One man, one woman
After reading the ballot explanation for the proposed North Carolina constitutional "marriage amendment," I find myself somewhat confused. The purpose seems to be to keep the tradition of marriage from being defined as anything more than one man and one woman.
Does this mean one man and one woman for all time or one man and one woman at a time? Will this put an end to those who cherish the tradition of marriage so much they do it over and over?
There are only four states with a divorce rate higher than North Carolina. Divorce is a big business here, and one man, one woman could really affect our economy.
GARY SCHUYLER
Winston-Salem
Folwell and immigration
Rep. Dale Folwell reminds us that Uriel Alberto, and other foreign-born residents brought to this country in their youth by their parents in their quest for a better future for their families, are illegal ("Vigil for Alberto draws about 70," March 6). Yes, they are illegal according to man's law, but what about God's law? Are they illegal in the eyes of God?
Alberto and many more just like him are human beings created in God's image just like the rest of us. The DREAM Act legislation offers a path to legal residency for just a portion of these (God's children).
My guess is that Rep. Folwell has enjoyed the opportunities and benefits of this great country for many years. What makes him any different than any other human being? He should place himself in the position of Alberto's parents and ask himself what he would have done to improve the lives of his own family.
Rather than deny other human beings the same opportunity, perhaps Folwell and others in the state legislature should be looking for ways to "pay it forward." I believe my God would approve.
LARRY PENDRY
North Wilkesboro
The anointing
Oh, the things I learn from reading the Journal!
The March 3 letter "Obama the Christian" says, "God has anointed our Christian president to exercise leadership in our world and to be a witness for those who have eyes to see."
My Webster's dictionary says anoint means "to put oil on, as in consecrating."
Lo and behold, I missed the news and photos of that event — the anointing. Surely CNN, MSNBC and others reported this — I missed it. On top of that, none of my friends told me about the anointing, nor did my pastor mention it.
So I guess I'll have to keep subscribing to the Journal to keep me informed of such important happenings.
LUCY VESTAL
Rural Hall
Sum It Up
Do you think President Obama started the contraception fight on purpose?
Correspondent of the Week
Our state parks
After reading Jim Hightower's column "Stealing state parks" (March 3), I think it is best to focus on the natural heritage, preservation and local economic benefits of state parks. With our mountains, Piedmont, sand hills and coast, North Carolinians have more natural treasures preserved than most. As a volunteer in the Hanging Rock State Park visitors center, advising on hiking trails, offering brochures on local attractions, selling park merchandise, keeping the center open after hours and even helping plan two weddings, I know how much the parks mean to visitors.
The Division of Parks and Recreation 2011 Annual Report shows that a "2008 economic study revealed that travelers spend an average $23.56 a day to enjoy the state parks." An analysis by North Carolina State University's Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management "estimated the state parks system's total annual economic impact at $412 million." The recent review by the General Assembly's Performance Evaluation Division and its purported savings should be shelved because of its adverse effect on local economies.
Land acquisitions are sometimes offered by land owners adjacent to the parks. Given real-estate markets, it is a good time to acquire additional park lands. This can be done, and the parks operated and well maintained, if the Parks and Recreation Trust fund is fully funded and allowed to operate as intended.
In this election year, it is a good time to remind candidates for state offices of the value of North Carolina's state parks.
HENRY FANSLER
Lewisville
One man, one woman at a time seems to be a lot less stressful. As of this week I have been married 33 years to one woman and so far so good. Some try the more than one at a time method. This is loaded with danger. I am reading where the late Osama bin Laden had several wives and two were constantly at each other's throats. No relief in the hideout until a Navy Seal showed up with the right solution. With relief at hand, I'll bet Osama kind of leaned into that first bullet.
ReplyDeleteFolwell and immigration. Careful, about mixing your belief in God into this State matter. There is that "wall" thing you know.
ReplyDeleteThe "anointing". I read that LTE myself the other day and it sounded quite "fundamentalist" in tone and acceptance. Once again a writer injects God. That "wall" must be in need of repair. I thought the only person I saw giving Mr Obama anything was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
ReplyDeleteIf you believe in God these days, you have to be some deviant, hateful person. That, of course, is the view of liberals.
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't too long ago that God fearing people were widely viewed as the pillars of the community. It's amazing how one group of people can twist and distort facts to the extent that the truth is no longer the truth.
Do I think Obama started the contraception fight on purpose? Well yes. It is typical agitprop from a Leftist president in collusion with a sympathetic press---being George Stephanopolis when moderating the early January Republican debate when he asked the question out of the clear blue to a bewildered Mitt Romney. All has been orchestrated ever since right up to this week. His party and their ideology constantly need diversion into preplanned narratives. The OWS scheme was one, contraception is now and "oil speculators" will be the next bit of agitprop. Something else will follow and all will be breathlessly covered by his whores and lackeys called the "mainstream media".
ReplyDelete"Do you think President Obama started the contraception fight on purpose?"
ReplyDeleteNo. The Republicans thought they had a good wedge issue with the "religious freedom" talking point, but then they went too far (as they usually do) and made it about contraception and Griswold v. CT, which has been pretty much settled for 40 years, and of course you had Limbaugh's vile attacks on Sandra Fluke, which made the situation that much worse for them. And the President took advantage of the situation, as he should have.
If you think this is all some sort of master plan by the Democratic party, then you'd have to assume collusion between the President, the GOP leadership in congress, and lard ass himself. And that's just absurd.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteAs is often the case here, misinformation hinders debate. In this case, where is the misinformation coming from? Round up the usual suspects: Limbaugh, Beck, the Blaze, the same as always fruitcakes.
ReplyDeleteNovember, 2011: As the Department of Health and Human Services is working on the contraception policy, White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley, who is Catholic, arranges a meeting between the president, Vice President Biden, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan and himself over the issue. Daley did not talk to female senior staff members before doing so, and Obama was "'mildly uncomfortable' being put on the spot" before he made up his mind about the issue. Obama indicated all sides' concerns would be addressed.
Dolan went public talking like he'd won. Dolan referred to this meeting Thursday, when he said Obama "gave me promises" on the contraception rule.
Shortly thereafter: Several of Obama's top female advisers, including Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told Obama they were mad at Daley's "power play." Other national women’s leaders objected as well.
December 2011: Newt Gingrich makes this an election issue by saying he'd investigate any rule requiring religious groups to cover contraception.
January 20: The Obama administration announces it will require contraception to be covered at Catholic universities and charities. Dolan immediately puts out a press release calling the decision "literally unconscionable" as well as a video of himself talking about it on the Conference of Catholic Bishops' website.
So who created all the fuss? Timmy Dolan and Newt Gingrich, long before anyone asked Mit Romney a question about it. Get the facts, please.
A few real facts to keep in mind:
1. Contraception is never mentioned in the bible. Catholic theologians developed the anti-contraception stance as yet another way of controlling their serfs.
2. 58% of US Catholics agree with the Obama administration’s ruling.
3. 92% of US Catholic women use some sort of birth control, so the infallible pope and his henchmen are out of touch with reality.
OT...some more "filler". The settlement among Obama, Dolan, Biden, Daley was supposed to be done. Newt making noise about an understanding among those parties is Newt's business as a Catholic. Then as you say, the female members of the Administration were upset. Early January, the question is introduced on the National stage at the Republican debate and put to an astonished Mitt Romney. That question was then front and center nationally, not among a small group of Catholics. How will Obama handle it as part of healthcare take over? His Jan 20th announced requirement set off a firestorm causing him to pivot from a mandate on the Church to a mandate on their insurance carriers.
Delete1. Catholics do things according to their own doctrines and conscience.
2. 58% of Catholics agree with the "ruling". Irrelevant! A President has no Constitutional authority to do this.
3. 92% of US Catholic women use bc. I'm sure. Again irrelevant. That is a matter of conscience between themselves and their church. No President has the authority to step into the breach.
4. The "how to use this firestorm" to get the administration's way and change the Constitutional overstep is what the Stephanopolis question to Romney was about. The start of a narrative away from the the constitution breach and onto simply a gender assault was the devised plan and it unfolds today.
Obama has over stepped his authority on several occasions, but nobody calls him on it. It's media Affirmative Action.
Delete1. There was no settlement among Obama, Biden, Daley and Dolan. As I said, Obama indicated that all sides concerns would be addressed.
Delete2. Whether Dolan lied or just jumped the gun, his statement regarding the meeting was not true.
3. Newt's "noise" had nothing to do with his "business" as a Catholic. It had everything to do with politics as usual...he sensed yet another wedge issue on the horizon. As usual, his sensor was malfunctioning...I guess he forgot that more than half of those being wedged were women, who already have a pretty low opinion of his philandering self.
4. Imagining that Stephanopoulus's question was somehow orchestrated by the administration is edging in the direction of paranoia. There had already been plenty of "noise" about this for those who were paying attention. And the media simply covers what's happening. See the link below.
5. Romney's astonishment is not astonishing. He has morphed from being a reasonable candidate to being just another one of the GOP clowns...clueless day in and day out.
6. The issue itself is an interesting one. We taxpayers who are unchurched subsidize almost all churches by not taxing their property and wealth. Nobody really makes much of a fuss about that.
But when they become employers, especially universities, who have control over their students as well as their employees, are they now engaged in business, thus subject to the same rules as everyone else? I think so.
Students at Georgetown Law are required to buy the school's insurance policy ($1,895 per year), which does not cover contraceptives, as well as a number of other things that are routinely covered elsewhere.
7. The "firestorm" was started by the right. It will probably be their final undoing.
Meanwhile, every other issue raised in this campaign, almost all of it by the GOP clown circus, actually has nothing to do with anything.
And the debt grows and the debit grows and the economy slumbers. How did trivia take over our political system? Here's a pretty good guess:
Tweet, tweet!
I made a mistake in my above statement by referring to the issue of contraception as "trivia". That may be true for men, who go around spewing their seed wherever they can, yet suffer little of the consequences. For women, who carry the full burden of pregnancy, it is another story entirely.
DeleteAnd that includes the burden of contraception. Far too many men cannot be bothered with condoms…for many it seems somehow unmanly…not to mention that condoms reduce their pleasure potential. So women are tasked with finding a way not to get pregnant…all of which are far more costly than condoms.
Consider some actual facts from a 2008 Guttmacher Institute Study which was published last August:
1. The typical American woman, who wants two children, spends about five years pregnant, postpartum or trying to become pregnant, and three decades—more than three-quarters of her reproductive life—trying to avoid pregnancy.
2. About half of all pregnancies in the United States each year—more than three million—are unintended. By age 45, more than half of all American women will have experienced an unintended pregnancy, and three in 10 will have had an abortion.[
3. There were 66 million U.S. women of reproductive age (13–44) in 2008.
4. More than half of these women (36 million) were in need of contraceptive services and supplies; that is, they were sexually active and able to become pregnant, but were not pregnant and did not wish to become pregnant. The number of women in need of contraceptive services and supplies increased 6% between 2000 and 2008.
5. Of the 36 million women in need in 2008, approximately 22 million were non-Hispanic white, 5.1 million were non-Hispanic black and 6 million were Hispanic. (The remaining women were of other or mixed races and ethnicities.)
6. Of the 36 million women in need of contraceptive care in 2008, 17.4 million were in need of publicly funded services and supplies because they either had an income below the federal poverty level or were younger than 20.
7. The number of women in need of publicly funded services increased by more than one million (6%) between 2000 and 2008.
8. Among the 17.4 million women in need of publicly funded contraceptive care, 71% (12.4 million) were poor or low-income adults, and 29% (5 million) were younger than 20. Four in 10 poor women of reproductive age have no insurance coverage whatsoever.
Oh, and whoever brought up Title X is, as usual, lost in space. Made it sound like a simple drive-thru process. It is far more complicated than that, and it is unlikely that women under the burden of a $70,000 per year cost at Georgetown Law could qualify.
I'd like to see what would happen if Dennis Miller called Hillary Clinton the 'C' word on the O'Reilly Factor.
ReplyDelete'Game Change' is another liberal, Hollywood bashing of Palin, and no feminist says anything, and they stand for women's rights? Poooooooohey!
My hormonal level is not quite right to appropriately respond to this alleged overreach by the Obama administration regarding contraception coverage which is rampant on the forum today.
ReplyDeleteIf this is a democratic conspiracy, then how exactly did the democrats get Daryl Issa to forbid Sandra Fluke from testifying during his hearing in the first place thus setting this Rushstorm in motion?
How many more babies do you guys want to pay for people who can't support the children they already have? Birth control is very cost effective compared paying for childbirth.
Over half of the births in N.C. are already paid for by Medicaid, and that is just the beginning: Medicaid, EITC, supplemental nutritional assistance program (SNAP), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, education and incarceration.
North Carolina: Births Financed by Medicaid
ReplyDeleteCompare North Carolina to:
Births Financed by Medicaid
Number of Births Financed by Medicaid, 2009View 50-State Comparison
NC
# US
#
64,439 NA
(show/hide notes)
Births Financed by Medicaid as a Percent of Total Births, 2009View 50-State Comparison
NC
% US
%
51% NA
(show/hide notes)
http://www.statehealthfacts.org/profileind.jsp?cat=4&sub=57&rgn=35
People can get free contraceptives under Title 10 in any public clinic. A church sponsored institution should not be require to do something that is again its faith. Remember the nasty little provision in the Constitution-'freedom of religion'?
ReplyDeleteAgain, liberals think they can use the government to compel people to conform to their perverted beliefs.
Let's get our morals from a man that swore allegiance to the Nazi Party as a teenager, was the head of the (renamed) Inquisition and is now the infallible absolute leader of a bunch of Holy child molesters. This man knows all about sex, but has never had any in like eighty years.
ReplyDeleteNow that's perverted.
Shame on you, Wordly. How can you say things like that about the poop? Oops, I meant, of course, the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, the successor of St. Peter, the chief pastor of the whole Church, and the Vicar of Christ upon earth.
DeleteDo you not understand that he is effing infallible? Which means, since all humans are fallible, that he is not human, but some monster from outer space, or as the poopists would have it, heaven.
And I'm pretty sure that you are wrong about that next to last statement. I'll bet you my life's savings against a single serving of Blo Gum, that the Holy See has had his thingymajig up more than one little boy or girl in his 80 years on our ephemeral planet.
This religious liberty thing is a farce. It is a ruse to control women to keep them underpaid and under the control of men. Women are not going back to the 1950s. There will be change in November. Look for a record numbers of women to be elected.
ReplyDeleteIt compromises MY religious liberty to have a U.S. Army sergeant murder women and children in Afghanistan today. I don't want my tax money going to kill women and children, and I consider this affront to the sanctity of life.
Oh, poor Wordly, you again misunderstand. Sanctity of life, as defined by the Right-to-Lifers, only applies to certain Southern Baptists, Papists, and other Americans exclusively. When it comes to foreigners and their ilk, be they Muslims, Buddhists or other pagans, all bets are off.
DeleteAnd it isn't just one sergeant doing the killing. There are thousands, who you and I have financed through our taxes.
During the CheneyBush years, that cost was never more than a few billion. When our current president wanted to justify bringing the troops home from Afghanistan, he raised the ante to a cool trillion.
Here are a few interesting facts from a recent Brown University study of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that barely begin to assess the real cost:
Measurable cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: $3.7-4.4 trillion. Billions more in expenses that cannot be measured.
Killed, mostly civilians: 224-258,000. Many more have died indirectly from loss of clean drinking water, health care and nutrition.
Plus an estimated 365,000 wounded and 7.8 million displaced from their homes, all just so Cheney could assert that his name is Dick.
This is an additional cost that will never be known.
Forgive the sergeants. They were just following orders. They know not what they did.
Never forgive Cheney and his puppet, W.
Most well read people know that the liberal Democrats HAVE to have women vote for Obama or he goes down to defeat in the next election. That's why liberals are 'inventing' a Republican war on women. It just a bunch of liberal nonsense as usual.
ReplyDeleteFor the record:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Control women? Looks like Obama wants to 'control' everybody, and everything.
DeleteWomen want the government to stay out of their lives regarding abortion etc., but when it comes to needing money for contraceptives, health care, and other social services, they can't get enough of government. What a surprise!
DeleteUS Government 1789-present
ReplyDeleteI'm still on Chicago time.
DeleteMe too. Have been for years...trying to get to LA time.
DeleteI saw a good bumper sticker today: Turn right, stay straight
ReplyDeleteSounds like a whole lot of wasted ink today to justify what the first amendment will not allow. We have a President not a dictator-yet. Until we over turn our first amendment, Lord Cromwell will still need his parliament.
ReplyDeleteNot necessarily wasted. Once you step past church services and become an enterprise, I see no 1st amendment problem. In fact, I see no reason why churches should be exempt from taxation in the first place.
ReplyDeleteThe big six downtown white churches here own property valued for taxes at well over $30 million. First Assembly of God's complex on University Parkway is valued at about $15 million. Calvary Baptist on Country Club Road is over $8 million. Add the hundreds of other church properties in our county and you are looking at millions of lost local tax dollars. That is a lot of subsidizing for us unchurched taxpayers.
Centenary Methodist takes in $150,000 per week in offering, over $7 million a year...and that is just their published figure. I wouldn't have a problem with that if I thought the money went to true Christian purposes.
They do have a couple of cookouts each year for the homeless. And they used to welcome the homeless to their regular Sunday service. But the suits were uncomfortable having to look at the ragged and bedraggled, so they began the Sunday "alternative" service, which is held in the basement. The reward for attending that is a free lunch. Out of sight, out of mind.
So what do they do with all that money? Build bigger and flashier cathedrals? Well, they have done that in the past, and continue to do so. But most goes for land purchases for more parking so that the congregants don't have to walk too far when the bell starts ringing on Sunday morning.
I guess "doing god's work" has become mostly pouring asphalt. A good bit of which is on my dollar.
Typical thought pattern of a liberal, always thinking of how to get at other people's money.
ReplyDelete