Three things you MUST know about Islam

Every time Allen West speaks about Islam, he talks about the importance of knowing our enemy.

If you’ve seen this video before, it never hurts to solidify these concepts in your mind. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a real eye-opener.

This is probably the best in-a-nutshell treatment I’ve seen of the basic facts that every American should know about Islam.

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Claire Culwell's story of grace

Claire Culwell tells the amazing story of how she came to be here.

“Even though life looks like a given… it’s a gift.”

Visit her website at  http://www.claireculwell.com/

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Is there ANY politician (besides Allen West, of course) who will stand against Islam?

Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey has become a popular hero in many quarters for his fearless determination to restore New Jersey, which has the highest taxes in the country, to fiscal sanity. What vaulted him from merely “popular” to acclaimed “hero” was his pull-no-punches forthrightness. YouTube videos of Chris Christie talking back, rationally but firmly and wittily, to his opponents, quickly went viral. In an age of milquetoasts and mamby-pambies, Christie’s bold frankness was not just a breath of fresh air, but a vitamin B-12 shot in the arm for the politically anemic.

So why am I talking in the past tense? Because it turns out that Christie does pull his punches — in fact, he is woefully compromised — in an area that could not be more crucial to our national security: the inroads being made in our country by those who would replace the U.S. Constitution with sharia law.

Some of us first started getting a bad feeling about Christie when we heard his wishy-washy comments about the Ground Zero Mosque — which were especially disturbing since so many New Jerseyans died in the Twin Towers on 9/11. But we liked Christie so much that we tried to overlook it. Unfortunately, Christie’s Muslim-coddling comments look even worse now, in the light of recent revelations about Christie’s associations with radical Islamists.

Let’s start with Christie’s recent appointment of Muslim lawyer Sohail Mohammed to the position of justice on the Superior Court of New Jersey. Mohammed is not just any Muslim lawyer; he has defended alleged terrorists. From Family Security Matters:

Sohail Mohammed’s most famous clients would be “The Fort Dix Six”, the group of would-be Islamic terrorists from Yugoslavia and the Middle East who were plotting to shoot up the Fort Dix military base in N.J. in January 2006.

Equally problematic is Sohail Mohammed’s defense of Mohammad Qatanani, a radical imam who is the head of New Jersey’s largest mosque, the Islamic Center of Passaic County, which has long been the center of a dense web of interconnected radical individuals and groups.

In 2008, while Christie was the U.S. Attorney for N.J., the Department of Homeland Security initiated deportation proceedings against the imam, because Qatanani was alleged to be connected with Hamas.

So what did Christie do? The very night before the immigration judge was to announce his decision regarding Sohail Mohammed’s client, U.S. Attorney Chris Christie praised the defendant. Yes, he praised him, saying “My view is he’s always had a very good relationship with us, and he’s a man of great goodwill.” Where did Christie make this statement? He announced it at a Ramadan break-fast dinner.

Steve Emerson, author of American Jihad: The Terrorists Among Us and head of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, writes:

Qatanani has a history of Hamas support and was related by marriage to a leading Hamas operative in the West Bank. This fall, Qatanani will return to a New Jersey immigration court, where the Department of Homeland Security is fighting to have him deported.

When even Janet Napolitano’s defanged version of the DHS is trying to deport some guy, you know he must be bad!

In his initial application for a green card filed in 1999, government lawyers say Qatanani failed to disclose a conviction in an Israeli military court for being a Hamas member and providing support to the terrorist group.

Chris Christie at the Iftar dinner he hosted for Muslim leaders at the Governor's Mansion during Ramadan, August 2010

Oddly, Christie — a Republican who was then the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey — sided with Qatanani against DHS, allowing a top lieutenant, Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles McKenna, to testify as a character witness at Qatanani’s first immigration trial, and publicly embracing the imam at a Ramadan breakfast at his mosque. Christie later appointed McKenna as New Jersey’s head of homeland security…

Oh, great. Doesn’t that make you feel more secure, Jersey folks?

The U.S. Attorney’s office was not a party to the case, Christie said, and his praise for Qatanani was not meant to be “a commentary on the dispute between the imam and DHS” but after 9/11, he found the imam “to be a constructive force in attempting to strengthen our relations with that community.”

Ah, yes, one of those nice “community builders” — kind of like Imam Rauf of the Ground Zero Mosque? Well, not exactly. Qatanani makes Imam Rauf look good by comparison!

From Daniel Greenfield, blogger at Sultan Knish and an expert on sharia’s ongoing advances in our country:

Mohammed Qatanani was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the organization that is behind both Al Qaeda and Hamas. [D]espite his own guilty plea to being a member of Hamas, and despite the fact that even in the United States, he had defended a charity that provided funds to children of suicide bombers (this is done as an incentive to reassure terrorists that if they die their families will be taken care of), Qatanani [has not yet been] deported.

I assume that Sohail Mohammed, having been given the job of Superior Court Justice by Gov. Christie, has had to tell Qatanani to find himself a new lawyer. But will Mohammed also have to give up his position on the board of a very problematic organization known as the American Muslim Union?

In a separate post at Sultan Knish, Greenfield elaborates on the AMU:

The Muslim American Union is not a benign group, it has been accused of being extremist in the past, and shares much of its leadership with the Islamic Center of Passaic County, a mosque that certainly is extremist. Despite its nature, Christie has appeared at the ICPC and befriended its Imam, Imam Qatanani, who admitted to being a member of Hamas. Sohail Mohammed defended the Imam, as his lawyer, and later spoke out as a private citizen. This raises concerns about both Sohail Mohammed and Christie.

There are legitimate concerns that the nomination is going forward as a payoff to Imam Qatanani of the ICPC, whose support Christie solicited during the election.

Imam Qatanani‘s association with the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization which seeks to impose Islamic law worldwide, and which has generated terrorist groups such as Hamas and Al Qaeda, raises legitimate questions about any politicians who would choose to affiliate themselves with him, and any organizations he is involved with.  He has already shown the ability to compel politicians of both parties to do his will. The [American Muslim Union] is closely integrated with Qatanani’s mosque, and Sohail’s role in the [AMU] should bear close scrutiny, particularly in light of recent revelations by terrorist researcher Steve Emerson that the AMU list appears to have circulated anti-semitic apologetics for 9/11.

Sohail is not only on the board of trustees of this noxious group, but has also been the group’s general counsel. As such, he has often represented clients being investigated by our government on terrorism allegations.

Joel Mowbray, writing in the Jewish World Review, has more on the organization to which Gov. Christie’s judicial nominee has devoted so much of his time and talent:

The AMU often is highly critical of U.S. counter-terrorism efforts…. One online newsletter even included a claim that a “Zionist commando orchestrated the 9/11 terrorist attacks.”

Though the American Muslim Union appears moderate in its official literature — saying it is “dedicated to serving the American Muslim community and its unique needs” — the organization has interlocking leadership with a group that has allegedly raised funds for Hamas and hosted as a guest speaker last year an alleged Hamas member.

Four current and former AMU directors and executives have held or currently hold leadership positions with the Islamic Center of Passaic County (ICPC). ICPC was founded in 1989 by, among others, Mohamed el-Mezain [also the mosque’s first imam], who was the Chairman of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLFRD), which the Treasury Department designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in December 2001 [for funneling money to Hamas].

According to Conservative New Jersey:

El-Mezain had actually boasted of raising almost 2 million dollars for Hamas. And his replacement, Qatanani, actually was a member of Hamas. An ordinary politician might have been forgiven for not knowing this, but Christie was the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey. It’s absolutely impossible that he would not have known the background of the Islamic Center of Passaic County. Yet Christie attended a Ramadan dinner, in the same place where terrorists had fundraised, and kissed Qatanani on the cheek.

Time to kiss Chris Christie goodbye as a serious contender for higher office.

Hat tip: Peter and Bob.

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Why can't Chuck get his business off the ground?

This entertaining little video from the Institute for Justice gives more genuine insight about how things really work in today’s America than you would get from a four-year college program in economics!

My own experience as a small-business owner — and that of most other entrepreneurs I know —  confirms this little video’s demonstration of how government overregulation kills innovation, jobs and prosperity.

But many Americans have yet to wake up to the way big corporations — and unions — collude with government to promulgate regulations that kill off smaller businesses (which, by the way, are less likely to be unionized).

It’s a great myth that businesses, especially big prominent corporations, want less government intervention in the economy. On the contrary, they love government power because it provides things they can’t achieve in a freely competitive marketplace where force and fraud are barred….

Burdens from government rules don’t fall uniformly on all firms. Major corporations with big legal and accounting departments can handle regulations far more easily than small firms can — or one that is still only a gleam in the eye of an aspiring entrepreneur….

In American history big companies were behind virtually ever advancement of the regulatory state….

Often big companies and unions are on the same side of regulatory issues, as when the heads of Walmart and the Service Employees International Union [SEIU] stood shoulder to shoulder to support Obamacare. But even when they disagree, it is usually over how government should manipulate the economic system. The debate is never between regulation and hands-off.

It’s not free enterprise when the government uses regulations, the tax code and other tricks to pick the winners and losers in the marketplace. If we want our economy to function the way it should — creating wealth and generating jobs — we need to break up the three-way Mussolini-like collusion of government, unions and some of the biggest corporations.

Allen West has certainly got his work cut out for him on the House’s Small Business Committee!

Hat tip: Pesky Emotional Republican

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Israel's best friend

Some say you can tell a lot about a person by who his enemies are. Well, the PLO, Hamas and Hezbollah hate Allen West with a fury — and they won’t like him any better after the hell he’s been raising lately.

Allen joined another South Florida Congressperson, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, in publicly condemning the PLO’s flying of its flag in Washington, DC.

House Foreign Affairs Committee chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has blasted the display of a ‘Palestinian’ flag on the newly upgraded ‘Palestinian mission’ in Washington beginning Tuesday. “Raising this flag in DC is part of the Palestinian leadership’s scheme to manipulate international acceptance and diplomatic recognition of a yet-to-be-created Palestinian state while refusing to directly negotiate with Israel or accept the existence of Israel as a democratic, Jewish state,” she charged in a statement.

In a written news release, West said,

“The raising of this flag is an attempt to legitimize an organization with a known history of terrorist actions…. By allowing this flag to be flown, the United States is extending a diplomatic right that we refrain from offering to even our own allies, like Taiwan. This action is a diplomatic slap in the face of our greatest of allies, Israel.”

West and Ros-Lehtinen are asking President Obama and the Department of State to withdraw the permission that was earlier given to the PLO to fly the flag.

I honestly believe Israel has no greater friend in Congress than Allen West.  But that’s not just my opinion.  West’s vigorous support of Israel — especially at a time when our own President undermines Israel at every opportunity — has earned him the deep appreciation of those who live under the constant threat of bombings by Palestinian terrorists. Indeed, the average Israeli may be more aware of Allen West than is the average American at this point in time. West was even featured on the cover of one of Israel’s highest-circulation newsmagazines.

Last week, Congressman West was a featured guest in a special Ft. Lauderdale filming of the popular Israeli TV variety show, Tuesday Night Live.  Sorry, readers, no video of that available yet — but I’m keeping my eye out for it! In the meantime, here’s an interview with Congressman West that aired recently on South Florida’s popular “The Shalom Show.”

Of particular note here is the way West responds when asked about fellow Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota, who is a Muslim as well as a leftist. West responds politely and reasonably while nevertheless stating quite clearly and firmly how totally at odds Islamic law is with the principles set out in the Declaration of Independence and in our Constitution. Now that’s what I call statesmanship. And it is a rare quality indeed — one that we sure could use in the White House….

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Why they are… "Silent No More"!

I could not be in Washington for the March for Life yesterday. But I was there last year, along with over 200,000 others. You probably did not see us on the news.  The “mainstream” media do not want you to see the diversity of ages, races, creeds and backgrounds who show up in Washington every January by the hundreds of thousands to protest the American abortion regime. This year, an estimated 400,000 attended.

The March is preceded and followed by two very different sets of speakers. Before the March, out on the National Mall, there is a Rally for Life at which pro-life activists, ministers, Congressmen and Senators take the podium, with a huge sound system that can be heard all the way out to the edges of the six-figures-strong crowd of people. It’s one of the biggest gatherings in Washington, but many national news media do not cover the event at all. You especially won’t see photos of any of these speakers in the news.  Here’s why:  Immediately behind whoever’s speaking, forming a solid line across the stage, is a silent, shoulder-to-shoulder row of brave women, each holding a black sign with white lettering: “I REGRET MY ABORTION.”  It is nearly impossible to take a photograph of any speaker without those signs showing up in your picture. So the media simply take no pictures. They can’t have the American public knowing that abortion hurts women. Not when they’ve built this whole murderous structure on an absurd fiction of “empowerment” and “choice” for women. As Hitler’s propaganda chief Josef Goebbels said, repeat the lie enough times and eventually people will believe it.

But doesn’t every one of us know better? Haven’t we all seen what abortion has done to women we know who’ve had them? If we’re honest, we know that it has mutilated them emotionally even when it hasn’t left lasting effects physically. But, it’s human nature to resist change, and we’ve gotten so used to abortion… and so we, as a society, keep on trying to convince ourselves that abortion is not that big a deal — and the media are only too eager to keep trying to prop up that fiction.

After the Rally on the Mall, the March begins, with the very front contingent of that whole enormous crowd being the women — and men — of the Silent No More movement. Those women with the black “I regret my abortion” signs are joined by men carrying black signs that say “Men regret lost fatherhood.” These men are even more ignored by the media than the post-abortive women are. The whole abortion debate tends to focus on the mother and the child — as if the man who did the impregnating doesn’t even exist. In all the rhetoric about “choice,” abortion advocates are scandalously silent about the fact that abortion is hardly ever what one would call a completely free “choice”; it is almost always done under pressure, real or perceived, from parents, bosses, and… the men involved.  Some of these men come to regret having pressured their girlfriends/wives to abort. Some men, on the other hand, beg their girlfriends not to abort — but since our warped legal system cuts the man completely out of it, the woman has the absolute legal right to kill the child that it took both of them to conceive. In still other cases, men do not even find out that their girlfriend was pregnant until after the child has already been killed.

On the Silent No More YouTube channel, there are nearly two hundred testimonies by these women and men. (More than 6,000 such speeches have been given all over the U.S. by people such as these.) You will notice that all of them list their full names. No anonymity here. They want the whole wide world to know who they are. Through what is sometimes a long process, have been healed of their shame. They have no secrets to hide any more. Quite the contrary: Now that they walk in truth, no longer living a lie, now that they have accepted forgiveness, and are no longer trying to hide from God and from themselves, they consider it their mission to tell others their stories — in the hope that others faced with an unplanned pregnancy will be spared from going through the hell that they themselves have gone through, having killed a child who can never be brought back.

You will also notice that all the men and women read from their own prepared notes, rather than speaking extemporaneously. There are several reasons for this. One is that each of them has put a lot of time, toil and tears into writing their unique, personal story. They do not want to risk getting flustered or breaking down and not being able to communicate it the way they had wanted to. And of course, the odds of goofing up or forgetting some important detail increase tremendously when one is dealing with such a huge emotional subject, with such painful memories, and involving the deepest, most personal parts of oneself.

One person after another came to the little podium with the small portable sound system to give their testimony. The sun sank lower and lower, the temperature dropped, the crowd thinned to a trickle — but still they went on, in the bitter cold and darkness, telling their stories, even though the crowd of spectators dwindled down to less than a dozen of us by the time the last speaker had her turn. It became clear to me that not only were they telling their stories for the world to hear — because by the end, the audience had become so small — but it was the telling of the story, in itself, that was such an important part of their own healing.

I am posting here the testimonies of three of the women who made the strongest impressions on me that day.

Although the video here of Angelina Steenstra was taken at the 2009 March, her speech here is exactly what I remember from when I heard her speak last year. She broke my heart.

The next video is of Cheryl Carey. I did not personally see this speech because Cheryl was one of the first speakers at the Supreme Court, and I was one of the last to arrive there, since the March crowd was over a mile long, and I was near the tail end. However, I had the incredible blessing of meeting Cheryl in the hotel later that evening, completely by “chance.” (Meaning: God arranged it!) She is an amazing person. We had a long heart-to-heart talk, even though we’d never met each other before, and may never meet again (in this life). She is one of those people who just glows. That glow doesn’t come through in this video as it did in our one-to-one conversation — but that only goes to show that even when one has been fully reconciled and forgiven and healed, the scars from abortion are still incredibly deep.

In the case of this next video, I can tell you:  I was right there at that moment. I was standing just a few feet away from the camera as it filmed this speech. I remember Patricia in a special way because she reminded me so much of several women I have known — women who look so much the very stereotype of “the nice girl next door” — and who had abortions because they didn’t want anyone to find out they’d been “bad.”

There are several very important themes in common in the experiences of these three very different women.
Did you notice?

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If you or anyone you know needs healing from an abortion, please, please visit  http://www.silentnomoreawareness.org/

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After Philadelphia, nobody can say, "But I didn't know…"

Better bloggers than I have been following the Philadelphia “house of horrors” story — bloggers such as Michelle Malkin, Jill Stanek, and Ace of Spades HQ.  So I will forgo rehashing all the hideous details. I am still making my way through the Grand Jury indictment — the whole stomach-churning thing — and it’s as revolting as any “slasher” film; only worse, because the whole damn thing is true.

As I am finding out, it isn’t even just one diabolical doctor; four other staffers from the hideous “clinic” have also been arrested for murder, and an additional four staffers have been arrested for multiple crimes ranging from theft, perjury and obstruction of justice, to conspiracy to commit murder, and violations of the Controlled Susbstances Act. Several of them, besides Gosnell, committed multiple murders by using scissors to cut through the spinal cords of living, breathing, crying, born-alive babies. In fact, Gosnell preferred for the babies to simply come out on their own (after labor was induced, as is standard for third-trimester abortions); if they were already delivered by the time he got there, he wouldn’t have to chance perforating the woman’s uterus, cervix or colon, as he’d done — and been sued for — numerous times.

It goes on. It gets worse. It boggles the mind.

So here are the two big questions I have about this whole deal.

The grand jury, which comprised a mix of people from all over the ideological spectrum concerning abortion, had no problem recognizing the cutting, with scissors, of born-alive babies’ spinal cords as “murder.” Yet, had Gosnell done a typical partial-birth abortion — which involves delivering the baby feet-first and reaching up into the birth canal to puncture the baby’s skull with scissors and suction out its brains while its head is still in the birth canal — that would have been legal, and not, in the eyes of the law, “murder.”

My question is:  Why is what Gosnell did “murder,” but this isn’t:

I apologize for having to post this picture. It is the worst kind of pornography. Please don’t go away, though. I beg you to keep reading. You know and I know that the only way a country of, mostly, otherwise decent people can allow this to continue is because it is so easy to just close our eyes to it. William Wilberforce was only able to get the slave trade abolished in England when he started showing people the insides of the actual slave ships.

So, again, the question:  Why is what’s shown here perfectly legal and “a woman’s right”… while Gosnell, who simply waited until the baby was all the way out — just a few inches further — is being prosecuted on multiple counts of murder? To put it another way, how can people who see that it was wrong for American and British property owners to claim a “right” to enslave Africans, have such a hard time seeing what’s wrong with women claiming a “right” to not only enslave but outright kill their own children?

I remember being at the National Rural Women’s Conference back in 1992, in Des Moines, IA. Since it was an election year, the conference, with several hundred women in attendance, was developing a platform, i.e., a formulation of its positions and recommendations on a whole slew of issues, one of them being health care. There was a clause in there about “reproductive health.” In the final plenary session, when the platform was being presented for the whole conference’s approval, I stood up and said that anyone who hadn’t been living in a cave for the past ten years knew that “reproductive health” was code language for abortion, and that there were plenty of us in that hall who emphatically did not support that.  A fierce debate broke out, with people from all around the room standing up and speaking passionately about whether or not a fetus is a baby. Finally, one pert young lady stood up and ended the debate by saying — and it made such a huge impression on me that 19 years later, I can still quote her word for word from memory — “Look. We all know that abortion kills a baby. But that’s not the issue. The issue is women’s lives.”

At that point, all us pro-lifers in the room saw, to our grief and dismay, that our opponents were impervious to any argument we could make. Kind of like the people William Wilberforce ran into who said, “Look. We know the conditions are awful in the slave trade, and that half the niggers die in the holds of the ships before they even reach their destination. But that’s not the issue. The issue is our ability to run a business, and we need cheap labor to do it.”

Sorry for the language, folks, but that is the way they talked. And it’s not only for the sake of historical accuracy that I use that awful word. The language, you see, is not immaterial. Whoever owns the language wins the battle. As George Orwell said,  “Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable…” This is why babies are usually referred to as “fetuses” when they’re not wanted, and “babies” when they are. (I have never heard a happily pregnant woman say, “Today I felt the fetus kick for the first time!” or “At the doctor’s today, we got to hear our fetus’ heartbeat!”)

But that is precisely why I and other pro-life people at that women’s conference were so flummoxed. We realized that the abortion debate had entered a new phase. Before that, the people who wanted to keep abortion legal tried to fool everybody with language. Call babies “fetuses” and people won’t care if they’re “terminated.” Now the pro-legal-abortion people were admitting that, yes, it’s a baby, and yes, abortion kills that baby…. and yet, they were saying, that doesn’t matter!

I was in such a state of shock when I heard that, that frankly, I don’t remember whether the final document included the bit about “reproductive health” or not. All I remember was the bright, clean-scrubbed, rosy-cheeked face of that vivacious, pretty young woman, who looked so wholesome and innocent and all-American — until she said those horrendous words: “That’s not the issue.” We kill, so what? No biggie.

My second question of the day is one I don’t see anyone else asking. Not even my fellow conservative bloggers. Not even the pro-life websites, God bless ’em.  I must conclude that either this very, very socially unacceptable question — unspeakable, even — or else, that the answer is obvious to everyone else, and I’m the only person around who’s too stupid to have figured it out. If so, I ask your forbearance in advance for being so clueless.

THIS is what 7 months pregnant looks like!

I honestly do not know the answer to this question: How could a woman — any woman — get an abortion when she’s seven or eight months pregnant? I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but by 7 or 8 months, you’ve been showing for quite some time! Even if you’re obese, by the time you are eight months along, the whole wide world can see that you’re pregnant! How exactly do you walk into your workplace the next day, not showing any more — when everybody there knows you were expecting? Do you lie, and tell them you had a miscarriage? Do you just not care if the whole wide world knows that you had an abortion — and not only that, but abortion of a nearly full-term baby, who could have survived on its own if it were delivered like any other preemie in a hospital? A baby whom, if you could just tough it out for another few weeks, someone would be eager to adopt?

In short: Who the hell are these women?

Call me a moron, but I honestly do not get it.

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"God's girl": Gianna Jessen

“The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”        — St. Irenaeus, 2nd century

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Here is a very special gift for you, my readers:
45 minutes with one of the most fully alive, contagiously joyful people I have ever had the blessing to meet:

Gianna Jessen.

Her talk is in five parts:

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A Pro-Life Champion: Meet Tim Huelskamp

One of Allen West’s great new colleagues in the “freshman class” of the 112th Congress is Tim Huelskamp (KS-1).  Like Allen, Tim is a Tea Party patriot and enough of a “true conservative” to have won, as Allen did, the endorsement and financial support of the House Conservatives Fund.

I am spotlighting him today because on January 22, the most depressing day of the year, we need to look for rays of light in the darkness that is our current abortion regime. Today is the 38th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, that together legalized abortion in all 50 states, through all 9 months of pregnancy. If someone had told us in 1973 that abortion would still be legal nearly four decades later….

Tim Huelskamp is one of my rays of light.  Tim was motivated to get into politics for one reason: to fight for the lives of babies in the womb, who are too young to fight for themselves.  Once in office — he’s been a state senator for fourteen years — he gained expertise in a host of other issues as well. Now, in the U.S. House of Representatives, he’s been appointed to the Budget Committee, where his commitment to fiscal responsibility will be a big support to House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan. Tim’s also on the Veterans Affairs Committee and the Agriculture Committee — which is a wise appointment, since he is a family farmer, one of the very few in Congress. (Freshman Kristi Noem of South Dakota, who was picked for a House Republican leadership spot early on, is another.)

As important as these issues are, however, Tim constantly stresses that the right to life is the most fundamental issue; after all, what good are any other rights if you’re not alive to enjoy them? (Isn’t it surreal that we have to continually re-state something so obvious?)

Although Congress was sworn in less than three weeks ago, Tim has already attracted national attention. The new issue of World magazine is dedicated to the pro-life theme, and it includes a glowing profile of Tim Huelskamp.

While he was in the state Senate, moderate Republicans accused Huelskamp of recruiting conservative Republicans to run against them in primaries, which he didn’t deny. Legislatively Huelskamp sought to strip Planned Parenthood of its state funding, a measure that finally passed the legislature in 2009 but that the Democratic governor [Kathleen Sebelius — ugh!] vetoed. He wrote the amendment to the state Constitution in 2006 that voters passed overwhelmingly, defining marriage as between a man and a woman, but gay marriage isn’t his only target.

He talks about restoring a “culture of marriage,” so he’s gone after divorce too. He worked on a measure to promote “covenant marriages,” which would limit the grounds for divorce and encourage marital counseling. Under covenant marriages [a strictly voluntary option], the couple would have to be separated for two years before the divorce could be final. He has a beef with the whole welfare system too because he believes it discourages marriage. And he points out that single parenthood, often a result of people “enjoying the fruits of marriage outside of marriage,” is correlated to poverty.

Family is what it all boils down to, in Huelskamp’s view, even as he feels the urgency of the nation’s fiscal crisis. The two are connected. “Fundamentally it’s about what you value,” he said. “We’ve lost our ways on a lot of fronts. You just can’t spend enough to replace the family.”

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his landmark report on the state of the Black family — a report that was much berated at the time but has proven prophetically accurate — was saying the same thing 45 years ago, if anyone had cared to listen:

There is one unmistakable lesson in American history…. a community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.

As families disintegrate, emotionally wounded children deal with their pain in many ways, most of which are destructive to themselves and to others, ultimately to the whole society. We can spend all the money in the world on our schools — and we do spend more per pupil than any other country in the world — but what good does it do, when the children are coming into the classroom from chaotic, addiction-addled, dysfunctional households? We just keep spending more and more money for more and more social workers, therapists, law-enforcement officers, etc., to deal with the wreckage.

Rebuilding a “culture of marriage,” as Huelskamp advocates, is the only way we can realistically hope to see things improve.

[Huelskamp] was “worried” in his first days on the Hill when he didn’t hear any discussion of social issues among top Republicans…. So he has appointed himself the watchdog of the class. “I’m not afraid to do that,” he told me. “This is not about having fun. This is about saving our country….”  Huelskamp is a rare breed in this freshman class: someone with political experience [14 years in the Kansas Senate]. He’s worried for those new to politics because he said it’s easy to get caught up in the “minutiae” of governing. He tells his colleagues to “wade through all that stuff” and “plant your flag on your principles. Keep an eye on that. This is a place that’s meant to break individuals and break families and break principles.”

We need principled people like Hueslkamp more than ever.

That was brought home this week by the unfolding horror in Philadelphia, which reveals beyond doubt what the abortion industry really is, and always has been, about. The conservative blogosphere is on fire with this story — see, for example, Right Klik and The Other McCain — but Ace of Spades, of all people, has been doing the best coverage of it that I have seen. In case you’ve missed it, here are the posts so far; I’m linking them in order from earliest to most recent. Gabe Malor did the first post; then Ace took it up, and now he is a man on a mission. (Well, you’d have to be some sort of monster — like, say, Barack Obama? — to not be shaken to the depths by what the grand jury lays out in its indictment of “Dr.” Kermitt Gosnell.)

Pennsylvania Abortion Doc Charged with Murder

Grand Jury Report on House of Abortion Horrors Is, Crucially, a Damning Political Indictment of Rendell’s Pennsylvania Government that Deliberately Permitted Gosnell to Thrive

Shocker:  All Three Network Morning “News” Shows Embargo Gosnell Story

Feminists:  What Gosnell Did Says Absolutely Nothing About Abortion Because It Wasn’t Abortion

Question:  Did the Rhetoric of the Abortion-Absolutist Left Encourage Kermitt Gosnell?

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“I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore, choose life, so that you and your descendants may live.”

Deuteronomy 30:19

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Remembering Mark Kilroy

Maybe it was writing about Charles Manson the other day.

Or maybe it was reading about the carnage in the Juarez valley, just across the Texas border, or the arrest of a 14-year-old hit man near Cuernavaca, or the horrific increase in not only murders, but specifically, beheadings all over Mexico.

For whatever reason, Mark Kilroy has been much on my mind lately.

He was a handsome young man, smart, fun and friendly. Do you remember? Or was it just those of us who lived in Texas at the time who were traumatized then and are still haunted by it now, 22 years later? Mark was a pre-med student at the University of Texas (which I’d attended for a while) and hailed from a little town less than an hour’s drive from where I lived at the time. Maybe that’s why I identified so strongly with him. The way I remember it, though, everyone in Texas came to see Mark as one of their own.  After he suddenly disappeared in Matamoros, just over the Mexican border from Brownsville, TX,  it was headline news for weeks; every time we opened the paper or turned on the TV, we’d see a picture of that young face so full of life, with his whole life ahead of him and obviously looking forward to it.

What happened to him is too horrible for me to recount in detail.  You can read the full story here, if you have the stomach for it.  To recap as briefly as I can, the weeks-long search for Mark finally ended when police found what was left of his body on a God-forsaken ranch where a Satanic, voodoo-type cult had killed dozens of people over several years. The beautiful young man had been tortured, mutilated, offered as a human sacrifice, and cannibalized. The cultists were drug dealers, who believed that their sacrifices to the devil obtained magical powers for them that would make them able to operate with impunity. In fact, investigators only discovered the cult’s site because they’d been pursuing a drug trafficker who unwittingly led them right to it since he believed that his black magic had made him invisible, and therefore untouchable by officers of the law.

Once the case was solved, and the perpetrators hunted down and imprisoned, we, the public, mourned and eventually moved on. We thought that this was one of those occasional outbreaks of pure evil, like the Jim Jones cult in Guyana, and that this macabre chain of events had no implications for the future.

Little did we know. Seventeen years later, in 2006, decapitations — with severed heads displayed for maximum terrorizing effect on local populations — began to become commonplace among the Mexican drug cartels, each gang trying to outdo the other in horror. Some observers speculate that videos posted on the Internet by Al-Qaeda In Iraq at that time may have inspired the practice. Others wonder if the slayers have been influenced by bloody rituals practiced in the region back in pre-Columbian times.

Whatever its roots, there appears no end in sight to the current wave of decapitations. [Luis] Astorga [author of several books on the drug cartels] fears that even worse atrocities lie ahead. “Who knows what perverse methods these assassins might use to get one up over their rivals,” he says. “Many are military killers but without the army command to hold them back. Their only limits are what they can imagine or what they can find in the most violent Hollywood movies.”

I can’t deal with this much grimness and horror without looking for a ray of hope.  I’ll be honest. I find my hope in the lordship of Jesus Christ over the world. Regardless of how crappy things look sometimes, the final victory really is His. Mark Kilroy’s parents, Jim and Helen, will tell you so themselves. Enduring an ordeal no parent should ever face, they drew on their deep religious faith during the search and afterwards. After it was all over, they were determined to bring good out of unfathomable evil.

Jim and Helen Kilroy work closely with the Mark Kilroy Foundation and its mission: the prevention of substance abuse, providing about 600 youths with free educational and sport activities, counseling, concerts and summer camps….

Since drugs were at the root of their son’s death at the hands of drug traffickers, they take every opportunity to counsel against substance abuse. Concerned residents started the foundation shortly after Mark’s death.

“We were still in shock and not really over our grieving, and as things progressed, it developed into a nice organization that gets lots of things done,” Jim Kilroy said. “Lots of people work on it.”

Helen Kilroy said drug awareness is the direction in which the Lord moved them.

“It seems like, once Mark disappeared, it was almost like we were on a journey,” she recalls. “In searching for him, we were being led in different ways and what brought us to the point that we are at now. It just seems that was what our Lord wanted us to do, that we should be saying whatever we could to help our young people not get on drugs.”

The Kilroys, wisely, are addressing the root cause of the living hell that so much of Mexico has become: the ravenous appetite of the United States for mind-altering drugs. Many young people in America feel so lost that the “escape” of drugs — which they find out only too late is really the worst kind of enslavement — is very alluring. The Kilroys’ foundation, like similar efforts in other places, works to help young people develop inner defenses against addictive behaviors by getting them in the habit of making life-affirming choices. When people have personal goals that they want to reach in the future, they’re not as likely to sacrifice that future for a temporary feel-good “fix” right now.

As anyone in Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, or any other twelve-step group for people with addictions can tell you, that choice for life is only possible through faith in a “higher power.”

God said: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore, choose life, so that you and your descendants may live.”

Deuteronomy 30:19

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