Where do you stand on the Transgender Issue now that the issue has gotten to the overt point of the open celebration of this lifestyle choice, dictated by certain direct and explicit actions.
84.38% I do not approve of behavior that has within its expressed tenants policies that harm children.
14.06% I do support the Trans Community in all its many facets because diversity is at a premium in today's society.
1.56% What is a "Children's Drag Queen Story Hour?"
I have just seen over the last week a "most interesting possibility" --- the President ultimately becoming a Supreme Court Justice:
I had never thought of the possibility, but it has happened several times already. Here is the excerpt from the article:
"While campaigning back in 2008, Obama himself said that the best justices historically have been former politicians. According to The Washington Post, he listed three-time California governor Earl Warren as his judicial hero.
We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom," Obama said of his ideal Supreme Court Justice, clearly thinking he displays these qualities. "The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African American, or gay, or disabled, or old."
Obama could end up like President William Howard Taft, who became chief justice of the Supreme Court after leaving the White House."
This deserves some thought and good discussion from any who have abject hate for the President. He CANNOT run for President again, but there is nothing preventing his appointment to the Supreme Court as the next replacement for Justice Ginsberg!
At the least, it would warrant the most interesting debate in Congress to affirm the appointment of our next Democratic President! Conservatives are trying every trick in the book to pack the Court with Conservatives in the last several rounds by their picks.
Based on the Conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention here is their process for taking over the most democratic and large religious group in America as I personally witnessed it. Conservatives of the SBC schemed their way into control:
1. Convince the naïve folks in Texas by going all over saying, "Baptist Seminary/college professors are corrupting students with "liberal teaching."
2. Work like dogs for some 10 years prior to the takeover to change the faith statement of Southern Baptists from "All scripture is reliable "to "All scripture is Inerrant."
3. Three main characters were at the core: Dr. W. A. Criswell, pastor of the largest church in the SBC at Dallas, TX / Paige Patterson, the underling who was President of Criswell Bible College / Paul Pressler, an Appellate Judge who was a prominent church member of the Mega Church.
4. Private planning meetings at various US airports where some dozen Mega Church ultra-conservative Pastors met to formulate a serious and effective plan for the takeover.
5. At the Presidential election time in Houston, TX, where I was present to observe the plan in action --- some 20 minutes before the vote church buses pulled up to the door and disgorged hundreds of people NOT dressed like the normal Messengers. They rushed through the registration lines and got ballots. Previously on that day, there was a total state of trust that Baptist churches would never violate the 10-messenger per church rule for voting in any convention. It happened so fast no one raised a single question! They left tossing unused ballot packets on the floor through the main exit in front of me.
6. Adrian Rogers, a TENNESSEE mega church pastor, won by the vote between a mainline, mission-supporting large SBC church Pastor he ran against! He was always a member of the airport meeting gang.
7. The President appoints the Committee on Committees which then submits those who serve on all the Boards and Agencies leading the SBC. They rotated every 3 years so it took 2 consecutive skewed-vote Presidential Elections to bring it off --- AND THEY DID IT --- to the most democratic organization in America of a religious nature!
The famous observation comes to mind: Power Corrupts / Absolute Power ABSOLUTELY CORRUPTS!
Here is the relationship of democratic voting in America and democratic nature of the Southern Baptist Convention. If you are a scheming group wanting to control, IT CAN BE DONE! The Conservative Nazi Party brought it off in Germany before WWII.
Smarting from the world-wide depression, Hitler and company blamed the mess on the Treaty after WWI putting a debt on Germany they could not possibly pay. He changed "World-Wide Depression" to "what the other nations of Europe did to us." People were mad and starving so, like Rush Limbaugh and other Conservative Commentators, he found the nasty "liberals of the prevailing nations" to blame.
It is master manipulation of naïve citizens at its best. Southern Baptist Conservatives did exactly the same: Put out lies big enough that naïve laypeople in Texas bought into it as TRUTH. Those of us who attended the Seminaries and knew the professors KNEW it was an abject lie and distortion. Those who feared and had to have a simple thing to worship---like the King James Bible---were deceived into thinking their new preachers were learning more about the Bible than they dared to admit in their Sunday School faith.
The Founding Fathers, just like the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention, had a marvelous idea of democratic participation in the denomination and individual churches. Just like our nation, composed of 50 states "which can do as they please" --- we are constantly moving toward a total Top-Down approach to America 200 years later. If you had all the states run by majority-conservative governments / the National government run by a conservative President, Congress, and Supreme Court YOU NOW HAVE AN OLIGARCY PRETENDING TO BE A DEMOCRACY OR REPUBLIC!!!
Stan commented: "If your argument is listen to me because I am old, you are prone to lose that argument."
Gene reply: My argument has to do with "wisdom comes with age," Stan. It also has to do with the the mental challenge and expansion I experienced as a young man getting through Emory with a Psychology degree / fully intending to go to Graduate School and get a PhD in Psychology and Counseling / insead, answering a call to ministry despite the Baptist firing given my father by a corrupt church in a corrupt small town in GA.
INTEGRITY is a quality not taught in any classroom, but exemplified to me by a real man of God rightly dividing the Word of truth from his pulpit, no matter what the threat or cost.
Listen to me ONLY if I make good sense in a nonsense world of Abject Conservatism --- only wanting to rule by force and the same deception of SBC Conservatives who now own Southeastern Seminary (Wake Forest, NC) --- and have turned it from a well-balanced Graduate School into a copy of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson's Schools of Indoctrination.
Gentlemen --- would it not be better to use PM to cover this rather than confuse readers over a good debate were were having ABOUT THE ARTICLE'S CONTENT?