Thursday, November 14, 2019



The virtue of Christian humility
  
Shortly after Jim Bakker’s release from prison in July 1994, I invited the disgraced TV evangelist to my home. There was an important question I wanted to ask him.

Some background: Bakker and his “Praise the Lord” (PTL) associates sold $1,000 “lifetime memberships” to people who were promised annual three-night stays at his Heritage USA luxury hotel complex in Fort Mill, South Carolina. According to what prosecutors revealed at his trial on fraud charges, Bakker sold tens of thousands of these memberships for a hotel that had only 500 rooms planned and was never completed. It was alleged Bakker kept $3.4 million of the money for himself and the rest paid for Heritage USA’s operating expenses.

“When did you start to go wrong?” I asked Bakker. His answer was instructive: “When I began to surround myself with people who told me only what I wanted to hear.”

I thought of that statement when I read a comment by former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who told a gathering in Sea Island, Georgia, sponsored by The Washington Examiner, what he had said to President Trump before leaving his position: “I said whatever you do, don’t hire a ‘yes man,’ someone who won’t tell you the truth – don’t do that, because if you do, I believe you will be impeached.”

The latest White House Press Secretary, Stephanie Grisham, sounded like a “yes-woman” when she responded to Kelly: “I worked with John Kelly, and he was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great president.”

The key to great leadership is to not overly regard yourself, to understand you don’t know everything, realize that, like everyone else, you are flawed and can make bad judgments, and to surround yourself with people who think well enough of you to tell you the truth from their perspective, even when it disagrees with yours. As long as the objective is to help you succeed with your agenda, such advice can be valuable and even humbling, humility being one of humanity’s better characteristics and a grace that appears in short supply in Washington.

Another story along these lines was told to me by one of the late Billy Graham’s associates. After a particularly successful evening during which thousands came forward in response to an invitation to receive Christ as Savior, Graham and his team went back to their hotel room. The aide said he told Graham, “You’re not as great as they think you are.” He said Graham responded, “Don’t I know it.”

Some of those evangelical “advisers” to President Trump might consider a verse with which they must be familiar. It is from Proverbs 15:22: “Plans go wrong for lack of advice; many advisers bring success.”

Israel’s King Solomon is said to have written that and most of the Proverbs, which are as good a guidebook for living (and leading) as has ever been written, even for non-believers.

Generals require committed privates in order to achieve success in warfare. Presidents need the same, along with staff who don’t always tell them what they want to hear, but sometimes what they need to hear.

SOURCE 





'LGBTQ' Activists Seek to Legalize Child Abuse
  
Somebody’s got to tell the dreadful truth: LGBTQ radicals and their allies want to legalize child abuse.

Of course, not all LGBTQ adults seek to victimize children, but their silence when it happens makes them complicit.

Children have long been treated like animals in lab experiments by perverted adults. Remember the crazed “sexologist” Alfred Kinsey? He was the child predator whose documentation of the sexual abuse of children, mostly boys, was used to further the homosexual agenda in the 1940s and ‘50s. Literally thousands of children, including babies, were sexually abused for hours by Kinsey in order to see if they would reach orgasm.

Instead of being locked up as a child abuser, Kinsey was held up by “free love” activists as a hero. You can learn more about how this child predator spawned the growing movement to legalize child abuse at www.drjudithreisman.com.

Today, the psychological abuse of children is becoming commonplace in the classroom. Graphic sex ed and even story time often focus on sexual identity and activity.

In addition to books about trucks or fairy tales, teachers and “drag queens” now read also about vulvas, clitorises, and penises, confusing otherwise happy and carefree children about their identities and introducing heavy subjects that kindergartners shouldn’t have to worry about.

One of the most popular books, I Am Jazz, is based on the real-life account of a toddler boy who insisted that he was really a girl. The book description says: “From the time she was two years old, Jazz knew that she had a girl’s brain in a boy’s body.”

You know a culture is in serious trouble when adults believe that two-year-olds have the ability to make such life-altering decisions.

As if the psychological abuse in schools and the media propaganda weren’t enough, the courts also are being used to bludgeon parents who seek to protect their children: A Texas jury recently decided that the mother of a seven-year-old boy can abuse her son by forcing him to take drugs that will medically castrate him. Does this mean she also will have the “right” to cut off his penis when she feels like it?

Court testimony reveals that the mother dresses him like a girl, insists he call himself a girl, and has terrorized the child by locking him in his room and shouting through the door that monsters eat only boys. Yet a jury granted the mother full custody. The real question is: Why isn’t this woman in jail?

Thankfully, just a few days ago a judge intervened and said that the father — who is trying to protect his son from the abuse — will have input in the decisions about the boy’s medical care. Alarmingly, however, the judge issued a gag rule on the father, which means that the fate of the young boy will now be shrouded in silence. Except for the public outcry in support of the father when he initially spoke out about the abuse, it seems that the judge would not have intervened at all. If the court ultimately determines that the abuse is allowed to be continued as the case proceeds, it will happen in the darkness, where evil lives to hide.

Nightmare accounts of adults manipulating children and physically abusing them with drugs to halt their sexual development are popping up across the nation. In Ohio, parents lost custody of their daughter when they refused to administer hormones so she could “transition” to a boy.

The American Principles Project (AmericanPrinciplesProject.org) reveals how homosexual activists lecture at medical conferences in an attempt to promote their radical agenda through family doctors throughout the country.

Thankfully, parents in both political parties are starting to fight back. Protecting children isn’t a Democrat or Republican issue; it’s a human-rights issue. The American Principles Project and other nonpartisan groups are now calling for legislation to protect children from the child abuse of gender reassignment.

Perhaps one of the most powerful voices for protecting children and helping adults who suffer from gender dysphoria is Walt Heyer of www.sexchangeregret.com. Mr. Heyer was abused as a child and regrets the “transition” that he was cajoled into.

 "So many people who change genders realize later that abuse in their lives contributed to their gender distress feelings,“ he says. "Changing genders is not the proper treatment for overcoming childhood trauma or abuse. Find someone who will address the underlying source of your distress without prescribing hormones or surgery. Avoid those who are 'transgender cheerleaders’ and advocate for transition.”

As our culture increasingly subjects innocent children to the twisted ideology of damaged adults desperate to validate their own disorders, America is quickly becoming a nation that promotes and propagates rampant child abuse.

Adults who suffered abuse as children need help and healing. We do them a grave disservice when we don’t love them enough to encourage them to seek counseling to overcome their pain. Allowing them to propagate their pain by harming children is just plain evil.

God calls us to stand up for the hurting and the powerless, especially children — even though we will be persecuted. May He give us the courage to fight and the wisdom to speak the truth in love.

SOURCE 






Inside the Mainstream Media's Sexual Predator Protection Racket

The mainstream media (news and entertainment) in this country have spent the past three years caterwauling about President Trump's treatment of them. They bristle at the merest suggestion that they have been derelict in their duty.

In their telling of the story, they are brave souls, the lone purveyors of truth, and the only things standing between ORANGE MAN BAD and the utter demise of the Republic.

In reality, it turns out that they're just a bunch of depraved sexual predator and pervert protectors.

The revelation that ABC News sat on the sordid Jeffrey Epstein story is shocking enough on its own, but it's merely the latest in distressing tale of Big Three Network entertainment and news divisions running interference for predators.

Amy Robach's backtracking, cover her you-know-what statement recycled the same "didn't meet our standards" nonsense that NBC used to excuse themselves for burying Ronan Farrow's reporting on Harvey Weinstein.

In the latter case, it was Weinstein himself who was powerful and making everyone nervous.

Epstein, on the other hand, had powerful connections who -- based on Robach's statement -- continue to strike fear in the hearts of the brave journalists of America.

NBC's claim was laughable, and it's still dogging them two years later. In fact, just as Project Veritas was releasing the Robach bombshell, The Washington Post published an article excoriating NBC for not having dealt with its original failure with Farrow's reporting.

Robach's frustration in the Project Veritas video isn't with the "standards," so that dog isn't going to hunt for very long. Nobody is even using the lame "doctored video" excuse this time around.

Although ABC and NBC are in the news right now, CBS isn't off the hook due to its Les Moonves saga, obviously.

News and entertainment divisions at the Big Three Networks have been blurred by leftists for so long that there is very little chance that rumors from one aren't known by the other. I was only on the periphery of the television industry when I was in Los Angeles and I heard whispers about Moonves years ago.

One incident is horrible. Two indicate the potential presence of a pattern. What we've seen in the last couple of years is a culture. A culture that existed because leftists protect their own no matter what. The Me Too cascade only happened because Weinstein was kind of a monster.

A most important point has been made by many in the past 24 hours. These news organizations whose "standards" prevented them from outing a serial sexual predator and a pedophile had no problem with airing every unsubstantiated bit of hearsay about Brett Kavanaugh in an attempt to ruin his career and life.

So, cool story about the standards, bro, but nobody sane is buying it.

SOURCE 






High Court rules in favour of Cardinal Pell on final appeal

This is already evidence that the case is an unusual one.  A conviction based on one uncorroborated allegation is very rare for a start

Australia’s final arbiter has granted disgraced cardinal George Pell special leave to appeal his five convictions for molesting two choirboys in Melbourne in 1996, and almost immediately the public defence of the 78-year-old has ramped up.

The High Court of Australia this morning ruled that it would hear Pell’s appeal after it was earlier rejected by the Victorian Court of Appeal. It is rare for the High Court to grant an appeal and the decision keeps Pell’s chances for an early release from prison alive. He has been in prison since March this year.

He is within his rights to apply for bail, but the chances of bail being granted are very slim.

Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt wasted no time in taking aim at Pell’s accusers and the judges who put him away and kept him there. He directly questioned the credibility of the two judges of the Court of Appeal — president Chris Maxwell and Chief Justice Anne Ferguson — who ruled against Pell in August. “Their credibility is now on the line,” he wrote, before taking aim at Pell’s accusers.

“At the very least, the improbability (of the crime being committed the way Pell’s accusers said it was committed) is so very high that no-one should convict a man on that evidence just because his accuser seemed to be so nice or honest.”

Bolt wrote that the third judge, Mark Weinberg, “seemed to accuse his fellow judges of putting too much faith in the demeanour of Pell’s sole accuser”.

The most senior Catholic to be found guilty of child sex abuse crimes was not in the Canberra courtroom when the decision was handed down, nor did he appear via video link.

Instead, the news was relayed to him inside his cell at Melbourne Assessment Prison where he spends his days in protective custody.

A unanimous Victorian County Court jury in December found Pope Francis’ former finance minister guilty of molesting two 13-year-old choirboys in Melbourne’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the late 1990s shortly after Pell became archbishop of Australia’s second-largest city.

Pell’s lawyers argued in their 12-page application for a High Court appeal that two state appeals court judges made two errors in dismissing his appeal in August.

The judges made a mistake by requiring Pell to prove the offending was impossible rather than putting the onus of proof on prosecutors, the lawyers said.

They also said the two judges made a mistake in finding the jury’s guilty verdicts were reasonable. Pell’s lawyers argued there was reasonable doubt about whether opportunity existed for the crimes to have occurred.

Pell’s lawyers also argue that changes in law over the years since the crimes were alleged have increased the difficulty in testing sexual assault allegations.

They argue Pell should be acquitted of all charges for several reasons, including inconsistencies in the complainant’s version of events. But prosecutors argue there is no basis for the appeal, and the Victorian courts made no errors.

In their written submission to the High Court, prosecutors wrote Pell’s legal team was asking High Court judges to apply established principles to the facts of the case, which were already carefully and thoroughly explored by the state appeals court.

Pell was largely convicted on the testimony of one victim. The second victim died of an accidental heroin overdose in 2014 when he was 31 years old without complaining that he had been abused.

The surviving victim said after Pell lost his appeal in August, “I just hope that it’s all over now.”

Pell must serve at least three years and eight months behind bars before he becomes eligible for parole.

As a convicted paedophile, he is provided with extra protection from other inmates and spends 23 hours a day in solitary confinement.

SOURCE  

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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