Smoky Mountains Sunrise

Monday, March 5, 2012

Dear Rush: “Why I Canceled My Sleep Number Bed”

Friends, the following companies have put a political correctness code above truth and freedom, particularly free speech.  Please join us in a boycott of these companies. If you listen to Rush, they apparently no longer want your business:
Quicken Loans, Citrix Systems, Legal Zoom, Sleep Number, Sleep Train, Pro Flowers, Carbonite and AOL
By Gary Demar
Dear Rush:

I know you apologized for calling 30-year-old Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute.” The language was certainly over the top. I know what you were thinking. Sometimes people need to be hit over the head with a 2×4 before something sinks in.

Before the watching world Ms. Fluke told us that she was sleeping around. Promiscuity and sex before marriage were once considered social taboos. No one denied that people engaged in these types of sexual encounters, but such women were generally looked down upon. I can remember people saying, “It’s OK to have sex with these types of girls, but they’re not the ones you bring home to your parents and eventually marry.”

Like you, I have reminded people that the larger issue is not about . I just read a Christian Science Monitor article that continues to perpetuate the lie that conservatives want to deny women contraceptives. We don’t. We just don’t want to have our money taken from us to pay for them. If Ms. Fluke wants to engage in promiscuous sex, then she should pay for it. I don’t want to be an unwilling accomplice to her immorality and stupidity.

I’ve gotten to the point in my life that I would be willing to pay for contraceptive devices for women like Ms. Fluke if they promise never to have children. The thought of them breeding is disturbing.

I’ve read that a number of companies have withdrawn their advertising from the show. The online backup service Carbonite is one of them. Here’s what CEO David Friend said in a written statement:
“No one with daughters the age of Sandra Fluke, and I have two, could possibly abide the insult and abuse heaped upon this courageous and well-intentioned young lady.”
 Can you believe this? He calls Ms. Fluke’s testimony about her self-professed promiscuity “courageous.” Am I to assume that Mr. Friend would not rebuke his own daughters for sleeping around and broadcasting it to the world? What a shame.

I found that two mattress companies – Sleep Train and Sleep Number – pulled their ads from the show.

My wife and I had just purchased a Sleep Number bed. When I heard about the company’s cancellation of its advertising, we cancelled our order and went with a competitor. I was very nice to the person taking my call. No yelling or expletives. He told me that they were keeping track of the responses. He then asked if I would like to leave a comment. I did.

My message was simple. Sleep Number had every right to complain and pull its advertising, and I had every right to cancel my order. That’s what makes America great. The issue, I said, was not about contraception but freedom. I did not appreciate the government forcing me to pay for someone else’s immoral behavior.

I liked the way you brought in liberal hypocrisy. We know it’s pandemic, but liberals never acknowledge it, and if they did, would never do anything about it. This was my favorite: “Will President Obama now give back the $1 million that Bill Maher just gave his super PAC?  You want to get some of the tapes that Bill Maher has called Sarah Palin? The ‘c’ word over and over again?”

Just like made oral sex acceptable to middle school students, now other young girls will argue that it’s OK to be promiscuous. Even President Obama supports Sandra Fluke. I shudder to think what our nation will be like in 20 years – if it’s still here.


Rick Santorum's Message for America



Sunday, March 4, 2012

Obama Risks $100 Billion If Catholic Hospitals Close

Bishops May Close Facilities Rather than Bend to Contraception Dictate 


Perhaps Barack Obama assumed that religious leaders would simply offer a token protest to his new mandate for religious organizations to provide free birth control, even when contraception, abortifacients, and sterilization violate the core doctrines of their faith. The president might have had reason to expect that Catholic bishops wouldn’t put up much of a fight, considering their support for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), commonly known as ObamaCare, from which Health and Human Services derives the authority to dictate their coverage requirements to employers.

Read the rest of this entry at The Fiscal Times >>


The Necessity of Reflection

By Father J. Guy Winfrey

Father Winfrey
As a culture, we have become a people who values instinctive responses. We seem no longer to value reflection and this is a tragic loss. This is true on every aspect of our lives these days and it is especially true when it comes to our faith.

I remember a conversation with one of my employers while I was in college. He knew that I was devout and that I was an active member of my parish, so he brought up the subject of religion. (In Texas, this is not a strange topic for conversation.) He was a Baptist, and the son of a Baptist minister. I remember trying to explain some point—I can’t recall what the actual topic was—and he was struck dumb. Finally he said to me, “I think you think too much about these things. We should have faith, and all of this analysis stops it.” It was my turn to be gob-stopped. I have not forgotten this exchange and it is emblematic of a certain sort of religious fervor that eschews the reasoning faculty of the human being.

Of course, religiously, this comes from the spirit of the camp fire revivals in the Great Awakening from which the sort of Baptists in the South generally come. It was a movement that emphasized the emotion and called that religious fervor. My formation made me very suspicious of feelings and emotions because they are so fickle and are terribly subject to manipulation. I visited a “mega-church” one time to tour the facilities and was shown a video control room they had set up for the services. It looked as complex and modern as the Monday Night Football truck. Then I was told that they had everything—the lighting, the sound, the backgrounds on the stage, etc.—programmed and calculated to evoke in the congregants particular emotions. Hmm… a scientifically designed program to effect a chosen religious spirit. It seems quite a dark thing to me: the emotion is the religion.

But this is also a symptom of a larger problem culturally. I have an intuition (something that is quite distinct from instinct) that modern reality programs, which are filled with drama and emotive dysfunction, are little more than the secularization of the remnants of the Great Awakening. They are the deliberate stirring up of emotions, but in the secular age there is no teleological purpose, no end in sight, so they stir up only to evoke the emotion itself. The emotions are the subject. One could say that reality programs are the product of secular Protestantism.

In our age, we do not take time to reflect, and because we don’t we sometimes try to force decisions and actions that are not fully formed. A lack of thought and reflection (for my English friends, reflexion) has been a typical charge directed toward Americans, but this was an exaggeration… perhaps until now.

The word itself is now thought of in mechanical, geometric or mathematic contexts usually. Reflection, coming from the Latin to bend back (reflexio), is a withholding from action. It is a pause in which one looks at things in the broadest possible manner and considers well. For centuries this has been one of the most salient characteristics of Western Christianity, especially from the scholastic period forward (not to say that the earlier Fathers of the Church were not reflective). It was not essentially instinctive, but meditative.

The one time bastion of thought, the university, has become little different than a middle-class secular tent revival. Students are natural protesters because of their immaturity and naïveté, but this has been distorted by many in academia to become the raison d’être of a university education. One wonders if they have ever read Newman’s, The Idea of a University? I doubt it. More’s the pity.

I am reminded of Newman’s period of reflection as he was leaving Anglicanism. He was one of the principle leaders of the Oxford Movement at the time, but he seemed to be drawn elsewhere because of many years of study and deep thought. He didn’t become a Roman Catholic quickly; rather, it was a process that extended over many years. For any who would like to peek into his process, they may read his Apologia pro Vita Sua.

Reflection must be recovered by us all—regardless of our religion. It must be recovered in politics, the university, our faith and our personal lives. To think and reflect is part of what distinguishes us from the animals; and this to me is one of the greatest damnations of purely instinctive processing.

Intincts are not at infallible. All animals have them and we know from Pavlav that they can be conditioned. A large part of military training is pointed directly at developing a specific set of desired intincts in the warrior. This is necessary for his survival and success as a combatant. But instinct is surely a baser aspect of humanity. Even military commanders don’t rely upon it for making tactical decisions.

There are certain Christian instincts that must be trained in the neophyte, like the natural repugnance to immorality, but reflection must be tutored and developed. It is an imperative. This is done through reading thoughtful and intelligent writers (especially the Fathers of the Church), and especially through meditating on these writings prayerfully.

If there is to be any hope for our civilization—religiously, politically, or intellectually, then we must restore the importance of reflection in our lives. We must not allow ourselves to be bullied into quick responses when these things require sober meditation and thought. Sometimes we cannot give an answer when one desires it. Sometimes the time required for reflection and thought may take quite a while—as I have already said, it took Newman several years before he could make a decision.

The last word on this is simply to point out the foundational necessity of silence for reflection. Before one can truly meditate, think, contemplate, and reflect, one must carve out a space of quiet. We must learn how to turn off our televisions, radios, and iPods. We must learn to enter into silence once more if we would be wise. How counter-cultural!


V. Rev. Fr. J. Guy Winfrey is an Archpriest in the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese and the pastor of St George Orthodox Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.


Tallis Scholars - "Miserere mei, Deus" - Gregorio Allegri


This recording of Gregorio Allegri's glorious Miserere is perhaps the purest, most definitive sound ever achieved by a professional choir. It was performed by the Tallis Scholars under the direction of Peter Phillips and recorded by Gimell Records in the early 1980s.


Friday, March 2, 2012

Guess Who Stopped By Today

We had an interesting visitor here at Sunlit Uplands today; a visit recorded by our Site Meter.  Someone in the Executive Office of the President googled "evangelicals, contraception mandate." One will never know what political or policy discussion and considerations may have prompted such a search, but we are delighted that they found our post entitled "Evangelicals, Southern Baptists Rip HHS Mandate," which we had reposted from Catholic World News.
  
Having worked in the Executive Office of the President in a far better time, we know that there are several thousand employees in the EOP, but it's nice to know that someone there is concerned about the firestorm they brought upon themselves.  

The Obama regime's sinister attempt to drive a wedge between the church hierarchy and the lay faithful, and between conservative Catholics and liberal Catholics backfired badly.  They have not only strengthened the unity of our Church and aroused a sleeping giant politically, they have forged greater unity among all Christians who care about religious liberty, conscience rights and the United States Constitution.  Yes, Catholics and Evangelicals are working together as Christian brothers and sisters to defend our "unalienable Rights" and to rid America of a regime which has proven itself to be an enemy to all people of faith.

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