Heading home for Christmas

(Andrews in Denver Post, Dec. 17) “This holiday stress is killing me.” “Yeah, my schedule is murder too.” Hold it; Christmas and death in the same thought? That can’t be right. It actually has been right for 2000 years now. Life is brutal, and it was not in denial but in defiance of evil that Jesus’ followers believe he came. A wave of death from the Judean king accompanied the holy birth, according to Matthew: “When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under.” Joseph and Mary fled for their lives with the baby. The world has only gotten bloodier since then.

This Christmas finds human life more endangered than ever, with weapons of mass destruction emboldening the Islamic East and a new, ghoulish bioethics rising in the secular West. The old saccharine Yuletide of happy endings died with Dickens – if it ever existed even for him; such somber works as “Hard Times” suggest not. Murderous holidays indeed.

In Backbone, Colorado, my hometown of the heart, up near timberline on Cottonwood Pass, folks celebrate this season of Christ’s nativity with a sensible approach – warm and reverent, yet realistic and unsentimental – that holds a lesson for all of us amid the jaded clamor of a flatlands urban Christmas. The key is perspective.

There among the aspen and lodgepoles, towering firs and wind-gnarled cedars, Backbone folks have learned not to lose sight of the forest for the trees. They see things in scale.

Not all worship Jesus, but nearly all recognize how much his worshipers with their biblical worldview have done to civilize and humanize our world. So recognizing, they insist on keeping that worldview (which informs the Declaration of Independence, after all) central in their civic life. Dissenters, though politely accepted, are given no veto over so vital a question.

Backbone folks don’t imagine that the birth in Bethlehem solved all problems or perfected all believers. Each is aware of his own dark side. But history convinces them that the Christmas star illumined the darkness for good, and that wise men still follow it. My hometown knows that Mary’s son changed the human scene dramatically. “Long lay the world in sin and error pining,” as the carol says, “till He appeared, and the soul felt its worth.”

Men and women with a new sense of worth, in the centuries after the manger and the cross, worked and prayed their way from a Rome where might made right, to a Britain where Magna Carta prevailed – and then to a New World where we Americans, “the almost-chosen people” in Lincoln’s words, now freely govern ourselves and seek to share our freedom globally. That’s what we call a Christmas gift, up in Backbone, Colorado.

“Home for Christmas” is one of the most powerful phrases any American can hear. Religion aside, we all feel a pull to get back where we belong, especially on these longest nights of the waning year. Even if distances are prohibitive or doors hopelessly closed, December 25 will still find most of us (if only in our dreams) “home for Christmas… where the love light gleams.”

So there’s your greeting card from my hometown of the heart, the place I’m heading next week on Christ’s birthday. I ask in closing, where will you be heading home to, at least in spirit? A roof and a fireside, somebody we can hold – these matter a lot. A door into hope and truth matters even more. May you find yours this Christmas.

Peace symbol is a lie and an insult

By John Lopez, Durango CO (jhlopez@earthlink.net) The Durango Herald, our local leftist rag, had several days of breathless nonstop coverage of a tempest in a teapot regarding a subdivision in Pagosa Springs that first asked, and then demanded with threatened sanctions that a doozy resident take down her peace symbol wreath as an inappropriate holiday decoration under local subdivision covenants. First Amendment conniptions of course broke loose -- you might have thought that some right wing fundamentalist had dared to question Islamic Awareness Day at the local grade school. [The Denver dailies took much the same line. - Editor]

The Herald’s coverage of the Peace Symbol controversy in Pagosa indicated that they anticipated another journalism award. It also displayed an obvious delight in persecuting Christians during Christmas, with the paper's baying leftist readership sharing in the joy. All letters printed were pro-symbol and several were aggressively anti-Christian. However there are at least two obvious reasons to oppose the Peace Symbol as a Christmas decoration. First, it is a lie. The dove is a generally accepted sign of peace. The design used in Pagosa and by the hippie left in the sixties is a design that was previously the Nazi SS Death Rune* and was later promoted by the Soviet KGB for use by several of its fronts during the Cold War.

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Vietnam Vets Against the War, et al. were front organizations instigated and funded by Communists in support of Soviet policy, which was that everybody in the West should disarm and leave the Soviet empire intact with a nuclear monopoly. The KGB term for those who supported their aims was “useful idiots.” Since history is no longer studied in most of the West, these idiots still abound today. Otherwise, the Ward Churchills and Cornell Wests would merely be nuisances panhandling to clean your windshield at a stoplight -- rather than tenured professors at actual universities.

The second reason for objecting is that the use of such a symbol in this season is profoundly insulting to Christian believers. To put it in a context that even the politically correct can fathom, it would be like putting a swastika in your window as a Chanukah decoration. To celebrate the KGB, Soviet totalitarianism and militant atheism at Christmas makes that sort of a statement.

This country is full of refugees from Communist dictatorships, many of them Christians, all of them mourning the scores of millions of Stalinist victims. If that is the message you wish to send to them by displaying this symbol, go ahead, it is a free country. But do not be surprised if you are scorned and despised as a consequence. ------------------ Note: The Death Rune, (identical to the peace symbol design) which has Old German and Norse origins, was used on SS grave markers and as a shoulder patch for the SS Women’s Brigades who enthusiastically served at Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Auchwitz, and other Nazi extermination camps. It's also a matter of record that Anton La Vey, High Priest and Anti-Christ of the Church of Satan used the same symbol as an altar cloth and backdrop for his Black Masses in the 1960s. I doubt he intended it to be a peace symbol.

Embryonic life in Perlmutter's sights

By Krista Kafer (krista555@msn.com) Last week an AP headline heralded a remarkable scientific breakthrough: “Swiss scientists grow human heart valves using material taken from amniotic fluid.” Another article spoke of dogs with muscular dystrophy walking again with the help of stem cells.

In both cases, scientists used non-lethal stem cell extractions from amniotic fluid or from adult cells -- rather than from embryos killed for the purpose. The fact is the most promising and successful therapies using stem cells involve those taken from adult, placental, or amniotic sources not from those taken from unborn children. For this reason, private investment capital is focused on adult stem cell research, leaving less successful and unethical research out in the cold – where it belongs.

This may be about to change – enter the new Congress flush with victory and access to the public checkbook.

Some members, including a few from Colorado, are dead set on using taxpayer funding for research that requires the killing of unborn children. As Congressman-elect Ed Perlmutter’s website boasts, “We now can begin to…fight to overturn the President’s veto of stem cell research…”

Presently it is perfectly legal to kill an unborn child from fertilization to just before birth, to extract their tissues and organs, and to allocate private funds for such grim activities. But thanks to President Bush's unyielding policy stance, sustained not long ago by his veto of a pending bill, those who value human life are not complicit in these activities through their tax dollars. This, however, could change.

What if the President’s next veto is overridden, as Perlmutter has pledged to achieve? That will be the last day I pay my federal taxes. Frédéric Bastiat once wrote, “When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.” It would be a cruel choice indeed, and one from which I would certainly face consequences. Even so, it is not enough in life to avoid doing evil; we must act to protect its victims, those who cannot fight for themselves, even at our own peril.

Thankfully the time has not yet come for such a drastic decision. Now is the time to educate our friends and neighbors about the real promise of adult stem cell research, and the cruelty and futility of embryonic stem cell research. We must make a case for the sanctity of human life. In our country, 4,000 unborn children die every day in abortion clinics, while countless others perish in science laboratories. And the road could grow darker still.

Stop with the selective moral outrage

By Krista Kafer (krista555@msn.com) If hypocrisy is “do as I say not as I do” then selective moral outrage is “do as I say not as I do and shame on you!” True moral outrage draws attention to what is wrong and exerts a powerful force for change. Selective moral outrage uses society’s moral expectations as a weapon against specific targets for political gain, while ignoring other comparable ones. Effective in the short run, the tactic’s success will surely wane as the public grows more cynical and apathetic toward moral outrage both real and counterfeit.

If you want to see selective moral outrage in action you have but to open the daily paper or magazine, visit the cinema or go to a political rally. This week the Denver Post is outraged by a government leak revealing that Bill Ritter’s plea bargain of illegal aliens put dangerous people back on the streets.

Let me rephrase, the paper and its Democrat allies are outraged about the leak -- but not about the fact that one of these coddled criminals was later arrested for child molestation. Hmmmm. I don’t recall any outrage last month over the leak revealing portions of the National Intelligence Estimate critical of the Administration. Perhaps the media was too busy hyping the content of the leak and forgot the source.

Consider the case of Mark Foley, the gay Republican congressman who hit on teenage boys in the Congressional Page Program via text messages. Sickening and deplorable, the man left office. Decent people were outraged providing a potential election tool for any opportunist. Democrats attempted to use the scandal to tar the entire Republican Party. Like flipping a switch, they turned on their moral outrage and bemoaned the action that they once condoned for one of their own.

Back in the 1980s, when Massachusetts Democrat Gerry Studds had sexual relations with a 17 year old male page (isn’t that statutory rape?), he kept his committee position, won reelection, and was even publicly applauded by Democrats. His recent death brought new accolades. Studds was lauded by the Washington Post as a gay pioneer who was a “longtime proponent of environmental protection, New England fishermen and human rights…” I don’t recall the Post treating Foley so tenderly.

Liberal politicians aren’t the only ones getting a pass. Where was the outrage when Rosie O’Donnell called Christians terrorists? Would she have kept her job if she’d said the same of Muslims or Jews? Unlikely. Mel Gibson was held to account for the repellent and inexcusable things he said. Why not O’Donnell?

Or how about those wealthy movie stars and politicians who own multiple mansions, fleets of cars, airplanes, and yachts and then chastise ordinary Americans for the energy use? An ordinary consumer like me can get a good browbeating from George Clooney and Al Gore in Vanity Fair’s Green Edition released earlier this year. or I could see the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" if I wanted another serving of shame for the planet’s destruction -- but honestly I don’t think my 1,000 square foot house is the problem, Al. When are reporters going to question the gap between celebrity environmentalists and their lifestyle? I’m not holding my breath.

An example closer to home, the press and school choice foes are quick to point out Hope Online Academy's flaws. The charter school, which recently fired a man with a criminal background, received the Rocky Mountain News’ front page headline Tuesday. A cursory search of the Rocky and the Denver Post also finds articles over the past year about teachers in traditional public schools who molested kids -- these articles are generally tucked away in other parts of the paper. I guess the front page is reserved for charter schools and the church.

In the end, the real trouble with selective moral outrage is that by applying standards unequally it diminishes their legitimacy. Standards need to apply to everyone. Seducing teens, leaking information, smearing religious people, wasting energy, and employing unethical people is wrong -- regardless of who does it.

Headlines evoke biblical echoes

By Dave Petteys (dpetteys@comcast.net) In Ecclesiastes it says somewhere “Nothing is new under the sun”. Reading Scripture and looking at current politics, one can see this is true. For example:

“..the Pharisees began to press him hard, and to provoke him to speak of many things, lying in wait for him, to catch at something he might say.” (Luke 11:53). The Democrats, like the Pharisees, are not willing to embrace the “New Covenant” of free markets and individual responsibility. And like the Pharisees, who thought killing Jesus himself would solve their problem, so do the Democrats and their allies in the media demonize the President and comb the landscape for any scandal.

The Democrats search desperately, hoping to find (or in some cases create) something that will give them the election without having to change their “Old Covenant” of continually trying to build heaven on earth with big government programs.

As for murderous fantasies, the George Soros’s of the world probably would not finance a contract killing of a President of the United States, (though some may have thought about it). They know they could never get away with such an action. But ominously, financing a movie depicting their desire MAY motivate someone somewhere who would try. This would sever any link and give them plausible deniability.

Rep. Foley should have heeded Jesus’ warning in Luke 12: “Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms (these days the IM chat rooms) shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.” Every Republican that holds office should put this passage on a 3x5 card, carry it, and read it often.

But there’s hope, for as the Bible also states: “ A wise man’s heart inclines him toward the right, but a fool’s heart toward the left" (Eccl. 10: 2).