam, government restrictions on religion and other perceived threats rank further down.

This is surprising because secularism is not a religious or political movement (such as Islamicism) nor generally recognized as the source of anti-Christian persecution.  Rather, secularism is the (active or passive) rejection of theism as a force in personal, cultural and civic life.  Under the secularist rubric, things are not wrong but “inappropriate.”  Christian faith is diluted to the point it becomes only a vague belief in a self-reflective, undemanding, and distant deity.  Consensus trumps truth, popular will crests over principle, the lowest forms of culture become accepted or at least are viewed as ethically optional.

As with society at large, believers in Jesus Christ have been adversely affected by secularism.  Instead of radical allegiance to their King, they too often are susceptible to the cult of narcistic secularism.  Radical autonomy and a blurred understanding of the God of the Bible lead to divorce, various forms of interpersonal or substance abuse, sexual sin, or a bland apathy toward the things of the Savior: Why study the Gospels when you can shop?  And isn’t Christianity just a code of ethics with some religious language thrown-in?

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Efforts to legalize homosexual “marriage” in New York remain stalled, at this writing, with the supporters of redefining marriage needing one more Republican vote in the state’s Senate.

Reports indicate that efforts are underway to draft expanded “religious exemptions” that could protect the liberty of religious organizations that disapprove of homosexual conduct or of homosexual “marriage.”

It is true that pro-family groups (including FRC) have argued that legalizing homosexual “marriage” would create a threat to religious liberty. The most often cited example is how Catholic Charities was forced out of the adoption business in Massachusetts and the District of Columbia after those jurisdictions legalized homosexual “marriage,” because the group was unwilling to compromise its principles by placing adoptive children with homosexual couples.

But even if religious non-profits like Catholic Charities were to be protected, what about Christians in business, like the wedding photographer in New Mexico who was sued for declining to photograph a homosexual commitment ceremony?

The only kind of religious exemption broad enough to completely protect rights of conscience—one saying, basically, “Any person, organization, or business that does not approve of same-sex ‘marriage’ will not be required to recognize homosexual relationships as ‘marriages’”—would be completely unacceptable to the advocates of homosexual “marriage.” Forcing the rest of society to affirm and celebrate homosexual relationships is precisely the goal of their movement.

However, even such an absolute religious and conscientious exemption to a homosexual “marriage” bill would not make the redefinition of marriage acceptable, or even tolerable, for one simple reason—the principal objection to homosexual “marriage” has nothing to do with religion. This is something that people on both sides of this debate need to be constantly reminded of.

We are not just fighting for “the right of religions to define marriage for themselves,” apart from the definition of “civil marriage.” This is because, at its heart, marriage is neither a civil institution nor a religious institution.

Instead, marriage is a natural institution—rooted in the order of nature itself.

The reason marriage is defined as the union of one man and one woman is because it takes precisely one man and one woman to create a new human life. Marriage is treated as a public institution because it is in the public interest (not just in the private interest of particular couples) for the human race to reproduce and continue into future generations.

It is also in the public interest for society to work at bonding each child to the mother and father whose sexual union produced them. This was evident even to the ancients, but modern social science has confirmed—beyond a shadow of a doubt—that children raised by their own married mother and father are happier, healthier, and more prosperous than children raised in any other living situation.

I wrote a pamphlet earlier this year listing “The Top Ten Harms of Same-Sex ‘Marriage.’” The threat to religious liberty was only one out of the ten. Even if that harm could be thoroughly forestalled—a grade of 10% is still a failing grade.

The core message of the opposition to homosexual “marriage” is not just, “Don’t make us perform same-sex weddings in our church.” Instead, it is: “Society needs children, and children need a mom and a dad.”

That’s true whether you are a Christian, a Buddhist, or an atheist.

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“Don’t Know Much About History” is the title of yesterday’s Washington Times article by Suzanne Fields that borrows from a line in a famous song by the singer Sam Cooke (“Wonderful World”).  It captures the essence of the poor test results that were released this week in the “Nation’s Report Card: U.S. History 2010” as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Fields, Pat Buchanan, and Jeff Jacoby have commented on the results.  Jacoby notes:

— the bottom line was depressingly predictable: Not even a quarter of American students is proficient in US history, and the percentage declines as students grow older. Only 20 percent of 6th graders, 17 percent of 8th graders, and 12 percent of high school seniors demonstrate a solid grasp on their nation’s history. In fact, American kids are weaker in history than in any of the other subjects tested by the NAEP — math, reading, science, writing, civics, geography, and economics.

Furthermore, there really hasn’t been much improvement in the history scores in the last twenty years.  Maybe history needs to be tested like math and English.  It seems that important to me.

I heard a caller to a radio talk show make this interesting point: he said there is a much greater emphasis on the teaching of world history these days – much less on pure American history.  If so, that is something that needs to be addressed and could prove highly beneficial.

PS – I wonder if students today – back to Sam Cooke – have ever seen a slide rule, let alone have any clue as to what they are for.

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Yesterday New Hampshire joined the growing number of states seeking to defund abortion giant Planned Parenthood.  The trend seemed to start last year when New Jersey Governor Chris Christie passed a budget which eliminated about 7.5 million dollars worth of family planning funding.

As reported by Kevin Smith, the Executive Director of Cornerstone, the Granite state’s leading family policy organization:

“This has truly been a banner day for the babies here in the Granite State… in a completely unexpected and under the radar move today, the NH Executive Council (which is like our lieutenant Governor, but it’s made up of 5 elected officials from across the state), which along with the Governor has to approve all state contracts above $2499 (yes, you read the correct) voted to REJECT the state contract for Planned Parenthood worth $1.8 million over the next two years!! This is simply amazing news!  The vote was 3-2 and it is the first time that a state contract with PP has ever been rejected!”

The story can be found here.

Here is a list (with the legislation in question as well as the state organizations that led the way) of some of the successful efforts this year, as well as three valiant efforts that did not pass.

Successful Efforts (IN, KS, NH, NC, TX, TN, WI):

Continue reading »

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Dear Friends:

“The voice of Love seemed to call me,” wrote British humorist P.G. Wodehouse, “but it was a wrong number.”¹

This is the lament of many a young man whose ardent hopes have been dashed by an indifferent young woman. Such laments usually are short-lived, as one crush almost invariably leads to another.

Real love does not disappoint. The enduring love of a husband and wife, of a parent and child, of loyal friends for one another and of patriots for their country: Such loves are always true, even if they sometimes can be hard.

Of course, there is one love that surpasses all others – the love of God, most profoundly demonstrated in the redeeming death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That’s a love that never misdials.

Sincerely,

Rob Schwarzwalder
Senior Vice President
Family Research Council

1 From “The Spot of Art” in Very Good Jeeves!

P.S. Tonight, watch FRC Action’s Webcast, “Cut, Cap, and Balance: Why Congress must Cut the deficit, Cap the spending, and Balance the budget.” Co-hosts FRC Action president Tony Perkins and “Let Freedom Ring” president Colin Hanna will be joined by Senators Jim DeMint and Orrin Hatch, House Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and other leaders.

Educational Freedom and Reform

Homeschooling

• “Homeschool graduations make The New York Times,” Angela Lu, WORLD Magazine
• “Homeschooling: Right Choice for Your Child?,” Emily Driscoll, Fox Business

Continue reading »

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“It’s too early for trivial pursuit,” said one of our brightest young staffers at our 8:30 meeting in Washington today. She had come in as I was quizzing a summer intern on the significance of the date. The intern got the answer right: Hitler invaded the Soviet Union seventy years ago this day. I had to chuckle over that line, trivial pursuit. In those stern days long ago, no one would have thought Hitler’s pursuit of conquest and domination was in the least trivial. It is, however, a great tribute to the heroes of those days that we can look back on 22 June 1941 as a date simply for quizzes.

President Roosevelt warned the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin that Hitler was going to attack him. So did British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. Stalin, brooding in the Kremlin, waved away all such warnings. They were merely the provocations of “Western imperialists,” trying to get him to turn on his Non-Aggression Pact partner, Adolf Hitler.

Stalin ordered that grain shipments from Soviet Ukraine to Germany be stepped up.

Hundreds of Soviet trains were still speeding west, passing Hitler’s panzer tanks were driving rapidly east, deeper and deeper into the USSR.

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The Code of Federal Regulations is an almost sure-fire antidote to insomnia.  If boredom were a commodity, the Code would be its biggest resource.

The arcane and involved language of the Code is one reason why so few people read it.  Yet within its myriad pages are the rules that govern government itself – how laws are applied, how legislation is to be understood, and even how words used in federal regulations are to be interpreted.

Some of those words are more important than others, and those that deal with the very nature of human personhood are, perhaps, the most important of all.

In the October 1, 2009 edition of the Code, we read that “Fetus means the product of conception from implantation until delivery.”

There we have it: an unborn child is merely the “product of conception,” conception itself evidently needing no interpretation (that it takes place through the sexual union of two image-bearers of God is, apparently, irrelevant).

What are we to make of this “product?”  This collection of cells and blood and tissue stored within the veil of human flesh?  Here’s what David said of this “product,” this “fetus,” this creature:

When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained;
What is man that You take thought of him,
And the son of man that You care for him?
Yet You have made him a little lower than God,
And You crown him with glory and majesty! (Psalm 8:3-5)

From conception onward, this “fetus” has all the same DNA as every reader of this piece.  What are the criteria for its humanness?

Is it less human because of its size?  If so, then anyone shorter than someone else is less human, as well.

Is it less human because of its development?  If so, then anyone with a physical or mental disability is less human than those more physically or mentally advanced.

Is it less human because it is dependent?  If so, then any child is less human than the parents on whose support she depends for food, clothing, shelter, etc.

And so it goes through whatever other comparisons can be summoned: Intelligence, appearance, etc.  What changes at time of “delivery,” per the Federal Registry, is not the personhood of the child but his place of residence.  He lives nine months within his mother’s womb, and the remainder of his life outside it.

Even the term “fetus,” used as a medical euphemism by those unwilling to confront the unborn child’s humanness, is telling if rendered honestly.  “Fetus” is Latin for “offspring” or “young while still in the womb.” Those who persist in its usage for the purpose of dehumanizing that to which they refer cannot avoid the potency of language itself.

Sometimes euphemisms have their place.  Saying that someone is “all foam, no root beer” is a pleasing way of conveying that the individual referenced is full of talk but has no substance or seriousness.  Yet language, however we might use it to obscure, can never fully hide that which it described.

To this point, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his landmark work Ethics, wrote,

Destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life.

The language of the Code of Federal Regulations is tedious.  Its impact on American public life is profound.  But its artful obfuscation of that which is most compelling of all – what it means to be human – is unsuccessful.

A fetus is a baby is a person is a human being.  No euphemism can hide that truth – and you can take that to the bank.

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Regardless of your denomination or faith tradition, anyone engaged in the battle to protect life will greatly appreciate the most recent statement from the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops on Physician Assisted Suicide, titled “To Live Each Day With Dignity”. I highly recommend reading the short (5 1/2 pages) document.

Here are some excerpts:

Continue reading »

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“So David slept with his fathers, and was buried in the city of David.” – 1 Kings 2:10

I was not a believer and certainly not schooled in the Bible when I first encountered that poetic phrase. As a graduate history student, poring over the writings of President George Washington, I noted the Father of our Country wrote when he passed the age of sixty, “the time is not far distant when I must sleep with my fathers.”

It referred, the text explained, to Washington’s belief that he, like most of his male ancestors, would not live much longer. How can they say Washington is not eloquent, I asked myself. That’s a beautiful phrase, a memorable image.

Washington’s phrase reminded me of my own father. My dad was a carpenter and he left the house every morning before dawn. The good part of that is that he would often return in the late afternoon. I can remember as a little boy of nine or ten wrestling with “Pop” on the TV room floor when he came home. He was still sweaty and often had sawdust in his hair and on his clothes. Many a time, after such a hard day’s work, he and I would fall asleep following our wrestling match. Soon, my mother would come in and yell: “Les! Go take your bath; it’s almost time for dinner!” Sweaty as he was, that was a sweet smell. Honest sweat, pungent sawdust. He was proud of his work and there was a lot to be proud of.

One day, Pop came home to find me pale and shaken. I had just gotten back from the fields near our house. My friend Shane and I had been playing “forts,” running free through the woods and hills. But something bad had happened. Soon, Pop got the story out of me. A man with a shotgun had confronted Shane and me. This was his land, he said. We were illegal trespassers. If he ever caught us on his property again, he said, aiming the gun at us, he would shoot us. Pop sent Shane away but took me in tow. He wanted me to identify the man with the shotgun. I was terrified. That man had said he would shoot me. Would he now shoot Pop, too?

The owner of the vast undeveloped property was well-known in the community. The newspapers referred to him as the Sixteenth Lord of the Manor. In truth, his family had owned that land since King Charles II gave it to them in the 1660s.

Pop wasn’t afraid. He held my hand tight and took me right up to the front door of the manor house. Is this the man, he asked? Yes, I answered, with a quavering voice. Pop confronted the Sixteenth Lord. “I’ll keep my son and his friends off your property,” he said, “but if I ever hear of you pointing a gun at a little boy, I’ll break it over your head.”

I thought my father the strongest, bravest man in the world. Still, I breathed easier once we crossed over the Sixteenth Lord’s property line. Only then did I notice the old, almost unreadable sign on the tree. It said: POSTED.

Much later, I learned that that meant the same thing as No Trespassing. And very much later, I learned what it meant to “sleep with your fathers.” I read this wonderful phrase in the Bible.

There is a lot of talk about bullying these days. We have a massive outlay in federal funds to address the issue of bullying. Growing up on Long Island, I had a sure defense against bullying – my Pop. So did most of the boys I knew. Divorce was rare then and out-of-wedlock birth rarer still. Abortion was against the law.

We kids grew up feeling safe, protected in our tender years. One of George Washington’s great contemporaries, Edmund Burke, wrote of something called “the cheap defense of nations.” Fathers in the home were surely a part of that cheap defense. Without fathers in the home, there won’t be enough money in the U.S. treasury or all the treasuries in the world to guard the young against bullying.

New York State, my home state, is on the verge of abolishing fathers in the home. They say they are only “re-defining” marriage. They’re not. They are ending it. And with the end of marriage, will come the dissolution of the state. Gone will be the cheap defense of nations. And no one will know what it means “to sleep with my fathers.”

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Earlier this week the American Enterprise Institute held a fascinating panel discussion titled, “A Worldwide War against Baby Girls: Sex-Selective Abortion Goes Global”. Speakers included Mara Hvistendahl, a writer for Science magazine, and author of recently released book on sex selection abortion, Unnatural Selection. AEI scholar and demographics expert Nicholas Eberstadt also addressed the current data on sex selection abortion as well as potential solutions to this severe demographic problem.

I recommend watching the panel discussion, however here are a few interesting points:

— Three factors countries with a high sex-selection abortion rate have in common include:

1) birth rates have fallen

2) availability of new technology, including ultrasound, etc.

3) pervasive abortion

— Americans (and in particular, U.S. government funds) have played a significant role in the situation as it currently stands.

— There is a link between sex selection abortion and the population control movement.

— The most educated classes have the most gender-related abortions.

— Due to the preference for male children, there are approximately 160 million “missing women” in Asia. For perspective, this number is larger than the entire female population of the United States.

— Sex-selection abortion is occurring here in the United States in Asian-American communities.

— The only country that has recovered from such an imbalance of the sexes is S. Korea.

The full one-hour panel discussion, is viewable from AEI’s website.

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Reuters is reporting that Advanced Cell Technology has enrolled the first two patients for its experiments on human eyes using injected embryonic stem cells. The report says that one patient each has been signed up for its two experimental trials that were approved within the past seven months by the FDA; the patients were recruited at the Jules Stein Eye Institute, UCLA.

Information on the experimental patient trials for Stargardt’s macular dystrophy and for age related macular degeneration says that each experiment is approved to enroll 12 patients, successively, with different doses of embryonic stem cell derivatives being given to groups of three patients each. These safety trials are scheduled to go through July 2013, but there is no other information about how long the patients will be monitored for potential tumor formation caused by the injected embryonic stem cell derivatives. Beyond the ethical problems associated with embryonic stem cells–requiring destruction of young human life to derive the cells–there is significant concern about the practical problem of controlling the cells’ growth. Embryonic stem cells have a disturbing tendency to grow and form tumors, even in instances when the cells had supposedly stopped growing, and in animal studies injection of as few as two growing embryonic stem cells was sufficient to cause problems.

A competing company, Geron, has so far injected two patients with derivatives of embryonic stem cells in its own human experiments, the first approved in the world. Because embryonic stem cells are difficult to impossible to control, safety is a significant and non-trivial, concern for the patients, and Geron has committed to follow the injected patients for 15 years.

Meanwhile, over 2,100 adult stem cell clinical trials are ongoing or completed. Adult stem cells are used to treat over 50,000 patients around the globe each year, and have shown published success for patients with dozens of different diseases and injuries, including for spinal cord injury, for corneal blindness, for juvenile diabetes, for heart damage, and for multiple sclerosis, just to name a few. Check out just a few of the adult stem cell success stories.

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On June 13, 2011, the federal bankruptcy court for Central District of California struck down the definition of marriage in the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DoMA).  The court held that DoMA could not be used to prevent a homosexual married couple from filing a joint bankruptcy petition.  The decision was signed by twenty judges who started with this observation: “This case is about equality, regardless of gender or sexual orientation….”  Good grief.

Ed Whelan, NRO and Ethics and Public Policy Center, had this to say about the decision:

“I know very little about bankruptcy-court procedure, so I don’t know if there is any good reason why the decision was signed by twenty bankruptcy judges. Update: A bankruptcy-law expert tells me that there is no good legal reason for the multiple signatories and that in the ordinary course the decision would have been signed only by the single judge handling the case.

“The decision rests heavily on the badly confused as-applied heightened-scrutiny standard adopted by the Ninth Circuit in Witt v. Department of Air Force—a ruling that the Obama administration (and then-Solicitor General Elena Kagan, in particular) irresponsibly failed to challenge in the Supreme Court. It also invokes Attorney General Holder’s (shoddy) reasoning explaining the Obama administration’s decision not to defend DOMA. So the bankruptcy court’s decision is very much a direct product of the Obama administration’s sabotage of the laws that it is obligated to defend.”

So, the beat goes on as we await activity on DoMA in the First Circuit.  I suppose there is a possibility that Paul Clement’s group working for the House of Representatives may appeal this bankruptcy decision.  It is not yet clear how many DoMA cases they will take on.

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Barack Obama and his colleagues in the enterprise to manage the American free enterprise system believe that government knows better than the private sector how to create jobs. This is an article of faith with the Left. As the President said in an interview on “The Today Show:”

What we have to do now, what this Jobs Council is all about, is identifying where the jobs of the future are going to be. How do we make sure there’s a match between what people are getting trained for and the jobs that exist, how do we make sure that capital is flowing into those places with the greatest opportunity? We are on the right track. The key is figuring out how do we accelerate it.

No: Government doesn’t have to figure this out — those who create jobs do. Government needs to remove itself substantially from the equation and allow open markets to determine whom to hire, for how much compensation and benefits, and what kinds of goods and services to produce. This is the very essence of the American economic experiment, one that has led to greater benefits for more people than any other system of finance, production, and income in history.

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Admiral Matt Nathan is commanding officer of the Naval Hospital at Bethesda. It’s an important position, but no more important to him than his role as husband and father. He got a chance to demonstrate his devotion to his country and his family recently when he spoke at his wife’s retirement from the Navy.

The admiral looked out at his wife, Captain Tammy Nathan, and their 13-year old daughter. And he surveyed the hundreds of guests who flocked to this event. My wife, a retired Navy captain, had helped Tammy make her decision to stay in the Navy nearly twenty years ago.

Matt Nathan began by recalling the memorial inscription to Sir Christopher Wren that he and his family had seen outside of St. Paul’s Cathedral. It says of the great 17^th century English architect: “If you seek his monument, look around you.” The hundreds of family members and guests at Tammy’s retirement were indeed a fitting monument to her and to her selfless work.

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Today, CNN.com posted an online guest editorial by Family Research Council President Tony Perkins with his analysis of what social conservatives want in a presidential candidate:

They are looking for that credible leader who can cast a coherent and compelling vision — a vision that unites the three powerful cords of conservatism and draws them snugly together. They want a candidate who realizes our nation and its economy will be no stronger than the core building block called the family. In the meantime, expect the passion of conservatives to grow as they search for a suitor who can rescue a nation that is in distress internationally, economically and morally.

Read the whole thing at CNN.com.

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Click here to subscribe to The Social Conservative Review.

Dear Friends,

“As fiscal pressures mean the public sector must contract, organized religious groups are stepping into the void.” So argues Lewis M. Andrews in “Religious Alternatives to the Public Sector” in The American: The Journal of the American Enterprise Institute.

Andrews notes that “congregations of all faiths” are helping in many ways, ranging from initiatives to help young women who have been sexually trafficked to providing food to needy families. Churches provide homeless shelters, job training programs, free clothing and household goods, marital counseling, palliative care for the sick and dying, and a host of other expressions of Christ’s compassion.

This goes on throughout the country, in communities large and small. But it is not new: from its earliest days, Christians have sought to help those in need, whether those needing assistance are themselves Christian or not. The early church leader Tertullian, writing in 197 AD, wrote that he and his fellow Christians gave “to support and bury poor people, to supply the wants of boys and girls destitute of means and parents, and of old persons confined now to the house.”

In addition to serving in your own local church, visit FRC’s www.RealCompassion.org for links to ministries that are addressing the great needs of our time, at home and abroad. The early Christians reshaped their culture through persistent, effective ministries to those society had rejected. Let’s all follow their example.

Sincerely,

Rob Schwarzwalder
Senior Vice President
Family Research Council

P.S. Today, Dr. Carol M. Swain came to FRC to speak about her book, “Be the People: A Call to Reclaim America’s Faith and Promise.” Click here to watch her remarks.

Educational Freedom and Reform
Homeschooling

• “GOING DEEP: The athletic, homeschooling Gelbaughs hope to reinvent the image of homeschoolers,” Stefanie Loh, The Patriot-News
• “Home schooling hit by Austin diocese and in article by renowned priest,” Patrick B. Craine, LifeSiteNews
• “13 virtual programs can teach across Va. Divisions,” Hattie Brown Garrow, The Virginian-Pilot

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