Here are a few of the key takeaways from the piece, along with quotes from the op-ed:
Don't Vote For The Kenyan
Civil leaders should be selected from among their own people. People must know the candidate. This is why the Constitution of the United States requires the president must be naturally born in the U.S.
Don't Vote For The Black Guy Who Supports Equal Pay, Women's Rights, And Equality
He must execute justice without respect to race, gender, and national origin, or any other categorical distinction made in society.
Don't Vote For Women
The Scriptures require that we "choose wise, understanding, and knowledgeable men." The word men used here is not the generic term for "mankind" but rather the word for "male." Everywhere the qualifications for civil leaders are mentioned in the Bible, males – not females – are identified.
Don't Vote For the Guy Who Endorsed Gay Marriage -- But The Mormon Still Makes Us Nervous
The Bible is clear that marriage is between one man and one woman, since "the two shall become one flesh"...This definition excludes multiple wives.
Never mind The Establishment Clause
So before you consult all the other voting guides, make sure you have rightly prioritized the words of Scripture above all the other voices for how you analyze the candidates.
Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., a privately held retail chain with 22,500 employees led by a Christian family, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma, opposing the Health and Human Services "preventive services" mandate, the company announced Wednesday. The company becomes the largest and only non-Catholic-owned business to file a lawsuit against the government's contraception mandate.
The company's CEO and founder, David Green, said Wednesday that the mandate would force the Christian-owned-and-operated business to provide, without co-pay, the "morning after pill" and "week after pill" in their health insurance plan, or face crippling fines up to 1.3 million dollars per day.
"We simply cannot abandon our religious beliefs and comply with this mandate," Green said during a teleconference press meeting. "We know that we have been blessed by God's grace and believe it is because we have chosen to live our lives and to operate our business according to His Word and we are very grateful for that. But our faith is being challenged by the federal government."
Hobby Lobby's evangelical roots were first noticed by many during the Chick-fil-A fracas earlier this year. Many news organizations began highlighting other businesses which, like Chick-fil-A, operated on Biblical principles.
[CEO David] Green is a big contributor to evangelical education, having given to Jerry Falwell's Liberty University and Oral Roberts University. He has also acquired Christian artifacts (medieval manuscripts, Hebrew scrolls and Codex Climaci Rescriptus: a rare sixth century Bible written partly in Palestinian Aramaic) for the National Bible Museum. In August 2011, Green announced that he is donating a 170-acre ranch in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., to Saddleback Church. A preacher's son from a poor background, Green started Greco Products in 1970 with $600, which he spun into his first Hobby Lobby arts and crafts stores in Oklahoma City in 1972. The family-friendly chain now has 490 locations in 40 states. Green strives to grow the company according to biblical principles; stores are closed on Sundays. The company has also delivered 508 million copies of a gospel booklet to children in more than 100 countries.
Hobby Lobby, the Oklahoma City-based arts and crafts store chain, cites its commitment to “honoring the Lord” on its website and closes its 500-plus nationwide locations on Sundays, as does Chick-fil-A.
“We believe that it is by God's grace and provision that Hobby Lobby has endured,” its website reads. “He has been faithful in the past, we trust Him for our future.”
While there have been many lawsuits challenging the US government's mandate, Hobby Lobby appears to be the first Evangelical-led business to file.
There are now 27 separate lawsuits challenging the HHS mandate, which is a regulation under the Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare"). These HHS challenges were not affected by the Supreme Court's June 28th ruling on the constitutionality of the "individual mandate."
"These abortion causing drugs go against our faith and our family is now being forced to choose between following the laws of the land that we love or maintaining the religious beliefs that have made our business successful and have supported our family and thousands of employees and their families," said Green, whose company is being represented by the Becket Fund, a religious freedom law group.
"The nationwide litigation against this HHS mandate is a fight for religious freedom for all Americans," said Kyle Duncan, general counsel for the Becket Fund, during the teleconference. "Today, [Hobby Lobby and its owners] are asking the federal court to protect their right to run their business as they always have in harmony with their Christian faith."
If Todd Akin's comments on "legitimate rape" and pregnancy have had you pounding your head against the desk, you might want to avoid the following clip of the American Family Association's Bryan Fischer and Brad Mattes of Life Issues Institute discussing the strong reactions to Akin's asinine remarks.
According to these two, it's rare for women to get pregnant from rape because "it really all stands to reason."
Rick Santorum, despite what he may say, is not looking out for women's best interest. Rick Santorum prefers a Biblical view of women, and anyone who has read the Old Testament knows women didn't fare too well in that book.
I did not receive an answer from any Santorum supporters, which probably says more about my followers than anything. I'm still waiting for a response.
My feeling is that women supporters of Rick Santorum are responding to a few things which trump any view he has on their abilities, or their autonomy. They are likely responding to his pro-life, Biblical views, which, as many believe, eclipse this business of women's rights.
Perhaps two home-schooled daughters of an Oklahoma pastor can shed some light on the appeal.
Haley, 18, and Camille Harris, 20 have penned a song for Ssantorum's campaign. The video for the "Game On!" has become a viral sensation with nearly 1 million views as of this writing.
The girls sing: "Game on, join the fight/We've finally got a man who will stand for what is right/There is hope for our nation again/Maybe the first time since we had Ronald Reagan/There will be justice for the unborn, factories back on our shores/Where the Constitution rules our land/Yes, I believe Rick Santorum is our man."
Daughters of a pastor in a family of eight, the girls live on four acres with 47 pecan trees. All of the Harris children have been home-schooled, much like Santorum’s kids. The girls say they are best friends, love coffee (though Haley prefers hot chocolate), have never bought a magazine and have never had cable (according to the girls, “Mom and Dad didn’t want to raise hoodlums :)”).
Camille, 20, said she has no desire to watch TV. "Even now, if I had the opportunity, I don’t choose to because they go against my value system. My dad’s like, 'You’re over 18. You can do whatever you want to do.’”
Camille had tried to write a theme song for Santorum before “Game On,” but nothing came. “I couldn’t get anything good or catchy,” she said. “But all of a sudden on Sunday night when someone said, 'Write a song for Super Tuesday,' I said 'I’m gonna write it.' We just prayed and asked God to give us the words and that song came really fast.”
So, there you have it. Perhaps the secret to Santorum's women supporters is the fact that there are way more families like the Harrises than we thought. Those home-schooling, media-avoiding, miracle-seeking, anti-contraceptive families tend to be large, and cut off from other world views. They simply don't know any better.
I realize that sounds awfully simplistic, elitist, condescending, and crass. I also realize that it is a gross generalization.
About women supporting Santorum: I too find this baffling, and can only attribute it to some form of Stockholm Syndrome. As someone who grew up among born-again and evangelical Christians in Appalachia, I would hypothesize that women who have accommodated themselves to living an evangelical lifestyle have nothing to gain from questioning the premises of Christian patriarchy. Their lives are more comfortable, less fraught with domestic conflict, if they simply decide to be happy and make the most of their assigned roles. Although to a feminist the trajectory of their lives seems constrained, on a day-to-day basis evangelical women feel productive and empowered by playing a dynamic role in their churches and schools, from which they derive a potent sense of community. Nor are they necessarily barred from having a job. They have avenues for self-expression such as crafts, baking, or book clubs. (If your first reaction is to disdain these, then unless you’re a professional artist you probably have too high an opinion of your own creative outlets.) In fact, when I recall the women I grew up under, they didn’t think men were superior at all; they took the patronizing attitude that men were to be indulged in their masculine delusions. It would be elitist/snobby/condescending/wrong to view such women as passive or merely subservient. How many of us want to challenge the social constructs within which we have created active lives that are reckoned as meaningful? At any rate, this is my best effort to make sense of the women’s vote, which is otherwise unfathomable and preposterous to me.
According to Bryan Fischer of the AFA, it's not conservatives who are disrespecting women -- it's the left. Liberals, says Fischer, are almost always the source of misogyny, hatred, and verbal attacks. They're just like Islamic Radicals, he says, treating women as something less than human.
Fischer, looking down on women
Fischer's idea of respect sure is strange.
In February, he stated that "women are not wired, either by evolution or by God, whoever is responsible for this difference, they are not prepared by DNA and innate personality characteristics to be in [combat]."
Last August, Fischer stated that a woman can only be president only if there aren't any godly men available to do the job.
Just last week, he stated that Sandra Fluke is "sleeping with so many guys she can't keep track," and that the "definition of "slut" is "a promiscuous woman." The left got Rush to apologize for using the dictionary accurately."
In January, responding to a report that 96.6% of all sexual assaults in military are male on female or male on male, Fischer actually said this: "Remove women and gays, problem vanishes."
Also in January, Fischer blamed women, and the feminization of public policy, for the sorry state of affairs in America.
Last April, Fischer said that welfare provides incentive for black women to "rut like rabbits."
Seriously, someone please have a discussion with Rick Santorum about self-awareness.
Speaking today at CPAC, Santorum actually said this (referring to the Obama contraception flap):
"It's not about contraception. It's about economic liberty, its about freedom of speech its about freedom of religion, its about government control of your lives and its gotta stop!"
For real. He said that.
The same Santorum who said he would invalidate all gay marriages.
The same Santorum who said that the right to privacy as it relates to having consensual sex with another adult in one's own home "doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution."
The same Santorum who said about contraception, "It's not okay. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."
The same Santorum who said he would "advocate that any doctor that performs an abortion, should be criminally charged for doing so."
The same Santorum who said this:
"They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues.
That is not how traditional conservatives view the world. There is no such society that I’m aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture."
Don't Vote For The Kenyan
