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Court Rules Man Who Identifies as Woman Must Be Allowed in Women’s Jail

Joshua Arnold  / August 21, 2022

A recent court decision ruled that a male identifying as a female, named Williams, who was imprisoned in Fairfax County, Virginia should be housed with female inmates, even though he retains male body parts. (Photo illustration: Mario De Moya F/Getty Images)

COMMENTARY BY

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand, contributing both news and commentary from a biblical worldview.

In a split decision on Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the 4^th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that “gender dysphoria” is a protected class under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The court ruled that a male identifying as a female, named Williams, who was imprisoned in Fairfax County, Virginia should be housed with the female inmates, even though he retains male body parts. 

The prison has a policy that “male inmates shall be classified as such if they have male genitals,” and “female inmates shall be classified as such if they have female genitals.” That’s surprisingly sound for Fairfax County—certainly better than their schools—but it was too commonsensical for the court. 

Although the majority opinion spans 35 pages, the verdict seems inevitable after the first sentence, which called the complainant “a transgender woman with gender dysphoria.” When the whole dispute is over whether a person should be housed in the male prison or female prison, such a biased presentation of the facts tips the court’s hand. As might be expected from this mistaken beginning, the entire opinion emphasizes the wrong points at every turn—including consistently feminine pronouns for the biological male.

The opinion devotes considerable space to whether a person with gender dysphoria can even raise a claim under the ADA, and it’s quickly apparent why. Among the conditions excluded from ADA privileges are “gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments.” For 15 years, Williams has taken hormone treatments for “gender dysphoria,” which the court defined as “discomfort or distress that is caused by a discrepancy between a person’s gender identity and that person’s sex assigned at birth.”

The majority devoted about half the opinion explaining, unpersuasively, that “gender dysphoria” was not excluded under “gender identity disorders.” A close parallel to their logic would be that trucks are not sedans, and therefore a “no cars allowed” sign does not apply to them.

The rest of the opinion is devoted to reframing the action of prison officials, who were just doing their jobs, in the worst possible light, given the court’s reality-free perspective of the facts. Although initially assigned quarters with the female inmates, Williams was reassigned to the male side of the prison when a female prison nurse learned he had male body parts. 

The decision condemns the nurse for this and for failing to deliver his female hormone treatments promptly. “Deputies also required [him] to give up the women’s clothing [he] had previously received and to wear men’s clothing,” they wrote (original incorrectly uses feminine pronouns). Gasp—how horrible!

In the male unit, Williams claimed he was “harassed” by other inmates and by deputies. But the only specific examples of harassment cited by the court include the use of respectful but masculine titles, such as “mister,” “sir,” and “gentleman.” Deputies also refused his requests to have a female officer conduct body searches—you know, because he has a male body—a request that would have potentially traumatized the female deputy.

On one occasion, a male deputy, whom Williams named in the suit, attempted to perform a body search on the uncooperative Williams. He is quoted in the opinion as saying, “Sir, you are a male, and I need to search you.” If Williams was actually a female, such a remark and search would be understandably violative. But since he is a male, in a male prison, it’s hard to see how the deputy could have said anything different.

The opinion also held Sheriff Stacey Kinkaid had committed “gross negligence” for allowing her deputies to perform these gross violations (or routine activities, if you believe in reality). It reversed the lower court’s decision (which had dismissed the complaint) and remanded the decision back to the lower court.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has jurisdiction over Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia. Far from being known for conservatism, it was one of four circuit courts that pioneered striking down state marriage laws, even before the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision. The Supreme Court is unlikely to consider the case unless there is a circuit split.

The decision represents a gross miscarriage of justice, based upon the majority’s refusal to consider the issue from any point of view except the fantasy one invented by Williams. The dissenting opinion points this out, noting that allowing Williams to be housed with female inmates and searched by female guards “create a separate set of concerns and safety issues.” He adds, “Sheriff Kincaid’s responsibilities extend not just to transgender inmates but to all inmates and prison employees.”

Indeed, transferring males who identify as females to female-only prison units is not a victimless policy decision. Female inmates at prisons in California, New York, and Washington have suffered sexual assault and rape from men pretending to be women. The policy question at issue is, should we upend the order of our penal system and subject women to violence to coddle the fantasies of a slim minority? Unless the answer is “yes,” then the 4th Circuit’s Tuesday decision was wrong.

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A Proclamation on Transgender Day Of Visibility, 2022

MARCH 30, 2022PRESIDENTIAL ACTIONS

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

In the past year, hundreds of anti-transgender bills in States were proposed across America, most of them targeting transgender kids.  The onslaught has continued this year.  These bills are wrong.  Efforts to criminalize supportive medical care for transgender kids, to ban transgender children from playing sports, and to outlaw discussing LGBTQI+ people in schools undermine their humanity and corrode our Nation’s values.  Studies have shown that these political attacks are damaging to the mental health and well-being of transgender youth, putting children and their families at greater risk of bullying and discrimination.

Transgenderism: Why Stop There?

Deroy Murdock  / April 01, 2022

LGBT activists rally on the steps of New York City Hall in support of transgender people on Oct. 24, 2018. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

COMMENTARY BY

Deroy Murdock

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor, a contributing editor with National Review Online, and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research.

“Identifying” as someone who one is not has become all the rage. If you think you’re somebody you’re not, the whole world is expected to nod its collective head, if not stand up and cheer.

This is especially true for gender identity, as William “Lia” Thomas has demonstrated so vividly in collegiate swimming pools. Unheralded male swimmer William Thomas became NCAA champion female swimmer Lia Thomas—Shazam!—just by saying so.

What a cool magic trick.

Gone are the days when a guy had to put some skin in the game to pull this off. Or, more accurately, pull something off to get some skin out of the game; namely, his penis. The old carving-station requirement for gender transition has gone the way of the rotary telephone. Today, mere affirmations will suffice.

“Hey, I’m a girl!” And you are.

As Yogi Berra might say, if he were alive and not in shock: “Only in America.”

Since simple declarations of identity can change people more swiftly than scalpels, what’s next after the triumph of transgenderism?

Why not transnationalism?

Visualize Lupita Martinez. She lives in poverty in Honduras. The mean streets of Tegucigalpa keep her at wits’ end. A crime surge on public transportation is the last macaw that breaks the branch of her patience.

So, Martinez joins a caravan and heads north, to the U.S.-Mexican frontier.

When she comes face to face with a Border Patrol agent, Martinez says the magic words: “I identify as an American.”

“Welcome home, Lupita!” the federal agent says with a warm smile, as he waves this Honduran American citizen back where she belongs.

And why not transracialism?

Picture Ludwig Von Thannhausen, age 18. He lives in suburban Chicago with his native German parents who brought him to America as a baby. He has blond hair, blue eyes, and looks like a young man born in Oberpfaffenhofen who also happens to be white.

But Von Thannhausen can’t get enough of things black.

He is obsessed with the Harlem Renaissance. He knows the literature of Langston Hughes better than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the paintings of Aaron Douglas more than Max Ernst, and the music of Duke Ellington deeper than Richard Wagner.

His heroes stretch from Frederick Douglass to the Tuskegee Airmen to Denzel Washington. He listens to everything from Motown to Parliament Funkadelic to Prince to Kanye West.

He dreams of majoring in black studies at Howard University in Washington, D.C., a historically black college. In fact, he’s applying as a black student and seeks scholarships intended for black applicants.

Von Thannhausen resembles a recruit for the Aryan Nation, but he said the secret words: “I identify as black.”

Who are we to disagree? If that’s his identity, that’s his identity.

And if his good grades, decent SAT scores, and impressive baseball record land him a spot at Howard, plus a $50,000 minority scholarship, then who are we to say that he is not really black?

But what would we say to the kid who actually is black (you know: dark skin, dark hair, etc.), applies to Howard, and misses out on admission, a scholarship, or both? If not for Von Thannhausen, those blessings would be hers.

Why not transindividualism?

Imagine that Bob Glenwood has multiple-personality disorder. He identifies as Bob Glenwood, but also as Steve Jones, Myron Shapiro, Jackie Washington, and Concepcion Gomez.

So, he fills out five voter registration applications and requests five absentee ballots.

Who are we to say that Glenwood deserves just one ballot? How dare we disenfranchise the other four people who live inside his brain? That would be Jim Crow 3.0.

As these (for now) fictional scenarios show, America will plunge into ever deeper chaos if we simply let people “identify” as those they are not and then deprive others of goods and benefits meant for people who legitimately embody those identities.

I identify as Walter Cronkite, and that’s the way it is.

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

SOCIETYNEWS

‘The Equal Rights of Female Athletes Are Being Infringed’: Women’s Group Files Civil Rights Complaint Over Transgender Swimmer

Maggie Hroncich  / March 18, 2022

Female swimmers (from left) Emma Weyant, Erica Sullivan, and Brooke Forde place behind Lia Thomas (left), the biologically male transgender swimmer who won the NCAA Division 1 women’s 500-yard freestyle on Thursday. (Photo: Justin Casterline/Getty Images)

Concerned Women for America filed a formal civil rights complaint against the University of Pennsylvania on Thursday, contending the school is violating Title IX requirements designed to protect the rights of female student athletes. 

The complaint came the same day transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, a biological male, won the 500-yard freestyle at the NCAA’s Division 1 Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships in Atlanta. Thomas is set to compete in the 100-yard and 200-yard freestyles today and tomorrow.

Thomas, who had previously competed on the men’s team, has been dominating women’s competitions and shattering records since switching to the women’s team in 2020.

“Thomas is anatomically and biologically a male with physical capacities that are different from anatomically and biologically female athletes, which extends an unfair advantage and strips female student athletes of opportunities afforded to them by law,” according to a statement from Concerned Women for America, a Christian conservative public policy organization. 

The complaint cites federal Title IX requirements for schools to provide equal educational opportunities, including in athletics, to receive federal funding. 

“The future of women’s sports is at risk, and the equal rights of female athletes are being infringed,” said Penny Nance, CEO and president of Concerned Women for America. “Any school that defies federal civil rights law by denying women equal opportunities in athletic programs, forcing women to compete against athletes who are biologically male, must be held accountable.”

Jay Richards, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, expressed support for Concerned Women for America’s complaint against the University of Pennsylvania. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

“The case of Lia (formerly Will) Thomas at the University of Pennsylvania is a highly visible example of how gender ideology is already wreaking havoc in our schools,” Richards said. “And it’s clearly a violation of the spirit and letter of Title IX. I just hope that courts have the courage to recognize that. If justice is to be served, then CWA should prevail.” 

Before I show the clip from AFTER LIFE let me show you how inconsistent humanists can be with this article below. Humanist claim to be the biggest supporters of women’s rights!!

By Canceling Richard Dawkins, the American Humanist Association Has Betrayed Its Values

The drive to punish dissenters from various orthodoxies is itself illiberal.

ROBBY SOAVE | 4.26.2021 1:00 PM

(Katja Ogrin/Empics Entertainment/ZUMA Press/Newscom)

Last week, the American Humanist Association (AHA) stripped British author Richard Dawkins of his 1996 Humanist of the Year award after he made a comment on Twitter that offended some in the transgender community.

“Regrettably, Richard Dawkins has over the past several years accumulated a history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalized groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values,” said the AHA. “His latest statement implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient.”

This is nonsense: Dawkins had raised a point that it is perfectly worthy of discussion, in accordance with the rationalist philosophy of the humanist movement. But it would also have been ridiculous for the organization to punish Dawkins even if the remark had been offensive, given that many of its past awardees have espoused controversial views, and even said insensitive things on Twitter.

Here was Dawkins’ tweet, which concerned Rachel Dolezal, a chapter president of the NAACP who engendered controversy for identifying as black even though she was a white woman:

If it’s disqualifying to express confusion about progressives’ simultaneous embrace of transgender people and vehement rejection of transracial people, I suppose that I will never win a Humanist of the Year award. I wrote the following in my 2019 book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump:

If we accept, as many on the left do, that people can identify as female even though they were born male, why is it unthinkable for people to identify as black when they were born white? How can the left embrace transgender people without even considering the possibility that there could be transracial people? (Race, after all, is more obviously socially constructed than gender. While our conception of gender is at least partly based on biological differences between the sexes, the same is not true for race.)

The point is not to demean transgender people, but to question why people like Dolezal instantly warranted pariah status. Dawkins subsequently clarified that it was not his intention “to ally in any way with Republican bigots in US now exploiting this issue.”

But according to the AHA, this clarification evinced “neither sensitivity nor sincerity.” Dawkins’ name is no longer listed on the website’s awardees page.

Perusing this page reveals something interesting: There are far more controversial past winners than Dawkins. The AHA gave Humanist of the Year awards to the author and activist Alice Walker—who promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories—and also to Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood who promoted eugenics and white supremacy. Sanger’s legacy is so complicated that her own organization is currently disowning her.

The AHA has also given lesser awards to several individuals with a history of provocative statements and bad tweets: Jessica Valenti, Cenk Uygur, and others. To be clear, the AHA is within its rights to give or rescind awards to anyone it wishes, for any reason. But people who support the organization’s mission have the same right to criticize it for hypocrisy.

Two such critics are Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker, who won the Humanist of the Year award in 2011 and 2006, respectively. Goldstein and Pinker wrote an open letter to the AHA calling on it to reverse course:

Dawkins did not call for discrimination against or marginalization of any individual or group. And he explicitly denied any intention to disparage anyone or to lend support to transphobic or racist political movements.  Now, it would still be completely appropriate for those of you who objected to the substance of his tweets to criticize them in The Humanist or other forums, explaining the nature of their objections. But to seek to punish, dishonor, or humiliate a writer rather than engage with his words is a betrayal of humanism.

The Humanist Manifesto III declares that “the lifestance of humanism [is] guided by reason.” Since no one is infallible, reason requires that a diverse range of ideas be expressed and debated openly, including ones that some people find unfamiliar or uncomfortable. To demonize a writer rather than address the writer’s arguments is a confession that one has no rational response to them.

This illiberal response is all the more damaging to an organization that claims to repudiate the repressive practices of religion. It has not been lost on commentators that an association of “freethinkers” has deemed certain thoughts unthinkable, nor that it is enforcing dogmas and catechisms by excommunicating a heretic. The AHA is turning itself into a laughingstock.

Goldstein and Pinker are quite right. The AHA’s own values require tolerance of difficult conversations around public policy subjects, rather than a knee-jerk drive to punish dissenters from orthodoxies.

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After Life #1 Trailer

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I listened to this question and answer session at Harvard in 1992 on cassette tapes and was captivated with Ravi Zacharias. His responses were so much better than Kath’s responses to Tony in AFTER LIFE. I have referenced work by Ravi many times in the past and Especially moving was Ravi’s own spiritual search which started in a hospital bed after a failed suicide attempt. I also want you to check out his talk at Princeton and the question and answer time afterwards which are both on YOU TUBEat these two links: Link for talk, Link for Q/A.

After Life 2 Trailer

On Saturday April 18, 2020 at 6pm in London and noon in Arkansas, I had a chance to ask Ricky Gervais a question on his Twitter Live broadcast which was  “Is Tony a Nihilist?” At the 20:51 mark Ricky answers my question. Below is the video:

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If Death is the end then what is the point Kath asks below:

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Francis Schaeffer passed away on May 15, 1984 and on the 10th anniversary of that date I wrote many skeptics such as Carl Sagan and corresponded with them on the big questions covered by the Book of Ecclesiastes.

Kath: You are an atheist?

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Adrian Rogers on Evolution

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Ravi Zacharias  (March 26, 1946 – May 19, 2020) 

Francis Schaeffer (January 30, 1912 – May 15, 1984^[1]) 

I grew up at Bellevue Baptist Church under the leadership of our pastor Adrian Rogers and I read many books by the Evangelical Philosopher Francis Schaeffer and in 1992 I heard cassette tapes of Ravi Zacharias in all his brilliance in his sessions at Harvard and have had the opportunity to contact many of the evolutionists or humanistic academics that they have mentioned in their works. Many of these scholars have taken the time to respond back to me in the last 20 years and some of the names  included are  Ernest Mayr (1904-2005), George Wald (1906-1997), Carl Sagan (1934-1996),  Robert Shapiro (1935-2011), Nicolaas Bloembergen (1920-),  Brian Charlesworth (1945-),  Francisco J. Ayala (1934-) Elliott Sober (1948-), Kevin Padian (1951-), Matt Cartmill (1943-) , Milton Fingerman (1928-), John J. Shea (1969-), , Michael A. Crawford (1938-), Paul Kurtz (1925-2012), Sol Gordon (1923-2008), Albert Ellis (1913-2007), Barbara Marie Tabler (1915-1996), Renate Vambery (1916-2005), Archie J. Bahm (1907-1996), Aron S “Gil” Martin ( 1910-1997), Matthew I. Spetter (1921-2012), H. J. Eysenck (1916-1997), Robert L. Erdmann (1929-2006), Mary Morain (1911-1999), Lloyd Morain (1917-2010),  Warren Allen Smith (1921-), Bette Chambers (1930-),  Gordon Stein (1941-1996) , Milton Friedman (1912-2006), John Hospers (1918-2011), Michael Martin (1932-).Harry Kroto (1939-), Marty E. Martin (1928-), Richard Rubenstein (1924-), James Terry McCollum (1936-), Edward O. WIlson (1929-), Lewis Wolpert (1929), Gerald Holton(1922-), Martin Rees (1942-), Alan Macfarlane (1941-),  Roald Hoffmann (1937-), Herbert Kroemer (1928-), Thomas H. Jukes(1906-1999) and  Ray T. Cragun (1976-).

 Adrian Rogers (September 12, 1931 – November 15, 2005) 

Charles Darwin Autobiography

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Francis Schaeffer “The Age of NONREASON”

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(Above) Tony and Anne on the bench at the graveyard where their spouses are buried.

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July 9, 2020 
Ricky Gervais 

Dear Ricky,  

This is the 83rd day in a row that I have written another open letter to you to comment on some of your episodes of AFTER LIFE, and then I wanted to pass along some evidence that indicates the Bible is historically accurate from Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop Book WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?

In the 6th episode of the second season of AFTERLIFE Tony and Lenny interview a 50 year old person who pretends to be a 8 year old little girl when everyone in his family knows this person has been around for 50 years. 

Just pretending something is true does not make it true. This was true too for Jean Paul Sartre. The atheist Sartre said that this Godless universe has no meaning but “Let’s pretend the universe has meaning.” But this is just fooling ourselves. 

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Let me share a portion of an article by William Lane Craig with you.

The Absurdity of Life without God

William Lane Craig

SUMMARY

Why on atheism life has no ultimate meaning, value, or purpose, and why this view is unlivable.

Francis Schaeffer has explained this point well. Modern man, says Schaeffer, resides in a two-story universe. In the lower story is the finite world without God; here life is absurd, as we have seen. In the upper story are meaning, value, and purpose. Now modern man lives in the lower story because he believes there is no God. But he cannot live happily in such an absurd world; therefore, he continually makes leaps of faith into the upper story to affirm meaning, value, and purpose, even though he has no right to, since he does not believe in God.

Let’s look again, then, at each of the three areas in which we saw life was absurd without God, to show how man cannot live consistently and happily with his atheism.

Meaning of Life

First, the area of meaning. We saw that without God, life has no meaning. Yet philosophers continue to live as though life does have meaning. For example, Sartre argued that one may create meaning for his life by freely choosing to follow a certain course of action. Sartre himself chose Marxism.

Now this is utterly inconsistent. It is inconsistent to say life is objectively absurd and then to say one may create meaning for his life. If life is really absurd, then man is trapped in the lower story. To try to create meaning in life represents a leap to the upper story. But Sartre has no basis for this leap. Without God, there can be no objective meaning in life. Sartre’s program is actually an exercise in self-delusion. Sartre is really saying, “Let’s pretend the universe has meaning.” And this is just fooling ourselves.

The point is this: if God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless; but man cannot live consistently and happily knowing that life is meaningless; so in order to be happy he pretends life has meaning. But this is, of course, entirely inconsistent—for without God, man and the universe are without any real significance.

Value of Life

Turn now to the problem of value. Here is where the most blatant inconsistencies occur. First of all, atheistic humanists are totally inconsistent in affirming the traditional values of love and brotherhood. Camus has been rightly criticized for inconsistently holding both to the absurdity of life and the ethics of human love and brotherhood. The two are logically incompatible. Bertrand Russell, too, was inconsistent. For though he was an atheist, he was an outspoken social critic, denouncing war and restrictions on sexual freedom. Russell admitted that he could not live as though ethical values were simply a matter of personal taste, and that he therefore found his own views “incredible.” “I do not know the solution,” he confessed.” [7] The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong cannot exist. As Dostoyevsky said, “All things are permitted.”

But Dostoyevsky also showed that man cannot live this way. He cannot live as though it is perfectly all right for soldiers to slaughter innocent children. He cannot live as though it is all right for dictators like Pol Pot to exterminate millions of their own countrymen. Everything in him cries out to say these acts are wrong—really wrong. But if there is no God, he cannot. So he makes a leap of faith and affirms values anyway. And when he does so, he reveals the inadequacy of a world without God.

The horror of a world devoid of value was brought home to me with new intensity a few years ago as I viewed a BBC television documentary called “The Gathering.” It concerned the reunion of survivors of the Holocaust in Jerusalem, where they rediscovered lost friendships and shared their experiences. One woman prisoner, a nurse, told of how she was made the gynecologist at Auschwitz. She observed that pregnant women were grouped together by the soldiers under the direction of Dr. Mengele and housed in the same barracks. Some time passed, and she noted that she no longer saw any of these women. She made inquiries. “Where are the pregnant women who were housed in that barracks?” “Haven’t you heard?” came the reply. “Dr. Mengele used them for vivisection.”

Another woman told of how Mengele had bound up her breasts so that she could not suckle her infant. The doctor wanted to learn how long an infant could survive without nourishment. Desperately this poor woman tried to keep her baby alive by giving it pieces of bread soaked in coffee, but to no avail. Each day the baby lost weight, a fact that was eagerly monitored by Dr. Mengele. A nurse then came secretly to this woman and told her, “I have arranged a way for you to get out of here, but you cannot take your baby with you. I have brought a morphine injection that you can give to your child to end its life.” When the woman protested, the nurse was insistent: “Look, your baby is going to die anyway. At least save yourself.” And so this mother took the life of her own baby. Dr. Mengele was furious when he learned of it because he had lost his experimental specimen, and he searched among the dead to find the baby’s discarded corpse so that he could have one last weighing.

My heart was torn by these stories. One rabbi who survived the camp summed it up well when he said that at Auschwitz it was as though there existed a world in which all the Ten Commandments were reversed. Mankind had never seen such a hell.

And yet, if God does not exist, then in a sense, our world is Auschwitz: there is no absolute right and wrong; all things are permitted. But no atheist, no agnostic, can live consistently with such a view. Nietzsche himself, who proclaimed the necessity of living beyond good and evil, broke with his mentor Richard Wagner precisely over the issue of the composer’s anti-Semitism and strident German nationalism. Similarly Sartre, writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, condemned anti-Semitism, declaring that a doctrine that leads to extermination is not merely an opinion or matter of personal taste, of equal value with its opposite. [8] In his important essay “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” Sartre struggles vainly to elude the contradiction between his denial of divinely pre-established values and his urgent desire to affirm the value of human persons. Like Russell, he could not live with the implications of his own denial of ethical absolutes.

A second problem is that if God does not exist and there is no immortality, then all the evil acts of men go unpunished and all the sacrifices of good men go unrewarded. But who can live with such a view? Richard Wurmbrand, who has been tortured for his faith in communist prisons, says,

The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe when man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil. There is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man. The communist torturers often said, ‘There is no God, no Hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish.’ I have heard one torturer even say, ‘I thank God, in whom I don’t believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.’ He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners. [9]

And the same applies to acts of self-sacrifice. A number of years ago, a terrible mid-winter air disaster occurred in which a plane leaving the Washington, D.C., airport smashed into a bridge spanning the Potomac River, plunging its passengers into the icy waters. As the rescue helicopters came, attention was focused on one man who again and again pushed the dangling rope ladder to other passengers rather than be pulled to safety himself. Six times he passed the ladder by. When they came again, he was gone. He had freely given his life that others might live. The whole nation turned its eyes to this man in respect and admiration for the selfless and good act he had performed. And yet, if the atheist is right, that man was not noble—he did the stupidest thing possible. He should have gone for the ladder first, pushed others away if necessary in order to survive. But to die for others he did not even know, to give up all the brief existence he would ever have—what for? For the atheist there can be no reason. And yet the atheist, like the rest of us, instinctively reacts with praise for this man’s selfless action. Indeed, one will probably never find an atheist who lives consistently with his system. For a universe without moral accountability and devoid of value is unimaginably terrible.

The Success of Biblical Christianity

But if atheism fails in this regard, what about biblical Christianity? According to the Christian world view, God does exist, and man’s life does not end at the grave. In the resurrection body man may enjoy eternal life and fellowship with God. Biblical Christianity therefore provides the two conditions necessary for a meaningful, valuable, and purposeful life for man: God and immortality. Because of this, we can live consistently and happily. Thus, biblical Christianity succeeds precisely where atheism breaks down.

Conclusion

Now I want to make it clear that I have not yet shown biblical Christianity to be true. But what I have done is clearly spell out the alternatives. If God does not exist, then life is futile. If the God of the Bible does exist, then life is meaningful. Only the second of these two alternatives enables us to live happily and consistently. Therefore, it seems to me that even if the evidence for these two options were absolutely equal, a rational person ought to choose biblical Christianity. It seems to me positively irrational to prefer death, futility, and destruction to life, meaningfulness, and happiness. As Pascal said, we have nothing to lose and infinity to gain.

• [1]Kai Nielsen, “Why Should I Be Moral?” American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1984): 90.
• [2]Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1985), 90, 84.
• [3]H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (New York: Berkeley, 1957), chap. 11.
• [4]W.E. Hocking, Types of Philosophy (New York: Scribner’s, 1959), 27.
• [5]Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Gay Science,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), 95.
• [6]Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” in Why I Am Not a Christian, ed. P. Edwards (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), 107.
• [7]Bertrand Russell, Letter to the Observer, 6 October, 1957.
• [8]Jean Paul Sartre, “Portrait of the Antisemite,” in Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Satre, rev. ed., ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: New Meridian Library, 1975), p. 330.
• [9]Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1967), 34.
• [10]Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 2d ed., 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1959), 2:360-1.
• [11]Loyal D. Rue, “The Saving Grace of Noble Lies,” address to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, February, 1991.

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This reminds me of an illustration from Francis Schaeffer of what existentialism means: 

When we speak of irrationalism or existentialism or the existential methodology, we are pointing to a quite simple idea. It may have been expressed in a variety of complicated ways by philosophers, but it is not a difficult concept.
Imagine that you are at the movies watching a suspense film. As the story unfolds, the tension increases until finally the hero is trapped in some impossible situation and everyone is groaning inwardly, wondering how he is going to get out of the mess. The suspense is heightened by the knowledge (of the audience, not the hero) that help is on the way in the form of the good guys. The only question is: will the good guys arrive in time?
Now imagine for a moment that the audience is slipped the information that there are no good guys, that the situation of the hero is not just desperate, but completely hopeless. Obviously, the first thing that would happen is that the suspense would be gone. You and the entire audience would simply be waiting for the axe to fall.
If the hero faced the end with courage, this would be morally edifying, but the situation itself would be tragic. If, however, the hero acted as if help were around the corner and kept buoying himself up with this thought (“Someone is on the way!” – “Help is at hand!”), all you could feel for him would be pity. It would be a means to keep hope alive within a hopeless situation. The hero’s hope would change nothing on the outside; it would be unable to manufacture, out of nothing, good guys coming to the rescue. All it would achieve would the hero’s own mental state of hopefulness rather than hopelessness.
The hopefulness itself would rest on a lie or an illusion and thus, viewed objectively, would be finally absurd. And if the hero really knew what the situation was, but consciously used the falsehood to buoy up his feelings and go whistling along, we would either say, “Poor guy!” or “He’s a fool.” It is this kind of conscious deceit that someone like Woody Allen has looked full in the face and will have none of.
Now this is what the existential methodology is about. If the universe we are living in is what the materialistic humanists say it is, then with our reason (when we stop to think about it) we could find absolutely no way to have meaning or morality or hope or beauty. This would plunge us into despair. We would have to take seriously the challenge of Albert Camus (1913-1960) in the first sentence of The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”92 Why stay alive in an absurd universe? Ah! But that is not where we stop. We say to ourselves – “There is hope!” (even though there is no help). “We shall overcome!” (even though nothing is more certain than that we shall be destroyed, both individually at death and cosmically with the end of all conscious life). This is what confronts us on all sides today: the modern irrationalism.

Francis Schaeffer has correctly argued:

The universe was created by an infinite personal God and He brought it into existence by spoken word and made man in His own image. When man tries to reduce [philosophically in a materialistic point of view] himself to less than this [less than being made in the image of God] he will always fail and he will always be willing to make these impossible leaps into the area of nonreason even though they don’t give an answer simply because that isn’t what he is. He himself testifies that this infinite personal God, the God of the Old and New Testament is there. 

Instead of making a leap into the area of nonreason the better choice would be to investigate the claims that the Bible is a historically accurate book and that God created the universe and reached out to humankind with the Bible. Below is a piece of that evidence given by Francis Schaeffer concerning the accuracy of the Bible.

TRUTH AND HISTORY (chapter 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?)

We now take a jump back in time to the middle of the ninth century before Christ, that is, about 850 B.C. Most people have heard of Jezebel. She was the wife of Ahab, the king of the northern kingdom of Israel. Her wickedness has become so proverbial that we talk about someone as a “Jezebel.” She urged her husband to have Naboth killed, simply because Ahab had expressed his liking for a piece of land owned by Naboth, who would not sell it. The Bible tells us also that she introduced into Israel the worship of her homeland, the Baal worship of Tyre. This led to the opposition of Elijah the Prophet and to the famous conflict on Mount Carmel between Elijah and the priests of Baal.

Here again one finds archaeological confirmations of what the Bible says. Take for example: “As for the other events of Ahab’s reign, including all he did, the palace he built and inlaid with ivory, and the cities he fortified, are they not written in the book of the annals of the kings of Israel?” (I Kings 22:39).

This is a very brief reference in the Bible to events which must have taken a long time: building projects which probably spanned decades. Archaeological excavations at the site of Samaria, the capital, reveal something of the former splendor of the royal citadel. Remnants of the “ivory house” were found and attracted special attention (Palestinian Archaeological Museum, Jerusalem). This appears to have been a treasure pavilion in which the walls and furnishings had been adorned with colored ivory work set with inlays giving a brilliant too, with the denunciations revealed by the prophet Amos:

“I will tear down the winter house along with the summer house; the houses adorned with ivory will be destroyed and the mansions will be demolished,” declares the Lord. (Amos 3:15)

Other archaeological confirmation exists for the time of Ahab. Excavations at Hazor and Megiddo have given evidence of the the extent of fortifications carried out by Ahab. At Megiddo, in particular, Ahab’s works were very extensive including a large series of stables formerly assigned to Solomon’s time.

On the political front, Ahab had to contend with danger from the Aramacaus king of Syria who besieged Samaria, Ahab’s capital. Ben-hadad’s existence is attested by a stela (a column with writing on it) which has been discovered with his name written on it (Melquart Stela, Aleppo Museum, Syria). Again, a detail of history given in the Bible is shown to be correct.

This brings me to the message of Solomon in ECCLESIASTES and below are comments by Francis Schaeffer:

Ecclesiastes 9:7-12

⁷ Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do.

⁸ Let your garments be always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head.

⁹ Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, (DOES IT SOUND OPTIMISTIC? NOW COMES THE BACKLASH) all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. ¹⁰ Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.

¹¹ Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all. ¹² For man does not know his time. Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them.

Solomon when at work takes off his hat and he stands by the grave of man and he says, “ALAS. ALAS. ALAS.”

But interestingly enough the story of Ecclesiastes does not end its message here because in two places in the New Testament it is picked up and carried along and put in its proper perspective.

Luke 12:16-21

¹⁶ And he told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully, ¹⁷ and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ ¹⁸ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. ¹⁹ And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax,eat, drink, be merry.”’ [ALMOST EVERYONE WHO HAS PROCEEDED HERE HAS FELT CERTAINLY THAT JESUS IS DELIBERATELY REFERRING TO SOLOMON’S SOLUTION.]²⁰ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ ²¹ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”

Christ here points out the reason for the failure of the logic that is involved. He points out why it fails in logic and then why it fails in reality. This view of Solomon must end in failure philosophically and also in emotional desperation.

We are not made to live in the shortened environment of UNDER THE SUN in this life only!!! Neither are we made to live only in the environment of a bare concept of afterlife [ignoring trying to make this life better]. We are made to live in the environment of a God who exists and who is the judge. This is the difference and that is what Jesus is setting forth here.

I Corinthians 15:32

³² What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”

There is no doubt here he is reaching back to Solomon again and he is just saying if there isn’t a resurrection of the dead then let’s just follow Solomon and let’s just eat and drink for tomorrow we die!!!! If there isn’t this full structure [including the resurrection of the dead] then just have the courage to follow Solomon and we can eat and drink because tomorrow we die and that is all we have. If the full structure isn’t there then pick up the cup and drink it dry! You can say it a different way in the 20th century: If the full structure is not there then go ahead and be an EXISTENTIALIST, but don’t cheat. Drink the cup to the end. Drink it dry! That is what Paul says. Paul  the educated man. Paul the man who knew his Greek philosophy. Paul the man who understood Solomon and the dilemma. Paul said it one way or the other. There is no room for a middle ground. IF CHRISTIANS AREN’T RAISED FROM THE DEAD THEN SOLOMON IS RIGHT IN ECCLESIASTES, BUT ONLY THEN. But if he is right then you should accept all of Solomon’s despair and his conclusions. 

The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.

Thank you again for your time and I know how busy you are.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002

PS: What is the meaning of life? Find it in the end of the open letter I wrote to you on April 23, 2020. 

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Below is the workforce of THE TAMBURY GAZETTE 

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Seen below is the third episode of AFTERLIFE (season 1) when Matt takes Tony to a comedy club with front row seats to cheer him up but it turns into disaster!!!

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Part 1 “Why have integrity in Godless Darwinian Universe where Might makes Right?”

Part 2 “My April 14, 2016 Letter to Ricky mentioned Book of Ecclesiastes and the Meaninglessness of Life”

Part 3 Letter about Brandon Burlsworth concerning suffering and pain and evil in the world.  “Why didn’t Jesus save her [from cancer]?” (Tony’s 10 year old nephew George in episode 2)

Part 4 Letter on Solomon on Death Tony in episode one, “It should be everyone’s moral duty to kill themselves.”

Part 5 Letter on subject of Learning in Ecclesiastes “I don’t read books of fiction but mainly science and philosophy”

Part 6 Letter on Luxuries in Ecclesiastes Part 6, The Music of AFTERLIFE (Part A)

Part 7 Letter on Labor in Ecclesiastes My Letter to Ricky on Easter in 2017 concerning Book of Ecclesiastes and the legacy of a person’s life work

Part 8 Letter on Liquor in Ecclesiastes Tony’s late wife Lisa told him, “Don’t get drunk all the time alright? It will only make you feel worse in the log run!”

Part 9 Letter on Laughter in Ecclesiastes , I said of laughter, “It is foolishness;” and of mirth, “What does it accomplish?” Ecclesiastes 2:2

Part 10 Final letter to Ricky on Ladies in Ecclesiastes “I gathered a chorus of singers to entertain me with song, and—most exquisite of all pleasures— voluptuous maidens for my bed…behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun” Ecclesiastes 2:8-11.

Part 11 Letter about Daniel Stanhope and optimistic humanism  “If man has been kicked up out of that which is only impersonal by chance , then those things that make him man-hope of purpose and significance, love, motions of morality and rationality, beauty and verbal communication-are ultimately unfulfillable and thus meaningless.” (Francis Schaeffer)

Part 12 Letter on how pursuit of God is only way to get Satisfaction Dan Jarrell “[In Ecclesiastes] if one seeks satisfaction they will never find it. In fact, every pleasure will be fleeting and can not be sustained, BUT IF ONE SEEKS GOD THEN ONE FINDS SATISFACTION”

Part 13 Letter to Stephen Hawking on Solomon realizing he will die just as a dog will die “For men and animals both breathe the same air, and both die. So mankind has no real advantage over the beasts; what an absurdity!” Ecclesiastes

Part 14 Letter to Stephen Hawking on 3 conclusions of humanism and Bertrand Russell destruction of optimistic humanism. “That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms—no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”(Bertrand Russell, Free Man’s Worship)

Part 15 Letter to Stephen Hawking on Leonardo da Vinci and Solomon and Meaningless of life “I hate life. As far as I can see, what happens on earth is a bad business. It’s smoke—and spitting into the wind” Ecclesiastes Book of Ecclesiastes Part 15 “I hate life. As far as I can see, what happens on earth is a bad business. It’s smoke—and spitting into the wind” Ecclesiastes 2:17

Part 16 Letter to Stephen Hawking on Solomon’s longing for death but still fear of death and 5 conclusions of humanism on life UNDER THE SUN. Francis Schaeffer “Life is just a series of continual and unending cycles and man is stuck in the middle of the cycle. Youth, old age, Death. Does Solomon at this point embrace nihilism? Yes!!! He exclaims that the hates life (Ecclesiastes 2:17), he longs for death (4:2-3) Yet he stills has a fear of death (2:14-16)”

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Mandeep Dhillon as Sandy on her first assignment in ‘After Life’. (Twitter)

A still from ‘After Life’ that captures the vibe of the Tambury Gazette. (Twitter)

Michael Scott of THE OFFICE (USA) with Ricky Gervais 

After Life on Netflix stars Ricky Gervais as a bereaved husband (Image: Netflix)

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Psychiatrist played by Paul Kaye seen below.

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Tony Johnson with his dog Brandi seen below:

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Energy Policy and Big-Government Tories

I don’t like big-government Republicans in the United States, so it naturally follows that I don’t like big-government Tories in the United Kingdom.

Indeed, I wrote just a few days ago about the new leadership race for the Conservative Party in the U.K. and wondered whether either of the candidates has what it takes to reverse Boris Johnson’s failedstatism.

I hope one of them is the reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher (just as I’ve been waiting decades for another Ronald Reagan).

We will find out relatively quickly. The race for Prime Minister will be decided next month and I will be very interested to see whether the winner fixes two very foolish energy policies.

The Wall Street Journal has a pair of excellent editorials this month.

On August 18, the paper opined about a bone-headed policy to cap energy bills.

Britain’s ruling Conservatives have imposed some awful energy policies in recent years, but their cap on household energy bills deserves a special mention. The scheme has been an economic loser, and now it’s becoming a political loser in ways that illustrate the dangers when parties of the right play socialism lite. …The cap traces back to…when Tory Prime Minister Theresa May embarked on a campaign to position the Conservatives as a kinder, gentler party.The effort didn’t work politically. In that year’s snap election she lost the majority… But the price-cap notion lived on and she implemented it in 2019. …The cap has exacerbated economic havoc in Britain’s energy market. As global gas and other commodity prices started to rise in 2021, energy retailers found it impossible to pass to consumers the prices retailers were paying for the energy they were supplying. This has contributed to a wave of bankruptcies… Meanwhile, since it only raises prices at a lag rather than limiting them, the cap leaves households frighteningly exposed to recent movements in global gas prices… The moral: Even half-hearted energy price controls are political losers for conservative parties.

It’s worth noting that energy prices are needlessly high in part because of bad government policy.

Which brings us to the WSJ‘s August 12 editorial.

Reports this week point to spiraling costs for households and businesses this winter, pushing millions of Britons closer to poverty. It’s a steep price for climate alarmism. …Politicians are eager to dodge responsibility for this disaster, and Russia offers a convenient excuse. …But these trends are inseparable from Britain’s homegrown fixation with achieving net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050. That’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s worst mistake… Various green charges add £153 to the annual household bill… But other net-zero costs lurk in household energy bills and budgets. The electric grid operator spent about £3.4 billion over the past year…a cost that tends to be higher due to the unreliability of wind and solar, and that’s passed to consumers… Another imponderable is how much lower gas prices would be if Britain produced more itself. Conservative Party administrations have flirted for years with proposals for shale-gas fracking in northern England only to lose their nerve. …So much for those who say conservative parties need to adopt the left’s climate agenda to court younger voters. Net zero has turned the Tories into the party that is impoverishing Britain.

In other words, bad policy is bad politics, which is the mirror image of my contention that good policy is good politics.

We will see whether the Tories have learned that lesson.

P.S. Some otherwise sensible people in the U.S. are flirting with making the same mistake with energy policy. Perhaps the failure of such policies in the U.K. will teach them something (but I won’t hold my breath).

Biden Overstepped Constitutional Authority When He Revoked Keystone Pipeline Permit, Multiple States Allege in Lawsuit

Thomas Catenacci / @ThomasCatenacci / March 18, 2021

A group of 21 Republican state attorneys general has accused President Joe Biden of overstepping his constitutional authority when he revoked the Keystone XL pipeline’s federal permit. Pictured: Biden delivers remarks in the State Dining Room of the White House March 15, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

A group of 21 Republican state attorneys general filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against President Joe Biden’s administration over its decision to nix the Keystone XL pipeline.

The states, led by Montana and Texas, accused Biden of overstepping his constitutional authority when he revoked the Keystone XL pipeline’s federal permit on Jan. 20 hours after entering office, in the lawsuit filed Wednesday afternoon in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.

“The power to regulate foreign and interstate commerce belongs to Congress—not the President,” Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen said in a statement Wednesday. “This is another example of Joe Biden overstepping his constitutional role to the detriment of Montanans.”

“There is not even a perceived environmental benefit to his actions—his attempt to cancel the Keystone XL Pipeline is an empty virtue signal to his wealthy coastal elite donors,” Knudsen said. “It shows Biden’s contempt for rural communities in Montana and other states along the pipeline’s path that would benefit from and support the project.”

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Congress never granted the president the authority to revoke the pipeline’s permit, which is a regulation of interstate and international commerce, according to the lawsuit. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the sole power to regulate interstate and international commerce.

Further, Biden violated the rules previously set by Congress on what actions the executive branch may take regarding the Keystone pipeline, the lawsuit said.

Biden had stated that keeping the pipeline’s permit would not be consistent with his “economic and climate imperatives,” which include solving the world’s climate crisis. The complaint Wednesday argued that he couldn’t alter U.S. domestic policy with the intention of conducting foreign policy.

“The President has certain prerogatives to act on behalf of the United States in foreign affairs,” the lawsuit said. “But as far as domestic law is concerned, the President must work with and abide by the limits set by Congress—whether he likes them or not.”

“This Administration has sought to leverage its power regarding U.S. foreign policy to unilaterally contradict Congress’s stated domestic policy regarding one of the most significant energy projects in a generation: the Keystone XL Pipeline,” the lawsuit said.

Former President Donald Trump’s March 2019 executive order approving the pipeline permit was constitutional because it fell in line with the “repeatedly expressed preferences” of Congress, according to Wednesday’s complaint.

The lawsuit also noted the damages incurred by Biden’s decision to nix the pipeline’s permit. The project was estimated to generate $55.6 million in property taxes across 27 counties in just three states and to create more than 42,000 jobs.

The project is an extension of an existing TC Energy pipeline that already transports crude oil from Canada to the U.S., according to The Wall Street Journal. The extension would carry crude directly from Alberta, Canada, to Steele City, Nebraska, where it would connect to existing pipeline that stretches to the Gulf of Mexico.

The part of the pipeline extension that crosses the U.S.-Canada border is mostly completed, the lawsuit said.

Montana, Texas, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming were listed as plaintiffs on the suit.

Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas were all listed as defendants.

On Feb. 10, 14 attorneys general, including many listed in Wednesday’s lawsuit, sent a letter “with alarm” to the Biden administration, urging the president to reconsider his decision to effectively kill the pipeline. The letter warned that the states had been reviewing all available legal options to protect their residents.

“Your decision will result in devastating damage to many of our states and local communities,” the attorneys general wrote in the letter to Biden. “Even those states outside the path of the Keystone XL pipeline—indeed all Americans—will suffer serious, detrimental consequences.”

Knudsen, the Montana attorney general, led the coalition, which included the top legal officers from Georgia, Missouri, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas. Montana’s portion of the proposed pipeline would have been 285 miles long and was expected to generate more than 4,000 jobs.

John Kerry, the White House climate czar, recently said workers who lose their jobs due to the administration’s climate policies can find jobs making solar panels. The letter said the Biden administration’s insistence that laid off pipeline workers would be given green jobs in the future was a “cold promise.”

Several prominent trade unions, which endorsed Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, strongly condemned the executive order. The unions ignored requests for comment from The Daily Caller News Foundation asking why they supported Biden despite his campaign promise to nix the job-creating pipeline.

“Well, I wish he hadn’t done that on the first day,” Richard Trumka, the president of the powerful AFL-CIO, told Axios. “Because the Laborer’s International was right, it did and will cost us jobs in the process.”

The Teamsters, the Laborers’ International Union of North America, the International Union of Operating Engineers, and the United Association of Union Plumbers and Pipefitters signed the Keystone pipeline’s labor agreement in August. The agreement promised the creation of 42,000 “family-sustaining jobs” in the U.S. and $2 billion in total earnings for the all-union workforce.

The Laborers’ International Union of North America estimated that Biden’s executive action would kill thousands of union jobs. LIUNA General President Terry O’Sullivan called the action “insulting and disappointing.”

Meanwhile, 12 states sued the Biden administration over its climate policies on March 8. One day later, two states sued the administration over its immigration policies.

A group of Republican attorneys general threatened additional legal action against the Biden administration in a letter to Department of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen Tuesday. The 21 attorneys general demanded clarity on Biden’s position regarding state tax policy.

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Joe Biden Signs COVID Bill With the Greatest Expansion of Abortion Funding in a Decade

NATIONAL   STEVEN ERTELT   MAR 11, 2021   |   4:59PM    WASHINGTON, DC 

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Joe Biden today signed the so-called COVID relief bill that is the greatest expansion of abortion in a decade. Although he claims to be a “devout Catholic,” Biden just signed a bill that forces Americans to fund abortions and the Planned Parenthood abortion business. It is the largest expansion of abortion funding since 2010, when Democrats passed Obamacare.

The COVID relief bill that spends all but 9% on COVID relief and will spend tens of millions, perhaps over $100 million on funding abortions and the Planned Parenthood abortion corporation.

In the Senate, Democrats defeated a pro-life amendment that would have stopped the COVID relief bill from using tens of millions and perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars to fund killing babies in abortions. Democrat Senators Joe Manchin and Bob Casey, who both claim to be pro-life, voted for the abortion-funding legislation after the amendment was defeated.

The Senate voted 52-47 to defeat the pro-life amendment offered by Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma to apply the Hyde Amendment to the COVID bill. Every Republican voted for the amendment along with Democrat senators Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Tim Kaine of Virginia, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Senator Sullivan of Alaska did not vote. despite voting for the amendemnt to stop abortion funding, Casey and Manchin eventually voted for the abortion-funding bill.

The amendment failed because it did not reach the 60-vote threshold needed to waive budget rules associated with the legislation. Without the 3/5 majority necessary, the amendment fails and the COVID bill will fund abortions.

Yesterday, the nation’s Catholic bishops slammed Democrats for passing the bill without any protections against abortion funding.

It is “unconscionable” that Congress passed the bill “without critical protections needed to ensure that billions of taxpayer dollars are used for life-affirming health care and not for abortion,” wrote the bishops in a statement.

“Unlike previous COVID [coronavirus] relief bills, sponsors of the American Rescue Plan Act refused to include the longstanding, bi-partisan consensus policy to prohibit taxpayer dollars from funding abortions domestically and internationally,” the bishops declared.

The policy was needed, they continued, “because this bill includes many general references to healthcare that, absent the express exclusion of abortion, have consistently been interpreted by federal courts not only to allow, but to compel, the provision of abortion without meaningful limit.”

“The many important, life-saving provisions in the American Rescue Plan Act have been undermined because it facilitates and funds the destruction of life, which is antithetical to its aim of protecting the most vulnerable Americans in a time of crisis,” they state.

The $350 billion state bailout funds are particularly problematic as the bill doesn’t prevent states and localities from using taxpayer funds to pay for abortions. Under the current guidelines, liberal states like New York and California, which are likely going to receive the lion’s share of the bailout, can funnel millions to abortion giants like Planned Parenthood if they choose.

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The Family Research Council released a lengthy analysis of the funds in the bill that could be used to pay for abortions:

The American Rescue Plan Act lacks key abortion funding restrictions on over $459 billion, breaking decades of congressional precedent on restricting federal funding for abortion.

1. Funds that Can Directly Pay for Abortions (Up To $386.7 Billion):

• $350 billion in funding for state and local governments with little to no guardrails against funding abortions. The funding formula is tilted towards blue states like California and New York who are more likely to abuse this money to fund abortions directly and bail out Planned Parenthood the abortion industry.
• $8.5 billion for the Provider Relief Fund, which could be used to directly finance abortions as well as to bail out abortion businesses like Planned Parenthood
• $7.66 billion for public health workers
• $7.6 billion for community health centers
• $800 million for National Health Service Corps
• $750 million for global health activities under the Center for Disease Control
• $500 million for rural health clinics
• $330 million for Teaching Health Centers that operate Graduate Medical Education
• $200 million for medical reserve corps
• $200 million for the nurse corps
• $200 million for programs related to sexual assault and domestic violence
• Amounts of $10 billion for COVID medical supplies that remain after September 2022 are allowed to be spent on other public health-related activities which can include abortion.

2. Funds that Can Subsidize Abortion ($704 Million) and Abortion Lobbying ($10 Billion) Overseas:

• $10 billion in foreign assistance funds not subject to the Siljander Amendment, allowing these funds to be used for international abortion lobbying.

• Of these funds, $500 million in humanitarian response activities for migrants and refugees by the United Nations also lack Helms Amendment protections to prevent the UN from using these funds to pay for abortions.
• Of these funds, $204 million for State Department Activities also lack Helms Amendment protections, allowing these funds to be used for abortions abroad.
• Of these funds $8.7 billioncan be spent on contraception and sterilization procedures overseas and are likely to go to the major abortion business like International Planned Parenthood and MSI Reproductive Choices that provide these services.

3. Major Subsidies for Health Plans that Cover Abortion ($81.7 Billion): 

• For 2021 and 2022, vastly expands Obamacare’s premium tax credits and cost sharing reduction payments, which subsidizes plans that cover abortion. The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimatesthese subsidies to cost $45.624 billion.

• Those under 150% of federal poverty level (FPL) would receive a 100% taxpayer subsidy to enroll in silver plans.
• Those unemployed of any income level (for 2021) would receive a 100% taxpayer subsidy to enroll in a silver plan, and enhanced cost-sharing reduction payments.
• Those between 150% and 400% FPL would receive a much more generous subsidy than current law.
• Middle class taxpayers above 400% FPL, ineligible under current law, would become newly eligible for a significant subsidy so that the benchmark silver premium doesn’t exceed 8.5% of household income.
• For six months, subsidizes 100% of the cost of COBRA continuation coverage. This subsidy covers the cost of health care premiums for the newly unemployed to remain on their employer sponsored health plans, which includes many plans that cover abortion. JCT estimates these subsidies to cost $35.095 billion.

4. Bailout for Abortion Businesses ($50 Million)

• $50 million for the Title X family planning program – The Biden administration will likely direct these funds to Planned Parenthood and other abortion businesses that withdrew from Title X over pro-life changes that were made by the Trump administration. Longstanding requirements on political lobbying, encouraging parental involvement, and reporting sexual abuse are not included.

The pro-life group SBA List wrote to senators ahead of the Senate vote urging them to adopt pro-life amendments to curb abortion funding.

“While prior bipartisan COVID relief packages have included Hyde protections on funding streams that fall outside of existing limits on abortion funding, this bill departs from the status quo by leaving funds open to use for abortion. COVID relief money should be used for life-affirming purposes… we strongly support and will score in favor of amendments to mitigate the funding of abortion, abortion coverage, or abortion providers,” it wrote.

SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser added: “Pro-abortion forces emboldened by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are shamelessly exploiting the COVID-19 crisis to expand abortion on demand, paid for by taxpayers. By failing to include Hyde Amendment protections and forcing taxpayers to bail out the abortion industry, their so-called ‘rescue plan’ abandons some of the most vulnerable Americans – unborn children and their mothers. Their agenda will divide, rather than unite our nation as this administration promised.”

Tom McClusky, president of March for Life Action also told LifeNews that the pro-life group opposes the bill without pro-life amendments to stop abortion funding.

“The current COVID-19 relief package has the potential to be the largest expansion of abortion funding since Obamacare. Less than 10% of the ‘relief’ actually goes towards combatting the pandemic. Instead, pro-abortion politicians are using this bill to open the floodgates to abortion funding, with billions of dollars unprotected from being used for the life-ending practice both here in the U.S. and abroad. This is radically out of step with the majority of Americans who oppose their tax dollars funding it. Americans who have been suffering from the effects of the pandemic deserve authentic relief, not this pro-abortion bonanza,” he said.

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Fortunately one of the abortion funding provisions was removed from the bill prior the Senate vote.

Senator Rand Paul has forced Democrats to remove a pro-abortion provision in their massive $1.9 trillion COVID bill that would have allowed every Planned Parenthood across America to receive free money through the Paycheck Protection Program. Last year, the Planned Parenthood abortion business improperly applied for and received $80 million in federal funds meant to support small businesses as they battle the economic fallout from the coronavirus.

That is despite the fact that the rules and regulations associated with the program specifically prohibited affiliates of larger organizations with more than 500 employees from applying. That covers Planned Parenthood as Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PFFA) alone has had more than 600 employees.

Shockingly, only 9% of the bill’s funding will go to public health issues, and almost half of the funding, not including the proposed stimulus checks, won’t be distributed until 2022 at the earliest.

Recent Marist polling, though, shows Americans overwhelmingly oppose taxpayer funding of abortion overseas. The survey reveals 77 percent of Americans reject the idea of taxpayer dollars funding abortion abroad while a majority of Democrats—55 percent—also oppose taxpayer funding of abortion abroad.

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March 1, 2021

Office of Barack and Michelle Obama
P.O. Box 91000
Washington, DC 20066

Dear President Obama,

I wrote you over 700 letters while you were President and I mailed them to the White House and also published them on my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org .I received several letters back from your staff and I wanted to thank you for those letters. 

I have been reading your autobiography A PROMISED LAND and I have been enjoying it. 

Let me make a few comments on it, and here is the first quote of yours I want to comment on:

The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision focused further attention on Court appointments with every nomination from that point on triggering a pitched battle between pro-choice and anti-abortion forces. 

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I know that you are a professing Christian but I wonder how you the view the Bible? Do you believe like evangelicals that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and is historically accurate? Tony Dungy is an evangelical and like me he is pro-life. Take a look at this article below:

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Ex-NFL coach Tony Dungy skeptical about Warnock’s faith after ‘pro-choice pastor’ tweet

DECEMBER 11, 2020 BY RYAN GAYDOS

Former NFL coach Tony Dungy is a man who takes his Christian faith very seriously, and when it comes to Rev. Raphael Warnock, who is running for U.S. Senate in Georgia, he wasn’t so sure about him.

Warnock, a Democrat and pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, is in the middle of a runoff election against Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga.

Warnock tweeted Tuesday he was a “pro-choice pastor,” which inherently goes against the pro-life views of most Christians.

WARNOCK COMPARED AMERICA TO COMMUNIST CUBA, SAID FIDEL CASTRO HAD ‘COMPLEX’ LEGACY IN RESURFACED VIDEO

When a Twitter user pointed out on Wednesday that “pro-choice pastors” do exist, the Super Bowl champion head coach appeared skeptical.

“Rev Warner may be a pastor. My question would be ‘Is he a Christian?’  That is, does he follow the teachings of Jesus and does he believe that the Bible is the absolute word of God?” tweeted, who is a football commentaror for NBC.

He added: “I would think it would be difficult for someone who believes that God sees us when we are in the womb (Psalm 139:13-16) to think that it is OK to choose not to bring that life to fruition.”

On Thursday, another Twitter user said being pro-choice didn’t mean that a person was pro-abortion. Dungy replied, “Please read Psalm 139:13-16.  Then tell me if you think God puts babies in the womb or man does?  If you believe they randomly get there then I have no argument. But if you believe God puts them there, then how does anyone have a right to ‘choose’ which ones survive?”

LOEFFLER AD BLITZ TARGETS WARNOCK’S ALLEGED PAST DISMISSALS OF CRITIQUES ON SOCIALISM

He then clarified his position in another way.

“What if I was advocating for the right to kill someone who was already born? Would that be morally OK?  Of course not. The only question in this debate is what we think of the unborn baby? Is it a life or is it not?”

CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXNEWS.COM

Dungy is not one to shy away from his faith. In 2006, it was noted that Dungy nearly put his football career on pause to join the prison ministry. And over the course of his career he worked in community service organizations and was a public speaker for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733 everettehatcher@gmail.com

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Baptist leaders remember Ronald Reagan’s optimism as being founded on faith in God

By Erin Curry, posted June 7, 2004 in 

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After being elected President of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979, Adrian Rogers met with President Ronald Reagan.

Former SBC President Adrian Rogers, pastor of the Memphis-area Bellevue Baptist Church, recounted that he first met Reagan in 1980 when he was a candidate for president. Rogers and four others visited with Reagan in a hotel room.

“Someone asked him this question at the end of the meeting, ‘Governor, I want to ask you a very personal question. Do you know Jesus Christ? Not do you know about Him, but do you know Him?’

“He said, ‘Oh, yes. He is very real to me. I have trusted Him as my personal Lord and Savior, and I pray every day. But I don’t wear my religion on my sleeves.’

“I felt impressed to pray for him, and I put my arm around him and prayed,” Rogers recounted. “I got a letter from him, and I really appreciated it. … He said, ‘Thank you for remembering me in prayer before our Lord.’”

Rogers was in about a half-dozen meetings with Reagan. Once, in the Oval Office early in his administration, “I told him, ‘Mr. President, Southern Baptists love you and will stand behind you if you will stand for the things that mean so much to them. Stand for the home, for the family, for purity. Those are the things that mean so much to them, and I would hope that you would stand for them.’ And he said he would.”

Rogers described Reagan as “a man of principle. He was not driven by polls or political correctness. In that sense, I think he was comparable to our current president. I think the same mosquito may have bit them both.

“The other major thing I would mention about him was his genteel kindness and his ability to make you feel important and feel at home,” Rogers said. “I do believe he was one of the most affable persons I have met.”

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Just as I am. Michael W. Smith (at the Lying in Honor of the Reverend Bi…

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Touching Moments From Billy Graham’s Funeral

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Watch live: Billy Graham’s funeral

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One of the thrills of my life was getting to hear President Reagan speak in the beginning of November of 1984 at the State House Convention Center in Little Rock.  Immediately after that program I was standing outside on Markham with my girlfriend Jill Sawyer (now wife of 34 years) and we were alone on a corner and the President was driven by and he waved at us and we waved back. Since the rally that President Reagan held was filled with thousands of people I assumed Jill and I were on the corner with many other people but when I turned around I realized that President Reagan had only waved to us two because we were all alone on the corner and I felt deeply honored.

One of the reasons I liked Reagan was because of his conservative economic philosophy which he got from my hero Milton Friedman and his social views on abortion which influenced his pick for surgeon general which was C. Everett Koop who was Francis Schaeffer’s good friend. Ronald Reagan because of his pro-life views also attended a meeting in Dallas in 1980 with my pastor Adrian Rogers who was President of the Southern Baptist Convention at the time

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Dr. C. Everett Koop pictured above and Adrian Rogers pictured below with Reagan.

I have a son named Wilson Daniel Hatcher and he is named after two of the most respected men I have ever read about : Daniel from the Old Testament and Ronald Wilson Reagan. I have studied that book of Daniel for years and have come to respect that author who was a saint who worked in two pagan governments but he never compromised. My favorite record was the album “No Compromise” by Keith Green and on the cover was a picture from the Book of Daniel.

VIDEO OF MELODY GREEN (Keith’s widow) INTRODUCES RONALD REAGAN

President Reagan’s Remarks at a Briefing for Right to Life Activists on …

BILLY GRAHAM ON RONALD REAGAN:

Ronald Reagan is one of the most winsome men I have ever known. Our long friendship really started one day in 1953, when I was playing golf in Phoenix. Mrs. Loyal Davis, wife of a prominent Chicago surgeon, came up to me on the course. 

“I want you to get to know my new son-in-law,” she said. 

I asked who he was. 

“Ronald Reagan.”

“You mean the film star?”

She confirmed that he had married her daughter, Nancy, some months before. 

Ron (as most of his friends called him) and I actually met later that year in Dallas. 

In the next two decades, my travels took me to California with some frequency, and often our paths crossed. As our friendship grew, I not only admired his quick wit and warm personality, but I also came to respect his keen insight and tough-minded approach to broad political issues. I also found him very interested in our work, even giving me friendly advice from time to time. 

During the years before Ron was elected to public office, I had often detected a spiritual side to him. For example, I remember once when I gave a small dinner party at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and invited him. He brought up the subject of the Second Coming of Christ. The same subject came up with him on other occasions as well. 

I have been told that where he grew up, in Dixon, Illinois, he did some preaching himself in his late teens. At the time, he was a member of the Christian Church, which was somewhat like the Baptist Church. I kept forgetting to ask him about it, however, something that I now regret. 

During the eight years of Reagan’s presidential administration, we saw each other a number of times. I especially appreciated his kindness in inviting Ruth and me to several states dinners for visiting foreign leaders. 

One night while I was staying at the White House, Nancy and the President got into a discussion about the question of salvation–who was going to be saved and who was going to be lost. He gave her his views on conversion and the new birth right out of the Bible. She turned to me. 

“Billy, is that right?”

I said it was and expanded a little further. 

While he was president, Ronald Reagan bestowed on me one of the highest honors I could ever imagine. On February 23, 1983, he presented me with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor our government gives to an American, for service to the nation. I felt unworthy of the honor, and still do. But whatever else it means, it will always remind me of the generosity and friendship of a remarkable man and a warm and enduring personal friend, Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Pastor to Presidents: Billy Graham and Ronald Reagan

November 19, 2020

Categories: Billy Graham, Plan Your Visit

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Billy Graham described Ronald Reagan as “one of the most winsome men I have ever known.” Their friendship began long before Reagan’s political career, when he was still a film star in Hollywood. As their friendship grew over the next couple of decades, Billy “not only admired his quick wit and warm personality, but [he] also came to respect his keen insight and tough-minded approach to broad political issues.”

When Reagan was inaugurated as President on January 20, 1981, Billy joined him on the platform while he was sworn in. Throughout Reagan’s term of office, Billy and Ruth were invited to many state dinners, including one for Queen Elizabeth II, and another for Chinese president Li Xiannian.

In Just As I Am, Billy remembers multiple conversations with the Reagans regarding faith. “They were both interested in understanding more about the Scriptures, especially Ron. He often asked me questions about the biblical view on important topics. Abortion was one such issue he wrestled with. I always stressed the Bible’s teachings on the sacredness of human life, both of the unborn and of the born. We talked about other current issues, but always in terms of principles, not what specific policies or programs should be adopted or scrapped.”

On February 23, 1983, Ronald Reagan presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Billy Graham, the highest honor a civilian citizen of the United States can receive. Of the honor, Billy said, “I felt unworthy of the honor, and still do. But whatever else it means, it will always remind me of the generosity and friendship of a remarkable man and a warm and enduring friend, Ronald Wilson Reagan.”

The Billy Graham Library is featuring an exhibit Pastor to Presidents highlighting Billy Graham’s friendships with our nation’s Executive Office. The exhibit runs through December 23, 2020. For more information on the exhibit, visit www.billygrahamlibrary.org

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Transcript: Ronald Reagan’s Friendship With Billy Graham

By | Fox News

This is a partial transcript of The Big Story With John Gibson, June 7, 2004, that has been edited for clarity.

JOHN GIBSON, HOST: President Ronald Reagan(search) was a man of deep religious faith. For many years, Billy Graham (search) was one of his closest personal friends. Reverend Graham will not be able to attend any of the Reagan memorials because of a broken hip.

Joining me now is Reverend Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham. Franklin, today’s big question, what was the special bond between your father and President Reagan?

REV. FRANKLIN GRAHAM, PRESIDENT, SAMARITAN’S PURSE: They first met in 1954. It was Nancy’s mother, Mrs. Davis, that met my father when he was playing golf… in Arizona and asked if daddy would take time to meet her new son-in-law who happened to be Ronald Reagan.

They met a few weeks after that and really became very close friends since 1954. My father loved him very much and enjoyed every opportunity had he to spend with him and to talk to him. He had a great interest in spiritual questions. He was a man of deep faith. He’s a man who not only believed in God, but he believed in God’s son, the Lord Jesus Christ. He believed that Christ died on the cross for our sins, and that God raised him from the dead and that he was coming again. And he looked forward to the second coming of Jesus Christ. And he often talked to my father about that subject. He was fascinated about that, so they had a lot of very deep theological discussions.

GIBSON: Reverend Graham, as you well know, the current President Bush is a Christian and makes no effort to conceal it, and in a lot of circles, especially in Europe, he is criticized for that. It seems to me that President Reagan wasn’t quite so public in his faith. Was there a reason for that, that you know of?

GRAHAM: Well, I think he probably was more public than we give him credit for. He spoke about God quite often, spoke about his faith. I think today where we have gotten into this realm of political correctness for some reason, somebody has said it’s not right to talk about your faith. If you are in public office. And, of course, when we come back to public office, we do bring our faith, we bring our character with us. And I think those all are important ingredients to a leader, especially to the president of the United States. Reagan believed in God, he believed in Jesus Christ.

Bush is the same way. He has a strong faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. You know, the Bible says that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son whosoever believed in him should not perish, but should have everlasting life. And that whosoever, it’s me, it’s you, it’s everyone who is watching, if we’ll simply believe and trust in him, God will forgive us of our sins. It’s faith.

You don’t have to work for your salvation. It’s simply by faith. And the President Bush understands this, and, of course, President Reagan, he understood it. He had just a very simple faith, which was very dear to him and very real to him.

GIBSON: Reverend Graham, your father, Billy Graham, met Ronald Reagan, as you said, in 1954. This is some years before Ronald Reagan was governor and then later president. What did your father see in him in 1954?

GRAHAM: Well, it’s interesting. He, of course, was a well-known actor, and my father had just finished a campaign in California in 1949, got to know a lot of folks in the industry. And when Mrs. Davis suggested that they meet, daddy was just fascinated in meeting him. He liked his movies and liked him as a person, and when they met, the two had a lot in common. And they shared the same type of jokes, both had great senses of humor. And they just liked each other, you know, companionship. They were just friends, and even after he left office, after he left Washington and went back to California, my father still stayed in touch, would go by to see the president. And then, of course, the last few years his illness was very — very difficult, but he continued to keep in touch with Nancy, to call her and go by to see her.

GIBSON: You know, your father is — one of the many things he is known for is being a friend to presidents. Did he envision — we’re looking at pictures of your father now. Did he envision this actor he met in 1954 who probably at that point was maybe involved with the Screen Actors Guild but not much more politically was going to be a major political figure?

GRAHAM: Of course not. He never dreamed that, and he just — I think he is very grateful for that friendship over the years, especially when the president — when he became president. Reagan had him at the White House on many occasions to visit him. My father has never sought really to be the friend of presidents. It has just happened to come his direction. And my father feels that it’s very important as a minister of the gospel that when you’re with a president or a member of Congress, of the Senate, whatever, to be a minister and to share our faith and to hold up our faith and God’s standards. I think it’s important for people who are in government to remember God’s standards that he has given to us and not to forget them, not to turn our back on them, but to take his standards and that should apply to the way we live our life.

When the Bible says thou shall not murder, we need to hold that standard. When the Bible says thou shall not steal, we need to hold that standard. When God says not to covet, we need to hold those standards. Of course, not everybody believes the Bible. Not everybody wants God’s standards, but as a minister, my father felt it was important that he at least represent God’s standards to those that were in leadership, and did he that to the best of his ability. And I admire him for staying with it all these years.

GIBSON: Reverend Franklin Graham. Reverend, thank you very much. Appreciate you coming on today.

GRAHAM: Thank you, sir.

Copy: Content and Programming Copyright 2004 Fox News Network, L.L.C. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Transcription Copyright 2004 eMediaMillWorks, Inc. (f/k/a Federal Document Clearing House, Inc.), which takes sole responsibility for the accuracy of the transcription. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No license is granted to the user of this material except for the user’s personal or internal use and, in such case, only one copy may be printed, nor shall user use any material for commercial purposes or in any fashion that may infringe upon Fox News Network, L.L.C.’s and eMediaMillWorks, Inc.’s copyrights or other proprietary rights or interests in the material. This is not a legal transcript for purposes of litigation.

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Remarks at a White House Briefing for Right to Life Activists

July 30, 1987

Senators, Congressmen, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to you all. Before I get on with things here, I think I’d better explain a little bit. This is just a small billboard that says — it’s a reminder that says, “Stay out of the Sun.” [Laughter] Well, there’s one Congressman I see in the front row to whom I have to say a special word: Henry Hyde. Watching your contributions to the hearings, Henry, I couldn’t help thinking — [laughter] — forgive me for this — other politicians can run, but there’s only one I know who knows how to Hyde. [Laughter] It’s a great pleasure to welcome all of you to Washington and an honor to be able to speak to this assembly of Americans who are doing so much to declare and defend the sacredness of all human life.

One of the aspects of this gathering that impresses me most is that just a few years ago many of you, perhaps most, never dreamed of getting involved in politics. What brought you into politics was a matter of conscience, a matter of fundamental conviction, and that gives you an integrity that Americans of all views cannot help but respect. It also happens to make me feel a particular kinship with you. You see, there was a time in my own life when nobody who knew me ever expected me to go into politics myself. [Laughter] In fact, back in 1966 when someone told my boss, Jack Warner, that I was running for Governor of California, he is supposed to have said, “No, Jimmy Stewart for Governor. Reagan for best friend.” [Laughter] 

But we come here today on an issue of the most fundamental importance. Many of you’ve been attacked for being single-issue activists or single-issue voters. But I ask: What single issue could be of greater significance? What single issue could say more about a society’s values than the degree of respect shown for human life at its most vulnerable: human life still unborn? 

Many of the most compelling arguments against abortion are as old as our civilization. Indeed, I would submit that a reverence for all human life is one of the distinguishing marks of true civilization. In our own time, medical science has added to our knowledge of the processes of life that take place before birth, deepening our understanding of what abortion means to the mother and the unborn child. We know, in particular, that when an abortion is performed the unborn child often feels pain. 

You might be interested to learn that when I first mentioned this in a 1983 speech there was an outcry, enraged criticism and angry denials. But criticism wasn’t the only response. It so happens that I also received a letter signed by 24 medical doctors, including eminent physicians like the former chief of pediatrics at the St. Louis City Hospital and the president of the New York State Medical Society. The letter stated that in recent years medical techniques have “demonstrated the remarkable responsiveness of the human fetus to pain, touch, and sound.”

And the letter concluded: “Mr. President, in drawing attention to the capability of the human fetus to feel pain, you stand on firmly established ground.” Well, in recent years medical science has taught us so much more about the individuality and responsiveness of the fetus, even at very early stages of development. My friends, isn’t it about time the law of the land recognized the medical evidence of 1987? [Applause] If there’s even a question about when human life begins, isn’t it our duty to err on the side of life? 

The law of the land — that’s a phrase with special resonance for Americans. After all, ours is not a nation founded upon centuries of shared history, like the nations of Europe or Asia. No, ours is a nation founded upon a shared and basic law, the Constitution. And because it is the Constitution that must reflect our most fundamental values — freedom, equality before the law, and yes, the dignity of human life — because of this, the duty of everyone here today is clear. We must not rest — and I pledge to you that I will not rest — until a human life amendment becomes a part of our Constitution. 

At the same time, we must continue to search for practical steps that we can take now, even before the battle for the human life amendment is won. I’ve submitted a bill to Congress that I know interests each of you keenly, and I’d like to talk about that with you in just a moment. But first, permit me to mention four other important steps our administration has taken, steps that I believe represent powerful examples of what can be done now to protect the lives of unborn children. 

First, our position on international population policies — as you may be aware, some international organizations have chosen to support abortion as a means of population control. Well, the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, or UNFPA, for example, works with Chinese population programs, which include abortion. Our response to that? We cut off American funds from UNFPA and from overseas organizations that support or promote abortion. As I said in my statement to the 1984 Mexico City International Conference on Population — incidentally, one of the best parts about being President is that from time to time you get to quote yourself — [laughter] — but as I said then: “We believe population programs can and must be truly voluntary, cognizant of the rights and responsibilities of individuals and families, and respectful of religious and cultural values.” Well, that means no coercive measures such as involuntary sterilization and no use of abortion for population control. 

Second, permit me to mention our recent actions concerning the District of Columbia. You’ll recall that the Congress has the responsibility to oversee and appropriate all funds in the District of Columbia budget, but each year Congress has chosen to restrict only Federal funds in the DC budget from being used for abortions on demand. Yet in practice, the record is clear. There is no way to separate Federal from locally raised funds, and this has permitted the District to go right on financing abortions. And you know, I just felt that the great beauty of this capital city meant nothing if right here, in this city that belongs to all Americans, the dignity of human life was being neglected and even attacked. So, this year we took action. You’ll be pleased to know that, in transmitting to Congress the District of Columbiabudget for 1988, we made it clear that both Federal and local funds must comply with the Hyde amendment. 

I want, third, to restate our firm opposition to the so-called, Grove City legislation sponsored by Senator Kennedy. This bill, S. 557, would mean that all hospitals and colleges receiving Federal funds, even those with religious affiliations, would be open to lawsuits if they failed to provide abortions. In other words, the legislation would virtually force these institutions to provide abortion on demand. I don’t mind telling you this one really touches my temperature control. I don’t want to get started, but let me just say this: As far as I’m concerned, every Member of Congress should oppose this proabortion Federal intrusion. [Applause] Thank you. You just made the day for some Legislators here. [Laughter] We support an amendment offered by Senator Danforth, an amendment that would eliminate the proabortion aspects of that legislation. As I said before, this administration will oppose any legislation that would require individuals or institutions, public or private, to finance or perform abortions

Now, the fourth point is one that will come to you as especially good news, a set of initiatives that we will pursue immediately. The first of these is a revision of the title 10 Family Planning Program guidelines. Current guidelines require grant recipients to provide abortion counseling and referral. This policy has effectively barred family planning organizations that will not engage in abortion activity from participating in the title 10 program. I’m directing the Secretary of Health and Human Services to publish regulations in the Federal Register removing this bias against groups that refuse to engage in abortion activities. In order to give effect to the statutory prohibition on the use of appropriated funds in programs where abortion is a method of family planning, I am also directing Secretary Bowen to make sure that the regulations specifically state that a program which does provide counseling and referral for abortion services as a method of family planning will not be eligible for title 10 funds.

Then there’s an initiative that represents an important change in the title 10 regulations so that any organization that provides abortion-related services will be required to clearly separate these services from title 10 programs that the Federal Government is paying for. At present, the coexistence of abortion with federally supported family planning services fosters the view that abortion is an acceptable and government-sanctioned method of family planning. In order to ensure that this will no longer occur, I’m directing the Secretary of Health and Human Services to publish in the Federal Register regulations that require grant recipients to separate, financially and physically, their eligible and noneligible programs.

Now, a third initiative is the development of a thorough and solid body of public health information on the effects of abortion on women. Growing numbers of women who’ve had abortions now say that they have been misled by inaccurate information. Making accurate data on maternal morbidity available to women before an abortion is performed is an essential element of informed consent. I am, therefore, directing the Surgeon General to issue a comprehensive medical report on the health effects, physical and emotional, of abortion on women.

The final initiative is a restriction on the use of Federal funds for activities that advocate abortion. It is inconsistent with title 10 for Federal funds to be used to provide speakers to debate in opposition to pro-life speakers, to lobby for proabortionlegislation, to provide transportation to abortion clinics, or make reservations at abortion clinics, to bring lawsuits in support of abortion as a family planning method, or to provide or distribute materials that advocate abortion. And I am, therefore, directing Secretary Bowen to publish regulations in the Federal Register to ensure that no title 10 funds go to any program that encourages, promotes, or advocates abortion or which assists a woman in obtaining an abortion.

You’ll be pleased to know that Secretary Bowen is fully supportive of my position on abortion and of these initiatives. Secretary Bowen has agreed that all necessary work will be completed in time to publish draft regulations in the Federal Register within 30 days. And I’m also pleased to say that the Secretary’s newly appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs is NabersCabaniss. Nabers will be among those charged with implementing these new initiatives at the Department of Health and Human Services.

And this brings me to the bill I mentioned earlier. To begin with, a word or two of background. In the past, we’ve been successful in restricting the use of Federal funds for abortions on a department-by-department basis, making use of the Hyde amendment. Yet each year there have been a few departments and agencies not covered by the Hyde amendment. The bill that we’re submitting to Congress will change that. And listen, if you will, to the key provision: “No funds appropriated by Congress shall be used to perform abortions, except where the life of the mother would be endangered if the fetus were carried to term.” In other words, this one piece of legislation would permanently restrict the use of funds for abortions throughout the Federal Government, with absolutely no exceptions. 

And introduced in the Senate by Senator Gordon Humphrey, this bill has 12 Senate cosponsors. And in the House, the bill was introduced by Congressman Henry Hyde and has garnered cosponsors numbering 124. Yes, opposition is stiff. But the very fact that this bill has been introduced has drawn attention to the importance of the debate and demonstrated the growing strength of the prolife movement throughout the country.

Will the bill pass? The pundits certainly don’t think so, but I have to tell you, at this point in my career, I’m used to a little skepticism. [Laughter] “The Impossible Became Inevitable” — that’s what the Washington Post headline said when our tax reform was finally enacted. And I just have to believe that, given the fundamental goodness of the American people, given this great nation’s reverence for life itself, prolife measures like this legislation will become inevitable, too. So, I intend to push for these prolife measures just as hard as I know how. Can I count on your support? [Applause] Thank you. I knew that was a foolish question when I asked it.

Many who turn to abortion do so in harrowing circumstances, and we must remind those who disagree with us, and sometimes even ourselves, that we do not seek to condemn, we do not seek to sit in judgment. Yes, we must take our stand without apology. Yet at the same time, it is our duty to rise above bitterness and reproach, to call upon all Americans to come together in a spirit of helping and understanding. For we know that in this great and good nation, positive solutions to the tragedy of abortion can be found.

If I could, I’d like to leave with you a quotation that means a great deal to me. These are the words of my friend, the late Terence Cardinal Cooke, of New York. “The gift of life, God’s special gift, is no less beautiful when it is accompanied by illness or weakness, hunger or poverty, mental or physical handicaps, loneliness or old age. Indeed, at these times, human life gains extra splendor as it requires our special care, concern, and reverence. It is in and through the weakest of human vessels that the Lord continues to reveal the power of His love.” 

The weakest of human vessels — surely there is no human life more frail and vulnerable than that of an infant still in its mother’s womb. And surely it is our task to appeal to the goodness we know we can find in every American and to call upon the power of His love.

I thank you all, and God bless you all for what you’re doing. 

Note: The President spoke at 11:50 a.m. in Room 450 of the Old Executive Office Building. In his opening remarks, he referred to a basal cell carcinoma on his nose. He also referred to Representative Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, who participated in the congressional hearings on the Iran-contra controversy.

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Schiff Bill Would Wrongly Redefine Infertility Through Tax Law

Emma Waters  / @emlwaters / August 17, 2022

Rep. Adam Schiff—seen here on June 21 on Capitol Hill—is a co-sponsor, with a fellow California Democrat, Rep. Judy Chu, of the euphemistically named Equal Access to Reproductive Care Act. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

COMMENTARY BY

Emma Waters@emlwaters

Emma Waters is a research associate with the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation.

The Democrats continue to weaponize the administrative state, from the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago to the vast expansion of the Internal Revenue Service.

Shortly after Congress voted, with no Republican support, to expand the IRS by 87,000 new employees, Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Judy Chu of California introduced a bill to use the IRS as a vehicle to redefine infertility.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Under the Equal Access to Reproductive Care Act, same-sex couples and single men would be able to “deduct assisted reproductive care, including surrogacy, as a medical expense on their tax returns, without having to demonstrate a medical/physical infertility.”

Schiff’s press release goes so far as to equate the pain felt by fertile, same-sex couples with the pain felt by infertile male-female couples.

Typically, the tax deduction is available for men and women after they are diagnosed as infertile. That’s based on “the inability to conceive after 12 months of unprotected intercourse.”

Schiff claims that failing to offer fertile, same-sex couples an infertility benefit is a form of discrimination. But, of course, such men are not infertile. They aren’t biologically deficient. After all, no two men can conceive a child together.

The Californians’ bill would provide generous tax deductions to affirm an illusion. 

By replacing the biological definition of infertility, groups like Men Having Babies are pushing to redefine “infertility” on the federal and state level. Their most recent efforts, in Illinois, resulted in the state redefining infertility to include “a person’s inability to reproduce either as a single individual or with a partner without medical intervention; or … based on a patient’s medical, sexual, and reproductive history.”

That treats infertility as a matter of personal feeling and preference.

Why does that matter?

For one thing, the bill would expand and normalize the use of surrogacy, which is not just another natural way to bear children. It is a complex process involving as many as five different actors, and one that raises all sorts of medical and moral concerns.

For instance, when a same-sex couple uses anonymous sperm or egg donations, they deprive the resulting child of either a mother or father. Male same-sex couples also need a surrogate to undergo dangerous hormone stimulations and a pregnancy.

That transforms an intimate, natural process into a commercialized, order-on-demand market.

That is also not like adoption and foster care. Both of those processes match the needs of children with a loving home. Surrogacy laws, in contrast, do not mandate background checks or home visits to ensure the child is being born to safe, loving parents.

As a consequence, it’s not uncommon to hear heartbreaking stories of male-commissioned surrogate children used for child pornography, pedophilia, or living in homes with men who have histories of sex-related crimes.

Under the innocuous title of “reproductive care,” commercial surrogacy (that is, surrogacy contracted for compensation) relies on male same-sex couples and single men “renting” the womb of a woman.

A recent photo shoot in New York City captured the problem, if unwittingly. It pictured two men looking into each other’s eyes while a pregnant woman stood off in the background, her own face obscured. Rather than recognize the biological reality of conception, pregnancy, and childbearing, this image revealed how surrogacy turns a mother into a commodity.

Women in these arrangements are no longer called “mothers” but instead “gestational carriers,” who offer rent-a-womb services to the highest bidder. (And the price is high.)

The Schiff-Chu bill implies that each person has a right to a child, no matter the circumstances. But children are not accessories. They deserve the chance to be raised by both a mother and a father.

Yes, some children, due to abandonment, death, or unsafe environments, are raised without one or both parents. In those cases, priority is given to adoption, foster care, and community-level support for single parents.

In contrast, same-sex and single-parent surrogacy conceives a child through artificial means. The goal is to raise the child without a mother or without a father. In either scenario, children are more likely to encounter physical or sexual abuse and suffer academic, emotional, and other harms throughout their lives.

Surrogacy, by design, severs the natural ties of children to their parents.

By redefining infertility, the Equal Access to Reproductive Care Act pushes a reproductive illusion, compromises the well-being of children, and commodifies women.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

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A Proclamation on Transgender Day Of Visibility, 2022

MARCH 30, 2022PRESIDENTIAL ACTIONS

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

In the past year, hundreds of anti-transgender bills in States were proposed across America, most of them targeting transgender kids.  The onslaught has continued this year.  These bills are wrong.  Efforts to criminalize supportive medical care for transgender kids, to ban transgender children from playing sports, and to outlaw discussing LGBTQI+ people in schools undermine their humanity and corrode our Nation’s values.  Studies have shown that these political attacks are damaging to the mental health and well-being of transgender youth, putting children and their families at greater risk of bullying and discrimination.

Transgenderism: Why Stop There?

Deroy Murdock  / April 01, 2022

LGBT activists rally on the steps of New York City Hall in support of transgender people on Oct. 24, 2018. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

COMMENTARY BY

Deroy Murdock

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor, a contributing editor with National Review Online, and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research.

“Identifying” as someone who one is not has become all the rage. If you think you’re somebody you’re not, the whole world is expected to nod its collective head, if not stand up and cheer.

This is especially true for gender identity, as William “Lia” Thomas has demonstrated so vividly in collegiate swimming pools. Unheralded male swimmer William Thomas became NCAA champion female swimmer Lia Thomas—Shazam!—just by saying so.

What a cool magic trick.

Gone are the days when a guy had to put some skin in the game to pull this off. Or, more accurately, pull something off to get some skin out of the game; namely, his penis. The old carving-station requirement for gender transition has gone the way of the rotary telephone. Today, mere affirmations will suffice.

“Hey, I’m a girl!” And you are.

As Yogi Berra might say, if he were alive and not in shock: “Only in America.”

Since simple declarations of identity can change people more swiftly than scalpels, what’s next after the triumph of transgenderism?

Why not transnationalism?

Visualize Lupita Martinez. She lives in poverty in Honduras. The mean streets of Tegucigalpa keep her at wits’ end. A crime surge on public transportation is the last macaw that breaks the branch of her patience.

So, Martinez joins a caravan and heads north, to the U.S.-Mexican frontier.

When she comes face to face with a Border Patrol agent, Martinez says the magic words: “I identify as an American.”

“Welcome home, Lupita!” the federal agent says with a warm smile, as he waves this Honduran American citizen back where she belongs.

And why not transracialism?

Picture Ludwig Von Thannhausen, age 18. He lives in suburban Chicago with his native German parents who brought him to America as a baby. He has blond hair, blue eyes, and looks like a young man born in Oberpfaffenhofen who also happens to be white.

But Von Thannhausen can’t get enough of things black.

He is obsessed with the Harlem Renaissance. He knows the literature of Langston Hughes better than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the paintings of Aaron Douglas more than Max Ernst, and the music of Duke Ellington deeper than Richard Wagner.

His heroes stretch from Frederick Douglass to the Tuskegee Airmen to Denzel Washington. He listens to everything from Motown to Parliament Funkadelic to Prince to Kanye West.

He dreams of majoring in black studies at Howard University in Washington, D.C., a historically black college. In fact, he’s applying as a black student and seeks scholarships intended for black applicants.

Von Thannhausen resembles a recruit for the Aryan Nation, but he said the secret words: “I identify as black.”

Who are we to disagree? If that’s his identity, that’s his identity.

And if his good grades, decent SAT scores, and impressive baseball record land him a spot at Howard, plus a $50,000 minority scholarship, then who are we to say that he is not really black?

But what would we say to the kid who actually is black (you know: dark skin, dark hair, etc.), applies to Howard, and misses out on admission, a scholarship, or both? If not for Von Thannhausen, those blessings would be hers.

Why not transindividualism?

Imagine that Bob Glenwood has multiple-personality disorder. He identifies as Bob Glenwood, but also as Steve Jones, Myron Shapiro, Jackie Washington, and Concepcion Gomez.

So, he fills out five voter registration applications and requests five absentee ballots.

Who are we to say that Glenwood deserves just one ballot? How dare we disenfranchise the other four people who live inside his brain? That would be Jim Crow 3.0.

As these (for now) fictional scenarios show, America will plunge into ever deeper chaos if we simply let people “identify” as those they are not and then deprive others of goods and benefits meant for people who legitimately embody those identities.

I identify as Walter Cronkite, and that’s the way it is.

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

SOCIETYNEWS

‘The Equal Rights of Female Athletes Are Being Infringed’: Women’s Group Files Civil Rights Complaint Over Transgender Swimmer

Maggie Hroncich  / March 18, 2022

Female swimmers (from left) Emma Weyant, Erica Sullivan, and Brooke Forde place behind Lia Thomas (left), the biologically male transgender swimmer who won the NCAA Division 1 women’s 500-yard freestyle on Thursday. (Photo: Justin Casterline/Getty Images)

Concerned Women for America filed a formal civil rights complaint against the University of Pennsylvania on Thursday, contending the school is violating Title IX requirements designed to protect the rights of female student athletes. 

The complaint came the same day transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, a biological male, won the 500-yard freestyle at the NCAA’s Division 1 Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships in Atlanta. Thomas is set to compete in the 100-yard and 200-yard freestyles today and tomorrow.

Thomas, who had previously competed on the men’s team, has been dominating women’s competitions and shattering records since switching to the women’s team in 2020.

“Thomas is anatomically and biologically a male with physical capacities that are different from anatomically and biologically female athletes, which extends an unfair advantage and strips female student athletes of opportunities afforded to them by law,” according to a statement from Concerned Women for America, a Christian conservative public policy organization. 

The complaint cites federal Title IX requirements for schools to provide equal educational opportunities, including in athletics, to receive federal funding. 

“The future of women’s sports is at risk, and the equal rights of female athletes are being infringed,” said Penny Nance, CEO and president of Concerned Women for America. “Any school that defies federal civil rights law by denying women equal opportunities in athletic programs, forcing women to compete against athletes who are biologically male, must be held accountable.”

Jay Richards, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, expressed support for Concerned Women for America’s complaint against the University of Pennsylvania. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

“The case of Lia (formerly Will) Thomas at the University of Pennsylvania is a highly visible example of how gender ideology is already wreaking havoc in our schools,” Richards said. “And it’s clearly a violation of the spirit and letter of Title IX. I just hope that courts have the courage to recognize that. If justice is to be served, then CWA should prevail.” 

Before I show the clip from AFTER LIFE let me show you how inconsistent humanists can be with this article below. Humanist claim to be the biggest supporters of women’s rights!!

By Canceling Richard Dawkins, the American Humanist Association Has Betrayed Its Values

The drive to punish dissenters from various orthodoxies is itself illiberal.

ROBBY SOAVE | 4.26.2021 1:00 PM

(Katja Ogrin/Empics Entertainment/ZUMA Press/Newscom)

Last week, the American Humanist Association (AHA) stripped British author Richard Dawkins of his 1996 Humanist of the Year award after he made a comment on Twitter that offended some in the transgender community.

“Regrettably, Richard Dawkins has over the past several years accumulated a history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalized groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values,” said the AHA. “His latest statement implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient.”

This is nonsense: Dawkins had raised a point that it is perfectly worthy of discussion, in accordance with the rationalist philosophy of the humanist movement. But it would also have been ridiculous for the organization to punish Dawkins even if the remark had been offensive, given that many of its past awardees have espoused controversial views, and even said insensitive things on Twitter.

Here was Dawkins’ tweet, which concerned Rachel Dolezal, a chapter president of the NAACP who engendered controversy for identifying as black even though she was a white woman:

If it’s disqualifying to express confusion about progressives’ simultaneous embrace of transgender people and vehement rejection of transracial people, I suppose that I will never win a Humanist of the Year award. I wrote the following in my 2019 book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump:

If we accept, as many on the left do, that people can identify as female even though they were born male, why is it unthinkable for people to identify as black when they were born white? How can the left embrace transgender people without even considering the possibility that there could be transracial people? (Race, after all, is more obviously socially constructed than gender. While our conception of gender is at least partly based on biological differences between the sexes, the same is not true for race.)

The point is not to demean transgender people, but to question why people like Dolezal instantly warranted pariah status. Dawkins subsequently clarified that it was not his intention “to ally in any way with Republican bigots in US now exploiting this issue.”

But according to the AHA, this clarification evinced “neither sensitivity nor sincerity.” Dawkins’ name is no longer listed on the website’s awardees page.

Perusing this page reveals something interesting: There are far more controversial past winners than Dawkins. The AHA gave Humanist of the Year awards to the author and activist Alice Walker—who promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories—and also to Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood who promoted eugenics and white supremacy. Sanger’s legacy is so complicated that her own organization is currently disowning her.

The AHA has also given lesser awards to several individuals with a history of provocative statements and bad tweets: Jessica Valenti, Cenk Uygur, and others. To be clear, the AHA is within its rights to give or rescind awards to anyone it wishes, for any reason. But people who support the organization’s mission have the same right to criticize it for hypocrisy.

Two such critics are Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker, who won the Humanist of the Year award in 2011 and 2006, respectively. Goldstein and Pinker wrote an open letter to the AHA calling on it to reverse course:

Dawkins did not call for discrimination against or marginalization of any individual or group. And he explicitly denied any intention to disparage anyone or to lend support to transphobic or racist political movements.  Now, it would still be completely appropriate for those of you who objected to the substance of his tweets to criticize them in The Humanist or other forums, explaining the nature of their objections. But to seek to punish, dishonor, or humiliate a writer rather than engage with his words is a betrayal of humanism.

The Humanist Manifesto III declares that “the lifestance of humanism [is] guided by reason.” Since no one is infallible, reason requires that a diverse range of ideas be expressed and debated openly, including ones that some people find unfamiliar or uncomfortable. To demonize a writer rather than address the writer’s arguments is a confession that one has no rational response to them.

This illiberal response is all the more damaging to an organization that claims to repudiate the repressive practices of religion. It has not been lost on commentators that an association of “freethinkers” has deemed certain thoughts unthinkable, nor that it is enforcing dogmas and catechisms by excommunicating a heretic. The AHA is turning itself into a laughingstock.

Goldstein and Pinker are quite right. The AHA’s own values require tolerance of difficult conversations around public policy subjects, rather than a knee-jerk drive to punish dissenters from orthodoxies.

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After Life #1 Trailer

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I listened to this question and answer session at Harvard in 1992 on cassette tapes and was captivated with Ravi Zacharias. His responses were so much better than Kath’s responses to Tony in AFTER LIFE. I have referenced work by Ravi many times in the past and Especially moving was Ravi’s own spiritual search which started in a hospital bed after a failed suicide attempt. I also want you to check out his talk at Princeton and the question and answer time afterwards which are both on YOU TUBEat these two links: Link for talk, Link for Q/A.

After Life 2 Trailer

On Saturday April 18, 2020 at 6pm in London and noon in Arkansas, I had a chance to ask Ricky Gervais a question on his Twitter Live broadcast which was  “Is Tony a Nihilist?” At the 20:51 mark Ricky answers my question. Below is the video:

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If Death is the end then what is the point Kath asks below:

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Francis Schaeffer passed away on May 15, 1984 and on the 10th anniversary of that date I wrote many skeptics such as Carl Sagan and corresponded with them on the big questions covered by the Book of Ecclesiastes.

Kath: You are an atheist?

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Adrian Rogers on Evolution

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Ravi Zacharias  (March 26, 1946 – May 19, 2020) 

Francis Schaeffer (January 30, 1912 – May 15, 1984^[1]) 

I grew up at Bellevue Baptist Church under the leadership of our pastor Adrian Rogers and I read many books by the Evangelical Philosopher Francis Schaeffer and in 1992 I heard cassette tapes of Ravi Zacharias in all his brilliance in his sessions at Harvard and have had the opportunity to contact many of the evolutionists or humanistic academics that they have mentioned in their works. Many of these scholars have taken the time to respond back to me in the last 20 years and some of the names  included are  Ernest Mayr (1904-2005), George Wald (1906-1997), Carl Sagan (1934-1996),  Robert Shapiro (1935-2011), Nicolaas Bloembergen (1920-),  Brian Charlesworth (1945-),  Francisco J. Ayala (1934-) Elliott Sober (1948-), Kevin Padian (1951-), Matt Cartmill (1943-) , Milton Fingerman (1928-), John J. Shea (1969-), , Michael A. Crawford (1938-), Paul Kurtz (1925-2012), Sol Gordon (1923-2008), Albert Ellis (1913-2007), Barbara Marie Tabler (1915-1996), Renate Vambery (1916-2005), Archie J. Bahm (1907-1996), Aron S “Gil” Martin ( 1910-1997), Matthew I. Spetter (1921-2012), H. J. Eysenck (1916-1997), Robert L. Erdmann (1929-2006), Mary Morain (1911-1999), Lloyd Morain (1917-2010),  Warren Allen Smith (1921-), Bette Chambers (1930-),  Gordon Stein (1941-1996) , Milton Friedman (1912-2006), John Hospers (1918-2011), Michael Martin (1932-).Harry Kroto (1939-), Marty E. Martin (1928-), Richard Rubenstein (1924-), James Terry McCollum (1936-), Edward O. WIlson (1929-), Lewis Wolpert (1929), Gerald Holton(1922-), Martin Rees (1942-), Alan Macfarlane (1941-),  Roald Hoffmann (1937-), Herbert Kroemer (1928-), Thomas H. Jukes(1906-1999) and  Ray T. Cragun (1976-).

 Adrian Rogers (September 12, 1931 – November 15, 2005) 

Charles Darwin Autobiography

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Francis Schaeffer “The Age of NONREASON”

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(Above) Tony and Anne on the bench at the graveyard where their spouses are buried.

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July 9, 2020 
Ricky Gervais 

Dear Ricky,  

This is the 83rd day in a row that I have written another open letter to you to comment on some of your episodes of AFTER LIFE, and then I wanted to pass along some evidence that indicates the Bible is historically accurate from Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop Book WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?

In the 6th episode of the second season of AFTERLIFE Tony and Lenny interview a 50 year old person who pretends to be a 8 year old little girl when everyone in his family knows this person has been around for 50 years. 

Just pretending something is true does not make it true. This was true too for Jean Paul Sartre. The atheist Sartre said that this Godless universe has no meaning but “Let’s pretend the universe has meaning.” But this is just fooling ourselves. 

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Let me share a portion of an article by William Lane Craig with you.

The Absurdity of Life without God

William Lane Craig

SUMMARY

Why on atheism life has no ultimate meaning, value, or purpose, and why this view is unlivable.

Francis Schaeffer has explained this point well. Modern man, says Schaeffer, resides in a two-story universe. In the lower story is the finite world without God; here life is absurd, as we have seen. In the upper story are meaning, value, and purpose. Now modern man lives in the lower story because he believes there is no God. But he cannot live happily in such an absurd world; therefore, he continually makes leaps of faith into the upper story to affirm meaning, value, and purpose, even though he has no right to, since he does not believe in God.

Let’s look again, then, at each of the three areas in which we saw life was absurd without God, to show how man cannot live consistently and happily with his atheism.

Meaning of Life

First, the area of meaning. We saw that without God, life has no meaning. Yet philosophers continue to live as though life does have meaning. For example, Sartre argued that one may create meaning for his life by freely choosing to follow a certain course of action. Sartre himself chose Marxism.

Now this is utterly inconsistent. It is inconsistent to say life is objectively absurd and then to say one may create meaning for his life. If life is really absurd, then man is trapped in the lower story. To try to create meaning in life represents a leap to the upper story. But Sartre has no basis for this leap. Without God, there can be no objective meaning in life. Sartre’s program is actually an exercise in self-delusion. Sartre is really saying, “Let’s pretend the universe has meaning.” And this is just fooling ourselves.

The point is this: if God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless; but man cannot live consistently and happily knowing that life is meaningless; so in order to be happy he pretends life has meaning. But this is, of course, entirely inconsistent—for without God, man and the universe are without any real significance.

Value of Life

Turn now to the problem of value. Here is where the most blatant inconsistencies occur. First of all, atheistic humanists are totally inconsistent in affirming the traditional values of love and brotherhood. Camus has been rightly criticized for inconsistently holding both to the absurdity of life and the ethics of human love and brotherhood. The two are logically incompatible. Bertrand Russell, too, was inconsistent. For though he was an atheist, he was an outspoken social critic, denouncing war and restrictions on sexual freedom. Russell admitted that he could not live as though ethical values were simply a matter of personal taste, and that he therefore found his own views “incredible.” “I do not know the solution,” he confessed.” [7] The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong cannot exist. As Dostoyevsky said, “All things are permitted.”

But Dostoyevsky also showed that man cannot live this way. He cannot live as though it is perfectly all right for soldiers to slaughter innocent children. He cannot live as though it is all right for dictators like Pol Pot to exterminate millions of their own countrymen. Everything in him cries out to say these acts are wrong—really wrong. But if there is no God, he cannot. So he makes a leap of faith and affirms values anyway. And when he does so, he reveals the inadequacy of a world without God.

The horror of a world devoid of value was brought home to me with new intensity a few years ago as I viewed a BBC television documentary called “The Gathering.” It concerned the reunion of survivors of the Holocaust in Jerusalem, where they rediscovered lost friendships and shared their experiences. One woman prisoner, a nurse, told of how she was made the gynecologist at Auschwitz. She observed that pregnant women were grouped together by the soldiers under the direction of Dr. Mengele and housed in the same barracks. Some time passed, and she noted that she no longer saw any of these women. She made inquiries. “Where are the pregnant women who were housed in that barracks?” “Haven’t you heard?” came the reply. “Dr. Mengele used them for vivisection.”

Another woman told of how Mengele had bound up her breasts so that she could not suckle her infant. The doctor wanted to learn how long an infant could survive without nourishment. Desperately this poor woman tried to keep her baby alive by giving it pieces of bread soaked in coffee, but to no avail. Each day the baby lost weight, a fact that was eagerly monitored by Dr. Mengele. A nurse then came secretly to this woman and told her, “I have arranged a way for you to get out of here, but you cannot take your baby with you. I have brought a morphine injection that you can give to your child to end its life.” When the woman protested, the nurse was insistent: “Look, your baby is going to die anyway. At least save yourself.” And so this mother took the life of her own baby. Dr. Mengele was furious when he learned of it because he had lost his experimental specimen, and he searched among the dead to find the baby’s discarded corpse so that he could have one last weighing.

My heart was torn by these stories. One rabbi who survived the camp summed it up well when he said that at Auschwitz it was as though there existed a world in which all the Ten Commandments were reversed. Mankind had never seen such a hell.

And yet, if God does not exist, then in a sense, our world is Auschwitz: there is no absolute right and wrong; all things are permitted. But no atheist, no agnostic, can live consistently with such a view. Nietzsche himself, who proclaimed the necessity of living beyond good and evil, broke with his mentor Richard Wagner precisely over the issue of the composer’s anti-Semitism and strident German nationalism. Similarly Sartre, writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, condemned anti-Semitism, declaring that a doctrine that leads to extermination is not merely an opinion or matter of personal taste, of equal value with its opposite. [8] In his important essay “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” Sartre struggles vainly to elude the contradiction between his denial of divinely pre-established values and his urgent desire to affirm the value of human persons. Like Russell, he could not live with the implications of his own denial of ethical absolutes.

A second problem is that if God does not exist and there is no immortality, then all the evil acts of men go unpunished and all the sacrifices of good men go unrewarded. But who can live with such a view? Richard Wurmbrand, who has been tortured for his faith in communist prisons, says,

The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe when man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil. There is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man. The communist torturers often said, ‘There is no God, no Hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish.’ I have heard one torturer even say, ‘I thank God, in whom I don’t believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.’ He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners. [9]

And the same applies to acts of self-sacrifice. A number of years ago, a terrible mid-winter air disaster occurred in which a plane leaving the Washington, D.C., airport smashed into a bridge spanning the Potomac River, plunging its passengers into the icy waters. As the rescue helicopters came, attention was focused on one man who again and again pushed the dangling rope ladder to other passengers rather than be pulled to safety himself. Six times he passed the ladder by. When they came again, he was gone. He had freely given his life that others might live. The whole nation turned its eyes to this man in respect and admiration for the selfless and good act he had performed. And yet, if the atheist is right, that man was not noble—he did the stupidest thing possible. He should have gone for the ladder first, pushed others away if necessary in order to survive. But to die for others he did not even know, to give up all the brief existence he would ever have—what for? For the atheist there can be no reason. And yet the atheist, like the rest of us, instinctively reacts with praise for this man’s selfless action. Indeed, one will probably never find an atheist who lives consistently with his system. For a universe without moral accountability and devoid of value is unimaginably terrible.

The Success of Biblical Christianity

But if atheism fails in this regard, what about biblical Christianity? According to the Christian world view, God does exist, and man’s life does not end at the grave. In the resurrection body man may enjoy eternal life and fellowship with God. Biblical Christianity therefore provides the two conditions necessary for a meaningful, valuable, and purposeful life for man: God and immortality. Because of this, we can live consistently and happily. Thus, biblical Christianity succeeds precisely where atheism breaks down.

Conclusion

Now I want to make it clear that I have not yet shown biblical Christianity to be true. But what I have done is clearly spell out the alternatives. If God does not exist, then life is futile. If the God of the Bible does exist, then life is meaningful. Only the second of these two alternatives enables us to live happily and consistently. Therefore, it seems to me that even if the evidence for these two options were absolutely equal, a rational person ought to choose biblical Christianity. It seems to me positively irrational to prefer death, futility, and destruction to life, meaningfulness, and happiness. As Pascal said, we have nothing to lose and infinity to gain.

• [1]Kai Nielsen, “Why Should I Be Moral?” American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1984): 90.
• [2]Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1985), 90, 84.
• [3]H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (New York: Berkeley, 1957), chap. 11.
• [4]W.E. Hocking, Types of Philosophy (New York: Scribner’s, 1959), 27.
• [5]Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Gay Science,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), 95.
• [6]Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” in Why I Am Not a Christian, ed. P. Edwards (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), 107.
• [7]Bertrand Russell, Letter to the Observer, 6 October, 1957.
• [8]Jean Paul Sartre, “Portrait of the Antisemite,” in Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Satre, rev. ed., ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: New Meridian Library, 1975), p. 330.
• [9]Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1967), 34.
• [10]Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 2d ed., 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1959), 2:360-1.
• [11]Loyal D. Rue, “The Saving Grace of Noble Lies,” address to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, February, 1991.

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This reminds me of an illustration from Francis Schaeffer of what existentialism means: 

When we speak of irrationalism or existentialism or the existential methodology, we are pointing to a quite simple idea. It may have been expressed in a variety of complicated ways by philosophers, but it is not a difficult concept.
Imagine that you are at the movies watching a suspense film. As the story unfolds, the tension increases until finally the hero is trapped in some impossible situation and everyone is groaning inwardly, wondering how he is going to get out of the mess. The suspense is heightened by the knowledge (of the audience, not the hero) that help is on the way in the form of the good guys. The only question is: will the good guys arrive in time?
Now imagine for a moment that the audience is slipped the information that there are no good guys, that the situation of the hero is not just desperate, but completely hopeless. Obviously, the first thing that would happen is that the suspense would be gone. You and the entire audience would simply be waiting for the axe to fall.
If the hero faced the end with courage, this would be morally edifying, but the situation itself would be tragic. If, however, the hero acted as if help were around the corner and kept buoying himself up with this thought (“Someone is on the way!” – “Help is at hand!”), all you could feel for him would be pity. It would be a means to keep hope alive within a hopeless situation. The hero’s hope would change nothing on the outside; it would be unable to manufacture, out of nothing, good guys coming to the rescue. All it would achieve would the hero’s own mental state of hopefulness rather than hopelessness.
The hopefulness itself would rest on a lie or an illusion and thus, viewed objectively, would be finally absurd. And if the hero really knew what the situation was, but consciously used the falsehood to buoy up his feelings and go whistling along, we would either say, “Poor guy!” or “He’s a fool.” It is this kind of conscious deceit that someone like Woody Allen has looked full in the face and will have none of.
Now this is what the existential methodology is about. If the universe we are living in is what the materialistic humanists say it is, then with our reason (when we stop to think about it) we could find absolutely no way to have meaning or morality or hope or beauty. This would plunge us into despair. We would have to take seriously the challenge of Albert Camus (1913-1960) in the first sentence of The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”92 Why stay alive in an absurd universe? Ah! But that is not where we stop. We say to ourselves – “There is hope!” (even though there is no help). “We shall overcome!” (even though nothing is more certain than that we shall be destroyed, both individually at death and cosmically with the end of all conscious life). This is what confronts us on all sides today: the modern irrationalism.

Francis Schaeffer has correctly argued:

The universe was created by an infinite personal God and He brought it into existence by spoken word and made man in His own image. When man tries to reduce [philosophically in a materialistic point of view] himself to less than this [less than being made in the image of God] he will always fail and he will always be willing to make these impossible leaps into the area of nonreason even though they don’t give an answer simply because that isn’t what he is. He himself testifies that this infinite personal God, the God of the Old and New Testament is there. 

Instead of making a leap into the area of nonreason the better choice would be to investigate the claims that the Bible is a historically accurate book and that God created the universe and reached out to humankind with the Bible. Below is a piece of that evidence given by Francis Schaeffer concerning the accuracy of the Bible.

TRUTH AND HISTORY (chapter 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?)

We now take a jump back in time to the middle of the ninth century before Christ, that is, about 850 B.C. Most people have heard of Jezebel. She was the wife of Ahab, the king of the northern kingdom of Israel. Her wickedness has become so proverbial that we talk about someone as a “Jezebel.” She urged her husband to have Naboth killed, simply because Ahab had expressed his liking for a piece of land owned by Naboth, who would not sell it. The Bible tells us also that she introduced into Israel the worship of her homeland, the Baal worship of Tyre. This led to the opposition of Elijah the Prophet and to the famous conflict on Mount Carmel between Elijah and the priests of Baal.

Here again one finds archaeological confirmations of what the Bible says. Take for example: “As for the other events of Ahab’s reign, including all he did, the palace he built and inlaid with ivory, and the cities he fortified, are they not written in the book of the annals of the kings of Israel?” (I Kings 22:39).

This is a very brief reference in the Bible to events which must have taken a long time: building projects which probably spanned decades. Archaeological excavations at the site of Samaria, the capital, reveal something of the former splendor of the royal citadel. Remnants of the “ivory house” were found and attracted special attention (Palestinian Archaeological Museum, Jerusalem). This appears to have been a treasure pavilion in which the walls and furnishings had been adorned with colored ivory work set with inlays giving a brilliant too, with the denunciations revealed by the prophet Amos:

“I will tear down the winter house along with the summer house; the houses adorned with ivory will be destroyed and the mansions will be demolished,” declares the Lord. (Amos 3:15)

Other archaeological confirmation exists for the time of Ahab. Excavations at Hazor and Megiddo have given evidence of the the extent of fortifications carried out by Ahab. At Megiddo, in particular, Ahab’s works were very extensive including a large series of stables formerly assigned to Solomon’s time.

On the political front, Ahab had to contend with danger from the Aramacaus king of Syria who besieged Samaria, Ahab’s capital. Ben-hadad’s existence is attested by a stela (a column with writing on it) which has been discovered with his name written on it (Melquart Stela, Aleppo Museum, Syria). Again, a detail of history given in the Bible is shown to be correct.

This brings me to the message of Solomon in ECCLESIASTES and below are comments by Francis Schaeffer:

Ecclesiastes 9:7-12

⁷ Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do.

⁸ Let your garments be always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head.

⁹ Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, (DOES IT SOUND OPTIMISTIC? NOW COMES THE BACKLASH) all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. ¹⁰ Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.

¹¹ Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all. ¹² For man does not know his time. Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them.

Solomon when at work takes off his hat and he stands by the grave of man and he says, “ALAS. ALAS. ALAS.”

But interestingly enough the story of Ecclesiastes does not end its message here because in two places in the New Testament it is picked up and carried along and put in its proper perspective.

Luke 12:16-21

¹⁶ And he told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully, ¹⁷ and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ ¹⁸ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. ¹⁹ And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax,eat, drink, be merry.”’ [ALMOST EVERYONE WHO HAS PROCEEDED HERE HAS FELT CERTAINLY THAT JESUS IS DELIBERATELY REFERRING TO SOLOMON’S SOLUTION.]²⁰ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ ²¹ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”

Christ here points out the reason for the failure of the logic that is involved. He points out why it fails in logic and then why it fails in reality. This view of Solomon must end in failure philosophically and also in emotional desperation.

We are not made to live in the shortened environment of UNDER THE SUN in this life only!!! Neither are we made to live only in the environment of a bare concept of afterlife [ignoring trying to make this life better]. We are made to live in the environment of a God who exists and who is the judge. This is the difference and that is what Jesus is setting forth here.

I Corinthians 15:32

³² What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”

There is no doubt here he is reaching back to Solomon again and he is just saying if there isn’t a resurrection of the dead then let’s just follow Solomon and let’s just eat and drink for tomorrow we die!!!! If there isn’t this full structure [including the resurrection of the dead] then just have the courage to follow Solomon and we can eat and drink because tomorrow we die and that is all we have. If the full structure isn’t there then pick up the cup and drink it dry! You can say it a different way in the 20th century: If the full structure is not there then go ahead and be an EXISTENTIALIST, but don’t cheat. Drink the cup to the end. Drink it dry! That is what Paul says. Paul  the educated man. Paul the man who knew his Greek philosophy. Paul the man who understood Solomon and the dilemma. Paul said it one way or the other. There is no room for a middle ground. IF CHRISTIANS AREN’T RAISED FROM THE DEAD THEN SOLOMON IS RIGHT IN ECCLESIASTES, BUT ONLY THEN. But if he is right then you should accept all of Solomon’s despair and his conclusions. 

The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.

Thank you again for your time and I know how busy you are.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002

PS: What is the meaning of life? Find it in the end of the open letter I wrote to you on April 23, 2020. 

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Below is the workforce of THE TAMBURY GAZETTE 

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Seen below is the third episode of AFTERLIFE (season 1) when Matt takes Tony to a comedy club with front row seats to cheer him up but it turns into disaster!!!

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Part 1 “Why have integrity in Godless Darwinian Universe where Might makes Right?”

Part 2 “My April 14, 2016 Letter to Ricky mentioned Book of Ecclesiastes and the Meaninglessness of Life”

Part 3 Letter about Brandon Burlsworth concerning suffering and pain and evil in the world.  “Why didn’t Jesus save her [from cancer]?” (Tony’s 10 year old nephew George in episode 2)

Part 4 Letter on Solomon on Death Tony in episode one, “It should be everyone’s moral duty to kill themselves.”

Part 5 Letter on subject of Learning in Ecclesiastes “I don’t read books of fiction but mainly science and philosophy”

Part 6 Letter on Luxuries in Ecclesiastes Part 6, The Music of AFTERLIFE (Part A)

Part 7 Letter on Labor in Ecclesiastes My Letter to Ricky on Easter in 2017 concerning Book of Ecclesiastes and the legacy of a person’s life work

Part 8 Letter on Liquor in Ecclesiastes Tony’s late wife Lisa told him, “Don’t get drunk all the time alright? It will only make you feel worse in the log run!”

Part 9 Letter on Laughter in Ecclesiastes , I said of laughter, “It is foolishness;” and of mirth, “What does it accomplish?” Ecclesiastes 2:2

Part 10 Final letter to Ricky on Ladies in Ecclesiastes “I gathered a chorus of singers to entertain me with song, and—most exquisite of all pleasures— voluptuous maidens for my bed…behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun” Ecclesiastes 2:8-11.

Part 11 Letter about Daniel Stanhope and optimistic humanism  “If man has been kicked up out of that which is only impersonal by chance , then those things that make him man-hope of purpose and significance, love, motions of morality and rationality, beauty and verbal communication-are ultimately unfulfillable and thus meaningless.” (Francis Schaeffer)

Part 12 Letter on how pursuit of God is only way to get Satisfaction Dan Jarrell “[In Ecclesiastes] if one seeks satisfaction they will never find it. In fact, every pleasure will be fleeting and can not be sustained, BUT IF ONE SEEKS GOD THEN ONE FINDS SATISFACTION”

Part 13 Letter to Stephen Hawking on Solomon realizing he will die just as a dog will die “For men and animals both breathe the same air, and both die. So mankind has no real advantage over the beasts; what an absurdity!” Ecclesiastes

Part 14 Letter to Stephen Hawking on 3 conclusions of humanism and Bertrand Russell destruction of optimistic humanism. “That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms—no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”(Bertrand Russell, Free Man’s Worship)

Part 15 Letter to Stephen Hawking on Leonardo da Vinci and Solomon and Meaningless of life “I hate life. As far as I can see, what happens on earth is a bad business. It’s smoke—and spitting into the wind” Ecclesiastes Book of Ecclesiastes Part 15 “I hate life. As far as I can see, what happens on earth is a bad business. It’s smoke—and spitting into the wind” Ecclesiastes 2:17

Part 16 Letter to Stephen Hawking on Solomon’s longing for death but still fear of death and 5 conclusions of humanism on life UNDER THE SUN. Francis Schaeffer “Life is just a series of continual and unending cycles and man is stuck in the middle of the cycle. Youth, old age, Death. Does Solomon at this point embrace nihilism? Yes!!! He exclaims that the hates life (Ecclesiastes 2:17), he longs for death (4:2-3) Yet he stills has a fear of death (2:14-16)”

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Mandeep Dhillon as Sandy on her first assignment in ‘After Life’. (Twitter)

A still from ‘After Life’ that captures the vibe of the Tambury Gazette. (Twitter)

Michael Scott of THE OFFICE (USA) with Ricky Gervais 

After Life on Netflix stars Ricky Gervais as a bereaved husband (Image: Netflix)

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Psychiatrist played by Paul Kaye seen below.

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Tony Johnson with his dog Brandi seen below:

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Proverbs 16 New Living Translation
https://youtu.be/RHzaBJPnKoA

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My favorite verses in chapter 16 are about gossip:

²⁷ Scoundrels create trouble;
    their words are a destructive blaze.

²⁸ A troublemaker plants seeds of strife;
    gossip separates the best of friends.

Proverbs 16New Living Translation

16 We can make our own plans,
    but the Lord gives the right answer.

² People may be pure in their own eyes,
    but the Lord examines their motives.

³ Commit your actions to the Lord,
    and your plans will succeed.

⁴ The Lord has made everything for his own purposes,
    even the wicked for a day of disaster.

⁵ The Lord detests the proud;
    they will surely be punished.

⁶ Unfailing love and faithfulness make atonement for sin.
    By fearing the Lord, people avoid evil.

⁷ When people’s lives please the Lord,
    even their enemies are at peace with them.

⁸ Better to have little, with godliness,
    than to be rich and dishonest.

⁹ We can make our plans,
    but the Lord determines our steps.

¹⁰ The king speaks with divine wisdom;
    he must never judge unfairly.

¹¹ The Lord demands accurate scales and balances;
    he sets the standards for fairness.

¹² A king detests wrongdoing,
    for his rule is built on justice.

¹³ The king is pleased with words from righteous lips;
    he loves those who speak honestly.

¹⁴ The anger of the king is a deadly threat;
    the wise will try to appease it.

¹⁵ When the king smiles, there is life;
    his favor refreshes like a spring rain.

¹⁶ How much better to get wisdom than gold,
    and good judgment than silver!

¹⁷ The path of the virtuous leads away from evil;
    whoever follows that path is safe.

¹⁸ Pride goes before destruction,
    and haughtiness before a fall.

¹⁹ Better to live humbly with the poor
    than to share plunder with the proud.

²⁰ Those who listen to instruction will prosper;
    those who trust the Lord will be joyful.

²¹ The wise are known for their understanding,
    and pleasant words are persuasive.

²² Discretion is a life-giving fountain to those who possess it,
    but discipline is wasted on fools.

²³ From a wise mind comes wise speech;
    the words of the wise are persuasive.

²⁴ Kind words are like honey—
    sweet to the soul and healthy for the body.

²⁵ There is a path before each person that seems right,
    but it ends in death.

²⁶ It is good for workers to have an appetite;
    an empty stomach drives them on.

²⁷ Scoundrels create trouble;
    their words are a destructive blaze.

²⁸ A troublemaker plants seeds of strife;
    gossip separates the best of friends.

²⁹ Violent people mislead their companions,
    leading them down a harmful path.

³⁰ With narrowed eyes, people plot evil;
    with a smirk, they plan their mischief.

³¹ Gray hair is a crown of glory;
    it is gained by living a godly life.

³² Better to be patient than powerful;
    better to have self-control than to conquer a city.

³³ We may throw the dice,^[a]
    but the Lord determines how they fall.

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Go Go’s Our lips are sealed

Green Day “Things I heard Today”

I heard a rumor

https://youtu.be/m-DZQ80vEVI

Blank space by Taylor Swift

Lyrics And music by Hunter Hatcher

And I know, that you know.
Can’t tell a soul. What to do?
And I know, I told you so.
And you know what to do.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.beu0026amp;v=sAKqNl4abTI

• The Meanest Member In Our ChurchContributed by Adrian Rogers on Oct 11, 2011      based on 21 ratings  (rate this sermon) | 38,797 viewsScripture: James 3:1-12Denomination: Baptist

Summary: The tongue is the meanest member in our church. The tongue is a fire and a world of iniquity.

There are people who deliberately, and hellishly, and hurtfully, and hatefully use their tongues to destroy the lives of other people. You may wish to write in your margin Proverbs 16, verses 27 and 28 by this verse, by verse 6. Here’s what that verse says: “An ungodly man diggeth up evil: and in his lips there is a burning fire. A perverse man soweth strife: and a whisperer separateth chief friends” (Proverbs 16:27–28). The fire of the tongue.

Oh, we talked about arsonists a few weeks ago. Are you guilty of using your tongue in a form of arson? So many people who would not think of using vulgar language, so many cultured ladies who sit around drinking pink tea, and discussing flower arrangements, use their two-inch tongue as a fire. They don’t use vulgar language, they just gossip, and snipe, and criticize. The ladies raid society. And, men, how many times we speak about men as gossips, or women as gossips. Some of the worst gossips I’ve ever known are men, and some of them ministers.

I heard about a lady one time who went to the newspaper office to put something in the society column, and she happened to lean up against a wall where there was a freshly printed piece of newsprint, or at least a type, and it printed on the back of her dress. She didn’t know that it had, but it printed on the back of her dress these words: “Daily News.” All day long people were snickering at her, laughing at her, pointing; she knew something was wrong. Finally, when she got home she said to her husband, “Would you please look on the back of my dress, and see if there’s anything there that ought not to be there.” He looked and said, “No, ma’am, nothing at all.”

The tongue is a fire. Morgan Blake, who was a sportswriter for the Atlanta Journal said this: “I am more deadly than the screaming shell from the Howitzer. I win without killing. I tear down homes, break hearts and wreck lives. I travel on the wings of the wind. No innocence is strong enough to intimidate me, no purity is strong enough to daunt me. I have no regard for truth, no respect for justice, no mercy for the defenseless. My victims are as numerous as the sands of the sea, and often as innocent. I never forget and seldom forgive. My name is gossip.”

The tongue is a fire, and it destroys like a hellish arsonist. And, then next James says that the tongue devours like a wild beast. Look in verses 7 and 8: “For every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed of mankind: But the tongue can no man tame…” (James 3:7–8). And, he says here now, the tongue is like a wild, ferocious, untamable beast. It may be very small, it lives in an ivory cage, but it breaks forth, and that boneless tongue can crush and kill and hurt.

Boys and girls sometimes say, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me.” But, words do hurt, they do hurt. And, all the protestations can’t take it away. The tongue is like a beast that devours. Paul said, and you might jot this scripture down, Galatians chapter 5, verse 15. Paul said this, “But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another” (Galatians 5:15). Isn’t that a strange thing to write to Christians? “If you bite and devour one another.” Christian cannibalism—consuming one another like animals, ferocious animals that are biting and destroying. Some people have had terror struck in their hearts by a movie called Jaws. I suggest something more dangerous is a church member that I call “Monster Mouth.” Like a wild beast, the meanest member in the church.

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John MacArthur on the Bible and Science (Part 2)

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John MacArthur on the Bible and Science (Part 1)

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June 24, 2013 – 9:47 am

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Evidence for the Bible

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May 23, 2013 – 1:35 am

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May 21, 2013 – 1:05 am

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John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 3) “Guard your mind and obey your parents!!”

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John MacArthur on Larry King Live Part 4 The Bible on War

February 28, 2013 – 6:30 am

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John MacArthur on Larry King Live Part 3 Who was Jesus?

February 27, 2013 – 6:41 am

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John MacArthur on Larry King Live Part 2 What Happens After We Die

February 26, 2013 – 7:44 am

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John MacArthur on Larry King Live Part 1 God v Science in the schools

February 25, 2013 – 7:25 am

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Adrian Rogers and John MacArthur on wisdom from Proverbs on alcohol

November 15, 2012 – 7:50 am

(My pastor growing up was Adrian Rogers and he died 7 years ago today. He would have been 82 if he was still living. ) I love the Book of Proverbs and every day I read one chapter of Proverbs. Since there are 31 chapters, I start the 1st of ever month and read chapter […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

Abortion and the Campaign for Immorality (Selected Scriptures) John MacArthur

October 16, 2012 – 7:19 am

Abortion and the Campaign for Immorality (Selected Scriptures) John MacArthur Published on Sep 30, 2012 by JohnMacArthurGTY http://www.gty.org/resources/sermons/90-448 What a privilege and joy it is to worship the Lord here at Grace Church. Patricia and I miss it when we’re not here. There’s no place like this. Our hearts are full to overflowing to be […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Tagged john macarthur | Edit|Comments (0)

“The very things that God hates… are affirmed as part of the Democratic Party Platform” John MacArthur

October 16, 2012 – 5:05 am

Homosexuality and the Campaign for Immorality (Selected Scriptures) John MacArthur Published on Oct 4, 2012 by JohnMacArthurGTY http://www.gty.org/resources/sermons/90-449 Earlier in the service I read from the first chapter of Romans what is really a very, very shocking portion of Scripture. Just to remind you that Romans chapter 1, verses 18 to 32, describes the wrath […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events, Prolife | Tagged john macarthur | Edit|Comments (0)

John MacArthur on Romans 1 and the Democratic Party

October 13, 2012 – 1:57 pm

First is what Romans says: Romans 1:18-32 New American Standard Bible (NASB) Unbelief and Its Consequences 18 For (A)the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who (B)suppress the truth [a]in unrighteousness, 19 because (C)that which is known about God is evident [b]within them; for God made it evident to […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

John MacArthur: Fulfilled prophecy in the Bible? (Ezekiel 26-28 and the story of Tyre, video clips)

April 5, 2012 – 10:39 am

Prophecy–The Biblical Prophesy About Tyre.mp4 Uploaded by TruthIsLife7 on Dec 5, 2010 A short summary of the prophecy about Tyre and it’s precise fulfillment. Go to this link and watch the whole series for the amazing fulfillment from secular sources. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvt4mDZUefo________________ John MacArthur on the amazing fulfilled prophecy on Tyre and how it was fulfilled […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology | Edit|Comments (1)

John McArthur and Adrian Rogers on Proverbs and Alcohol (Eddie Sutton and Ryan Dunn used as examples)

January 17, 2013 – 7:59 am

Same old story it seems. Kentucky pulls out another close victory over the Vols. This is not the only story I am talking about today. Kentucky’s Alex Poythress (22) shoots between Tennessee’s Josh Richardson, left, and Yemi Makanjuola during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game at Rupp Arena in Lexington, Ky., Tuesday, […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

Did God kill someone that I knew? What does I John 5:14-17 mean?

March 1, 2012 – 4:01 pm

1 John 5:14-17 New American Standard Bible (NASB) 14 This is (A)the confidence which we have [a]before Him, that, (B)if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. 15 And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, (C)we know that we have the requests which we have asked from […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|