Free Republic

Preaching God's word with an eye on national politics Pepperell vicar leads liberal think tank By Rich Barlow Globe Correspondent / March 5, 2009 One day about six years ago, the Rev. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale was testifying before Congress on behalf of abortion rights, basking among politicians who were interested to hear her views and happy to shake her hand. The next day, the Episcopal priest was back for a meeting at St. David's, her tiny Pepperell church, where a 2-year-old scaled her chair to perch on her head.

To determine what made Obama's campaign a success, we must look deeper to identify the basic psychological qualities that underlie these strategies. I perceive them to be: a finely developed skill in strategy, worthy of a great general [4], a tremendous audacity, enabling him to succeed in risky or controversial tactics that his opponents would not dare to attempt [5], a stage magician's skill in misdirection, compelling the public to perceive only what he wishes them to see and ignore what he wishes them to overlook, a penchant for evasion and concealment---the very opposite of his much-vaunted desire for "transparency"---often...

The long-awaited position on ordaining gay clergy in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America isn't a clear yes or no. An ELCA task force admitted Thursday that it could not reach a consensus on the issue that has polarized its members for years. But with the matter expected to dominate this summer's national convention in Minneapolis, its position paper offers this suggested solution: The ELCA will allow the ordination of gay pastors but will leave it up to individual congregations and synods whether to ordain or appoint pastors. The term used to describe this compromise is "structured flexibility." While acknowledging...

In only the third such ruling in the nation, a Sacramento judge has found to be unconstitutional a statute that makes it a federal crime for someone to fail to register as a sex offender and relocate from one state to another. U.S. District Judge Lawrence K. Karlton found that, in enacting the 2006 Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, "Congress overstepped its authority under the (Constitution's) commerce clause." Karlton made rulings this week in two prosecutions and threw them out, saying SORNA does not meet the U.S. Supreme Court's standard for congressional jurisdiction over interstate commerce. Federal prosecutors immediately...

The White House said Tuesday afternoon that President Obama has "confidence in the process" of vetting senior administration and Cabinet officials despite the withdrawal of two high-profile nominees earlier in the day. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs came under fire during his daily briefing for declining to answer questions about whether there was a breakdown in the vetting process after Health and Human Services Secretary nominee Tom Daschle and Nancy Killefer, nominated to be Obama's first chief performance officer, withdrew amid troubles over taxes. In response to questions about the two nominees' vetting, Gibbs would only say: "The president...

When Washington makes a big decision—to pass the PATRIOT Act, to invade Iraq, to bail out Wall Street, to spend hundreds of billions "stimulating" the economy—the most important stage of the debate isn't the final agreement on what to do. That's just a bunch of details about portions and timing. The key stage comes in the initial rounds, when the acceptable radius of disagreement is established. Your sharpest critics are often your most radical critics, so it's important that their arguments be confined to the foreign press, the blogosphere, and other backwaters. Once those boundaries are ratified, you must police...

Conservatives are having a St. Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus type conversion as of late. After spending decades eschewing the popular culture, they now realize the value striving to influence it. For the past few years, organizations like the American Film Renaissance have been promoting conservative movies from established actors such as Patricia Heaton and Gary Sinise. These events also furnish an opportunity for unknown, conservative artists to present their works -- something Hollywood would never do. Conservatives used to approach the pop culture with a laager mentality -- they prohibit their kids from watching television or listening to popular music. As if eliminating...

If you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. This famous maxim by the ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu is familiar to every student of military science and strategy. His counsel is simple: understand your enemy, understand yourself. Nearly eight years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, however, important segments of our military infrastructure dedicated to training and educating the next generation of military leaders have woefully failed to heed Sun Tzu’s advice. Two recent blog posts by Washington Post military correspondent Tom Ricks related to policies and publications by the U.S....

San Francisco (AP) -- The state's high court has prohibited three Southern California parishes who left the U.S. Episcopal Church over its ordination of gay ministers from retaining ownership of their church buildings and property. In a unanimous decision, the California Supreme Court ruled that the property belongs to the Episcopal Church because the parishes agreed to abide by the mother church's rules, which include specific language about property ownership.

Conservative evangelicals who saw environmentalism as alarmism welcomed Richard Cizik's resignation as the National Association of Evangelicals' Washington lobbyist last week. But evangelicals and scientists who had been working on "creation care" for several years saw it as a blow to their efforts. More than 50 evangelicals — including several environmental advocates — sent a letter to the NAE President Leith Anderson this morning, signaling their support for Cizik's efforts and urging the organization to "carry out Richard's vision of a broad Christian moral agenda." Those who signed the letter included presidents of organizations, professors, pastors, and authors, such as...

A lifelong New Jersey resident, Bette Greenfield (left) retired in March and moved to Florida in July. I'm not from a wealthy family living on a big estate in Palm Beach or in an Upper East Side apartment. I'm 71. I've worked hard and lived a quiet life - and have just lost my retire ment savings in the blink of an eye, thanks to Bernie Madoff. When my brother told me the news, I said, "I guess I'm going to have to live in a refrigerator box now." I made jokes because it was the only thing I could...

Giuseppe Vacca, director of the Gramsci International Institute said that Gramsci’s conversion “wouldn’t be a scandal and wouldn’t change a thing,” because in fact his method of cultural hegemony continues to be employed by feminist, pro-abortion and homosexual groups.

The Vatican has revealed that Antonio Gramsci, the founder of Italian Communism and an icon of the Left, reverted to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed..

Is the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, well, Catholic? That’s the question raging in the wake of a controversy over the fact that the CCHD has given funds to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, the voter-registration and poverty-fighting program that is now universally-recognizable by its acronym, ACORN. Most organizations would normally covet such branding, except that in ACORN’s case it came by way of a reported embezzlement by one of its executives and accusations that an ACORN worker tried to file false voter registrations. In the midst of a presidential campaign, that was more than enough to...

30 Little Known Facts about America-- "Thank god I can come here to FR and get normal,sensible conversation and not this kool-aid induced craziness!!"

Faithful Catholics in the US have been both stunned and gratified by the recent show of episcopal strength in dealing with the heretical nonsense of “Catholics” in public life who clearly misrepresent the Church’s teaching on vital issues. To date, more than fifty bishops have spoken out about this kind of misconduct or issued guidelines about voting at this critical juncture in our nation’s history. The trend is truly heartening. Let’s pray that it continues! Much more could be done, of course, but I am grateful that more bishops are standing up to strengthen and protect the faith of millions....

OBAMA: In times of economic scarcity, ahm, generally, ahh, the politicians in this country, right now, ahh, want to look for scapegoats, want to organize around race, as opposed to around principle, and around values, ahh, and I think that's a mistake, and I think that can be countered, but it's gonna require the kinds of grassroots mobilization, ahh, and, and the kinds of work at a local level that I think, ahh, I talk about a lot in, in those chapters on Chicago. INTERVIEWER: Wonderful man there, Reverend Wright? OBAMA: Right! [ED: WRIGHT ?!?] And... INTERVIEWER: Yeah... OBAMA:...

Democrat Socialist Jujitsu on American CapitalismBy Rene Guerra The Democrats and the rest of the Left have craftily turned around the blame for something disastrous they caused, via insidiously cunning ways. They, of course, couldn’t have done anything of that without the help of the complicit "mainstream" media, who don't expose the true genesis of the monster that the current financial crisis is. Every American should know the truth. The whole thing started when the Democrats corrupted the original intention of the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that Bill Clinton signed rescinding the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. The latter kept routine-business banks separate from big investment-banks. Specifically,...

In her game-changing convention speech, Sarah Palin took a swipe at Obama for having been nothing more in his life than a ‘community organiser’. This prompted the Obama campaign to issue a pained defence of community organisation as a way of promoting social change ‘from the bottom up’. The impression is that community organising is a worthy if woolly and ultimately ineffectual grassroots activity. This is to miss something of the greatest importance: that in the world of Barack Obama, community organisers are a key strategy in a different game altogether; and the name of that game is revolutionary Marxism.

Contact Recent forays into Ramesh Ponnoru’s “Right Matters” forum over at the Washington Post online reveals the need for an update to Godwin’s Law. (You know—whoever brings up Nazism first loses the argument.) A prototypically knee-jerk liberal over there (“All conservatives are racist, sexist, bigot homophobes…) asserts that labeling Obama a socialist immediately sucks all credibility out of one’s argument. Fine. I’ll grant that Obama may or may not be a socialist—it is a broad-brush term to describe his policies—and that one needs to be more precise in how one portrays the change he apparently believes in. (And I call...