Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me. Isaiah 49:16
Or so says Fundamentalist, right-wing, tea bagging, Fox News host, Glenn Beck.
From the Jesus Needs New PR blog:
GLENN SAYS… I’m begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words ’social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!
GLENN CONTINUES… Communists are on the left, and the Nazis are on the right. That’s what people say. But they both subscribe to one philosophy, and they flew one banner. . . . But on each banner, read the words, here in America: ’social justice.’ They talked about economic justice, rights of the workers, redistribution of wealth, and surprisingly, democracy..
I’ll give Beck credit for one thing…he speaks out loud what many right-wing Christians and politicians think privately.
I am for virtually everything the Glenn Beck is against.
And that’s a good thing.
Rick Green is running for a seat on the Texas Supreme Court. The video clip that follows tells you everything you need to know about Rick Green’s judicial philosophy.
HT: Right Wing Watch
The Columbus Dispatch reports:
The director of a little-known legislative council helping to oversee the state’s agency for injured workers often asked her three-member staff to pray and judged them "on the quality of their faith" before firing them, the staffers say.
The two staff attorneys and an executive assistant accuse Virginia McInerney, director of the Ohio Workers’ Compensation Council, of wrongful discharge, religious discrimination, harassment and retaliation.
McInerney said last night that she could not discuss specifics because legal action could be involved. But she said, "I deny the wrongdoing they are alleging."
The Feb. 16 firings have Democrats and others raising questions about what happened inside the council, which is expected to receive more than $1 million in Bureau of Workers’ Compensation funds this fiscal year.
According to the workers, McInerney told them that she believed God placed her in the job. They said she led the staff in prayer, asked a worker to listen to and take notes on God at Work CDs and complained that a Senate resolution to privatize the bureau was "another of Satan’s efforts to stall or impede the council’s progress."
One worker also complained that McInerney said the source of conflict in the office was an "inability to recognize her ‘divine gift for editing.’"
"It became increasingly clear that the director was judging employees not on professional performance but on the quality of their faith, according to her beliefs," staff attorney Kim H. Finley wrote in a letter this week to state Sen. Stephen Buehrer, chairman of the council.
Finley, staff attorney Shadya Y. Yazback and executive assistant Stephanie Susan Irwin all sent letters to Buehrer on Tuesday protesting their firings. Buehrer, R-Delta, refused to comment on the matter yesterday….
Finley said in her letter that the workers approached McInerney on Feb. 10 seeking separation agreements because "her poor management, failed leadership and discriminatory practices had led to significant and insurmountable inter-office issues."
McInerney said she could not meet their terms under state law and offered them the chance to resign. The workers said that when they refused, they were fired. They are asking the council to consider "modifying the terms" of their departures.
The council is not part of the bureau but was created in 2007 after a series of bureau investment scandals. It was modeled after the Ohio Retirement Study Council, which provides legislative oversight of the state’s employee pension systems.
The duties of the bipartisan council, which consists of legislators and representatives of employers, employees and the public, include reviewing the soundness of the bureau and legislation affecting it.
McInerney, 52, who had worked at the Ohio Legislative Services Commission, started as director on July 6, 2008, at a salary of $102,500 a year, according to state personnel records. She has appeared on the 700 Club, written a book and magazine articles about Christian singles and spoken in the past at the Vineyard Church of Columbus….
If this report is true McInerney should be IMMEDIATLEY removed from her position and those fired should be reinstated.
I am concerned that Sen. Steve Buehrer is the head of the council. Buehrer is a right-wing fundamentalist Christian and this may cloud his judgment on this matter.. He represents my district. I have written Buehrer several times over the years. He has never responded to anything I have sent him. Evidently he only represents SOME people in District 1. Perhaps he only represents Republicans, which make up 60+ percent of his district. Time will tell if Buehrer will act according to the Constitution rather than his Fundamentalist Christian beliefs. I have my doubts.
This is another reminder that God and government do not go well together.
If you doubt Virginia McInerney’s religious motivations check out her website.
Google search for Virginia McInerney
HT: Religion Clause
They started it! 
Drive Thru , a Focus on the Family website, posted the following:
This headline from a U.K. publication caught my eye.
“Lap-dancing clubs increase while library numbers drop,” and the article includes these details.
The number of lap-dancing clubs has increased from 24 to 300 since 1997, but the number of public libraries has shrunk by 6 per cent in the same period.
Schools, police stations, hospitals and public toilets have also become a rarer sight on the nation’s streets, the figures show.
A photo caption with the article says that this is a 1,150% increase in lap-dancing clubs.
This is the trajectory of a western country in which most adults are not marrying, and the church–informally sidelined since at least WWII–is now officially sidelined by so-called “equality” legislation that would further stifle the religious freedoms of people and organizations.
It’s beginning to look a bit like the U.K. version of Pottersville, and I mean the Jimmy Stewart variety rather than the Harry variety. Can the U.S. be very far behind? And who wants to live in Pottersville, anyway?
The title of this post is absurd. It mixes Library, Lap Dance, and James Dobson, three unrelated things, and puts them together in order to make a point.
This is what Focus on the Family does with their post. The only difference? They do what I did to advance their right-wing agenda.
First, why doesn’t the Focus on the Family article mention the name of the source for their information? A UK publication =The Christian Institute
What is the purpose of The Christian Institute:
The Christian Institute holds to historic Biblical Christianity. We have a mainstream evangelical basis of faith. We are non-denominational.
We are committed to defending the institution of marriage, and believe in the sanctity of human life from conception. We believe that the rule of law is the basis of order and civilisation, but our national life needs Christian underpinning.
We recognise that there are many who are not Christians who share our concerns on moral and ethical issues.
In other words, The Christian Institute is a UK version of Focus on the Family.
Second, what do lap dances and libraries have in common? NOTHING. But, what is Focus on the Family trying to say? That as the number of libraries have declined the number of places you can get a lap dance has increased. What are they trying to say? People read less and as a result they go to adult clubs more?
Third, the writer of the Focus on the family quotes an absurd statistic. Lap dancing clubs have increased by 1,150%. Oh my God, the UK is being taken over by lap dance clubs. Technically correct, the statistic is meant to make people think the perceived problem is far worse than what it really is. Reality? The number of clubs has increased from 24 to 300.
Of all the problems facing the UK I doubt lap dancing clubs even makes the list.
But then, it is actually Focus on the Family that lives is an alternate reality called Dobsonville. (a play on the Potterville reference. Potterville being the alternate reality in the Jimmy Stewart classic It’s A Wonderful Life)
What follows is an excerpt of a thoughtful article by Shane Claiborne. While many of us may no longer embrace the Bible or the Jesus of Clairborne, his message is pointed and thoughtful and would provide a needed correction to the Church. Clairborne is despised by many in Evangelicalism. He is, after all. messing with their stuff.
Excerpted from an Esquire article.
To all my nonbelieving, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians. Christians who have had so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten the Christ of our Christianity.
Forgive us. Forgive us for the embarrassing things we have done in the name of God.
The other night I headed into downtown Philly for a stroll with some friends from out of town. We walked down to Penn’s Landing along the river, where there are street performers, artists, musicians. We passed a great magician who did some pretty sweet tricks like pour change out of his iPhone, and then there was a preacher. He wasn’t quite as captivating as the magician. He stood on a box, yelling into a microphone, and beside him was a coffin with a fake dead body inside. He talked about how we are all going to die and go to hell if we don’t know Jesus.
Some folks snickered. Some told him to shut the hell up. A couple of teenagers tried to steal the dead body in the coffin. All I could do was think to myself, I want to jump up on a box beside him and yell at the top of my lungs, "God is not a monster." Maybe next time I will.
The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination. But over the past few decades our Christianity, at least here in the United States, has become less and less fascinating. We have given the atheists less and less to disbelieve. And the sort of Christianity many of us have seen on TV and heard on the radio looks less and less like Jesus.
At one point Gandhi was asked if he was a Christian, and he said, essentially, "I sure love Jesus, but the Christians seem so unlike their Christ." A recent study showed that the top three perceptions of Christians in the U. S. among young non-Christians are that Christians are 1) antigay, 2) judgmental, and 3) hypocritical. So what we have here is a bit of an image crisis, and much of that reputation is well deserved. That’s the ugly stuff. And that’s why I begin by saying that I’m sorry.
Now for the good news.
I want to invite you to consider that maybe the televangelists and street preachers are wrong — and that God really is love. Maybe the fruits of the Spirit really are beautiful things like peace, patience, kindness, joy, love, goodness, and not the ugly things that have come to characterize religion, or politics, for that matter. (If there is anything I have learned from liberals and conservatives, it’s that you can have great answers and still be mean… and that just as important as being right is being nice.)
The Bible that I read says that God did not send Jesus to condemn the world but to save it… it was because "God so loved the world." That is the God I know, and I long for others to know. I did not choose to devote my life to Jesus because I was scared to death of hell or because I wanted crowns in heaven… but because he is good. For those of you who are on a sincere spiritual journey, I hope that you do not reject Christ because of Christians. We have always been a messed-up bunch, and somehow God has survived the embarrassing things we do in His name. At the core of our "Gospel" is the message that Jesus came "not [for] the healthy… but the sick." And if you choose Jesus, may it not be simply because of a fear of hell or hope for mansions in heaven…
It is so simple, but the pious forget this lesson constantly. God may indeed be evident in a priest, but God is just as likely to be at work through a Samaritan or a prostitute. In fact the Scripture is brimful of God using folks like a lying prostitute named Rahab, an adulterous king named David… at one point God even speaks to a guy named Balaam through his donkey. Some say God spoke to Balaam through his ass and has been speaking through asses ever since. So if God should choose to use us, then we should be grateful but not think too highly of ourselves. And if upon meeting someone we think God could never use, we should think again.
After all, Jesus says to the religious elite who looked down on everybody else: "The tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom ahead of you." And we wonder what got him killed?…
In fact, the entire story of Jesus is about a God who did not just want to stay "out there" but who moves into the neighborhood, a neighborhood where folks said, "Nothing good could come." It is this Jesus who was accused of being a glutton and drunkard and rabble-rouser for hanging out with all of society’s rejects, and who died on the imperial cross of Rome reserved for bandits and failed messiahs. This is why the triumph over the cross was a triumph over everything ugly we do to ourselves and to others. It is the final promise that love wins…
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