Culture
Clips —
October 10, 2006
The World We Leave Behind
Today, we live in a country
that is obsessed with its economic prosperity. We are comfortable
enough to spare ourselves the rigors of moral striving. Same-sex
marriages, eroding family values, ambushing innocent children
in class rooms, elected officials with a fetish for underage kids,
absentee fathers — these things cause concern but little more.
We proceed with the knowledge that American life will go on. We
are confident that we are the greatest empire in the history of
empires. This belief in the inevitability of our way of life breeds
certain carelessness to the truly important stuff of life. This
is the decadence that precedes the fall.
We need to continue passing the torch of moral excellence to our
children so that, down the road, they may realize something greater
than violence, sexual promiscuity, making celebrities out of a
former Governor who had secret and openly gay liaisons while married,
and disintegrating family values. For the true measure of our
success is the world we leave for our children.
If we strive for the high ground of moral excellence, we will
have improved the only corner of the universe that we can be certain
of improving. And that is ourselves. If we do this, our morality
will overflow from our own lives and trickle into the lives of
others. And then, in quiet moments when we’re alone, we will suddenly
realize that knowing the good, we have done it; knowing the righteous,
we have served it, knowing the truth, we have embodied it.
Armstrong Williams
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/Armstrong
Williams/2006/10/09/the_world_we_leave_behind
--
Abortion Chic
To put an accurate face on abortion would require something that
strict pro-choicers refuse to acknowledge: That abortion really
has three faces — that of the mother, the father, and that of
the ... what do we call it? Fetus is so South Park these days.
How about the quirky ``products of conception from your termination''?
That's how hospital administrators a few years ago in Glasgow,
Scotland, labeled the post-abortion remains from Nicola McManus,
who had induced the miscarriage of her nine-week-old ``baby,''
as I prefer to call it, upon taking the RU486 ``abortion pill.''
McManus was startled to discover the remains in a jar resting
on a shelf in her hospital room. Her outrage at the careless hospital
staff brought tears and the sort of statement Ms. & Co. prefer
not to hear: ``Women need more counseling before abortions, not
less,'' said McManus. ``I will never get over what happened to
me.''
A nine-week-old fetus, for the record, has a heartbeat, a closed
circulatory system, a respiratory system, eyes, ears and brain
function. She can't go shopping yet, but she can squint, swallow,
move her tongue and make a fist. She is not, in other words, ``just
a clump of cells.''
The problem with petitions and ``I Had an Abortion'' T-shirts,
such as those hawked by Planned Parenthood, is that they trivialize
the deeply emotional and spiritual consequences many women suffer.
Kathleen Parker
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/Kathleen
Parker/2006/10/06/abortion_chic
--
Culture Warrior
Bill O’Reilly has a message every American must understand: Our
country is under attack — from within.
O’Reilly’s new book, Culture
Warrior, boldly describes two disparate worldviews that
are competing for the very soul of our nation. On one side are
the “traditionalists,” those who know that America is a noble
enterprise, a beacon of hope and light for the world, and who
understand that our belief in God and our commitment to good has
made us the greatest nation on Earth. On the other side are the
secular-progressives (S-Ps), who see America as imperialistic
and intrinsically evil — and who want nothing more than to sanitize
our classrooms and our public squares from the alleged poison
of faith.
In an exclusive phone interview, Bill told me that the culture
war in which we’re all immersed is “not a political war, but is,
at its heart, a social war.” He’s right. And I believe that the
battle is also a spiritual one. It transcends politics. It’s bigger
than Republican vs. Democrat or conservative vs. liberal, and
the stakes are significantly higher than the next election.
We live in a defining era — a brief period in which America’s
future is at risk. Will we remain the land of the free and the
home of the brave? Or will we allow the secular humanists to hog-tie
our rights, and use the schools to drown our kids in their dogma,
while we simultaneously succumb to the siren song of malevolence
(the anthem of today’s media culture) and become just another
hopeless, Godless country in the mold of Western European nations
like France?
Kathleen Hagelin
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/Rebecca
Hagelin/2006/10/06/culture_warrior
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