Crazy Dems

Military Chaplains Soon Forced Into Performing Same-Sex Marriages? (Two veterans from over a year ago think so)

Published by Papa Giorgio

BigGovernment has this:

The stage is being set so that military Chaplains can and most likely will be ordered to perform same sex marriage in contradiction to their religious beliefs.

WASHINGTON, May 22, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Democrat House leaders including Nancy Pelosi have opposed a measure to ensure military chaplains are not forced to perform same-sex “marriages,” arguing that it is based on a “manufactured crisis” and therefore unnecessary – a response strongly criticized by chaplain advocates.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday echoed sentiments issued by the Obama White House regarding the conscience language, part of a defense spending bill, saying that “there’s nothing that says that chaplains act against their faith.”

The result will be that chaplains of certain faiths abandon the military as they are forced to choose between violating their faiths or being driven out for not performing such marriage ceremonies.

What is required is the respect of certain long-established and broadly supported religious beliefs. We currently lack a White House and Democrat leadership capable of providing this respect. When Leftists empowered by big government meet religion, religion loses and is ultimately diminished in size and influence.

…read more…

In a recent response to a friend post on FaceBook, I mentioned the types of areas that same-sex marriage hurts religious belief and places where faith and care and concern for the poor as well as children:

…Unfortunately, like many others, this is what Thomas Sowell calls “stage one” thinking. Emotions based policy making without asking what affect a decision will have on society. The oldest (and most successful) adoption agency in Massachusetts (80-years in the field of placing children with families, Illinois and California are sure to follow) and DC had to shut their doors because of their religious option to prefer heterosexual couples when adopting to homosexual couples, from Universities ceasing to give insurance to their students and staff, to forcing chaplains in the military to marry gay couples. These are the early consequences to stage one thinking…

You can add military chaplains to the mix. Decisions like these do not just affect “marriage,” they reverberate throughout all society. Special rights always sets up battles and shows how they destroy healthy thinking, for instance this dichotomy:

“If homosexuality is really genetic, we may soon be able to tell if a fetus is predisposed to homosexuality, in which case many parents might choose to abort it. Will gay rights activists continue to support abortion rights if this occurs?” ~ Dale A. Berryhill, The Assault: Liberalism’s Attack on Religion, Freedom, and Democracy

The question become this, then. Would conservatively religious people serving LESS in the military hurt or help our nation? Does forcing one to reject his religious conscience by Government edict good or bad for society? This is stage two thinking. About 0.1 percent of all American military personnel officially declare themselves to be atheists, while about 77% are Christians — with about 3,000 chaplains — of some flavor (Catholic, Protestant, and the like).  Would our military and national defense suffer if less-and-less Christians joined? The left never asks these questions, they merely legislate from emotional stances:

The Blaze has this portion on the matter:

According to a policy statement released by the administration yesterday, President Barack Obama “strongly objects” to provisions in a House defense authorization bill that would prohibit the use of U.S. military property in same-sex marriages and protect military chaplains who refuse to perform gay marriage ceremonies against their religious beliefs.

Arguing that the measure’s “overbroad terms,“ the Obama administration claims such a measure ”is potentially harmful to good order and discipline.”

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Commentary Magazine ends their wonderful article on this topic very astutely:

…If President Obama does veto the protections offered to chaplains by the House — as his Office of Management and Budget recommends — then it is possible to envision a future where Catholic, evangelical and Orthodox Jewish clergy will no longer be welcome as military chaplains.

At the American Conservative, Rod Dreher quotes American Jewish Congress chief counsel Marc Stern as saying that, “no one seriously believes that clergy will be forced, or even asked, to perform marriages that are anathema to them.” Yet the “sea change” that same-sex marriage will create in American law will bring with it consequences that advocates for this measure aren’t acknowledging. As Dreher writes:

The strategy of the pro-SSM side seems to be to deny that anything like this could possibly happen, and that people who say it could are being irresponsible scaremongers. Then when it actually happens, they’ll say oh, who cares; those bigots deserve what they get.

Dreher is right. The legal problem here is not so much the direct issue of redefining marriage from the traditional understanding of it being one man and one woman. Rather, it is the implications that stem from government sanction that will redefine some religious believers as being outside of not only mainstream opinion but literally outlaws and vulnerable to prosecution and/or defunding on the grounds of discrimination against gays.

The only way for advocates of same-sex marriage to avoid the stigmatizing of some faiths in this manner is to agree to legal stipulations that remove any possibility that religious institutions could be compelled to sanction behavior their religion regards as immoral. But if they refuse to do so, as the White House is indicating with its opposition to House protections for military chaplains, then gay marriage ceases to be a civil rights issue and becomes the focal point of a kulturkampf in which religious freedom is on the line. If that is the way things are heading, then military chaplains won’t be the last victims in the purge of believers.

…read more…

 

Wind Farms Causing Global Warming! You Cannot Make This Stuff Up

Published by Papa Giorgio

Via Independent IE “Technology” page:

….But on huge wind farms the motion of the turbines mixes the air higher in the atmosphere that is warmer, pushing up the overall temperature.

Satellite data over a large area in Texas, that is now covered by four of the world’s largest wind farms, found that over a decade the local temperature went up by almost 1C as more turbines are built.

This could have long term effects on wildlife living in the immediate areas of larger wind farms.

It could also affect regional weather patterns as warmer areas affect the formation of cloud and even wind speeds.

It is reported China is now erecting 36 wind turbines every day and Texas is the largest producer of wind power in the US.

Liming Zhou, Research Associate Professor at the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at the University of New York, who led the study, said further research is needed into the affect of the new technology on the wider environment.

“Wind energy is among the world’s fastest growing sources of energy. The US wind industry has experienced a remarkably rapid expansion of capacity in recent years,” he said. “While converting wind’s kinetic energy into electricity, wind turbines modify surface-atmosphere exchanges and transfer of energy, momentum, mass and moisture within the atmosphere. These changes, if spatially large enough, might have noticeable impacts on local to regional weather and climate.”

The study, published in Nature, found a “significant warming trend” of up to 0.72C (1.37F) per decade, particularly at night-time, over wind farms relative to near-by non-wind-farm regions.

The team studied satellite data showing land surface temperature in west-central Texas….

Via M.I.T. Media Relations:

….According to Prinn and Wang, this temperature increase occurs because the wind turbines affect two processes that play critical roles in determining surface temperature and atmospheric circulation: vertical turbulent motion and horizontal heat transport. Both processes are responsible for moving heat away from Earth’s surface.

In the analysis, the wind turbines on land reduced wind speed, particularly on the downwind side of the wind farms, which reduced the strength of the turbulent motion and horizontal heat transport processes. This resulted in less heat being transported to the upper parts of the atmosphere, as well as to other regions farther away from the wind farms….

Via Gateway Pundit, and the part on birds is found here:

Not only do wind farms kill off high-profile bird species like golden and bald eagles and California condors, the farms also cause global warming. After hundreds of millions in blown taxpayer money and thousands of dead birds the latest research shows that wind farms cause warming. Reuters reported, via Free Republic:

Large wind farms might have a warming effect on the local climate, research in the United States showed on Sunday, casting a shadow over the long-term sustainability of wind power…

…The world’s wind farms last year had the capacity to produce 238 gigawatt of electricity at any one time. That was a 21 percent rise on 2010 and capacity is expected to reach nearly 500 gigawatt by the end of 2016 as more, and bigger, farms spring up, according to the Global Wind Energy Council.

Researchers at the State University of New York at Albany analysed the satellite data of areas around large wind farms in Texas, where four of the world’s largest farms are located, over the period 2003 to 2011.

The results, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, showed a warming trend of up to 0.72 degrees Celsius per decade in areas over the farms, compared with nearby regions without the farms.

“We attribute this warming primarily to wind farms,” the study said. The temperature change could be due to the effects of the energy expelled by farms and the movement and turbulence generated by turbine rotors, it said.

“These changes, if spatially large enough, may have noticeable impacts on local to regional weather and climate,” the authors said.

But the Democrats will continue to dump billions into the costly energy source anyway. It makes them feel good.

The Left Confirms Feelings In Order to `Feel Good,` but Distorts Truth in the Process

Published by Papa Giorgio


From video description:

Prager ends the short discussion with a great example of how “diversity/affirmative action’ plays a role in warping truth/history in order to make people “feel good.” It is one of the key differences between the Left and the Right, that is, equality or liberty. You cannot have both. (Posted by: Religio-Political Talk)

For more clear thinking like this from Dennis Prager… I invite you to visit: http://www.dennisprager.com/

Howard Dean Dismisses His Opposition by Labeling Them

Published by Papa Giorgio

I posted this for a previous topic, but it fits well here:

I often wondered why the liberal does this, that is, find stories to showboat as against the status-quo showing America or our culture as racist by finding rare stories of victims to make some point of racism, sexism, homophobia, islamophobia, imperialism, bigotry, or intolerance. David Mamet answered this for me. After he laid the premise of the protagonist in a play who is typically afflicted by a condition not of their making, thus, drawing a similarity to the political realm of someone “afflicted” with homosexuality, illness, being a woman, etc, saying they had merely acted and thusly could not have sinned, he furthers his point by saying:

These plays were an (unfortunate) by-product of the contemporary love-of-the-victim. For a victim, as above, is pure, and cannot have sinned; and one, by endorsing him, may perhaps gain, by magic, part of his incontrovertible status.

So the liberal, by emphasizing these “victim-hood” stories, absorbs to their psyche innocence, proving that they are peaceful, fair, tolerant, stand for the poor, disenfranchised, and care about the environment.  Thus, better than those whom they just labeled. While many of these people will label religious folk as “holier than thou,” it is these priests of the victicrats [whether directed towards human plight or a perceived environment plight] that are replacing spirituality with “concern.” They are not just as religious, but are in fact fanatical in their positions.  (Larry Elder defines a “victicrat” as someone who “blames all ills, problems, concerns and unhappiness on others.”) At least the religious person is being honest and keeping the categories straight. But I digress.

Read more: https://mii.zkn.mybluehost.me/the-incoherence-of-the-cultural-relativist-making-moral-pronouncements-conversation-series/#ixzz1rCP75W5j