The West Is Now Marked by Systemic Evil

UN LGBT Expert Wants to Punish Religious Opponents

Austin Ruse
C-Fam


NEW YORK, April 17 (C-Fam) One of the great debates at the UN over the last few decades has been over how to wedge the LGBT issue into the UN dialogue. Member states were largely uninterested. Conservative and religiously minded countries knew the issue was a radicalizing one.

The debate tended to play itself out in the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, far from New York headquarters where conservative western NGOs can play a more active role in the debate.

In Geneva, year in and year out, Brazil would play stalking horse for the pro-gay European countries. Annually, Brazil would propose language that would place “sexual orientation and gender identity” as a new category of non-discrimination. Each year it was defeated.

The issue came to fruition in 2016 with the adoption of a resolution calling for a report on violence against gays and called for the appointment of an “independent expert” to develop this report, someone who can travel around the world gathering information, making statements, and generally pushing governments toward acceptance of SOGI into non-discrimination law.

The fears of opponents have played themselves out in recent years with the appointment of Costa Rican Victor Madrigal-Borloz as the “independent expert.” Madrigal has gone far beyond reporting on violence against gays.

Measuring Up

Statement on Gender and Sexuality

Grace Presbyterian Church of NZ

[The following is an official statement of the General Assembly of Grace Presbyterian Church (NZ).  We believe it will be a helpful encouragement to all faithful Christians, not just the members and adherents of  Grace Presbyterian Church (NZ). Ed.]

At the General Assembly 2018 a task force was commissioned to prepare a statement on gender and sexuality for the denomination. This most recent General Assembly saw that document adopted. May it be a blessing to the denomination and people. 

A Statement on Gender and Sexuality 

This statement has been written as an attempt to provide a harmonisation of love and truth in our context regarding gender and sexuality so that our people may have some pastoral guidance in dealing with these issues.

Introduction 

Christians at the dawn of the twenty-first century find themselves living in a period of historic transition. Our society has become increasingly post-Christian and has begun to reinterpret what it means to be human. By and large the society we live in does not discern God’s design for human life nor delights in the beauty of being image-bearers of God. 

Our societies’ unbelieving worldview denies God created human beings for his glory and denies that his good purposes for us include our personal and physical design as male and female. Therefore, the Church once more must strive to declare to the world, “that the LORD, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his.” (Ps. 100:3)

Integrating Into the Void

Hugh Hefner's Legacy of Despair

The bitter fruit of Hefner’s life’s work has helped poison American families.

David French
National Review Online

Hugh Hefner didn’t invent pornography, and it would no doubt be thriving today even if he hadn’t founded Playboy magazine those many years ago. After all, man is fallen, and somebody would have filled that depraved niche in American life. Hefner, however, played his part, and the part he played was immensely destructive to our nation’s cultural, moral, and spiritual fabric. Hefner mainstreamed porn, he put it in millions of homes, and he even glamorized it — recasting one of America’s most pathetic industries as the playground of the sophisticated rich. He then grew to a ripe old age, consorting with women young enough to be his granddaughters. He was America’s most famous dirty old man.

And now he’s dead. May God have mercy on his soul.

It’s hard to calculate the damage he did, but the cultural rubble is all around us. My generation is perhaps the first to grow up with easily accessible porn. Every one of us knew whose father had a Playboy subscription (only the scary pervs subscribed to Penthouse or Hustler), and their kids knew exactly where dad kept his stash. They’d sneak out old issues, bring them to school, and pass them around. Before teens could rent porn on tape, they could see porn on the page, and once they saw it, they were hooked.

The effects have lasted a lifetime.

Open War Is Upon Us Whether We Like It Or Not

Emptying The Caverns of Isengard

The prediction business is risky at any time.  Just ask your local weather man. However, we are going to go out on a limb in the case of Ireland.  We are going to predict  that within a few months we will witness Christians being fined, fired, and imprisoned for being faithful to our Lord in Ireland.

Donna Rachel Edmunds explains why:

Ireland has stripped away laws which protected the rights of people to freedom of religion when in conflict with gay rights. The move comes just weeks after the first Irish gay weddings went ahead, following a referendum to allow gay marriage earlier this year.

Following the landslide defeat for opponents of same sex marriage – the referendum was lost by 62 per cent in favour of gay marriage to 38 per cent against – Ireland’s Parliament has been busy with a slate of reforms designed to cement the rights of gay people within Irish law, Pink News has reported.

What the Irish Parliament has done is acknowledge its fealty to a higher law than the law of Jesus Christ.  In fact, the Irish Parliament believes itself higher than the Almighty.  The Irish justice system will now punish anyone and any church which declares--in the Name of Christ--that since homosexuality is a sin, homosexuals cannot serve in office.  For Christians, this is not a startling position: it is one the Church has held since the Apostles, in all places where the Bible is revered.

Redemption in Action

‘Jewish Schindler’ Saves Dozens of Yazidis and Christians from Islamic State

by Donna Rachel Edmunds 

Breitbart London

A Canadian Jewish businessman has spearheaded efforts to rescue Iraqi Yazidi and Christian girls from slavery after the girls were captured by ISIS troops, using money donated privately by business contacts. The businessman has cited Oskar Schindler, who rescued Jewish children from the holocaust, as his inspiration.

Last summer the world looked on in horror as ISIS swept through north Iraq, home to Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, and Yazidis. Hundreds of thousands fled before them, but thousands more starved to death in the desert, or were captured by Islamic forces. Girls in particular were bartered for in the markets, standing naked while men bought them as sex slaves.

But while most of the west turned off their TV sets, Canadian entrepreneur Steve Maman decided to take positive action. Making contacts in Iraq who could negotiate the release of the girls, Mr Maman raised thousands of Canadian dollars to finance a rescue operation, The Liberation of Christian and Yazidi Children of Iraq (CYCI).

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Our Transgressive Daisy Chain

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

The great need of the hour is for Christians in North America to get a map in their heads, a map that has an x on it, that x indicating “you are here.” Related to this, we need to know how exactly we got here. We need to be oriented, and that means we need to be oriented by Scripture — not by the secularists who taunt us, on the one hand, or by the evangelical bedwetters, who believe every last one of their taunts, on the other.

It is not as though we were not warned. We were warned repeatedly, but we did not have the right categories in our minds to process those warnings. We had some prophetic souls who were able to point out where the x was going to be a century after their time. We are now standing on it and we still don’t know. Here is Chesterton, near the beginning of the 20th century.

Too big to fight, or too big to miss?

“For the next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality. And it is coming, not from a few Socialists surviving from the Fabian Society, but from the living exultant energy of the rich resolved to enjoy themselves at last, with neither Popery nor Puritanism nor Socialism to hold them back . . . The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow, but much more in Manhattan.” (G.K. Chesterton: ‘The Next Heresy,’ in G.K.’s Weekly, June 19, 1926).

And this libertine excess, which throws off the “chains” established by God’s moral order, does not result in greater freedom for all. It results in petty tyrannies, soft despotism, and all those 16 ounce soda bans. Chesterton again:

“For when you break the great laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws” (Chesterton on Dickens, Collected Works XV, p. 151).

A glaring example of breaking the great laws would be our culture-wide unwillingness or inability to tell the difference between boys and girls, along with our unwillingness or inability to admit that these are the only two possible options on the menu.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

The Prophet Sober and the Culture Drunk

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Magblog

March 9, 2015

Well, it is Monday morning, so let me write something outrageous. We can sweep up the pieces later. But also keep in mind the fact that just because something is outrageous, it does not follow that it is untrue or unnecessary. In fact, now that the cultural headquarters of our republic has been transferred to the National Zoo’s central monkey house, every day that goes by makes normality more and more outrageous. So there’s that.

Worldview thinkers know that everything is connected. The world is all of a piece, and in the final analysis, the long war between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent is an interpretive war over the whole. The seed of the woman seek to understand the world as the Creator of it understands it, and the seed of the serpent seek to understand it in evolutionary terms, which is to say, on its own terms.

The cosmos is here because God put it here. Or, taking the other route, the cosmos — in some form — was always here. Either God is eternal, or matter/energy are. In the former scenario, there was nothing material and then bam, there was everything that is. In the latter, you have constant, everlasting, unrelenting change. No hope, but lots of change.