07/25/15

The Religious Origins of the Sanctuary Movement

Thanks to Donald Trump, the major media are being forced to cover the illegal immigration movement, such as the proliferation of “sanctuary cities” across the U.S. that attract criminal aliens, give them legal protection, and let them back out on the streets to commit more crimes. But the really taboo topic is how these sanctuary cities grew out of a movement started by the Catholic Church and other churches.

Over 200 cities, counties and states provide safe-haven to illegal aliens as sanctuary cities, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) reports. What has not yet been reported is that the Catholic Church, which gave President Obama his start in “community organizing” in Chicago, has been promoting the sanctuary movement for more than two decades.

What’s more, in April, a delegation of U.S. Catholic bishops staged a church service along the U.S.-Mexico border and distributed Communion through the border fence. At the same time, Pope Francis said a “racist and xenophobic” attitude was keeping immigrants out of the United States.

No wonder the pope’s approval ratings have been falling in the United States. Overall, Gallup reports that it’s now at 59 percent, down from 76 percent in early 2014. Among conservatives, it’s fallen from 72 percent approval to 45 percent (a drop of 27 points).

“Few people are aware that this extreme left branch of the Catholic Church played a large part in birthing the sanctuary movement,” says James Simpson, author of the new book, The Red-Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration and the Agenda to Erase America.

Simpson says Catholic Charities, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and its grant-making arm, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, are prominent elements of the open borders movement.

The sanctuary movement has its roots in the attempted communist takeover of Latin America.

With the support of elements of the Roman Catholic Church, the Communist Sandinistas had taken power in Nicaragua in 1979. At the time, communist terrorists known as the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) were threatening a violent takeover of neighboring El Salvador. President Ronald Reagan’s policies of overt and covert aid for the Nicaraguan freedom fighters, known as the Contras, forced the defeat of the Sandinistas, leaving the FMLN in disarray. In 1983, Reagan ordered the liberation of Grenada, an island in the Caribbean, from communist thugs.

Groups like the Marxist-oriented Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) were promoting the sanctuary movement for the purpose of facilitating the entry into the U.S. of illegal aliens who were supposedly being repressed by pro-American governments and movements in the region. The U.S. Catholic Bishops openly supported the sanctuary movement, even issuing a statement in 1985 denouncing the criminal indictments of those caught smuggling illegal aliens and violating the law. Section 274 of the Immigration and Nationality Act prohibits the transportation or harboring of illegal aliens.

Two Roman Catholic priests and three nuns were among those under indictment in one case on 71 counts of conspiracy to smuggle illegal aliens into the United States. One of the Catholic priests indicted in the scheme was Father Ramon Dagoberto Quinones, a Mexican citizen. He was among those convicted of conspiracy in the case.

Through the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, an arm of the Bishops, the church has funded Casa de Maryland, an illegal alien support group which was behind the May 1, 2010, “May Day” rally in Washington, D.C. in favor of “immigrant rights.” Photographs taken by this writer showed Mexican immigrants wearing Che Guevara T-shirts, and Spanish-language communist books and literature being provided to rally participants.

An academic paper, “The Acme of the Catholic Left: Catholic Activists in the US Sanctuary Movement, 1982-1992,” states that lay Catholics and Catholic religious figures were “active participants” in the network protecting illegals. The paper said, “Near the peak of national participation in August 1988, of an estimated 464 sanctuaries around the country, 78 were Catholic communities—the largest number provided by any single denomination.”

A “New Sanctuary Movement” emerged in 2007, with goals similar to the old group. In May, the far-left Nation magazine ran a glowing profile of this new movement, saying it was “revived” by many of the same “communities of faith” and churches behind it in the 1980s.

One group that worked to find churches that would provide sanctuary to immigrants in fear of deportation is called Interfaith Worker Justice, led by Kim Bobo, who was quoted by PBS in 2007 as saying, “We believe what we are doing is really calling forth a higher law, which is really God’s law, of caring for the immigrant.”

But conservative Catholic Michael Hichborn of the Lepanto Institute says Interfaith Worker Justice is run by “committed Marxist socialists,” and that Bobo is “highly active and involved with the Democratic Socialists of America,” a group which backed Obama’s political career.

06/1/15

Have We Lost the Cultural War?

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Paul Kengor’s new book, Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage, provides a detailed explanation of why, according to a new Gallup poll, “Americans are more likely now than in the early 2000s to find a variety of behaviors morally acceptable, including gay and lesbian relations, having a baby outside of marriage and sex between an unmarried man and woman.” Gallup notes, “Moral acceptability of many of these issues is now at a record-high level.”

What we are witnessing is a “shift to the left” that has been carefully orchestrated and planned over the course of decades. It is a phenomenon known as “cultural Marxism,” the application of Marxism to culture rather than the economic sphere. Kengor’s book, published by an arm of WorldNetDaily, outlines how this movement has operated, naming the names of the individuals and organizations that have been part of it, and how they have reached their zenith under the presidency of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

Significantly, he writes, Obama’s “most enduring legacy may be on American culture,” not in economics or foreign policy.

This seems mystifying, since as a candidate Obama had presented himself as a strong family man and a Christian, with two young daughters and a wife devoted to them. And yet, Kengor, author of The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: the Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor, has documented how Frank Marshall Davis, a communist atheist and pedophile, had an enormous influence on Obama. Kengor documents this yet again in the chapter of his new book, “The Gay-Marriage President and His Mentor.”

A professor who has written several books on politics, religion, and anti-communism, Kengor focuses on the role of the universities, especially Columbia University, in this cultural transformation. He calls them “indoctrination centers.” The products, he writes, “now pervade other cultural institutions critical to changing society’s opinions: media, television, films, education, and, the greatest influencer of all…the Internet, where they commandeer engines like Google and Yahoo! and Facebook and Mozilla…”

The evil genius behind the “fundamental transformation” of America lies in making it appear that this descent into immorality and paganism is somehow “progressive,” and a move to a higher level of consciousness. The book documents how the Judeo-Christian foundations of this country are being dismantled right before our eyes. It is not an accident. It is the planned destruction of America and the religious values that gave birth to our political and economic freedoms.

As recently as the 1990s, Kengor points out, there was a bipartisan consensus that children needed to have a dad and a mom. Now, that consensus has been rejected, as fatherless or motherless families are being embraced. Things have happened so quickly, he notes, that “everyday Americans” have even been conditioned to embrace major aspects of this revolutionary change.

As a student of the Marxist notion of dialectical change, I found Kengor’s treatment of the Marxist call for the “abolition of the family” to be fascinating. He devotes several pages to a discussion of what Marx meant by that phrase, and whether abolition means termination or gradual transcendence. What cannot be disputed is that the destruction of the traditional family results in more power for the government to control our lives and interfere with families. “As long as the traditional family is reversed,” he notes, “Marxism is advanced.”

The Marxist viewpoint was openly expressed by Professor Melissa Harris-Perry of MSNBC, who advocated a “collective notion” of control of children in advertisements for the cable channel. “We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families…” she said.

As the family unit withers away, the government would take control of the children.

The next step is for “progress” or “evolution” to a new level, with such concepts and arrangements as multiple wives, group marriages, sibling marriages, fathers and stepfathers marrying daughters and stepdaughters, and uncles marrying nieces.

If you think this is somehow impossible, Kengor quotes directly from a group called “Beyond Marriage,” which has issued a statement, “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision.” Prominent among this group is Chai Feldblum, a Georgetown University law professor and a commissioner on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) under President Obama.

The author of the paper, “Gay Is Good: The Moral Case for Marriage Equality and More,” Feldblum argues, “the moral case for supporting the range of other creative ways in which we currently construct our intimate relations outside of marriage.”

What is particularly disturbing about this progression is that Georgetown advertises itself as the nation’s oldest Catholic and Jesuit university. It seems difficult to square its Catholic reputation with having someone like Feldblum on the payroll “teaching” students. Then, again, this is clearly part of the transformation that has been going on for decades and which is meticulously documented in the Kengor book.

Kengor is astounded by this turn of events, about how “everyday mainstream Americans” have come to accept ideas and concepts that are destroying their very own country. “We are breaking new ground in the long, long sweep of human history,” he writes, “and the groundbreakers act as if it is no big deal whatsoever…”

What’s worse, as we have repeatedly noted, the so-called “conservative media” have abandoned the struggle as well, as Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld and the once-conservative National Review have endorsed same-sex marriage. (Gutfeld has been rewarded with his own show on the Fox News Channel).

So what is the way out of this cultural collapse?

Kengor, a Roman Catholic, devotes a whole chapter, “The Voice of Sheen,” to the wisdom of Catholic Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, who had popular radio and television shows and wrote two important books, Communism and the Conscience of the West, and Peace of Soul. Sheen understood how Marxism was designed to destroy the traditional family.

“The Universal Roman Catholic Church was far and away the dominant international voice of opposition to the communist movement and its tumultuous machinations,” Kengor notes.

Fulton Sheen died in 1979, but DVDs of his talks and programs are still extremely popular among traditional Catholics.

Strangely, Kengor’s book begins with a quotation from Pope Francis about the threat to the family, as if the current pope will somehow emerge as a Fulton Sheen-type of Catholic or world leader. Instead, however, Francis has embraced pro-homosexual priests, the United Nations agenda, liberation theologians, Barack Obama, Raul Castro and Mahmoud Abbas.

By contrast, Sheen supported traditional Catholic teaching on homosexuality and had described how “false compassion” was “gradually growing in this country” to the point where “pity…is shown not to the mugged, but to the mugger…to the dope fiends, to the beatniks, to the prostitutes, to the homosexuals, to the punks…” He spoke up for the “decent man,” who, he said, “is practically off the reservation.”

It seems like he was describing cultural Marxism.

Today, the decent man is not only “off the reservation,” but is in danger of extinction himself.

Ironically, the liberals tried to demonize the late Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) by asking, “Have you no sense of decency?,” when he investigated communists in the federal government. Yet, as the Kengor book makes clear, McCarthy didn’t go far enough; the Marxist manipulation of culture was never examined in the detail that was required.

Now that we can see the damage and destruction all around us, the decent men and women of the United States can see they are in danger of losing their families and their country. The book Takedown is must-reading so we can understand the terrible predicament we are in.

But whether we will get the moral leadership we need from the churches remains to be seen. Some religious leaders will try to make peace with the “change,” while others will resist it on the basis of sound principles based on natural law. Kengor notes that another objective of the cultural Marxists is the complete “takedown of religious institutions,” so more confrontations are on the way. The plan is to “rob” Americans of their First Amendment religious freedoms.

He quotes the aforementioned Feldblum of “Catholic” Georgetown University as saying, “I’m having a hard time coming up with any case in which religious liberty should win.”

Will the Republican presidential candidates come to the defense of the “decent man” and the traditional family? Or will they pander to the progressive constituencies demanding special rights for an increasing number of sexual minorities?

This is an “especially exciting time for extreme leftists,” Kengor writes, for they are “genuinely transforming human nature” and America itself, with “the unwitting support of a huge swatch of oblivious citizens and voters.”

But the American revolutionaries of 1776 faced overwhelming odds and their descendants may not go away quietly.

02/24/15

Media Accepting Obama’s Spin on the Economy

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

With as many lies and distortions that proceed from this scandal-plagued administration, one might think that mainstream reporters would turn a skeptical eye toward another one of President Obama’s carefully crafted narratives. Each narrative is designed to push “progressive” policies or to cover up administration mismanagement. But our corrupt media reflexively cheer whenever the leftist agendas for amnesty, Obamacare, climate change, and economic regulation are mentioned. Add to the list of official narratives the hyped state of the economy, the successes of which cannot fail to be championed because they reflect on the viability of the current President’s policies.

Yet President Obama’s claims about how his administration’s efforts have boosted the economy, or that the economy is actually improving, are based on cherry-picked data.

“At this moment when our economy is growing and creating jobs, we’ve got to work twice as hard, especially in Washington, to build on our momentum,” claimed President Obama in his recent economic report, according to The New York Times. He continued, “And I will not let politics or partisanship roll back the progress we’ve achieved on so many fronts.”

Back in January, the labor force participation rate was the lowest since 1978. It has since increased by a mere 0.2%. And while hiring may be up, wages remain stagnant.

What type of progress, exactly, is the President citing? His entitlement and regulatory policies, such as Obamacare and proposed EPA regulations, shackle American economic ingenuity with an ever-increasing burden.

“Right now, as many as 30 million Americans are either out of work or severely underemployed,” wrote Gallup President Jim Clifton in, “The Big Lie: 5.6% Unemployment.” “Trust me, the vast majority of them aren’t throwing parties to toast ‘falling’ unemployment.”

“Our concern with our analysts is that [the unemployment statistic is] very, very misleading because what America really wants are full-time jobs. … The percent of full-time jobs in this country, to the population, is the worst it’s been in thirty years,” Clifton said on CNBC. He connected this to the middle class crisis.

Mortimer Zuckerman, of The Wall Street Journal has argued that the President’s signature health care legislation depresses full-time hiring. “Many employers cut workers’ hours to avoid the Affordable Care Act’s mandate to provide health insurance to anyone working 30 hours a week or more,” wrote Zuckerman last July. “The unintended consequence of President Obama’s ‘signature legislation?’ Fewer full-time workers.”

But President Obama, his administration, and the media are on a full-blown public relations campaign to promote “middle class economics,” with more government as the answer.

“In a letter to Congress with the report, Mr. Obama called on lawmakers to approve his economic agenda of expanded tax breaks for the middle class and increased spending on initiatives such as early childhood education,” reported The Washington Times. “The president also wants to raise several hundred billion dollars through tax increases on mostly wealthier families.”

“The [recent economic] report…also contained a fair dollop of wishful thinking—or what some might call the administration’s own ‘dynamic scoring,’” observed Neil King Jr. for The Wall Street Journal.

President Obama has tied his favorite policies to theoretical economic gains which may, or may not occur. “So various measures to provide free preschool or expand the Earned Income Tax Credit would bring more adults into the workforce, thus expanding the tax base,” writes King. “A revamped immigration system would in turn lure more foreign-born workers to counteract what the president’s report calls ‘the effects of an aging native-born population.’”

“Although annual budget deficits have fallen from the trillion-dollar-plus levels early in Mr. Obama’s presidency, the national debt has continued to soar and topped $18 trillion late last year,” notes The Washington Times.

With the current controversy over comments by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani questioning whether or not President Obama loves this country, we are reminded of President Obama’s comments when criticizing then-President George W. Bush for running up $4 trillion of new debt during his eight years in office. Obama said it was “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic.” President Obama has so far added over $8 trillion in new debt, and he still has two more years in office. So how would he rate himself?

Both The Wall Street Journal and New York Times ran articles which summarized the economic report without questioning its assumptions, effectively offering the administration additional platforms from which to spout its economic spin.

I reported last November that President Obama unsuccessfully attempted to sell the “illusion of economic success” to the public in order to “salvage what most polls indicate is about to be a dismal election for Democrats.” This effort continued with the President’s State of the Union, where he argued that “we have risen from recession freer to write our own future than any other nation on Earth.”

Obama’s tired rhetoric of hope and change resonated with the media back in January, and it still does. Meanwhile, many in America struggle to put bread on the table.

“Not only have the ‘benefits’ of the Obama recovery not been ‘fully shared,’ but many Americans are still worse off today than when Obama became president,” reports Townhall. The 2013 median family income, “the most recent year available,” is more than $2,000 less than what it was in 2009 when Obama became President, it reports.

The media are doing their part to validate Obama’s claims about the economy. It is all about their political agenda and double standard.

“Among Democrats, there are divisions over the degree to which Hillary Rodham Clinton, considered their leading contender, should praise the recovery and run on Mr. Obama’s stewardship of the economy,” wrote Jonathan Martin for The New York Times on February 22. “And Republicans—assessing falling unemployment and soaring job creation under a president with still-mediocre approval ratings—are grasping for the right way to frame their 2016 campaign message.”

Martin, like so many other reporters, operates under the premise that the economy has actually recovered. But to the extent it has, there may be other factors at work besides Obama’s initiatives. How much credit for the nation’s economic growth belongs to the Republican-led states, such as Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida and especially Texas; states which are doing far better at adding jobs and balancing their budgets than the federal government? And how much is attributable to the powerful capitalist economy in this country, which chugs along despite the burdensome taxation, regulatory and bureaucratic demands that have been imposed on it by this administration?