Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, released his 2,074-page version of the Senate health care reform bill-at an estimated price of $890 billion.

The price tag is obscene, partly because it includes funding of abortion-on-demand. Beginning on page 118 (under "Voluntary Choice of Coverage of Abortion Services"), it gives Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, the authority to determine when abortion can be covered under the government-run health care plan. Remember, Ms. Sebelius was a very close ally of late-term abortionist George Tiller and she had a radically pro-abortion record as governor of Kansas.

Senator Reid's plan also requires abortion to be offered in the insurance Exchange
(line 13, page 120). Read more

In a nationwide survey of 1005 adults, Barna Research found that seven of ten adults, 71 percent, placed a good night's sleep at the top of a list of things they look forward to. Born again Christians were even more interested than non-believers in getting a good night of rest.  We're tired and the study's director, George Barna, says it's our own fault.  We're filling our schedules and failing to institute proper boundaries in our lives.  We're busy because, "we have not learned to say 'no' to appealing opportunities."

Everybody's got excuses for their sleep deprived states.  Currently, mine is a bathroom flood which means 5 huge fans blowing....for days. Lots of parents say they'll sleep when the kids are older. But the Barna survey found that people who have young children in the house were no more likely to want more sleep than those with no little kids around.

 Other research confirms Americans' desire for more sleep but, we're getting less and less of it.           The National Sleep Foundation in Washington D.C. reported that, in 2007 only 26 percent of Americans got eight hours a night, down from 38 percent in 2001.Sleep experts say we need seven to nine.  Read more

When: NOW

Where: Where you are

What: The Facebook Group which is standing in opposition to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda is encouraging the over 4700 members to pray for the removal of the bill. See this page for the information. Thanks to Andrew Marin for organizing this. Read more

Ho hum. Some religious leaders and preachers are going to be in Washington DC today to "engage in civil disobedience to protest inclusion of 'sexual orientation' in hate crimes law."

These folks, led by Christian Anti-Defamation Commission head, Gary Cass, believe that the recent hate crimes revision signed by Barack Obama criminalizes speech which disapproves of homosexuality. So they see their action in the same tradition as Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. If there was a law against hyperbole, then perhaps these guys would get some jail time; however, I don't think they will get arrested today if they just intend to say homosexuality is wrong.

The new law does not criminalize speech as the ministers will no doubt discover today. A plain reading of the law makes that clear. Some evangelicals have been worried that the bill would be a kind of slippery slope leading to prosecution of intentions or beliefs. Courts can do strange things with laws, but I remain skeptical. Putting out the fleece, Paul Blair views today as a kind of test:  Read more

The battle over health care reform has moved from the House of Representatives to the Senate. Pro-life Democrats flexed their political muscle in the House and forced a vote on funding of abortion in the health care bill-and prevailed.

Pro-abortion activists and politicians went ballistic for being handed such a high profile defeat while enjoying the most pro-abortion president and congress in our nation's history.

President Obama recently addressed the issue of funding abortion in health care reform. During a TV interview with ABC News' Jake Tapper, he said, "We're not looking to change what is the principle that has been in place for a very long time, which is federal dollars are not used to subsidize abortions." But in the same interview the President said, "there needs to be some more work" on the health care bill and indicated that he opposed the Stupak amendment restricting abortion funding. This left everyone-political pundits, activist and members of Congress-confused. His statements clearly conflict. Read more

Right in the thick of the debate about establishing a federally controlled health care system in this country, my daughter, studying in Rome, ran smack into European health care.  It started out not to be an emergency, but after a couple of days and several contacts with the system, it became one. Once they took the problem seriously and hospitalized her, she got wonderful care.

One cannot assess an entire system based upon one experience with it.  But a common criticism of Italian universal health care is that there's a bias against proactive prevention... in favor of waiting until there's an emergency to take a problem seriously.  Proponents of national health care here in America claim we'll realize huge savings from practicing more preventative medicine.  Perhaps Italy, whose universal system has been in place since 1978, has learned it doesn't work that way.

Health care socializers here in America complain doctors order too many tests, one of the reasons our system is so expensive. But there's something reassuring about a doctor thinking through the possibilities that could be causing your acute symptoms rather than sending you home with a prescription he hopes will work. Read more

We're really getting down to crunch-time with the health care reform bill. The House is expected to take a vote on it as early as tomorrow. Nancy Pelosi has decided to keep members of the House there until a vote is reached, and abortion is the hurdle preventing this. Pro-abortion leaders, along with the abortion industry, are fighting hard to keep abortion-on-demand in the health care bill. It's Planned Parenthood's number one priority. This means you and I will be paying for a skyrocketing number of abortions if this passes.

And don't let your elected official be fooled by the so-called compromise Ellsworth amendment. It's so poorly written that even Rep. Louis Slaughter, D-NY, co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus, said, "None of us really objected to the Ellsworth language. In fact, we think he did a good job." Abortion will still be funded!

Ask them to support the Stupak amendment which would make sure abortion isn't included. Read more

One of the realities permeating the health care debate is that the bulk of medical spending occurs in the last few years...sometimes the last few months....of people's lives.  That's why the idea of government-run health care raises not-unreasonable fears of rationing, the dreaded death panels. We are on the threshold of a tidal wave of baby boomers entering their peak healthcare-consuming years. Medicare is already facing its own financial crisis.  Proposed healthcare legislation funds itself, in part, by cutting Medicare further just as the boomers turn 65 and increase enrollment in the program by thirty percent.

Betsy Mc Caughey, chairman of a group called the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, has been a voice opposing a nationalized healthcare system.  In a recent Wall Street Journal op ed she argues that the current plans amount to an "...Assault on Seniors." Ms. Mc Caughey, says this assault began in February with the stimulus package, which contained over a billion dollars for comparative effectiveness research, code, writes Mc Caughey, for "limiting care based on the patient's age." 

Rationing care is central to the proposed overhaul. One of President Obama's key advisors on cost-efficient health care is Ezekiel Emmanuel (brother of Rahm Emmanuel, White House Chief of Staff.) Dr. Emmanuel's 2009 Lancet article on the allocation of medical resources advocates a concept called "the complete lives system."  If you've reached a certain age...say around sixty-five...you have lived a "complete" life.  Scarce medical interventions should be directed to the 25 year-old.  Read more

This appeared in the Independent, a newspaper in Uganda. The Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009 would impose the death penalty on certain homosexual behaviors and require citizens to report suspected homosexuals to the authorities.

Put down the stones

Christians believe that when Jesus was confronted by the religious leaders of His day, He had just the right response. However, I fear that many of my Ugandan brothers and sisters now doubt that Jesus was correct in His example. Let me explain.

In the 8th chapter of the Gospel of John, the Pharisees and teachers of the law brought a woman to Jesus for Him to judge. Read more

Could the United States government think of any more ways to control businesses in this country?  It is already a major owner of over 600 financial institutions, two auto makers and an international insurance conglomerate.  The leading proposals to overhaul health care and revamp energy consumption will place all kinds of mandates on businesses, costing them plenty. Planned changes in tax policy, including the upcoming expiration of the Bush tax cuts, will squeeze small businesses.  But Congress is considering another piece of legislation that will cost employers, not just their money, but also their freedom, to hire and fire based upon their own moral convictions. 

It's called ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.  If passed and signed into law, ENDA will extend special civil rights protections to homosexuals and transgenders.. These privileges will be bestowed on people based solely upon their sexual preferences and inclinations.

 ENDA would add "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" to a list of characteristics  an employer cannot consider in making hiring, firing and promotion decisions. It expands the list that currently includes race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.  ENDA severely limits the ability of employers to intentionally hire people who share their values.  Read more

This morning in Uganda a coalition of organizations released a statement strongly opposing the Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009 which I wrote about earlier this week. I wish Christian groups were among the signers, however, it is American backed Christian groups that seem to be leading the support for this bill. My prayer is that the Christian groups would heed the counsel of believers here to approach this issue in a different way. Here is the statement. One can join with Americans to speak out on this situation here.

Anti-Homosexuality or Anti-Human Rights Bill?

Statement from the Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights and Constitutional Law Read more

Homosexual activists, fighting to attain legal same sex marriage, are creating an unlikely battleground:  divorce courts. In the latest skirmish, a Dallas judge, Tena Callahan, has ruled that her court has jurisdiction to hear the "divorce" case of two men "married" in Massachusetts in 2006 and now living in Texas.

 The decision caused quite a stir in the state where, in 2005, 75 percent of voters passed a constitutional amendment to define marriage as the union between one man and one woman.  Everybody thought that meant: NO GAY MARRIAGES; period; end of story.

But homosexual groups are trying to figure out how to force same sex marriage on states where voters are clearly and overwhelmingly against it.  This attempt to get the courts to grant divorces to gay couples is one way they're going about it.  Jennifer Pizer, marriage project director for the gay advocacy group, Lambda Legal, predicts an eventual end to bans on same sex marriage in Texas and across the country. Read more

The widely criticized community activist group, ACORN, has been a "tough nut to crack." Accusations of criminal activity including misuse of money, tax evasion and voter registration fraud have dogged the organization for years. ACORN tactics against banks, like street demonstrations and boycotts, aimed at lowering standards for home loans, were found to be a prime contributor to the subprime mortgage catastrophe. Detailed exposes of ACORN by such prominent journalists as the Wall Street Journal's John Fund, and a recent congressional report on the group's activities have been met with excuses from allies in Congress who value ACORN's political activism. Millions in federal funds are pumped into ACORN, an acronym for the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now. And ACORN stands to receive $8.5 billion dollars in stimulus funds.

But thanks to an undercover duo of twenty-somethings, who entered at least five ACORN offices posing as a hooker and her pimp, ACORN's support is currently unraveling. FOX news aired videos obtained via hidden camera, of ACORN workers advising the garishly-dressed Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe to engage in various...highly illegal activities. The Giles-O'Keefe team was coached in obtaining a mortgage to house their brothel, and in hiding and laundering their profits for tax purposes. They were told by an ACORN worker to list the prostitute's occupation as "freelancer," "performance artist," or "entertainer." The pair was offered tips on how to claim as dependents underage girls to be trafficked in from Central America.

The fallout was almost immediate...and it continues:

 The ACORN employees, caught red-handed, were fired.
 ACORN has ordered organization-wide training. Damage control
 ACORN is suing Hanna Giles and James O'Keefe,
 The Census Bureau officially told ACORN its help will now not be needed in
conducting the 2010 head count.
 President Obama, who represented the group as a young lawyer and once ran a voter-registration program for Project Vote, an ACORN partner,
now says ACORN deserves to be investigated.
 The IRS announced it will no longer employ ACORN in its tax assistance program.
 Both houses of Congress are moving to cut off funding to ACORN and pressure is building on state legislatures to do the same. Read more

My daughter, Alyson, took a semester away from her nominally Christian university to study abroad. Emails describing the first few days of classes had a common theme.  "I'm the only conservative and they hate Christians."  One professor says 'Jihad is tame compared to 13^th century Christians.' There's the obligatory Sarah Palin bashing complete with sexual innuendo.  Another prof was... "totally ripping on Columbus."

She issued a request (and I quote) "Conservative articles and accounts would be very helpful since I'm learning liberal ones."

Alyson has not previously encountered this level of America and Christian-bashing ...but she's been warned of it.  So, apparently has Julea Ward, until recently, a graduate student in counseling at Eastern Michigan University. I recently heard Julea, a stately and poised young black woman tell her story of campus discrimination. Discrimination... not for her color, but for her Christianity.  Read more

The state of Texas is in the midst of a mandatory, every-ten-year review of its social studies curriculum for public schools.  This is important to the whole country because textbook publishers develop material based on their largest market, Texas.

The biggest news from this process is that the sixth grade curriculum-writing team removed Christmas from a list of religious holidays.  The standards currently require sixth grade students to be taught the significance of Christianity's Christmas and Easter, the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and the Jewish holidays of Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah.  The committee proposed removing Christmas and Rosh Hashanah and adding Dwali, a Hindu festival.

This is not just the war on Christmas. In a note, explaining the change, team members wrote that the examples include the key holiday from each of the major religions.  They're deleting Christianity and Judaism from the list of America's predominant faiths.  Read more

Picking up the narrative on the new book from Joseph Nicolosi, Shame and attachment loss: The practical work of reparative therapy, I want to focus on the family dynamics Nicolosi proposes to be at the source of male homosexuality. There are two basic types of family soil which Nicolosi believes grows some same-sex love: the "classic-triadic family" and the "narcissistic family." If you are looking for the "relatively-normal-often-happy family" in this book, you won't find it. According to Nicolosi, they don't produce same-sex attracted men.

In the classic triadic family, the boy "experiences the father as an unsafe/unworthy object of identification," mothers are "over-involved, intrusive, possessive and controlling," and the sons are "temperamentally sensitive, timid, passive, introverted, artistic (!), and imaginative." The result is that the mother and father do not have a good relationship, the father is distant and/or hostile with the son, the son avoids masculine play, the father fails to bring out the son's masculinity, the mother smothers the boy and robs him of his assertion.

The narcissistic family is worse, it seems to me. The parents are more into themselves than the children. The family is invested in looking good to the world but has many family secrets which must be protected at all costs. I could say more about this family but I will save that for another post. What I want to get to is Nicolosi's concept of "shared delight." He says same-sex attracted males didn't have any of that with their fathers. In a section with the heading, "The 'Delight-Deprived' Boy," Nicolosi expounds on the experiences he says same-sex attracted males missed. Read more

Sarah Capewell's son is dead because of Britain's nationalized health care system. Little Jayden was born premature at 21 weeks and 5 days after conception. If Jayden had been born just two days later, doctors would have worked to save his life. But the cutoff age for a premature baby under Britain's National Health Service rationing guideline is 22 weeks.

Forty-eight hours denied Jayden the lifesaving healthcare that he needed to live. Even without it, he breathed on his own for two hours—a sure sign Jayden was a fighter. In spite of Sarah's pleas with doctors to save his life, they refused to offer even the most remedial care. They told Sarah that before 22 weeks gestation, Jayden was only a fetus and had no human rights.

This and worse is what we can expect if President Obama successfully imposes government-controlled healthcare on American citizens. From the very first day, such a system would be desperate for money to keep it afloat. Nancy Pelosi told reporters that half the bill "will be paid for by squeezing excesses out of the system." This means the rationing of healthcare—denying basic medical treatment to our most vulnerable citizens—would become commonplace. You and I can't let that happen. Read more

Trying to keep up on the new developments in reparative therapy, I purchased NARTH's co-founder Joseph Nicolosi's new book, Shame and Attachment Loss: The Practical Work of Reparative Therapy. This post is not a review but more of a prep for a review. I am going to provide some excerpts and comments which may form the basis for a more formal review at a later date.

You have to get past a couple of features of Nicolosi's writing in order to proceed. He has an annoying (to me) habit of speaking of himself in the plural ("When a man finds masculinity mysterious and exotic, and seeks it outside himself, we believe he is living in a false self...). This form reappears throughout the book. You also have to grasp the jargon being used in order to understand what he proposes ("grey zone," "double bind," "double loop"). In some respects, reading this book is like reading material from object relations theorists such as Masterson and Volkan. It is inside baseball to most folks who are not conversant with attachment and object relations theory.

However, this book is published by Christian publisher Intervarsity Press and makes an effort to make some of the concepts accessible to a lay and non-psychodynamic audience. To be sure, Nicolosi doesn't leave the reader unclear about his views. Regarding homosexuality, he begins by dismissing Daryl Bem's empirically derived theory of same-sex attraction because it does not stigmatize same-sex attraction. He then, indicates what has remained the same since his earlier books and what has changed. First, what has remained the same: Read more

Life Issues Institute was shocked and saddened to hear that a long-time, pro-life activist, Jim Pouillon, was brutally gunned down in a cold act of murder this morning. He was reportedly killed by a 33-year-old man who is now in police custody.

Mr. Pouillon was killed outside Owosso High School in Michigan where he was holding a sign and protesting abortion. The victim, a 63-year-old man who required supplemental oxygen from a portable tank, was shot four times in the chest.

"It's hard to imagine the hatred that motivates someone to murder, regardless of which side of the debate they're on. It's all desperately wrong," said Bradley Mattes, Executive Director of Life Issues Institute. "The murder of millions of innocent unborn babies is spilling out onto the streets of America. I pray we can stop the killing on all fronts. Our prayers are with Jim's family." Read more

The Stimulus Package was sold with promises of millions of "shovel ready" jobs.  Americans envisioned men who had lost jobs in the construction industry getting work repairing roads, bridges, and the electrical grid. Even the skeptical were glad, at least, that long-needed highways and schools would be built.  But not the feminist groups.  They demanded that half the stimulus jobs be given to women.  Most of the recession's job losses were in the manufacturing and construction industries, three quarters in jobs held by men.  But feminists worked hard to see that stimulus dollars were funneled into female-dominated fields and declared that one third of the spending for manufacturing and construction must be designated to train women for jobs which men normally occupy.

Conservative leader Phyllis Schlafy pointed out, in a column on Townhall.com, that all the feminist groups got involved.  Their leaders called a meeting with President Obama's economic advisors to demand female-friendly jobs. Mrs. Schlafly writes, "As one tactic to intimidate Obama administration officials, the feminists successfully insisted that participants in the meeting be seated in a circle without a table between them-a format that enabled the feminists to be confrontational."  And they were. In fact, to counterbalance the jobs being created to improve the nation's infrastructure, they insisted social service, health-care, childcare and librarians jobs be funded to enhance what they termed "human infrastructure."  When they moved on to Congress with their demands, one Pelosi staffer joked about using the term "apron ready" as the female equivalent term for 'shovel ready' jobs.  The feminists didn't think that was funny.

The feminist groups actually got what they were after. Obama Administration  stats show that, up to the time when the stimulus was being debated, women held 20 percent of the jobs lost in the recession, but would gain 43 percent of the stimulus-created jobs. We expected armies of hardhats going out to fix the infrastructure.  Instead the AP reported: "'shovel ready' jobs take a back seat to spending on health care, welfare." Read more