Applying Our Faith to Our Lives

Let’s Put Madalyn to Rest

The dead are supposed to be at rest, apparently that’s not the case for atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair. According to some people Madalyn is still actively petitioning the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to ban religious broadcasting. The truth is that in 1995 Madalyn Murray O’Hair was killed by former associates for the assets of her organization American Athiests and buried on a ranch in Texas. But this hasn’t stopped eMail campaigns concerning Ms. O’Hair and FCC petition #2493.

FCC petition #2493 was submitted in December 1974 to question the practices of religious organizations granted station licenses. The petition asked the FCC to halt further issuing of licenses to religious organizations until the inquiry was completed. The petition was denied and Ms. O’Hair was not a sponsor of a petition. The FCC has issued a fact sheet on petition #2493 which can be found at their website: http://www.fcc.gov.cgb/.

There’s a couple of things about some of these eMail campaigns that should serve as a warning about their legitimacy. First, Ms. O’Hairs name is incorrectly spelled as O’Hare. Second these campaigns are always a grass roots effort, they don’t come from churches or ministries like Family Research Council http://www.frc.org/ that keep watch on issues pertaining to government and Christianity. If any person or group tries to ban broadcasting the Gospel we will hear about it from these ministries and our churches. The best news about all this is the FCC does not have the authority to ban religious broadcasting.

A variation of the eMail campaign has petition #2493 being submitted by an unspecified group, and Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family asking people to sign the eMail. Focus on the Family has refuted Dr. Dobson’s involvement on their website http://www.family.org/. Go the FAQ page and search for petition #2493.

Would it be cynical to say I suspect there are people who get their kicks out of initiating these petitions just to get the Lords people wasting their time? All it takes is one person to verify the validity of a petition and put a stop to another pointless eMail campaign. Let’s put petition #2493 and Madalyn Murray O’Hair to rest.

Current Book Releases

Among the recent books seeking to undermine the veracity of Jesus and the credibility of the Bible the largest selling is Bart D. Erhmans Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. Using an analytical method called textual criticism Professor Ehrman attempts to make the Bible look like the invention of the monks and other scholars who, Professor Ehrman claims, made changes and additions to the original manuscripts as they made copies. Textual criticism seeks to work with currently available manuscripts to reconstruct the original text, has Professor Ehrman correctly applied the techniques of textual criticism and has he correctly interpreted the results of his study?

For a good review of the book read the Daniel B Wallace review at bible.org. For a good review of Professor Ehrman’s analysis and book marketing read Fred Sanders’ article at Middlebrow.

May the Good Lord bless you,
Jerry Le May

Pruning My Reading List

I’m an avid reader. I have up to half a dozen books in progress at a time; collections of sports articles, history, theology, devotionals, true crime. Some books I’ll read straight through like Golda Meirs autobiography which I finished recently but some books I go through a chapter or two at a time like Working by Studs Terkel. I have subscriptions to World Magazine and Outside to keep up on events and to enjoy the excellent writing and the photos. I look at a number of on-line publications like Slate, Saturday Review, The Economist and Weekly Standard to name a few. I read carefully and weigh everything against that greatest of all books the Bible.

Lately I’ve decided to stop reading two newspaper because of the lack of journalistic integrity. The New York Times (NYT) and Los Angeles Times (LAT) have published sensitive information about our countries surveillance of financial transactions that will make it more difficult to track terrorist activity. The NYT and LAT, and other publications that defend them, claim they have the sacred role of holding the US Government accountable for their actions. An administration, in their view, that conducts surveillance of financial transactions without Congressional approval and oversight has overstepped their authority. So, the argument goes, the press is obligated to report this story. All this is done under the banner of a free press.

Never mind that the enemy has been tipped to our methods and will change the way they conduct their financial transactions to evade detection. The press claims the jihadists was already aware of the surveillance program so publishing an article about how our Government uses it to detect terrorist money transactions does not reveal sensitive or classified information. Not so, since Al Qaeda and other jihadist terror groups are loosely organized what one group knows may not be known by all groups.

We can always hope the jihadists get lazy and revert back to the convenience of using the modern banking system to transfer funds, it wouldn’t be the first time people have revealed their secrets by being lazy. During World War II the Nazis developed a secret code that if used properly was unbreakable. Before encoding a message the operator put a simple sequence of letters into a random generator which then encoded the message. Putting a different sequence letter into the random generator each time made the code different for each message. Well, an operator got lazy and used the same sequence for two different messages. A British decoding team noticed similar code sequences in sequential messages and because of the operator’s laziness were able to break the code used for those two and many other messages.

It’s not easy to give up the good writing in these two newspapers. Growing up in Orange County, California I read the great sports writer Jim Murray in the LAT for 20 years. Jim is gone now but I still enjoyed reading the quotes and stories in the Morning Briefing section of the sports page. And I loved the features in the New York Times Sunday magazine; The Diagnosis articles on elusive medical cases, the Lives stories of people like the man whose father used to take the family on all-night trips to watch for UFOs, the Ethics column and William Safire’s column on words. The NYT obituaries are the best, I read many written for the people who died in the Sept. 11 attacks.

So two newspaper websites have been removed from my list of favorites, what effects will this have? I don’t have subscriptions to cancel but visits to a website are recorded and the NYT and LAT negotiate advertising rates based on how many people are looking at their site. So the NYT and LAT have a few less visits per week from me, and I suspect others are doing the same. People are cancelling their subscriptions as well. The LAT has had steady reduction in subscriptions, 5% within one 6 month period.

I would think the NYT and LAT understand how good we all have it in the USA. The first obligation of any publication or other media broadcast is to serve their country, are the NYT and LAT serving the US by revealing information useful to our enemy?

May the Good Lord bless you.

Jerry Le May

Faith of the Democrats

The first Presidential campaign I actively followed was 1976 when Democrat Jimmy Carter ran against incumbent Republican Gerald Ford. The campaign was memorable to me not so much for President Fords debate blunder of claiming that Eastern European countries were not oppressed by communism but by Jimmy Carters statement that while he was personally opposed to abortion he wouldn’t prohibit anyone else from having one. I had been raised Catholic and though I wasn’t attending Mass, praying or doing anything spiritual at the time, Mr. Carters statement struck me as juxtaposed. As a candidate for office how could you believe something personally yet not seek to implement that believe into public policy?

A couple of years later a friend took me to an evangelistic concert where I met Jesus Christ and responded to His love by accepting Him as my Lord and Savior. I began to travel in Christian circles looking at life from a Biblical perspective. I was glad when openly evangelical Ronald Reagan was elected President. When Jimmy Carter returned to private life I became aware that he was also a professing believer who became active in charitable causes such as Habitat For Humanity. A friend had his picture taken with Jimmy and Roslyn after a Sunday service at their Baptist church in Plains, I saw no difference spiritually between the former and current Presidents.

During the election of 2000 when both the Democrats and Republicans had a professing evangelical believer as a candidate I began to contrast how they made their faith a part of their candidacy. I saw George Bush declare his faith in Jesus Christ and state his belief in the sanctity of human life and later that marriage is a union between a man and a woman. I also saw Al and Tipper Gore when asked in an interview about the election say they wanted what the Lord wanted. Yet on the convention platform in Los Angeles Al Gore declared emphatically he would fight for a woman’s right to choose. It then occurred to me that through the years of my adult life most Democratic Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates have declared a personal faith in God but refused to make Biblical values a part of the policies they would seek to implement if elected.

Starting with Jimmy Carter in ’76, who added to his duplicitous stand on abortion by stating in a recent interview with Charlie Rose that George Bush won the ’04 election because so many homophobic voters went to the poles to vote on the many state constitutional marriage amendments. Then in ’84 Democrat congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro was running mate to Walter Mondale. Ms. Ferraro was a Catholic representing a largely Catholic New York district, and a staunch supporter of abortion. In ’92 Bill Clinton was a professing Southern Baptist. His first act as President was to order the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration to coordinate the marketing of the RU-486 abortion pill. He also dismantled the military ban on homosexuals with the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy which furthered the agenda of the Gay and Lesbian community at the expense of the Military.

In ’00 Al Gore and Joe Lieberman ran for the Democrats, Al Gores duplicity has already been noted. Joe Lieberman who claimed a Jewish faith opposed gay marriage but supported adding sexual orientation to the list of motivations for a hate crime and supported abortion. Some commentators suggested Mr. Gore failed to win his home state of Tennessee in the election because of the influx of new voters, other however pointed out that Tennessee’s many evangelical voters saw the genuine article in Mr. Bush and voted that way.

Then in ’04 it was John Kerry and John Edwards, again both professing a belief in God yet both supported abortion on demand. John Kerry ‘personally believed’ that marriage is between a man and a woman but said the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was fundamentally ugly and claimed the constitution calls for same sex partnership rights. John Edwards opposed DOMA because the states could ignore gay marriages and voted to include sexual orientation as a motivator for hate crimes. Using the phrase so many Democrats have used in the past John Edwards ‘personally opposed’ gay marriage but he didn’t see a need for state constitutions to be amended since one state does not have to recognize a marriage performed in another state.

And who knows what the future holds. It is said that New York’s junior senator Hillary Clinton is being influenced by the Bible study she attends, and while it’s true she does not emphatically endorse the Roe vs Wade decision she hasn’t said the decision was wrong or should be overturned. She also voted against the Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as a union between a man an woman. The public policy of Hillary’s spouse has already been noted. Farther on the horizon is Barak Obama. At the ’04 Democratic convention he stood with his pastor, yet in a Charlie Rose interview he noted that a large number (1 million?) people who voted for President Bush voted for him even though Barak’s positions on issues were the same as John Kerry. Baraks website refers to opponents of abortion as right-wing ideologues.

So what’s the point? If a candidate professes faith in God it is their obligation to incorporate their faith into their public policy, if they refuse to then they shouldn’t be in office. Something to keep in mind at this year’s election and as the Presidential election cycle begins.

May the Good Lord bless you.

Jerry Le May

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