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Texas Gov. Rick Perry has painted the upcoming election in November as a religious crusade to take back the soul of the country, reported dallasnews.com. Perry, speaking at a Texas Eagle Forum rally, said, “We will raise our voices in defense of our values and in defiance of the hollow precepts and shameful self-interests that guide our opponents on the Left.” He challenged the crowd, “Who do you worship? Do you believe in the primacy of unrestrained federal government? Or do you worship the God of the universe, placing our trust in Him?” in other news, lifesitenews.com reports that President Obama has for the second year in a row issued a proclamation declaring June “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month,” while rejecting a Sanctity for Life Day, the latter a proclamation issued by George W. Bush for 2009 prior to his leaving office and first made by President Ronald Reagan in 1984. Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America, was not surprised with Obama, saying he “sides with those demanding that the innocent be discriminated against and the immoral celebrated. He is consistently wrong on moral issues.” This June’s proclamation favoring gays boasts that across Obama’s administration “openly LGBT employees are serving at every level.”

Other news

  • Al Gore, former U.S. vice president and presidential hopeful in 2000, is separating from his wife, Tipper, according to numerous news sources. Al’s son is also leaving his wife, it was announced soon after the father’s announcement.
  • Gays are working to get restrictions on their donating blood lifted, reports msnbc.com. Groups advocating such a lifting are arguing that there are frequent shortages in the blood supply. Gay rights organizations say the regulation discriminates against them. The Health and Human Services advisory committee reviewing the policy says that the final call will be made by the Food and Drug Administration. Meanwhile, repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding homosexuals in the military could have disastrous consequences, reports Frnk Gaffney in newsmax.com. Several distinguished officers who included among their ranks two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, several service chiefs, a number of combatant command, theater, and other major U.S. and allied force commanders and two Medal of Honor recipients wrote, “We believe that imposing this burden on our men and women in uniform would undermine recruiting and retention, impact leadership at all levels, have adverse effects on the willingness of parents who lend their sons and daughters to military service, and eventually break the All-Volunteer Force.” The newsmax.com report maintained that legislators are more interested in appeasing homosexual activists than understanding the damage to the armed forces…the only alternative would be to reinstitute conscription, better known and reviled as ‘the draft.’”
  • Freedom From Religion Foundation case goes forward. A federal judge is allowing a case to go forward that was filed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation last October challenging housing allowances for ministers (contained in Section 107 of the Internal Revenue Code), reports onenewsnow.com. The allowance permits a pastor to take tax credit for any compensation received for housing, just like other tax credits or deductions are permitted for non-pastors (defined in Section 119). The allowance has been in effect since the 1950s. Liberty Counsel founder Mat Staver points out that this allowance is not the government’s favoring or promoting a religion, and he warned that tax deductions for giving to churches and religious organizations could be next on the agenda of groups and individuals with anti-religious, anti-Christian bias.
  • Minnesota agrees to pay for marriage counseling. Gov. Tim Pawlenty has signed an omnibus spending bill which included the “Minnesota Couples on the Brink” project for couples on the road to divorce, reported the Washington Times. In other words, the state will pay for marriage counseling. If couples knew more about divorce and its aftermath, “they might want to find an alternate path,” remarked State Senator Steve Dille (R.), lead sponsor of the law. There was dissent from some Minnesota divorce lawyers, and family lawyers in the Minnesota State Bar Association voted against endorsing the project, maintaining it was not the job of the government to act as a counselor.
  • A Christian school in Florida has fired a teacher over finding that she became pregnant just before her wedding, reported Fox News. As a Christian organization, the school forbids sex before marriage among its personnel. But she has in turn filed a federal discrimination suit. She claims the school also violated her privacy by telling parents and students why she was fired.
  • Gay rights activists held a “kiss-in” at a Chicago restaurant, saying they were kissing publicly in response to the restaurant’s owner last month telling two males to stop kissing each other. The Chicago Tribune, reporting on the incident,carried a photo of the two males kissing in their booth at the kiss-in. The owner said he was not hostile and didn’t refuse to serve the “couple.” He said he would ask any couple to respect his restaurant and leave the kissing outside. He said the two came into the restaurant holding hands and exchanging kisses. At one point, they were kissing each other on the neck while other customers “began to look uncomfortable.”
  • Wilder Publications is under fire after placing warning labels on copies of the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and other historical documents, according to Fox News. The warning read, “This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would it it were written today.”  The disclaimer also told parents they might want to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and interpersonal relations have changed since the book was written. Almost all of the reviews discussing the disclaimer on Amazon end with the same thought: don’t buy from this publisher.
  • Stop Islamization of America hosted a rally last week in lower Manhattan to protest the planned construction of a large mosque overlooking Ground Zero in New York City, reported Personal Liberty Digest. Some 5 to 10 thousand people showed up, protesting what the organization called “an insult to the Americans who were murdered there.” A main reason cited as to why the mosque should not be there is that it symbolizes “a radically intolerant belief system that is incompatible with the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.” Rally organizers have promised to hold another event in the same place in September, when the construction is supposed to begin. They also said they would be filing suit against the federal government, asking that the site instead be designated as a war memorial similar to Pearl Harbor of Gettysburg.
  • Richard Clarke, an anti-terrorism czar under Presidents Clinton and Bush, claims that America’s lack of preparation of the annexing of its computer system by terrorists could lead to an “electronic Peal Harbor,” according to www.telegraph.co.uk. He said problems could start with the collapse of one of the Pentagon’s computer networks. Soon internet service providers would be in meltdown, large refinery fires and explosions would ensue, chemical plants would malfunction, air traffic controllers would report mid-air collisions, cities would black out, and tens of thousands of Americans would die in an attack comparable to a nuclear bomb. Clarke said all this could take place in no more than 15 minutes and involve not a single terrorist or soldier setting foot in the U.S. Clarke was right before, according to the report, as he issued dire warnings of the need for better defenses against al-Qaeda. Clarke believes Obama has failed to come to grips with the scale of the problem, including the reality of well-trained hackers, and said the U.S. is currently far more vulnerable to cyberwar than Russia, China, or even North Korea.
  • Claremont School of Theology, a seminary in California with ties to the United Methodist denomination, is adding clerical training for Muslims and Jews to its curriculum, making it a multi-faith school, noted latimes.com. Eventually Claremont School of Theology wants to add programs for Buddhists and Hindus also. One person remarked about the ecumenical affair, “Jesus Christ is not just some historical figure who merely taught people how to act…He died on the cross for the sins of those who accept Him as their Lord & Savior…unless you are born again you cannot see the Kingdom of God.”
  • Christian universities have a strong advantage in the booming market for online higher education and are seizing the opportunity to expand their footprint, according to Insidehighered.com. “The expansion of Christian online learning might be of particular interest to families that are leery of the secular education provided by the nation’s public schools,” said Carlos Campo, incoming president of Regent University, a school in Virginia by Pat Robertson. It has 4,900 students, about 55 percent of whom are online. Campo acknowledged, however, that replicating the ethos of a faith-based campus in a distance-learning context has been difficult in various ways, including measuring the spiritual health of students and tracking how well the online students are attaining spiritual goals. Kathy Player, president of Grand Canyon University, said they stream its chapel services, pepper their learning portals with inspirational passages from Scripture, and provide channels for online students to submit prayer requests.
  • Environmentalists may be overlooking one of the most potentially devastating disasters of earth: the destruction of the world’s honeybees. More than a third of them have been mysteriously disappearing, according to a report at wnd.com. Entire colonies of honeybees are abandoning hives and food stores, including honey and pollen. Those experts who are watching the disaster say that a third of the human diet depends on honeybee pollination of crops, especially fruit, nut, vegetable, and seed production in the U.S. Included are almonds, apples, apricots, avocadoes, blueberries, boysenberries, cherries, citrus fruits, cranberries, grapes, kiwi, loganberries, macadamia nuts, nectarines, olives, peaches, pears, plums, raspberries, strawberries, asparagus, broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, celery, cucumbers, cantaloupe, honeydew, onions, pumpkins, squash, watermelon, alfalfa hay and seed, cotton lint, cotton seed, legume seed, peanuts, rapeseed, soybeans, sugar beets, and sunflowers. James Tew, Ohio State University’s state honeybee specialist, said that if bees are unable to pollinate the nation’s crops, Americans could be forced to settle for a menu of wheat and corn.
  • Untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan are worth nearly $1 trillion, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials, reports the New York Times. A Pentagon memo stated that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw matieral in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys. The vast scale was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. “There is stunning potential here,” said Gen. David Petraeus, command of the U.S. Central Command.
  • Florida Gov. Charlie Crist has vetoed a bill that would have required women seeking an abortion during the first trimester to undergo an ultrasound exam and pay for it. Crist recently began to run as an independent after being defeated in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate. He is in a close and fierce battle with conservative Republican Marco Rubio.