|
nChrist
|
 |
« on: December 29, 2013, 02:00:27 PM » |
|
________________________________________
The Patriot Post Friday Digest 12-20-2013
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
________________________________________
Publisher’s Note
This is our last Digest of 2013. As is our custom, we take leave between Christmas and New Year’s to be with our families. Our next edition will be on Friday, Jan. 3, 2014.
A Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
THE FOUNDATION
“Conscience is the most sacred of all property.” –James Madison
CULTURE, SCIENCE & FAITH
A&E Fires Phil
“Duck Dynasty” star and patriarch Phil Robertson came face to face with the political correctness police at A&E again this week when he dared to go “off script” during a GQ interview.
Last May, the network requested that the #1 show in cable TV history1 eliminate its references to God and guns, but Phil said no: “God and guns are part of our everyday lives [and] to remove either of them from the show is unacceptable. If we can’t pray to God on the show, then we will not do the show.”
Responding to a question about sin in the current edition of GQ, Phil replied in his colloquial manner, “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there.” He then paraphrased 1 Corinthians: “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers – they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”
The reaction from the two most infamous proponents of gender confusion and homosexual normalization was swift and predictable. The so-called “Human Rights” Campaign protested, “Phil Robertson’s remarks are not consistent with the values of our faith communities or the scientific findings of leading medical organizations. We also know that Americans of faith follow the Golden Rule – treating others with the respect and dignity you’d wish to be treated with. As a role model on a show that attracts millions of viewers, Phil Robertson has a responsibility to set a positive example for young Americans.”
Well, we think Phil did set a positive example for young Americans!
The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation complained, “Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil’s lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe. He clearly knows nothing about gay people or the majority of Louisianans … who support [them].” They accused Robertson of “vile and extreme stereotypes” and “hateful anti-gay comments.”
If you want a good resource for “what true Christians believe,” don’t start with GLAAD, start with Scripture. Both the Old and New Testaments are crystal clear on the subject, as Mark Alexander outlined in detail in his commentary, “Gender Identity, the Homosexual Agenda and the Christian Response2.”
As for “the majority of Louisianans,” Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal clarified, “Phil Robertson and his family are great citizens of the state of Louisiana. The politically correct crowd is tolerant of all viewpoints – except those they disagree with. I don’t agree with quite a bit of stuff I read in magazine interviews or see on TV. In fact, come to think of it, I find a good bit of it offensive. But I also acknowledge that this is a free country and everyone is entitled to express their views. In fact, I remember when TV networks believed in the First Amendment. It is a messed up situation when Miley Cyrus gets a laugh, and Phil Robertson gets suspended.”
Indeed, A&E immediately surrendered: “We are extremely disappointed to have read Phil Robertson’s comments. The A&E Networks have always been strong supporters and champions of the LGBT community. The network has placed Phil under hiatus from filming indefinitely.”
Phil responded, “My mission today is to go forth and tell people about why I follow Christ and also what the Bible teaches, and part of that teaching is that women and men are meant to be together. However, I would never treat anyone with disrespect just because they are different from me. We are all created by the Almighty and like Him, I love all of humanity. We would all be better off if we loved God and loved each other.”
The Robertson family responded, “We want to thank all of you for your prayers and support. The family has spent much time in prayer since learning of A&E’s decision. We want you to know that first and foremost we are a family rooted in our faith in God and our belief that the Bible is His word. Phil’s … beliefs are grounded in the teachings of the Bible. Phil is a Godly man who follows what the Bible says are the greatest commandments: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart’ and ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Phil would never incite or encourage hate. We are disappointed that Phil has been placed on hiatus for expressing his faith. As a family, we cannot imagine the show going forward without our patriarch at the helm.”
In other words, they just put A&E on notice.
When it comes to opposing the homosexual agenda, Christians are now routinely condemned for speaking their beliefs. But the tyranny of political correctness is anathema to America itself, and enslaving all of us to a particular code of thought deemed acceptable to leftists is no different from any other kind of slavery.
If you’d like to let A&E know what you think, send an email to feedbackaetv@aenetworks.com. (Keep it clean.)
NATIONAL SECURITY
The Snowden Chronicles and Another NSA Smackdown
A series of chain reactions that began in May with the release of highly classified information by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden continued this week. Snowden’s leaks have revealed the sheer ubiquity and volume of information gathered and stored by the government, and this latest backlash arrives in the form of a stunning collective setback for the intelligence community, notably, the National Security Agency (NSA). Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC, issued a preliminary injunction barring the agency’s bulk collection of phone records, specifically, the so-called “metadata” associated with an individual phone call.
Metadata includes such information as the phone number called, the time the call was made, the duration of the call and, potentially, the location from which the call was made. Judge Leon ruled that the NSA’s metadata collection violates the Fourth Amendment’s proscription on unreasonable searches. However, the judge hedged his decision somewhat by staying his injunction order, pending an almost certain government appeal on the case.
By way of background, Congress first authorized bulk collection of phone records through the Patriot Act, which it passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Although special “FISA” courts were later established in 2006 to provide judicial oversight and authorization for intelligence collection operations, the enormity of the data collected renders this oversight largely moot: A single “authorization” to collect data can render millions upon millions of metadata records.
The controlling law up to this point has been the Supreme Court’s 1979 opinion in Smith v. Maryland, in which the court ruled that collection of metadata regarding a phone call did not violate the Fourth Amendment’s bar to unreasonable searches. Accordingly, critics complain that Judge Leon failed to follow the Supreme Court by not recognizing that metadata falls outside the Fourth Amendment’s “unreasonable search” prohibition, as annunciated in that decision, and that the judge is employing judicial activism in his ruling. One critic – a former assistant U.S. attorney – even went so far as to call the judge’s ruling “comically lawless.”
However, Judge Leon’s central point – roughly paraphrased – is that the methods, conditions and assumptions that rendered Smith are apples-and-oranges apart from today’s “privacy-expectation” landscape, and that the Smith court – which decided a case involving a single phone record on a single individual – could not possibly have foreseen the ways in which aggregate metadata is currently being used to violate all of America’s “reasonable expectation of privacy,” and thus Smith is largely useless in determining the constitutionality of a governmental action fundamentally different from the one in that landmark case.
Additionally, where Smith gave the government authority to access metadata only in a limited manner (“limited data on outgoing calls”) on one individual in a single case, the government has extended that authority over the years – especially after the Patriot Act – so that it has no limits, has a duration of at least several years and extends to every person in the U.S. Information gathered from billions of cross-referenced data files is of a fundamentally different quality and character from data gathered from a single-line “pen register,” as in Smith.
Moreover, the NSA and other intelligence agencies have even further extrapolated the authority granted in Smith by dragooning every major phone company into involuntary service. To quote Judge Leon, “It’s one thing to say that people expect phone companies to occasionally provide information to law enforcement; it is quite another to suggest that our citizens expect all phone companies to operate what is effectively a joint intelligence-gathering operation with the Government.” Indeed, in Judge Leon’s mind – and ours, for that matter – there is only one word for this constitutional overreach: unsatisfactory. |
