Tag Archives: Congress

Manhattan Declaration in action, the shutdown

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The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops lobbied Congress to hold the continuing resolution and debt ceiling bill hostage to anti-birth control ideology. In a September 26 letter, they wrote:

We are writing once again, as Chairmen of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities and Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty, on an increasingly grave concern to our Church and many others: Preserving religious freedom and the right of conscience for all who take part in our health care system.
We have already urged you to enact the Health Care Conscience Rights Act (H.R. 940/S. 1204). As Congress considers a Continuing Resolution and debt ceiling bill in the days to come, we reaffirm the vital importance of incorporating the policy of this bill into such “must-pass” legislation.
Loudoun’s Chuck Colson inspired Manhattan Declaration lays out the programme for the tea party/”Christian” right led sedition.
…we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.
…
Chuck Colson Founder, the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview (Lansdowne, VA)
Congressman Frank Wolf co-sponsored H.R. 940.
Thanks Frank!

Morality call – say no to the Values Voter Summit

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The SPLC is asking elected officials to stop courting the anti-GLBT hate groups that sponsor the so-called Values Voter conference.

It’s a simple ask.

“If you are elected to represent *all* people, you can’t treat some people as sub-human.”

Morality call, no human is sub-human. If a “values voter” considers a fertilized egg to be fully human,  how can he or she treat a living breathing person as a sub-human?

Here is the SPLC email. Continue reading →

Truth Decay

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John Flannery and Former Nixon White House Counsel, John Dean

On 9-11, I was rounding the Lincoln Memorial and had a clear view across the Potomac to the Virginia side where I saw a mushroom cloud that rose to the sky composed of dirt and debris.

I worked in the Cannon House Office Building at the time and called my staff to discover that the twin towers in New York had been attacked by terrorists, as had the Pentagon in Virginia – and the plane that crashed into the Pentagon was that great dirt cloud I watched rise up high into the air.

By October, a bi-partisan U.S. Congress approved the so-called USA Patriot Act.  It was a bitter event because we missed an opportunity to do better.  The House Judiciary Committee had cobbled together a unanimous bi-partisan compromise under Committee Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner but at the 11th hour, just before the floor vote, then Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert replaced Sensenbrenner’s Judiciary Committee compromise bill on the House floor with a wide-ranging wrong-headed substitute.

You really should read the bill as most members of Congress never did; there were only two copies of the bill available at the time of the vote. Continue reading →

An Act of War Against Syria – Why And For Whom?

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Since when did a democratically elected official’s oath in the House and Senate become, “I will do what I want in your best interests even if you voters don’t understand how good this is for you?”

We have elected representatives from Virginia and across the nation who are telling us they are going to disregard what we’re telling them – and vote to attack Syria anyhow.

They treat us like children to whom they’re administering castor oil. Continue reading →

“Limited” War In Syria – Really?

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Syrian dead – from nerve gas?

Right now we have elected officials in the U.S. Congress from both parties denouncing any military involvement in Syria.

The public is against us getting involved in this brutal civil war.

President Barack Obama, however, wants to travel a different road.

The President’s avowed reason to force a “limited” aerial attack against Syria, notwithstanding the congressional and public resistance, is because the Syrian government in a civil war that has tallied more than 100,000 dead has recently used chemical weapons killing a thousand or more innocent women and children.

President Obama’s advisers believe the President shall suffer “a credibility gap” if he doesn’t act, to “punish” Syria for using chemical weapons since the President told Syria a year ago, “not to do it – or else.”

There is no international treaty or law against killing women and children in war.

But we say we care if it happens with chemical weapons.

We have no problem if either side in Syria blows up women and children with bombs and bullets. Continue reading →

Frank Wolf cosponsors Federal “Marriage” Amendment

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Frank Wolf trains Eugene Delgaudio (Sterlingfest, 2006)

Box Turtle Bulletin reports that Frank Wolf is co-sponsoring Rep Tim Huelskamp’s (R – KS) Federal Marriage [sic] Amendment. The language is:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman.

And that language runs afoul of the recent Supreme Court DOMA ruling. Here are excerpts from Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion:

The history of DOMA’s enactment and its own text demonstrate that interference with the equal dignity of same-sex marriages, a dignity conferred by the States in the exercise of their sovereign power, was more than an incidental effect of the federal statute. It was its essence.

…The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity. By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

Continue reading →

THE PRIVATE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS – NONSENSE

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Citizen with an M60

“The notion that registering gun purchases somehow violates the Constitution is unmitigated nonsense,”

so said former Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger. He also said that

“[n]othing outrages me more than the conduct of the National Rifle Association (‘NRA’).”

Former NRA Vice President Neal Knox once said that the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were possibly “part of a conspiracy to enact gun control” and “could have been created for the purpose of disarming the people of the free world.” This past week, the NRA has eclipsed its ordinary standard for bad taste by attacking the President’s children, asking why the federal government provides them Secret Service protection but not other children in our public schools. Anyone want to suggest a distinction that the NRA might understand? Continue reading →

Sticks and stones

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From the Department of Republican Embarrassment come the following two not-unrelated events:

First, contrary to that annoying buzzing sound coming from the anti-Muslim opportunist crowd, it seems that American Muslims are far and away the most likely among us to unequivocally condemn violence directed at civilians. A Gallup poll released on Tuesday lays out the truth rather starkly.

Continue reading →

House votes to de-fund NPR

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So far, they’ve tackled: removing funding from Metro; medicaid payments for abortions; taking away funding for basic women’s health care (pap smears and breast exams); and taking away enforcement power from the EPA.

Now they’ve taken funding away from NPR.

But they haven’t even begun on a single jobs bill.

Weren’t jobs their biggest priority back in November?

#DearJohn, #WhereAreTheJobs?