Culture Clips — October 10, 2006

The World We Leave Behind

Today, we live in a country that is obsessed with its economic prosperity. We are comfortable enough to spare ourselves the rigors of moral striving. Same-sex marriages, eroding family values, ambushing innocent children in class rooms, elected officials with a fetish for underage kids, absentee fathers — these things cause concern but little more.

We proceed with the knowledge that American life will go on. We are confident that we are the greatest empire in the history of empires. This belief in the inevitability of our way of life breeds certain carelessness to the truly important stuff of life. This is the decadence that precedes the fall.

We need to continue passing the torch of moral excellence to our children so that, down the road, they may realize something greater than violence, sexual promiscuity, making celebrities out of a former Governor who had secret and openly gay liaisons while married, and disintegrating family values. For the true measure of our success is the world we leave for our children.

If we strive for the high ground of moral excellence, we will have improved the only corner of the universe that we can be certain of improving. And that is ourselves. If we do this, our morality will overflow from our own lives and trickle into the lives of others. And then, in quiet moments when we’re alone, we will suddenly realize that knowing the good, we have done it; knowing the righteous, we have served it, knowing the truth, we have embodied it.

Armstrong Williams
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/Armstrong
Williams/2006/10/09/the_world_we_leave_behind

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Abortion Chic

To put an accurate face on abortion would require something that strict pro-choicers refuse to acknowledge: That abortion really has three faces — that of the mother, the father, and that of the ... what do we call it? Fetus is so South Park these days. How about the quirky ``products of conception from your termination''?

That's how hospital administrators a few years ago in Glasgow, Scotland, labeled the post-abortion remains from Nicola McManus, who had induced the miscarriage of her nine-week-old ``baby,'' as I prefer to call it, upon taking the RU486 ``abortion pill.''

McManus was startled to discover the remains in a jar resting on a shelf in her hospital room. Her outrage at the careless hospital staff brought tears and the sort of statement Ms. & Co. prefer not to hear: ``Women need more counseling before abortions, not less,'' said McManus. ``I will never get over what happened to me.''

A nine-week-old fetus, for the record, has a heartbeat, a closed circulatory system, a respiratory system, eyes, ears and brain function. She can't go shopping yet, but she can squint, swallow, move her tongue and make a fist. She is not, in other words, ``just a clump of cells.''

The problem with petitions and ``I Had an Abortion'' T-shirts, such as those hawked by Planned Parenthood, is that they trivialize the deeply emotional and spiritual consequences many women suffer.

Kathleen Parker
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/Kathleen
Parker/2006/10/06/abortion_chic
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Culture Warrior

Bill O’Reilly has a message every American must understand: Our country is under attack — from within.


O’Reilly’s new book, Culture Warrior, boldly describes two disparate worldviews that are competing for the very soul of our nation. On one side are the “traditionalists,” those who know that America is a noble enterprise, a beacon of hope and light for the world, and who understand that our belief in God and our commitment to good has made us the greatest nation on Earth. On the other side are the secular-progressives (S-Ps), who see America as imperialistic and intrinsically evil — and who want nothing more than to sanitize our classrooms and our public squares from the alleged poison of faith.

In an exclusive phone interview, Bill told me that the culture war in which we’re all immersed is “not a political war, but is, at its heart, a social war.” He’s right. And I believe that the battle is also a spiritual one. It transcends politics. It’s bigger than Republican vs. Democrat or conservative vs. liberal, and the stakes are significantly higher than the next election.

We live in a defining era — a brief period in which America’s future is at risk. Will we remain the land of the free and the home of the brave? Or will we allow the secular humanists to hog-tie our rights, and use the schools to drown our kids in their dogma, while we simultaneously succumb to the siren song of malevolence (the anthem of today’s media culture) and become just another hopeless, Godless country in the mold of Western European nations like France?

Kathleen Hagelin
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/Rebecca
Hagelin/2006/10/06/culture_warrior

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