American actor Chuck Norris has made an anti-Obama video with wife, Gena Norris. The couple recently released the YouTube video that invokes God and Ronald Reagan, and encourages Evangelical voters to use their power to oust President Barack Obama from his position as Commander-in-Chief in the upcoming November election. Norris begins the video by saying that "our great country and freedom are under attack," and that the U.S. may be "lost forever" if changes are not made. "We can no longer sit quietly or stand on the sidelines and watch our country go the way of socialism, or something much worse," Norris warns. Norris then encourages Evangelical voters to head to the polls to have their voices heard. According to the video, 30 million Evangelicals failed to vote in the 2008 presidential election. Gena Norris implies that this religious absence at the polls led to Obama's victory four years ago.
NCVC's email claims that NC Equality's video, "Payback Challenge," which features footage of an Amendment One supporter shooting holes in an anti-Amendment One yard sign, was a "thinly-veiled threat against supporters of traditional marriage and can have no other purpose than to incite hatred." (See the full email here.)
The email was clearly a classic example out of the Religious Right playbook: the victimizer playing the victim.
I reached out to NC Equality's Stuart Campbell to get his take on the claims.
"We find it incredibly ironic that the NC Values Coalition would condemn Equality NC for recounting the shooting of one of our supporter's signs when they were deafeningly silent during the Amendment One campaign with their condemnation when the actual shooting occurred," stated Campbell.
"This latest attack comes from the same organization that partnered with the anti-LGBT National Organization for Marriage and various SPLC-identified hate groups to support writing discrimination into our state's constitution--an organization that would now, speaking out of the other side of their mouth, attempt to deflect its own hate-filled agenda by calling us "out of line."
Their twisting of the truth demonstrates that the NC Values Coalition will stoop to any level to promote their own agenda of discrimination and division, and that it has never been more important to unite our supporters in our fight for equality."
To learn more about Equality NC and to help them in their fight for equality, visit their website here.
The NC Values Coalition sent out a fundraising email yesterday that is jaw-droppingly insane.
Let me walk you through it. Here goes:
This week we are reminded that our fight for traditional marriage did not end on May 8th.
EqualityNC has released a very disturbing video targeting our own Tami Fitzgerald and pro-marriage legislators under their "Payback Challenge" campaign. [emphasis theirs]
Let's stop for a second before we get to the crazy part.
Just so we're all clear, Equality NC's "Payback Challenge" is, in their own words, a fundraising drive "dedicated to making strategic investments in key legislative and state races in North Carolina’s primary and general elections." Disturbing stuff, right?
The "Payback Challenge" video's goal is pretty simple. First, it is intended to remind LGBT North Carolinians and equality-supporting allies that Amendment One was very much "personal," and very much "payback," despite the insistence from Tami Fitzgerald and Vote For Marriage NC that it wasn't. Secondly, the video is to urge LGBT North Carolinians and pro-equality allies to donate to Equality NC who are working to help elect pro-equality candidates in the 2012 election. Horrible, right?
Here's the video, before we move on with NCVC's facepalm-inducing logic.
Pretty effective, right? Sometimes, organizations like the NCVC do all the work for you. All you need is to hold a mirror up to them, and you have yourself all the ammunition you need (no pun intended, seriously).
Okay, back to the hilarious NCVC email:
The video - which can be found here - overlays gunshots and video of a man shooting at an anti-amendment sign with video of NC Values Coalition Executive Director Tami Fitzgerald praising the passage of the marriage amendment on election night. The video is a thinly-veiled threat against supporters of traditional marriage and can have no other purpose than to incite hatred. [emphasis theirs] Their purpose is clear and it is distasteful in light of the shooting incident that occurred just a few weeks ago when a volunteer at a Washington DC homosexual rights group walked into the lobby of the Family Research Council and started shooting. This video is innapropriate, and EqualityNC has crossed the line. [emphasis, again, theirs] We do not expect EqualityNC to agree with us. But we do expect them to communicate responsibly and civilly. We condemn this video and hope that Americans from all walks of life will join us. Friends, we at the NC Values Coalition will consistently and constantly defend traditional marriage. In spite of their threats. Please stand with us against their attacks and join us in condemning this disturbing video. Jessica Wood Communications Director, NC Values Coalition
Wait, what?
Okay, so let me make sure I understand. The video, which shows an ALLY OF NC VALUES COALITION SHOOTING A RIFLE AT A PRO-EQUALITY SIGN, is a VIOLENT THREAT AGAINST PEOPLE WHO ARE ANTI-GAY. Huh?
(Also, "In spite of their threats" is not a sentence, but let's not quibble over grammar.)
Also, these are very likely the same folks who thought it was silly and overreaching that people got upset when Sarah Palin released a map with crosshairs targeting legislators who voted for Obama's health care bill.
But I digress.
So, back to the email. "Equality NC's purpose is quite clear"? Um, you mean, that they're showing people how hateful and violent your fellow anti-LGBT, "pro-marriage" supporters were in the weeks leading up to the Amendment One vote?
And while nobody on the pro-equality side is condoning the lone act of violence against hate group The Family Research Council, there is nothing -- nothing -- in the video that even remotely suggests that compassionate pro-equality North Carolinians go out, purchase an arsenal, and shoot anti-gay activists and hate group members.
This is what you do, people, when you have nothing but your own religious bigotry. You make stuff up. You project your own hatred, and the hatred of those who share your beliefs, onto your opponents -- opponents who want nothing more than to allow all of their fellow North Carolinians to be treated equally and to not be discriminated against because of their natural traits.
As we age, we often rely more—not less—on supernatural explanations for major life events, such as death and illness, research shows.
“As children assimilate cultural concepts into their intuitive belief systems—from God to atoms to evolution—they engage in coexistence thinking,” says Cristine Legare, assistant professor of psychology the University of Texas at Austin and the study’s lead author. “When they merge supernatural and scientific explanations, they integrate them in a variety of predictable and universal ways.”
Legare says the findings, published in the journal Child Development, contradict the common assumption that supernatural beliefs dissipate with age and knowledge.
“The findings show supernatural explanations for topics of core concern to humans are pervasive across cultures,” Legare notes. “If anything, in both industrialized and developing countries, supernatural explanations are frequently endorsed more often among adults than younger children.”
The results provide evidence that reasoning about supernatural phenomena is a fundamental and enduring aspect of human thinking, Legare says.
“The standard assumption that scientific and religious explanations compete should be re-evaluated in light of substantial psychological evidence,” Legare suggests. “The data, which spans diverse cultural contexts across the lifespan, shows supernatural reasoning is not necessarily replaced with scientific explanations following gains in knowledge, education, or technology.”
Micky Ward, the Massachusetts boxer who inspired Oscar-nominated film The Fighter, has delivered a blow to Scott Brown.
“I can’t support Scott Brown. I just can’t do it,” Ward told The Sun of Lowell after agreeing to back Brown, who is up against progressive Democrat Elizabeth Warren. “I found out Scott is anti-union and I’m a Teamster guy. I found out he’s also against gay marriage, and I say, if you love someone, you should have the same rights no matter who you are.”
Over at Huffington Post, Marcus Borg writes that we could all benefit from reading a chronological New Testament. He states, "This matters not just for historical reasons but also for Christian reasons."
"About half of American Protestants belong to churches that teach that the Bible is the inerrant "Word of God" and "inspired by God.""
I have written in these pages of the problems with biblical literalism and the belief in biblical inerrancy, and I feel strongly that many of the most divisive social and political issues would not be issues if we as a society could accept that Biblical inerrancy is a relatively recent development.
Borg writes:
The key word is "inerrant." Christians from antiquity onward have affirmed that the Bible is "the Word of God" and "inspired" without thinking of it is inerrant. Biblical inerrancy is an innovation of the last few centuries, becoming widespread in American Protestantism beginning only a hundred years ago. It is affirmed mostly in "independent" Protestant churches, those not part of "mainline" Protestant denominations. Catholics have never proclaimed the inerrancy or infallibility of the Bible, even as many have not been taught much about the Bible.
Biblical inerrancy is almost always combined with the literal and absolute interpretation of the Bible. If it says something happened, it happened. If the Bible says something is wrong, it is wrong.
For Christians who see the Bible this way, whatever Paul wrote to his communities in the first century is absolutely true for all time. For them, whatever the Gospels report that Jesus said and did really was said and done by him. So also the stories of the beginning and end of his life are literally and factually true: he was conceived in a virgin without a human father, his tomb really was empty even though it was guarded by Roman soldiers, and his followers saw him raised in physical bodily form.
These Christians are unlikely to embrace a chronological New Testament. It would not only change the way the see the Bible and the New Testament, but also make them suspect and probably unwelcome in the Christian communities to which they belong.
Like obituaries that are written by journalists in anticipation of a prominent public figures' death, it is not terribly uncommon for presidential speechwriters to write two versions of speeches so that the President is prepared for various outcomes to events of national importance.
The following is a short speech written by William Safire, who was Richard Nixon's speechwriter at the time, to be given in 1969 if the astronauts had been stranded on the moon.
Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.
These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.
These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.
They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.
In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.
In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.
Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.
For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.
Via Christian Post:
