Barack Obama, Outside Agitator

By Patrick J. Buchanan

In his U.N. address, President Obama listed a parade of horrors afflicting our world: “Russian aggression in Europe,” “terrorism in Syria and Iraq,” rapes and beheadings by ISIL, al-Qaida, Boko Haram.

And, of course, the Ferguson Police Department.

That’s right. The president could not speak of war, terrorism and genocide without dragging in the incident in a St. Louis suburb where a white cop shot and killed a black teenager:

“In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri — where a young man was killed, and a community was divided.”

What, other than its racial aspect, can explain why Obama is so hung up on Ferguson? At the Congressional Black Caucus dinner Saturday, he was back stoking the embers.

Conservatives to Synod: Don’t Go Soft on Marriage

Boston College Prof. Mary Ann Glendon, former US ambassador to the Vatican, moderated a discussion with Princeton Prof. Robert George in 2009. Both have signed a letter to Catholic bishops urging them to uphold traditional marriage. (Paul Haring/CNS)

One sign that a summit is viewed as crucial is when a tug-of-war breaks out to shape its agenda and outcome. By that standard, the looming Oct. 5-19 Synod of Bishops on the family appears a very big deal indeed.

In the run-up to the synod, we’ve already seen cardinals publicly jousting over the contentious issue of whether the Church ought to relax its ban on divorced and remarried Catholics receiving Communion.

Activists and rank-and-file believers alike have entered the fray on all manner of issues related to the family, with the latest to-do involving a cross-section of 48 mostly conservative intellectuals and ministers, including not just Catholics but also Protestant luminaries such as Rick Warren, urging the synod to hold the line in defense of traditional marriage.

Their open letter to the synod, sent to Rome through diplomatic channels in late September and also posted on the Internet, does not engage any of the hot-button issues expected to surface at the meeting, such as gay marriage or the communion ban for divorced and remarried believers.

The implied message, however, seems clear: Now is the wrong time to go soft.

Traditional Christian teachings on marriage, the signatories say, “represent true love, not ‘exclusion’ or ‘prejudice’ or any of the other charges brought against marriage today.” The letter is entitled, “Commitment to Marriage,” and the full text can be read here.

Read more at Crux >>

Wake Up, Conservatives! Examining Conservative “Support” for Common Core

From The Center for Vision & Values, Grove City College

By R.B.A. Di Muccio

Most conservatives instinctively and correctly oppose Common Core. The issue becomes muddy when a few high-profile conservatives appear to be in favor of it. Such support provides a bottomless font of schadenfreude for Common Core’s mostly liberal supporters and gives them an effective wedge issue. Therefore, examining conservative “support” for national Common Core standards might be the single most important tactic in the fight against it.

Prima facie, this support is based on a simple premise: public education is failing, so we should establish minimal standards that all kids must meet. Bill Bennett, for example, has said, “we can all agree that there is a need for common standards of assessment in K-12 education. And we can all agree that there are common and shared truths.”

Okay, but the question that arises is: What are the “common and shared truths?” Let’s answer that in a moment.

Christian Brothers High School, Memphis - "At the Name of Jesus"

Judge Napolitano Sums Up Eric Holder

"The Least Faithful To The Constitution Of Any AG, And Doesn't Regret It"

Catholic Scholars Blast Common Core in Letter to U.S. Bishops

About 130 Catholic scholars around the country have signed a hard-hitting letter to U.S. Catholic bishops denouncing the Common Core State Standards as doing “a grave disservice to Catholic education” and urging the bishops  to ignore the standards or, in the more than 100 dioceses that have already adopted them, to give them up.

The letter was sent by Gerard V. Bradley, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, to every Catholic bishop in the country, with 132 scholars from various disciplines and institutions signing on.

Read more at The Washington Post >>

Regensburg Vindicated

From the Ethics & Public Policy Center

By George Weigel

On the evening of Sept. 12, 2006, my wife and I were dining in Cracow with Polish friends when an agitated Italian Vaticanista (pardon the redundancy in adjectives) called, demanding to know what I thought of “Zees crazee speech of zee pope about zee Muslims.” That was my first hint that the herd of independent minds in the world press was about to go ballistic on the subject of Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Lecture: a “gaffe”-bone on which the media continued to gnaw until the end of Benedict’s pontificate.

Eight years later, the Regensburg Lecture looks a lot different. Indeed, those who actually read it in 2006 understood that, far from making a “gaffe,” Benedict XVI was exploring with scholarly precision two key questions, the answers to which would profoundly influence the civil war raging within Islam—a war whose outcome will determine whether 21st-century Islam is safe for its own adherents and safe for the world.